Persona 4 Golden (PC)

What in God’s name have I gotten myself into? For the better part of FOREVER, I have somehow not played any Persona games. Generally, I pass these off to our resident Persona person, Eric Layman, to review, but this time I took a chance with Persona 4 Golden to see what all the hubbub was about with the series, which has made its doubt on PC with this edition. What I found during my experience were a few things:

– A shit ton of dialogue with branching choices.
– A fantastic narrative that didn’t waste a breath.
– Well-placed music that sets the eery David Lynch-like tone of the story.
– An old-school turn-based JRPG that harkened back to ye good old days.

Ultimately, a good game.

Let’s dig right into it.

Let me start out by saying that if all Persona games are like this one, then you have me hooked for life. The story was crazy good. The first obvious complaint I started out with this game is there is so much dialogue. I felt like I was reliving Pokemon Sun, which made me want to throw my Nintendo 3DS XL during that adventure. Anyway, there is a lot of dialogue in Persona 4 Golden, but it’s all well-placed and doesn’t seem to waste any moment. It builds a beautifully structured narrative before it digs into the gameplay, which to be truthful, I didn’t expect because I have never experienced anything like that before in my gaming history. The first two hours of the game is setting up the narrative, which means gamers will run through a ton of dialogue, branching choices, and pure story. They will not start gameplay until Persona 4 Golden says it’s okay, which is fine because the story setup is solid.

The story surrounds a young kid who is staying with his uncle and cousin for a year in a small Japanese village called Inaba. The main character (you) must find a way to fit in with the local crowd, as well as with students at his school (easy enough). While finding his comfort in the community, a local reporter and a local government official are caught in a scandalous affair, which ripples through Inaba and seemingly affects everyone in some way. To add more drama to it, the young reporter, who is caught in the scandal, is found dead, hanging from a telephone pole with no suspects in mind. The situation gets worse, as people involved somehow with the young reporter being to either show up dead or missing. The story hits close to home with the main character and his school when a young student is found dead as well. The bodies seem to pile up in the most serial killer of ways with no clues on how/why, and then stranger shit starts occurring — incredibly strange shit. While playing a midnight television seance game, where students peer into a television on a rainy night at midnight in hopes of seeing their soulmate, the seance quickly turns to reality when a dimensional portal opens up in our main character’s television, which eventually sends our main character (and friends) into a world that is directly connected with the murders in Inaba. In the dimension, they meet a creepy-ass bear that tells them that someone is throwing people into his dimension, which eventually leads to the deaths of said people. To make matters worse, in order to uncover the mystery of what the hell is going on, our main characters have to fight shadows, incredibly vicious dimensional beings, in hopes of uncovering clues and solving the mystery.

This is like if David Lynch directed an episode of Scooby-Doo.

While I dreaded the first 30-minutes of the game, finding no way to avoid dialogue, the music and story grabbed me and showed me exactly why this game series had been revered. I get it now and understand all facets of why gamers enjoy the series, why it takes so long to write a review for Persona games, and why the entire series is nothing short of time-consuming. It seems like Persona 4 Golden is very methodical in how it creates its story and doesn’t really give a damn whether gamers want to jump into gameplay or not. It’s solely focused on grabbing gamers with its narrative, which I absolutely adore and appreciate. Its design and process of story-first works and I would replay this game just to change my dialogue choices and play the game differently if I had another 5-10 days to do so. In short, I really thought the story was the selling point of the game and it collaborated so well with the music, voice actors (who seemed to give it their best), and overall creepy tone that Sega and Atlus devs were trying to achieve. The story will be the driving reason why gamers want to play this game.

As for other reasons, the gameplay design had a traditional turn-based component to it, which translated well in the PC release, and will be familiar to gamers. Essentially, the game is built on 2012 intentions, where it’s simplified through leveling up after countless fights, gaining skills along the way from leveling up, and gathering together a team of fighters to JRPG one’s way through the storyline. In other words, gamers are going to tread on familiar territory in gameplay design that you’re used to from a standard JRPG turn-based structure. You’ve got guard, attack, special moves, and motivation to keep getting better through confronting and defeating enemies. Yes, there is a grind component to this, which is present through the turn-based design of any game in the past (looking at you Phantasy Star I – IV), which is not as present as other JRPGs thanks to the variety of creative enemies which are something out of a nightmarish anime-style dream, if not just a tad No Face from Spirited Away When I say ‘No Face’, I mean the No Face when he starts eating everything, including people. It’s never a comfortable sight when that happens in the film. Anyway, gamers will be given plenty of motivation to keep going in the game, in spite of the grind, thanks to a solid leveling system and the variety of enemies a gamer would encounter. Persona 4 Golden makes sure you get the right amount of everything when it comes to execution and design.

As mentioned previously with enemy design, the art style in the game is out there and frightfully good. The enemies certainly push the creepiness of the narrative and seem to up the ante with each major boss encounter. The wacky animated environments have a touch of horror in them, especially when gamers skip to the alternate dimension. For example, the first time gamers meet Teddie (the clown/bear/thingy mentioned previously), the tone of the scene is set through a foggy yellow environment and the character’s creepy expression of unusual happiness, which makes the moment dreadfully uneasy. Of course, it only gets worse from there with drops of murderous clues through dialogue and visuals. I don’t want to give anything away because it’s best to experience it, but visually this game works well with the narrative. I love those two elements the most when it comes to the gameplay design.

As for the Vita vs. PC, I can’t really say what was different about the PC version of the game when compared to the Vita version because I never experience Persona 4 Golden the first time around. Sure, maybe the textures look a bit dated, especially when the game cuts away to animation, as it’s tough to go from ‘oh, that is some cool anime’ to ‘oh, look a Vita adventure’, but in the end does that really matter? It certainly doesn’t affect the story or the gameplay, both of which are more relevant than the visuals. What should gamers expect from this? Death Stranding-esque visuals that are less playful and more real? That would never work for this game or represent the Persona series. Getting back to the Vita vs. PC comparison, according to the YouTubes the PC version delivered more spruced up Vita graphics, which seemed to do the trick for Persona 4 Golden making its debut on the platform. The PC version cleaned up some textures, added some solid shading, and added some polished visual love to the original game. It works and it isn’t too jarring of a difference when compared to the Vita version, which is fine when you’re trying to deliver the same experience without ruining it.

All of this said, my first journey through Persona 4 Golden was a positive one. While it almost lost me with the incredible amount of story and dialogue, it set me straight when the gameplay finally kicked in. The nearly perfect juggling act between wild visuals, great story, and familiar JRPG gameplay has me sold that I need to check out other Persona games in the series. Hopefully, they make them for the PC.

Persona 4 Golden was an excellent PC game that deserves gamers’ time and attention.