Media Diary Week 1

This week I will be doing a review of a video game known as Persona 4. I am an avid fan of the RPG genre and I did know of this game for quite some time but never decided to play it until recently, so I decided to give it a try and was very pleasantly surprised when I found it to be a really enjoyable and very interesting take on the genre.

The game is about a high school student by the name of Yu Narukami (the character’s name can be changed to whatever the player would want) who moves to the countryside to live with his uncle and cousin, he goes to the new school and meets his new friends as every stereotypical ‘boy moves to insert location here’ story goes about doing things. Things get interesting however as on the day he arrives at school a dead body is discovered, this starts off the escalating mystery as another person dies and the police are incapable of catching the culprit. It is then up to the main character and his friends to discover who is committing the murders, which leads them to entering a TV world in which monsters exist and people’s worst thoughts become reality.

The characters to choose from use monsters known as Personas, beings that represent who they are. These Personas are important as they each have their own strengths and weaknesses which are important to remember when dealing with the monsters known as shadows. The game is your standard affair when it comes to the RPG, monsters have weaknesses and you exploit them which is what you would expect. The main attraction of Persona 4 is the strict time management; this is because the game’s story goes over the course of an in game year. This means planning out your days perfectly to get the items you want, the side quests completed and developing supports with your team mates. Now why would you want to build supports? Well not only does it give party members extra abilities which could save you from certain death it also helps with the Persona fusion system for the main character. Personas can be collected after battle and fused with each other to make stronger Personas; the bonuses they receive vary depending on what type they are from. The type that a Persona is from is represented by a support; these supports can be party members or people in town. Sounds easy right? Wrong. Your character has two types of experience to gain, one in the TV world in battles and experience in the real world. You’re still a high school student after all, which means the usual things a student has to do such as studying, homework etc. This keeps the player occupied and can makes the supports much more important as you have less time to focus on them while bringing up your knowledge, courage, diligence and so on.

The environments in the real world are not anything special I’m afraid, they’re the typical Japanese town locations that you would expect and they aren’t anything to be amazing at. That changes completely in the TV world however as each dungeon is unique and is and help contrast the simple and somewhat bland environments of the real world. These dungeons are a manifestation of the victims who are thrown into the TV world, which means someone has to save them and that person is you. But you haven’t got time to do that? You have the real world to deal with? That’s too bad as the real world also wants you to save the victims in the form of the weather system. The real world has weather which can change your plans very quickly; this is because the most dangerous weather state to have is fog. When the fog comes in the real world it clears in the TV world, this doesn’t sound too bad until it is explained that the monsters will get violent and kill the victim who is thrown in. This means you need to not only check the weather, plan out your day for experience; get supports and do everything expected from a high school student but now you have to make sure you save the victim before the fog shows up.

Now as you can imagine this may sound like a lot to handle and is quite stressful, and that’s the fun of Persona 4. But it is also the greatest downfall of Persona 4 as well, this is down to the fact that it is not only difficult in terms in planning but even the battles are difficult. Persona 4 gets caught in the typical trap of an RPG, which is of course grinding! Grinding is nothing new to the RPG; it has been around for a long time and is almost expected. However remember that planning I mentioned before? Well that also means you have less time to grind which is especially frustrating when even on easy the game is difficult, grinding opportunities are scarce and you will run out of resources very quickly.

So even while the game as a whole can be frustrating and difficult if you like a decent challenge while trying a new take on the long overused RPG genre then this is worth trying out, it still holds up even in the age of HD and if the PlayStation 2 quality bothers you there is a remake called Persona 4 Golden which adds more to an already expansive game. If you’re looking for a game that will keep you busy for several weeks then I recommend this game, with a new game plus mode also included it adds an extra one hundred hours to a game which already passes the one hundred and fifty mark.