Hey everyone! It’s been a bit of a hectic time for me recently as I have just moved to a new city for a job! However I won’t let that stop me from pushing out more content for the www to digest!

Today I’m going to be reviewing Persona 4 Golden, this is the first game in the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona series I have ever finished and all I can say is if every game is like this…. I want to play them all

This game even has animated cutscenes, amazing voice acting (What up Nero) and as far as I know an animated series to boot!

So without further ado, here is your PC review of this amazing treasure~

Story/Progression

Ok before I continue, I’m going to do my best not to mention any huge spoilers, because that’s pretty much what makes this game such a work of art! With that being said, I may have to mention some minor things here or there to explain how the game/story tie in with certain aspects. I would HIGHLY recommend you try to play this game blind if possible but there may be times where you might need a guide or two.

TLDR: (Minor spoilers ahead.)

So the game takes place in a small town called Inaba where the main character comes to stay for a year and live life as any normal high school student would, and yes you do actually go to school. This game is considered to be part game part visual novel so expect to have a lot of dialogue to sit through as you learn about different characters and their impact on the story.

You stay with your uncle and cousin and as the year goes on you’ll learn more about what goes on in this small country town and strange events that begin to unfold.

As you begin to get into the story you’ll have an event where you enter this strange room. (shown below)

Known as the Velvet Room, your character is greeted by some interesting characters who claim that you are dreaming and will gift you special powers to ‘Uncover the truth’ whatever that means.

Without going too much further into story details, strange occurrences begin to happen; people from town mysteriously disappear and no one can figure out why. Suddenly one night after hearing a rumor about some bizarre TV channel called the Midnight Channel showing a parallel world that speaks to a person’s desires.

Sure enough more clues begin to emerge about the people who mysteriously disappear and just when it couldn’t be any more strange, your character accidentally touches a TV and is pulled into well… another world.

To try and sum up this story; it is what I would call the Japanese adaption of Scooby-Doo of solving mysteries and uncovering the culprit! Trust me though there is a ton more to discover as you play this game and for any kind of RPG/JRPG this has been one of the most rewarding stories as the game dips into tons of personal philosophy and actually pulls from many real world influences to add to your deep immersion.

Talking about characters for a bit, the game is comprised of a battle party system where you take four characters into battle. Each of these members are friends you’ll eventually make as your character goes about each day and everyone has their own story to share as well as funny quirks and interacting with other characters.

There is a system in the game called Social Links. This allows you to develop closer bonds with certain characters and learn more about them and their past. Depending on the character there may be additional options such as relationships with certain characters or unlocking special abilities of party members.

I’ll talk more about this in the gameplay section as this also ties in with that, but just know that this is an important aspect of the story that will ultimately decide certain things such as the path the game will take later on.

If you decide that you want to go for the best ending for your first play-through there are relatively spoiler free guides that tell you which social links to focus on and so forth, but feel free to give yourself a full blind experience if you’d rather figure it out on your own!

Fear not though, if you don’t get the ending you want the first time through the new game plus feature does carry over certain stats that help make progressing the game much easier the second time around.

Along with the main story, there are also exactly 69 (nice) side quests to complete through out the game that involve doing a variety of tasks such as fishing, talking to cats and even solving extremely random riddles. These side quests don’t affect the main story but they do give nice rewards and adds some interesting dialogue options to the game.

You can also take on part time jobs to make some money as well as finding certain social links.

As you discover more places to visit, there will be fun things to do such as playing a crane game for some sweet prizes and going to the movies with friends, (I’d love to do that right now actually but uh COVID-19 said nah) which can help improve your social link and/or grant party members new abilities.

Gameplay

This part of the review is going to go on some tangents as there are a lot of different aspects of gameplay. To start the game progresses itself by allowing the player to choose what they do each day. Some days are completely free to do whatever you like while others force you to participate in certain events. So the important thing is to manage your time or you may be resetting your game a bit.

As I mentioned before, the premise of this game is to solve the mystery of the town while also somehow maintaining a life of your own. This game does give you some help in the beginning but around the first dungeon is when the game lets you go on your own and trust me it can be a bit unforgiving unless you learn quick.

As the story progresses and a new occurrence happens, you will have a time limit as to when you have to solve said occurrence or else the game will actually set you back a week prior to the final day of that mystery. So how does one go about solving it?

Well when I mentioned that your character enters a TV into another world… that’s where you do the mystery solving essentially. Each time you have to go in as the story prompts you, there will be a dungeon to explore, fight monsters and eventually fight a boss at the end.

The beginning of the game can be challenging as progressing in the dungeons is a bit of a marathon that requires you to use items/moves effectively as the lifeblood of dungeons in this game is your SP (magic points basically) which allow you to heal, cast special moves that can defeat enemies faster and give buffs to party members.

This becomes less of an issue later thankfully, but not knowing this the first time through actually forced me to restart my game because I lacked items/levels.

Another thing to talk about here is the difficulty. If this is your first time playing this game or any Persona game ever… do not play on very hard. I’m one who enjoys a challenge, but between hard and very hard there actually isn’t much difference between the two other than you level up at 1/4 the speed, earn 1/4 money from battles and you do 1/4 your normal damage. The shadows (enemies) essentially are the same and there is no effect on the story as the game will point out for you. This game goes even further though to allow for your own personal difficulty as you would like.

Going back to the combat in this game, I could probably describe this as a Pokemon/Final Fantasy hybrid where you select different ‘personas’ to aid you in battle. The game is turn based with each party member taking a turn to perform an action using their own persona as well. The gimmick with this game however is what personas you decide to use and how you combo it with your party members.

You can also use abilities such as analysis to identify shadows and change party member tactics (Which you should just change so you control them all the time, the AI isn’t exactly future proof).

Certain shadows will also have weaknesses to different attacks. For example some enemies take extra fire damage but could be immune to ice damage. Some enemies even reflect damage back so learning about different enemies will be important to get through this game effectively. On the flip side, if you or a party member gets hit with an attack that is effective it can also deal additional damage and stun that character preventing them from taking a turn which in some fights can be the difference between life or death.

If you are able to strike every enemy with their weakness and knock them down, you’ll get a chance to initiate an all out attack. This allows your entire party to strike at every enemy in the fight and do a massive amount of damage!

The two exceptions to this system are light and dark attacks, these kind of attacks don’t do damage but rather have a percent chance to instantly kill enemies… and yes this can also happen to you as well. The only way to actually lose in combat though is if your character dies and not your party members.

As far as the dungeons themselves go, typically you run through a dungeon with a map that expands as you explore more of the dungeon and fighting monsters that appear in the game, which allows you to decide if you wish to fight them or not. The loot system in the game involves a bit of gambling so to speak.

Shown above, after defeating enemies you’ll get this screen that essentially allows you to pick bonuses to your loot. Usually though you must defeat enemies by either killing them with their weakness or by finishing with an all out attack.

Some cards may give more money or experience. You can also obtain new personas to use or cards that will increase your current persona’s stats. Keep in mind however that you only have a certain amount of choices to pick and sometimes you’ll get negative cards that can actually reduce items/money/experience. On the flip side, some cards grant additional tries at more cards.

If you happen to grab every card shown on the shuffle screen you’ll get a bonus to the next time you get a shuffle screen that gives you more tries/better loot.

While some feel this formula gets a bit stale after awhile it can be interesting seeing what’s behind the next door or if you take the correct path or get magically teleported back to the beginning of the map. I will mention that you will probably revisit dungeons after finishing them for extra quests/boss fights which can be a bit repetitive at times.

Using the picture above, this is essentially your power in this game with being able to use any persona. Each persona is categorized into different types such as Tower, Justice, Chariot and so on… I think these are based on Tarot cards but don’t quote me on that.

You also have the typical gear system in RPGs that involves buying better armor, weapons and accessories. I’ll just say it now, good luck fighting the reaper if you want the best weapons in the game.

Going back to social links, (This part of the review is almost done I promise) Each social link, or character, corresponds with a different persona type.

In the picture above, Rise is known as the Lovers social link and when you level up this link any persona that is of the Lover’s type will gain extra power when creating those types of personas.

Wait… create personas?

Yup, so in addition to having access to different types of personas, you can also create your own personas by combining personas you find in dungeons by defeating shadows, there are specific combinations to obtain certain personas if you are able to figure them out.

Thankfully once you obtain that persona you can simply just purchase it in the future instead of fusing it. You can also save a persona’s current stats so if you were to fuse it for another persona, you could always just buy it again right where you left it.

In addition, party members gain special abilities based on their social rank as well as learning more about them and their history…. and yes you can date some characters for those who are interested.

Some social links however require you to either be at a certain point in the game, complete a quest or to be proficient in a skill to advance the link… Wait skills? Yup, your character has personal skills to level on top of all that.

As if this game didn’t teach you enough about social interactions and interpreting people, you also have to spend time developing your own skills, which is important for unlocking certain social links and being allowed to explore new places in the game.

Keep in mind however that any of these tasks; whether it be grinding in dungeons, improving social links or your own social skills require TIME. which as I said before you have to be careful with how much you use. Eventually you’ll get a feel for the game and know when you need to work on a dungeon or if you have free time to work on social links and so on.

Music/Sound Quality

*Breathes in* alright now to talk about a fairly straight forward part of the game and that is the god-like soundtrack. The Persona series might have some of the best music ever in a video-game and oddly enough I first discovered this series thanks to the music. There are literally endless amounts of persona music mixes if you want to get a feel for the vibe of the games.

From the casual day to day music to the battle music, I didn’t have a single track that I didn’t like and could listen to it all day! Without a doubt, my favorite track from Persona 4 would be Heartbeat, Heartbreak but for the battle theme it would be I’ll Face Myself and yes there are multiple versions of this track and none of them are bad.

One tiny gripe I had about the PC port however, was that some sound effects in the game were absurdly loud to where I had to mute my volume for a second. This particular event happens with party members performing follow up attacks which thankfully gives you a prompt before it happens so you can prepare yourself, hopefully that gets patched in the near future.

Graphics/Aesthetics

I wouldn’t get your hopes too high considering this is a game from 2012, but the port does do a nice job of up-scaling textures and definitely making the game look and run very smooth

The art style of this game though is as someone who is regularly on twitch would say ‘AYAYA’ but if you aren’t a big anime fan I wouldn’t let that stop you from enjoying the very creative shadow/dungeon designs and the many different costumes you can get for party members.

Each persona of characters in the game are also very reflective of the character traits and their personality which helps give a certain detail to the development of progression in the game.

I also want to mention here however, that some people report issues with some cutscenes loading and personally I had some issues loading an ending cutscene which was just black and red credits, but you can always just look up the ending if you happen to make it that far.

In Summary…

Persona 4 Golden was my first time exploring the Persona universe and honestly wish I had tried it sooner. If the music wasn’t enough of a hint, the wonderful story, characters and challenging combat would definitely solidify this game as one of my all time favorite rpgs. If you’re looking for a good juicy JRPG to sink some time into, I could not recommend this game anymore and especially at its best form on PC. Also it’s only $20 on Steam so you have no reason to complain about playing this game~

Shout out to Atlus for making this happen and I sincerely hope more ports are coming soon to PC along with the Shin Megami Tensei series coming to Switch down the road!




As always,

Brother Ghesh out~