Chebo's Reviews 4 - Persona 4

Welcome back to not Doom.
This time there's Persona 4, for the PlayStation 2. ( Not the Golden Edition for PSV ) It was developed by Atlus and released in 2008, it is a role-playing game with "dungeons" and partial social simulator at the same time. How unique is that?

Plot

The game starts in a world between dream and reality, the Velvet room. In it you meet Igor and his assistant Margaret, very mysterious characters you barely find anything about later. You form a contract by entering your protagonist's name and arrive in Inaba, the town where the school you transfered to is. You are picked up by uncle Ryotaro Dojima along with his daughter Nanako. After some days of hanging out with the main characters and discovering a disturbing corpse hanging on an antenna, you check out a rumor; The Midnight Channel. According to it, if you look into a shut off TV at midnight on a rainy night, your true love will appear on it. It seemed to be true, a silhouette did appear. Soon after that you discover a world inside the TV, and this is where the game starts to escalate.

Dungeons, Personas and Shadows

-Dungeons are the places in the TV world with very special features, and they must be completed to progress through the story.
-Shadows are the monsters in the TV world that you must fight with your persona(s)
-Personas are obtained through fusion or through one out of three mini-games that can randomly appear at the end of a battle
-Personas gain more stats and skills through levels
-The player can hold more personas at once after reaching some certain levels
-The XP at the end of a battle is the same amount for both the player and their persona(s)
-All shadows have their weaknesses ( with the exception of some specific ones and most bosses ) and skills
-Personas also have weaknesses and skills
-If a shadow's weakness is exploited, it will be knocked down and the player will get an additional turn without switching to the next teammate or shadow
-If all shadows are knocked down, an all-out attack will be possible, it allows the team to basically gangbang all shadows while they're down, mostly ending the battle
-If a teammate is down, they won't be included in the attack



Social links and Fusion

-Social links are personal interactions with friends, not only are they fun, but have benefits too
-Each social link has their own arcana, and there are 22 arcanas
-Every persona has their own arcana too
-There is a way to fuse a persona by combining two or more, but they are not allowed to be a higher level than the player, and a persona gains a starter XP bonus accordingly to their arcana's social link rank
-If the player reaches the final rank of a social link, they unlock the ability to fuse the strongest persona of that arcana

Overworld

-Unless there's a major story event, you get to choose how to spend your time during the day/after school
-This includes social links, buying and selling, doing quests, raising Social Qualities and exploring the TV world
-The 5 qualities are Courage, Dilligence, Understanding, Expression and Knowledge and each of them has 5 ranks
-Social qualities are mandatory to proceed through some social links, choosing some conversation options and part-time jobs
-Part-time jobs are another activity, you can gain additional money, Social Qualities and even social links through them
-Some part-time jobs like translating can be done at night instead of reading a book or studying, unless you are exhausted from exploring the TV world

Character development

It's so freaking angelic. Even the NPCs that aren't main characters mostly have sidequests. While Shin Megami Tensei focuses on the apocalypse, Persona pays a lot of attention to the characters, thus the social links were invented. All of the social links have a lot of detail and emotion. Some even made me cry.

Graphics


It's kinda blurry, but it's not easy to get a super high resolution screenshot unless I do it myself with an emulator, and I promised to myself that I'd do the article today.



Soundtrack

Quite a lot of variety. It's very upbeat at times, and motivating. And at other times? Freaking sad.