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Persona 4 arrives at a time when a lot of gamers have put their PS2s up on a shelf in the closet. That’s too bad, because it might be the best RPG of 2008, no matter what console you’re talking about.

Explaining exactly why is a little difficult. Like last year’s Persona 3, this is a very unlikely genre hybrid – half 3D dungeon crawl, half teenage social life simulation. It’s hard to break down, in simple terms, the brilliance of a game about going to high school by day and exploring a maze full of monsters by night.

Some of Persona 4’s strong points are easy to describe, though. Visually, it’s incredible – the design work that went into building its weird alternate worlds runs the gamut from genuinely creepy to laugh-out-loud hilarious. The English script and voice acting are the best that Atlus has ever produced. Also, it’s hard not to love an RPG that stars a giant talking plush bear named Teddie.

We Have Such Sights To Show You

Teddie, without giving away too much of the story, inhabits the shadow dimension that the game’s heroes wander around in their off hours. As the game begins, you take on the role of an anonymous teenager, just transferring to a new school in a small-ish rural town. Not long after that, you discover that something very strange is going on – your television, for whatever reason, is now a portal to this other world, and bad things are happening to people who wind up on the other side.

In the simpler half of the game, you explore the TV dimension and beat down the monsters that live there. Initially, it feels like any number of other randomly-generated dungeon crawls, but the combat system is a cut above the usual. The Personas of the title are spirit avatars that grant each character powerful magical abilities, and there’s a lot of tactical depth to learning how different abilities can target each monster’s weaknesses. Battles are very fast-paced, but they’re not repetitive or monotonous, and finding the right tactics to wipe out a big group of enemies feels hugely rewarding. If you hit every enemy’s weak spot and knock them down, the whole party gets to charge in for a massive-damage beatdown.

If you played Persona 3, you can look forward to several changes that make the combat system easier to use. Persona 4 gives you direct control over every member of the party – that’s a huge improvement on the last game, where the supporting characters were all under the CPU’s control. Those other characters also develop a bunch of handy new combat abilities as you build up their Social Links.

Rank Up!

What’s a Social Link? That’s the linchpin of the other half of the game, the part where you live out the life of an “ordinary” high-school kid. What makes the main character different from the other party members in combat is his ability to use more than one Persona. Everyone else has just one fixed set of abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. The hero can shuffle through as many Personas as he can collect and create.

Each Persona belongs to one of 20 categories, one for each face card in a classic tarot deck – Priestess, Emperor, Chariot, and so on. Those face cards, the Major Arcana, also each represent a major character in the game, the people you meet as you go to school and explore the town of Inaba. Spending time with somebody during the virtual day builds up the corresponding Social Link, and what that does is power up every Persona you create that belongs to the same category. Get to know one of the girls in your party, for instance, the bully-clobbering kung-fu freak Chie Satonaga, and you’ll make much more powerful Chariot Personas.

Getting to know the characters is fun for its own sake. The storylines that unfold along each Social Link are often very affecting, and Atlus USA’s localization makes the dialogue fun to listen to and read. The characters actually sound like real people having real conversations, not just cartoons reciting stock cartoon lines. The genius of the scenario design isn’t just in the dialogue or the plotting, though; it’s the way that exploring the story feeds back into every other aspect of the game. In most RPGs, either the story overshadows the gameplay or gameplay pushes the story aside. Persona 4 twists them together in a way that becomes dangerously habit-forming.

Life In General

Just like the combat system, the social-life aspects of the game are much improved in Persona 4. Persona 3 was fun as far as it went, but it didn’t have enough activities to do at certain times of the day. That turned day-to-day life into a bit of a grind – you had to do the same thing over and over a lot to build up key stats and Social Links. Persona 4, by comparison, almost offers too much to do. There are more people to hang out with, part-time jobs to take on, books to read, little fetch-quests to finish, and a menu full of stat-building dishes to gulp down at the local Chinese diner.

Persona 3 veterans may find some aspects of the game too familiar. The sequel recycles many of the last game’s monsters and Personas, although it has its share of original designs as well. Meanwhile, newcomers to the series might be shocked by the difficulty level. Even on the toned-down Beginner setting, some of the bosses are painfully tough.

Those are pretty minor complaints, though, and definitely not enough to give Persona 4 a pass. Aside from some minor quibbles, it’s beautifully made – an addictive game, an involving story, and a gorgeous piece of artwork all at once. While not perfect, Persona 4 is one of this year’s best RPG and another example of how even old hardware can still run some of the best games.

Article By: D.F. Smith