Game Over: Persona 4 Golden

Dane reached the end of Persona 4 Golden.

- Dane Townsend

Persona 3 was arguably the game that made me appreciate JRPGs again. Lisa: The Painful and Earthbound both helped in more minor ways, but whilst I eventually trailed off on completing both, Persona 3’s story and characters kept me hooked the whole way. I hadn’t really felt that attached to a game’s cast to that degree before, and it made me understand what people loved about the JRPG format. The long form meant you had a very significant portion of time to get to know your party members and to invest yourself in the world and story. It was a great revelation, it felt like finally solving a puzzle that you’d been stuck on for weeks.

Perhaps putting Persona 4: Golden’s predecessor on such a high pedestal was a mistake, because my initial first impression of the game was something of disappointment. The game doesn’t do itself any favours, in my defence, because Persona 4: Golden’s graphics and layout are almost identical to Persona 3. This brought familiarity to my first five or so hours into the game, but also inevitable comparisons to the game I already loved. Yosuke felt like Junpei, but with a different voice, and even more obnoxiously perverted. The soundtrack was good, but it didn’t hit me the same as Shoji Meguro’s previous work in Persona 3. Inaba, whilst eerily paralleling my own real life transition to having to go to school in a completely different small town where there’s very little to do, just didn’t have the cosy midnight vibe that Gekkoukan High and Tatsumi Port Island carried. It kneecapped itself by being so familiar, because I was still aching after finishing what is now one of my favourite games of all time.