Persona 4 Golden (2012)

This is my second (or perhaps third) attempt at playing Persona 4 Golden. It’s not that the game is bad—far from it—but it’s undeniably long. While the captivating story and unique characters stand out, some design choices make the experience uneven.

One recurring annoyance to me is the lack of lip movement during dialogues. For a game so focused on narrative and interaction, this feels oddly outdated.

The premise is intriguing: people are mysteriously drawn into TVs at night, where they must confront their Shadow—the dark, hidden sides of themselves. If they fail or die in the TV world, they die in real life. This leads to a series of rescues that drive the plot forward.

The combat system, while initially fun, becomes tiresome over time. Like many Shin Megami Tensei games, it revolves around exploiting enemy weaknesses with magic. However, once you run out of SP (magic points), battles grind to a halt. And since party members are designed to complement each other, running out of SP on one character can derail an entire run. SP recovery items are more accessible in this version than in the original PS2 release, but the issue still persists.

The game tackles bold and mature themes for a JRPG aimed at teens. For instance, Kanji’s dungeon—a men-only public bathhouse—explores his struggles with his sexuality. While this is a brave narrative choice, the aftermath feels uneven, with Yosuke’s recurring jokes about Kanji’s sexuality undermining the seriousness of the subject.

Rise, a teenage pop star, is the next victim, and her dungeon is a strip club, symbolizing her discomfort with being objectified. Her boss fight, a pole-dancing Shadow, is followed by a double-boss twist when Teddie unexpectedly gains a Persona—a standout moment reminiscent of Persona 3’s Aegis gaining humanity.

A notable plot twist involves a victim who was murdered outside the TV world, a first for the game. The story cleverly explains this as the killer adapting their methods after the team starts rescuing victims.

Despite its strong narrative moments, Persona 4 Golden can wear players down with its mechanics. Investigation sequences, crucial for advancing the story, are frustrating. Picking the correct dialogue options often feels counterintuitive, and failure can lead to bad endings, forcing a restart.

The dungeons, particularly the Magatsu dungeon, also test patience. Shadows endlessly respawn, and many enemies lack weaknesses, turning combat into a slog. Boss battles often require trial and error to memorize their phases, making some encounters feel more punishing than rewarding.

Half the game functions as a dating sim, but frequent time skips disrupt social interactions. Missing out on critical events, like Marie’s dungeon despite a near-maxed social link, can feel punishing. The True Ending adds another layer of frustration, requiring obscure actions without clear hints.

The finale ties the narrative together brilliantly. The true villain is revealed to be the attendant at the gas station from the very start of the game—a death goddess named Izanami, who grants the protagonist his powers. The final battle echoes Persona 3 in theme and design, blending epic music and the “Power of Friendship” trope into a satisfying climax.

Persona 4 Golden is an ambitious blend of visual novel, dating sim, and dungeon crawler, but it’s not without flaws. The plot has noticeable holes, the time skips disrupt immersion, and the combat can feel repetitive and punishing. Yet, despite these shortcomings, it’s a game that sticks with you—much like its message about bridging gaps to create something meaningful.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely, though maybe with a guide handy.

Praise Persona 5 and 3 and reloaded and all that shit as much as you want but damn, the 4th one is really special. It's something about the vibes and the story and the characters that really really sets it apart from the others, even any other jrpg I've ever played.

I wasn't a huge fan of the golden edition look first, the textures are just resized up and it looks a little cluttering in a lot of the environments. However, I got used to it after a while. And then there's all the fun features and quality-of-life stuff added to the golden version and you realize they really made a great game even better.

I was a little bit disappointed about how they handled the queer characters in this game, I sort of remember it being showing more finesse with it. I guess... it's still good considering the time and the cultural implications of the themes in Japanese culture, but in 2024 it's very, very cringe how they handled it. I do appreciate it being there still though. There are many other inappropriate comments and unnecessary scenes that only Japanese studios can produce and get away with with seemingly no collective recollection or admittance of these problematic events.

All in all though, and for its time, it's a very very special game to me that holds probably one of the most nostalgically charged games of my life, and deserves an honorary spot in the top shelf of my brain.

This game and Persona franchise in general get so much praise, it makes me feel like something is wrong with me that i cant get into them. No matter how many times i try to enjoy it, i always end up dropping it and watching whats left on youtube, to see how the story ended.

I can see myself enjoying the story, characters and the social systems, but not when they're locked behind boring and stretched out for no reason day by day system, and repetitive dungeon crawling with most basic combat any turn-based JRPG could offer.

To sum it up, its type of games that you either absolutely love, or "it gets better after 100 hours of playing" which probably isn't worth the time and effort, even if you really want to romance a certain waifu.

I'm not a fan of modern JRPGs. There's a lot of motifs in that genre that make me cringe. These motifs are still present in this game, but there's enough great character development and intricate game systems that kept me coming back and curious what would happen next. All the characters are fully realized with their own motivations, flaws and quirks that will slowly get revealed to you the more you spend time with them. The game has it's missteps along the way. For example, the introduction to Kanji stumbles down a narrow line of being borderline offensive. I will say they overall do a great job with him as a character (he ended up being my favorite character) even if his introduction comes off as a caricature. The game has grating line reading in spades as well. I even tried switching between Japanese and English voice acting and found issues with both. The worst offender in the grating and ear bleeding deliveries would be Teddie. The game radically improves once Teddie is no longer your support character. God... I still get nightmares from his "Way to go Sensei!"... it was so shrill... so cringe... honestly if I had a choice I wouldn't have let him stay in the real world.

Gameplay is split roughly 75% visual novel/life sim and 25% turn based JRPG. The game contrasts the quotidian with the fantastically surreal. Each individual element of this game is very mediocre. The interaction with a given character is extremely bare bones. You are frequently given dialogue options, but most of the time all choices are saying basically the same thing and don't seem to change the bearings of the interaction what so ever. The only exception being the random pop quizzes or exams where if you get them right you get a slight bonus. Still, the character development is well handled and typically nuanced in these interactions. You may be effectively watching a visual novel, but it is a well done one with variation across the large cast of characters. The brilliance of the game design is forcing an overwhelming amount of micro choices upon the player with stringently limited time to force you to make decisions. These micro decisions are then tied to in-game rewards. The more time you spend with a party member, the stronger and more useful they become in battle. They will unlock new moves and allow you to make stronger Personas (odd it took me this long to mention this term). Conversely, the more time you spend with non-party members, they will level up the different schools of personas, likewise allowing you to make stronger personas. The core party members are the most beneficial given they directly impact combat. Focusing on a specific school of Personas also didn't seem to be that useful from my playthrough. If I ever played this game again (probably won't given how long it is) I would prioritize party members first and max them out ASAP.

Besides deciding who to spend time with, whether you should study for a test, or participating in a community activity, you will need to dungeon crawl. This is basic and bear bones like the interactions mentioned above. You have to walk through procedural generated dungeons, getting to the last floor to fight a boss. After which you will typically unlock a new character. The dungeons all have unique themes but honestly are just set dressing. Sure the first dungeon is a castle and the second is a bath house, but mechanically they are the same thing... a few later dungeons switch things up slightly, but you still end up walking through monotonous hallways and fighting random encounters. They allow you to smack an enemy before engaging in combat. If you do that from behind, you will start the battle with an advantage (first strike for all party members). If you don't strike the enemy first, then they will get advantage against you. Combat itself is simple turn based. There's a rock-paper-scissors mechanic very similar to Pokemon that you will need to exploit to be successful in combat. Overall, it's fine I guess. The game has a few difficulty spikes against boss fights which can be frustrating since it means you have to grind to level up... The baby boss was an insanely huge jump in difficulty...

Overall, I'm surprised how the game was able to pull me in and get me invested in the characters and story. At some point I'll probably play Persona 5. I hear it's better than this game. But I need a break from the JRPGs.

This is my first Persona experience. As a Final Fantasy veteran, this game felt immediately new and refreshing for the first 30ish hours. Had it ended at that point, when the police apprehend the first suspect and everyone thinks the murders will be done, I would have given it a solid 4 stars. But after 30 additional hours, this game REALLY overstays its welcome; the refreshing and new aspects of it feel stale and grindy.

Here's my breakdown of the goods and bads:

• Story and characters [5 out of 5] - The highlight of this game. A long involved story with lots of opportunity to grow close to the cast of characters. All the characters and interesting and fleshed out, to the extent that over-the-top anime characters can be.
• Dialog [2 out of 5] - I broke this out separately from the above point because, despite enjoying the characters and story, I will say that the character interactions are frequently very cringy and outdated. Two of the main male characters are horny, girl-obsessed teenagers that are constantly objectifying and making unwelcome passes at the female members of the group, and finding ways to violate their boundaries. Combined with the portrayal of one fat girl as completely undesirable, essentially mocking her, this aspect of the game will be a big turnoff to many young, modern gamers.
• Gameplay [2.5 out of 5] - I really enjoyed the gameplay loop for the first couple dozen hours. Building out relationships (social links) between the main cast, dungeon crawling and leveling up, getting and fusing new personas, missions (retrieving dungeons items), etc... all kept the game interesting. After sixty... long... hours... of doing the same things, the town of Inaba began to feel very small and the tasks that were once interesting became just a grind. The game also forces you to take 5+ hours between every new dungeon just to grind. The "mission" system is really just retrieving items and felt like it could have been made a little more interesting.
• Music [4 out of 5] - I loved the music. There's a pretty large variety of songs, and I found the OST on Spotify and found myself playing and singing the music frequently. Though, again, after sixty... long... hours... of the game, this does start to get old too. See a pattern?
• Graphics [1 out of 5] - The graphics are embarrassing for even a PS2 game. I'm currently in the middle of FFXII, which was also a PS2 game, and Persona looks like a PS1 game in comparison. Most dialog is accompanied by a nice anime-style drawing of the character that's speaking, so at first you don't really notice how poor the character models are, but sixty... long... hours... that I'd say at least half of which is dialog, you start to notice these things. The dungeons are equally pathetic and could have been achieved with the GFX chip on a SNES console: hallways where the only thing that differentiates each new dungeon is different theming/skinning of the hallways and doors and different music. Even more pathetic is when you realize that P4 Golden is a 2020 PC rerelease... wtf you couldn't even make it look like a PS2 game??
• Art style [5 out of 5] - I loved the art style and the personality that it brought to this game. Combined with the music, this was a big reason the game felt so refreshing to start out.

I managed to complete Persona 4 Golden in my second attempt with the game, since in the first one I dropped because the plot was not holding me in the game like Persona 3. This time, I came back much more used to Atlus games, before that I had only played P3, this time after having played Megami Tensei 1 to 2, Shin Megami and P1 to P2, I was able to get used to the repetitive battle systems and the proposal of Atlus RPGs, enjoying more of the game's combat. But just like my first time, the plot development doesn't really stand out.

[Investigative plot] Investigative mystery stories like this should be fun to follow because of the development of the mysteries, each little mystery should be like a puzzle piece, a reward for whoever is playing, getting closer and closer to the truth should be satisfying and a game where you have to find a culprit, it's cool for you to theorize about who the killer is. Unfortunately here we really don't have a range of suspicious characters to suspect in the first place, the protagonists also never seem to be getting anywhere, getting stuck in a repetitive loop of: Throw person on TV, rescue person, with the game never really developing far beyond that, which serves more to individually develop the protagonists with their themes but not adding to the investigation part of the game. This lasts until you get towards the end and the game starts throwing a bunch of Plot Twists at you. And at the end of it all, the culprit is a character who appeared in the prologue for about two minutes and never participated in the story again, not giving you a reasonable chance for the player to realize that he might be the culprit. Another thing that disappointed me is the cowardice of the game when it comes to deaths, some characters seem like they are going to die or disappear but they always come back somehow, taking away much of the dramatic weight that the game could have, so the game never actually kills anyone that the player really cares about, taking much of the weight off the danger these suspected assassins pose, previous Personas had far greater story consequences. In short, the plot is boring.

[Endings] Of course, like a true old-school JRPG, the game still hides the true ending from you, being counterintuitive sending you one way when you should be going the other way. When we get the Bad ending or normal ending in the hospital, the game leaves you with several hints that those aren't really the real ones, but after Adachi and Marie, when everything seems to be really resolved and it lets you say goodbye, when I try to enter in the Velvet Room and the game practically tells me "THERE'S NOTHING MORE FOR YOU TO DO HERE, GAME IS OVER, GO TO FINAL", when the game doesn't give you any hint that something is missing, it takes you to an untrue ending, only to later find out on the internet that there was still a dungeon and a final boss to kill, because you actually had to guess out of nowhere that you had to follow a specific path in the Good Bye section. Typical JRPG movement, especially the older ones, Ohhh, my Valkyrie Profile nightmares come back in my mind... The endgame should be a reward for the player who played and followed the adventure for so long, not a secret ending that you obtusely unlock. And yes, I know about the Social Link Jester tip, but an S link that was only placed later in Golden and that not everyone will want to evolve cannot be considered.

[Gameplay] About the Gameplay, it's the same thing as P3 only with some improvements, the horrible FES orders are now optional since now you can actually control your party precisely, now it's also much easier and rewarding to Grind, I remember that I finished the game at LVL 95 and I didn't even need to Grind much. A lot of people seem to dislike Persona's combat but I enjoy it, it's very satisfying to target enemies' weaknesses and do a group attack. The only thing that I really despise about having changed is the HP of the enemies, everything now takes a long time to die, the boss battles are endless, maybe this change has something to do with the buffs you get when you evolve the protagonists in S. Link, this problem lasts until you get Personas Overpowers like Yoshitsune and the enemies start dying for real on hard mode.

[Conclusion] So that's it, Persona 4 is a good game, the Social Links are cool with Nanako and Dojima being the best as they are the characters that develop the most, the music is still fantastic and the characters are charismatic enough to keep you on the adventure. It really could only have a better development in the investigative part of the game and in the consequences of the acts to become a game really as remarkable for me as Persona 3 was.

My Persona Ranking is: P3P -> P2 -> P4G -> P1 PSP

More than anything else, Persona games are about hitting a vibe. There's lots to say about individual systems in Persona 4 Golden, but really it's about the whole they add up to.

Despite being a silent protagonist, Yu is easily the most charming of the modern Persona series, which adds a lot of personality to the 80-100 hours you'll spend in Inaba. The game does drag at times, and there's eventually what I dub Girls und Panzer Moments™ where each character simply must say an almost identical, meaningless line at every development. Also, warning o' clock for just... so much sexism, with little dashes of homophobia and even transphobia. At times it makes the game feel ancient, and is almost entirely responsible for that star that's missing in this review. I recommend liberally mashing through dialogue text in these scenes. By the end though, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I cared about all the characters. Kanji and Rise are gems, and I was surprised by Ai's plotline. I even liked Teddie by the end! Truly, a feat in narrative design.

The battle system is fantastic. Not quite as obtuse as other SMT games, not too hand holdy like Persona 5, this one hits a nice mix. While I overall prefer more obtuse combat systems such as the original Persona, most will find themselves thoroughly entertained by fights for the whole journey. If you've played any other SMT game and thought it was a little easy, start on hard with this one. As for your inner selves, making awful little demons is as fun and satisfying as ever. Long live demon fusion!

So would I recommend Persona 4 Golden to someone new to the franchise? No, probably not. Most people are better served by starting with Persona 5 Royal, then working their way backwards to 4 or 3, depending on what kind of vibe you're interested in. Persona 1 remains my favorite, though I recognize I have a problem. Also, for those who dabbled in the PS2 original, the Golden additions are significant throughout the entire game. Good stuff, a good game.

Incredible anime style slice of life JRPG. Superb cast of characters that you grow attached to so quickly, and leave a lasting impact. Relatively simple fantasy whodunnit detective mystery storyline that weaves in Japanese mythology and psychology so well.

The life-sim gameplay was the shining point of the game, with the slice of life style events tugging at your heart strings. Combat and dungeon gameplay left something to be desired, especially later on in the game where it felt very repetitive, and sometimes just annoying.

Had many moments of fan-service that personally rubbed me the wrong way, but overall it was fine. Really leaned into classic anime tropes, but honestly I had a good time with it for the most part.

The English voice acting cast was absolutely stunning. Every character was so believable, and the performances in some parts of the game absolutely blew me away.

Some narrative themes showed their age, with some homophobia showing in some scenes. However it was never particularly mean spirited, and you could argue that the characters are “just teenagers”. In my opinion the game still felt accepting, however this is coming from a cis male, so take my opinion here with a grain of salt.

Overall an incredible game - and I’m sad that it’s over. Near the end I felt like it just kept dragging on, but once I finally finished I just wanted more. Definitely a memorable, unique experience!

I've traid many times to get into this franchise.

Persona 1 is unbearable to me. I like the look and the vibe, even like the story, but there is just a never ending set of repeating dungeon crawling that kills me really fast.

Persona 3 is one that a lot of people swear by, calling it the best one even. I can't get on that train, I was really liking the beginning and a lot of the characters and social links, but... There comes a point where the whole story revolves around a robotic teenage girl and everything becomes a thing about her, with the whole cast and plot fizzling out in favor of generic anime nonsense.

But I really wanted to give P4 a fair chance. I couldn't play it on the previous releases because for some reason the motion blur and low resolution made me nauseous. I never get nauseous with games, but there was something in the scrolling of this one when walking through the beautiful streets of Inaba that got me. Enter: The PC port and modding!! Maxing out the FPS and turning off the motion blur with a mod finally allowed me to really get into this world and its wonderful characters.

This one is different. Yes, the dungeons are still dull gameplay wise. Yes, there is still quite a lot of uncomfortable sexualization of teenage girls. But everything else works flawlessly together. The writing stays strong from beginning to end, unraveling the mystery that got you hooked at a perfect pace, letting you figure out the twists and turns alongside its characters, and even depending on your choices and answers to really keep it on track.

I was surprised about how much of the interactions with NPCs for social links and other stuff actually impact the main plot and gameplay side. There is not just getting a higher level to give EXP to personas, but also unlocking specific skills, evolving forms, and even exclusive abilities not attainable any other way. Even the optional romances feel more impactful, being hinted at throughout the calendar year that the game takes place in and actually stopping you from just romancing everyone, making it feel meaningful instead of just horny collectables.

Characters like Kanji and Naoto explore themes and topics that are unusual even nowadays, specially in videogames, and while it's still a 2000s anime game and you have to keep that in mind when looking at some of the representation, you can still feel how the theme of living your own life and not what others imagine for you still resonates. A lot of the more secondary social links can also hit hard, depending on who you are or what you've been through, but the game never stops giving you opportunities to spend more time with them and checking out more new dialogue.

Not to mention the seemingly infinite amount of quests, optional bosses, persona collecting, etc. for RPG completionists... This was not for me now, but I could've imagined teenage me getting absorbed with it for hundreds of hours. Getting the right combination of skills on your Personas to work with the party that you want to use is very satisfying, and the design of the monsters, while only aesthetic, is always quite surprising.

This really is a game that makes you feel like you've lived a year in this small town, you've learned in that high school with its quiz style tests and its study groups. You interacted with well developed and fully fleshed out classmates and got to know a lot of different people with radically different perspectives in the places you least expected to.

While I still think there is a lot of bad sprinkled throughout, and I'm not sure how good the "Golden" additions are to the overall story, this was a fantastic experience that I can totally see myself revisiting some day. Maybe by then I will actually get into fishing and model building.

One thing is clear, Chie is the best and Yosuke and Teddie suck balls. Here is my correct and objective tier list.

Absolutely wonderfully impactful experience, through and throughout. Lifestyle type of gameplay on the surface, of hanging out with friends, reading, working, etc was comforting, and enjoyable, specifically to see stats and numbers raise incrementally as they did. Especially choosing the right option in dialogue, to give your character an extra knowledge or courage boost. Despite it being most enjoyed as a novel experience, which I'm sure is slightly tainted if not almost ruined on a NG+ run, is still entirely more than serviceable.

The combat was fun and interesting, and definitely satisfying once you've gotten the hang of all the minutiae surrounding it. Normal difficulty never really brought a tedious and uninspiring challenge. Items and healing were sparse enough in the beginning to be challenging, and abundant enough in the latter half and final dungeons to not be impeding nor obnoxious. Too, choices in party and persona bring such rich options to you, allowing as much customization as a Pokemon team.

The actual avenue to battling, the Personas one accumulates and uses throughout the game, add such an interesting depth of character and lore to the game. recognizing such an array of mythos and legends; representation from so many diverse cultures, peoples, and tales, was incredibly interesting to me, despite not recognizing them all. Yet, how the shadows and personas represent party members (and other social links)— their inner struggles, self, shadow, ego, etc. adds numerous layers of depth and interest to the game's story. The whole Jungian motif and such was definitely beneficial to the telling, and enjoying of, the game.

The story was phenomenal; each social link was enjoyable, bringing new insight to a specific character's flaws or modus operandi. Their denouements were entirely enjoyable, each character (of which social links I have completed) had found satisfying conclusions to the chapters in their lives, and there were definitely quite a couple, filled with passion, emotion, empathy, and understanding, that brought me to the precipice, and some even to, tears. Other than heartwarming (but never overly saccharine) stories, the other events were comical or enjoyable enough; daily dialogue from teachers or other such things, for example.

Persona 4's main allegory is that of escaping fear. All throughout the game, every character must deal with this. Whether it is kanji's crass and harsh offensive nature, employed to avoid facing what he truly fears, or Yukiko's cowering, and running away from it, each ally, and each social link, innately struggle with this. Upon defeating their shadow, everyone comes to the realization of what it is that they are truly concerned with, and its highly self-destructive nature. Yet, realizing it is a very perfunctory, though beginning step. It is at this inception that then they must, further from realize— deal, fall to, and overcome their struggles. At last, they are reborn, and, realizing another holistic and wholesome side to themselves, become stronger yet. Then, further on, realizing introspection's work, seeing this change, and understanding that there is more to come, and preparing themselves for it, brings about another becoming of themselves. Along with the much broader theme of repressed feelings (and especially desires, and the escaping of them, though seen later on), Persona 4's motifs of "Leave Inaba", and "Return to Inaba", and, especially the ending cutscenes of the true final boss, I think they tell a comparable allegory; that, despite the game's possibility of awakening this realization, and its ability to comfort one with its fictional town, story, characters, relationships, and so on, the game wishes for you to let go of it once you have overcome it. Upon completing it, to stay in Inaba, to stay with all your friends, and go on with it, comfortable and happy, is incongruent and ingenuine to the game. The game is a respite, taken to introspect, to understand, to find comfort through the game and of yourself. Though, staying too long risks stagnation; one must always change as they grow.

You now what is the biggest issue with Persona 4 Golden?

=> Persona 5

Like a lot of people I bought this game at its release on Steam after having my mind blown away by P5 on PS4. While I had a great time I would have enjoyed this game much more if I played it 8 years ago.

The game is still great, characters are amazing, the story is good, soundtrack is a joy, general atmosphere is pleasing.

I did expect the graphics and general QoL stuff to be not as good, the dungeons to be a bit more repetitve compared to P5 but I also expected something a tiny bit different. Most of it kind of just the same, but less polished. You can't reasonably expect a PSvita game to match one of the biggest masterpiece of this generation, but the issue is that it's impossible not to compare them.

Social links give less interesting bonuses, Demon catching isn't as fun, Inaba has way less stuff to see etc .... It is still really impressive to discover the density of dialogs and all the different situations that emerge in this game especially considering THIS IS A PSVITA GAME FROM 2012. Pokemon be damned let's have more of Atlus stuff.

Would I recommend this game if you're a JRPG fan and want to dive into the Megaten or Persona series : absolutely. Would I recommend this game to someone who just finished P5 and is searching for more of the good stuff : definitely not.

Special mention to the quality of the PC port and to the difficulty settings (not sure if this is an addition in the Steam version or not) => just having more XP per battle to avoid the boring sidequests grind is a must even if you don't want to switch to easy mode.

This is certainly a great game, but at times it felt like it overstayed its welcome. Granted, you could say it has one heck of a high ratio of hours-of-valuable-content to dollars spent, and you'd be right, but for me, too much of that time felt like a slog for this game to be nigh perfect.

I think it mostly comes down to feeling like much of the time spent battling, particularly, grinding for experience points against non-boss shadows, wasn't meaningful, that it yielded diminishing returns, except the fights--often the boss battles--that kept me on my toes, thinking of new strategies to survive. The challenges kept me engaged, but the trouble was that my failure to overcome them could result in such a high loss of progress, and ultimately time, such as when failing to clear lengthy back-to-back boss fights with no opportunity to save progress in between them, which of course made the game feel even "sloggier."

I recognize, though, that these "sloggy" feelings can, to some degree, be mitigated by adjusting the difficulty setting at the beginning of the game, but in this case, lowering the necessity for grinding would lower the challenge, which is not an appealing trade-off. Certainly, RPGs, as a general rule, tend to be long and, arguably, overly repetitious, whatever their level of challenge, but they not need be, and need not feel tedious, if my experiences playing Undertale or, if memory serves, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, are any indication.

Despite my gripes about certain battles, I felt that some other lengthy aspects of the game--the persona-fusion and social-link systems--which tie in so brilliantly to the battle system, were engaging throughout. I kept wanting to see how the side-stories between "me" (but canonically "Yu") and my favourite characters would play out, and as result, see what cool and useful personas (or personae?) I could create through fusion, in terms of their skills and affinities, specifically the ones that could nullify, repel or drain certain attacks.

Although I found persona-fusing largely satisfying, there was a certain lack of features in The Velvet Room, the place where you do the fusing, that annoyed me. There was no way, as far as I could tell, to conveniently refer to the social-link rank of a certain potential persona's arcana except, after having already chosen its skills to be inherited, in the moment before I was required to finalize said fusion. This is a problem if, like me, you have a bad memory and also want to optimize your choices of persona fusions.

Another thing that irked me about the fusion system is that, at least on two separate occasions, after fusing several personas consecutively, Igor messed up and created some inferior persona that I didn't want, that didn't have the configuration of skills that I had thought hard about giving the one I actually expected to get. This meant I had to reload a previous save file and then save between each preceding back-to-back fusion, lest Igor screw it up again, to say nothing of having to remember precisely which personas and their skills I had tried to get the first time. An ability to save between fusions, without going back to the save point in the "lobby" of the TV World or Central Shopping District, would have been nice, although in most cases this would be overkill, as Igor's screwups were pretty uncommon.

In addition to how the game's above-mentioned interlinked systems kept me invested, the game's writing and characterization kept me pushing forward, to see how things would play out, no doubt helped in part by the murder-mystery plot and cast of (mostly) lovable characters. On the face of it, the story's tone and mood are lighter and more saccharine than that of Persona 3, but by its conclusion I was convinced that it had as much thematic depth and substance as its predecessor.

In fact, I liked this world so much that it's a shame so much of it appears to be locked behind new-game-plus mode. I would love to see more of my ongoing social links unfold, for example, without the necessity of playing through the same story mode again or battling more shadows. That said, I think much of the fetch quests for NPCs sound like busywork, unlike those tied to the Hermit-arcana social link, so certainly not all of the post-game optional content sounds golden.

Perhaps someday I'll go back to seek out some of the more meaningful post-game content, but I doubt it would be impressive enough to bump up this game to a five-ish star rating. I definitely look forward to soon catching up on my backlogged TV Listings, though, as unlike the other stuff, it isn't obstructed by obstacles to enjoyment.

Don't pay much mind to the above, mandatory star-rating, as I'd probably rank this game closer to a 90% than an 80%, or a little shy of 4.5 stars. So yes, finally, in spite of my criticisms, this is well worth playing through to its golden ending, and now that it's recently been added to Steam, it won't have to die with the Vita (or the Vita TV, in my case)!