Persona 4 Golden review

Oh boy. It's been a long time since I spent way over 100 hours in a single game while also not doing speedruns. And I can say that I don't regret spending that time.

Persona 4 Golden got ported to steam in June and ever since I've been playing it. Yesterday My all achievements playthrough took almost 130 in game hours (not counting crashes) and over 150 real hours. And I must say it is quite a good time to release this game, good job, Sega/Atlus. It is probably one of the easiest/more accessible entrances into SMT games. It has setting of lighthearted school mistery / everyday stuff anime, which sets the tone just right. Characters, while they are tropy, feel distinct and fleshed out. Most of problems that they are facing are just human problems regarding life, family, friends, which did bring me joy in these weird times.

My first playthrough on hard difficulty took me ~90 hours, but probably only first 40-50 were challanging, then I overleveled at some point and game became a cakewalk. Combat system is pretty basic for any smt game (atleast based on what I have seen/played). And if anything it feels like it is the weakest aspect of this game. It isn't bad, it is just very basic. Compared to P3 and P5 it has the least amount of "elements", buffing/debuffing system is a simple cast, rather than stacking, skillcards are more of an RNG mechanic rather than something you were showered with to work with it in P3. However it doesn't go to any unnecessary lengths like P5 does, where you can just create overleveled personas as far as you got enough money. Reaper mechanic is pretty lame aswell, for almost my entire first playthrough I thought that it is akin to P3 or P5, where he will just appear sometimes and start following you, so I was just teleporting from floor, however he is just sitting in a box, WHICH MIGHT NOT EVEN HAVE HIM, really lame.

Style-wise I didn't like some parts of it at first, but I got over it and it wasn't too bad (I still prefer most character designs from P3/P5 or even from older games). Main cast is pretty good though (other than Teddie/Kuma, didn't like him). Dungeons are an improvement over P3's Tartarus, but for the most part it is still semi-random floors with various different patterns. Bosses were pretty good and fairly challenging (probably if I didn't overlevel even lategame bosses would've been harder). Equipment management isn't supper thrilling, rarely I had to choose between which of 2 or 3 items to wear, most of time there was just simple BETTER option.

Story wasn't bad, it is a decent murder mistery, which I spoiled to myself couple of years ago, but even then I don't think it is that hard to get what's going on by some point in the game. Last act of the game, which is part of Golden specifically, is pretty weakly paced compared to everything happening before, as story literally goes on a halt. Yes it allows you to finish leveling your social links, but both last dungeons literally require you to one-shot them, without urgency or consideration (though ofc that far in a game you don't need to leave dungeons as you can refill hp/sp by just kicking weakest enemies all over. Story does wrap-up pretty nicely and it even does a nice reuniting timeskip before credits roll (And then they also technically continue this story in P4 Dancing all night, and that story is pretty good, whole 11 hours for a dancing spin-off for a spin-off is impressive).

Music is solid, a lot of good tracks (Never More, Your affection, Time to make history, A New World Fool are some of my favorites, won't go over all of them). But that comes as no surprise, since Shoji Meguro is a pretty good composer, who been doing music for smt forever.

NG+ is pretty easy for the most part, though allows for some amusing dialogue options. Wish I knew that money carries over, since my NG+ run was on Very Hard, and first dungeon was pretty fucking hard even then :D Other that that the only notable part of NG+, other than you being able to do all the achievements, is secret boss fight. Oh boy... I won't go into details, but with max level party, with pretty good personas and latest equip I had I barely won that in 50!!! minutes. And not a single moment in those 50 minutes was relaxing. That fight was brutal and felt like a great finishing for a game (while it isn't last boss). I just wish I drank more coffee/collected more skill cards, since getting 100 skill cards proven to be more difficult and was my last achievement with some tactical grind.

Now to port details - PC port worked just fine for me, though it liked to crash every now and then. In 150 hours I probably lost 2 or 3 to just crashes. That made some bosses panic-inducing, since I was listening to dialogues and shit after fight, and getting game crash there would drive me mad. There're also other issues for some people with game lagging or cutscenes lagging. There still wasn't a single official patch, they are currently rolling out beta versions, but it takes pretty long, IMO if there are many people complaining, some official fix should be done atleast within weeks. Port has good customisation options for difficulty, nice visual enchancements. Did I mention that this game looks pretty good for a 8y.o. vita game? You are also able to swap between JP and EN voices, though I used the latter one, since I was too lazy to read all the time, however the acting is pretty good and cast did great job (I swear I didn't recognise Laura Bailey until I looked Rise's VA).

I'm glad that this game came to PC, since I was looking into options of getting to play it on some point. Also I bought myself P5R, so eventually I'll look into that and see if they improved that game. Also Sega was happy with how this game performed sales-wise, so hopefully there will be more ports of SMT games to pc, which I'd gladly play, since that is so far the only jrpg series I managed to get into.

As for final rating, as it is with every massive game - it has to do a lot and even more to become 10/10. While there's a lot of things that I loved about this game, there are also obvious issues. The more you do - the harder it is to deliver on every front. But this game did a pretty good job at that, I'd give it a solid 8/10, while I do think out of mainstream persona games (3,4,5) this one is probably the weakest. Chie best waifu.