Persona 4 Golden thoughts

I've said for a while(since 2016)that Ori and the Blind Forest is my favorite game of all time. To quote one of my tweets: "No other game has hit me on an emotional impact like this game(Ori)has."

Don't get me wrong, I still love that game to death. But a few months ago, I picked up Persona 4 Golden. 3 months later, I finally beat the game, after about 48 hours of playtime. For those wondering, I played on Very Easy and did the Golden Ending route.

Persona 4 Golden became my new favorite game of all time, favorite RPG at the very least, because of the reasons I'll list below:

-Godlike writing. The characters were very relatable, there was a lot of dialogue and reoccurring jokes that had me cracking up, and the Social Links gave the characters very fleshed-out backstories that allowed me to form personal connections with them. For those wondering who have played the game, I maxed out every Social Link of the characters in the Investigation Team except for Naoto.

-Godlike music. There's not a single track in the game that I don't like. One particular track I want to point out is a track called "Omen"( https://youtu.be/tO_Z38jHYU8?t=6007 ). Without revealing too many spoilers, the track plays at a part of the game where the player and every other character has a sense of impending doom, and the track sets the mood perfectly in my book. Another track I really love is "Heartbeat, Heartbreak"( https://youtu.be/tO_Z38jHYU8?t=3775 ).

-The combat is some of the best I've seen in any RPG I've played. I was initially intimidated after seeing how much goes into the combat, especially in a speedrun setting, but it was easy for me to get into given my experience with other RPGs.

-As for the speedrun side of things, the speedrun is amazing. Easily one of my top 10 RPG speedruns. For how long the run is(9-11 hours), there's a lot that goes into it, especially given the many changes the route has gone through over the past few years. I really want to learn the speedrun for this game, especially after watching Ghoul02 do a bunch of work on the game and do 2 marathon runs, one of which I managed to watch all the way through. I couldn't give less of a crap that it's a 10 hour speedrun, or if I struggle in learning the run in some way. I still want to run the game in some form, even if I have to split my full-game attempts into two parts.