Persona 4 is finally beaten with a final clock in the area of 95 hours.
Now its time to rant. **SPOILERS** ahead and such. I'm just gonna do this in the old fashioned categorical matter for the sake of simplicity.
Graphics: Despite being spoiled recently by the shininess of a PS3 and an HDTV, I've got to say, Persona 4 still looks good. For the most part, the graphics are pretty much identical to P3, with the odd improvement here or there. The biggest improvements were in the areas of dungeon design and general artistic direction.
To put it as simply as possible, TV World was a lot more attractive and interesting than Tartarus. The more cohesive and logical designs (rather than just weird shapes and colors) was significantly more appealing and held my attention a bit better. It was a little thing, but the change from castle to bathhouse to underground research lab was just more interesting.
Taking it a bit further, on the whole, P4 just seemed to have a more organized artistic scheme. The use of color, the menus, the battle screens, etc was both more attractive than P3 (which, at least in my recollection, was a little more muted and dull) and just worked better together.
P4 did take a serious hit in the animation department though. While the early stuff was pretty solid, it seems that the animation budget dried up by the end of the game, with the ending being particularly guilty of several lazy animation tricks and a general decrease in the basic quality of the artwork. It was really disappointing, given the early stuff was so good looking, as was a lot of the animation in P3.
Character designs stuck to the Persona 3 idea of relatively simple designs that I found surprisingly memorable. Simple and attractive, for the most part. There was the odd miss here or there (Daisuke, Mitsuo, lot of the blushing portraits), but, in return, there was the odd absolute win too (Exposed Adachi). Additional bonus points for Namatame's boss form, which is probably the single most awesome design in the entire game. Love and peace all the way.
Storytelling: Here is one of those categories where Persona 4 had a lot of ups and downs. So let's get the biggest issue out of the way first.
Persona 4's pacing was really, really bad. Like, tremendously so. The biggest flaw, I think, is that the game simply gave you too much time to burn. A lot of the game, as far as general plot progression is concerned, was characterized by "You are waiting for X to recover" or "You are waiting for the killer to make his next move." While this conveniently gave you a lot of time to rescue the kidnapped, build you starts and grind social links, it didn't let the game flow as well as Persona 3 did. In P3, you were always moving forward and pushing on. In P4, the heroes role was primarily reactive role. This is further inhibited by the fact that the fog is, for most of the game, less threatening than Apathy Syndrome and the Dark Hour.
Of course, in return, once things start rolling, they start rolling well. The beginning of the game is still incredibly enjoyable and flows very well, as does each individual kidnapping. Although the middle does, as stated, lag, the end picks up the action again. The kidnapping of Nanako is a huge deal and is very tastefully (and almost incredibly tragically ;_; ) handled, and the push into the truer ending is good and very well done.
All three revelations were, at their worst, acceptable, and, at their best, pretty good. By the point it was revealed, Namatame was my expected villain and did not disappoint. The crazed, desperate and delirious man (with the awesome boss form) was a good enemy and served as an excellent catalyst for the decision to move onto the bad end or the good end. The sudden dark twist of the cast was very well handled, and it served as an intriguing and exciting branching point that really added some realism to the cast as they were faced with the highly emotional choice of how to deal with Namatame.
Unsurprisingly, the bad end was highly disappointing. Not even in a good way. Which is... well, important. The idea is that it should indicate you did something wrong, so the continued existence of the fog and the sad, subdued tone worked very well. I think Dojima's question ("Were you satisfied with everything you did?") was the highlight.
The revelation of Adachi... makes sense, looking back. I will yield, it did surprise me, but it worked well enough. I would have appreciated a little more to it, but Adachi made up for the lake of thorough explanation by being a Grade A Jerk-Ass. He wasn't the most compelling villain ever, but the man made himself easy and enjoyable to hate. Grey villains are fun, but so are people who are such irredeemable jackasses that there is no way to like them. The shift from gentle, slightly dopey cop to highly bitter sociopath was impressive, and was well carried. It could have benefitted from a little bit of expansion, but it functioned.
Ameno Sagiri worked.
The final sequence was very well done and enjoyable, and served to highlight the themes of the game (search for the truth and companionship) very well.
Izanami... mrm. We return to the pacing problem here. Functionally, it worked and wasn't unfair, but it really could have done with some additional expansion. It worked well in isolation, but its hard to avoid the feeling that it was a little tacked again. Still, I can't bring myself to call it bad.
Overall, the story carried itself pretty well. The themes remained core to the story, each individual arc played out fairly enjoyably and, despite taking a long time to get there, the loose ends managed to tie themselves up quite nicely. Adjusting the pacing significantly could have made this into an absolutely amazing story, but, unfortunately, that was not to be.
I think it also bears mention here that this game had an uncanny amount of self-awareness. Ash and I constantly found our questions or joking statements being immediately answered or reciprocated by the game, to the point where it became absolutely uncanny the way we would make a smart-ass remark or an incredulous question, only to have to game act like it was reading our minds. Seriously, you can ask Ash. It was creepy >_>
Atmosphere: Excellent. While it worked acceptably for Persona 3, I feel the approach taken by 4, where the TV World and the persona stuff was really strange and met with appropriate incredulity, is inherently a bit better. It is just... harder to swallow the existence of SEES given that it was presented as a group that already existed. The extraordinary became ordinary a little too quickly.
Here, the initial trouble with coming to grips with the strangeness of the situation served as a right hoot at the beginning (the initial exploration of the TV, getting arrested with weapons, etc) was maintained fairly regularly, and the game benefitted quite a bit from it. There was the occasional disconnect (just SHOW Dojima the TV thing, guys), but those were fairly far and few between.
This moves a little more into personal taste, but I also felt this allowed the idea of the personal life and the life of heroes to mesh better. The characters started out as normal folks and, as a result, it made more sense that school and their personal lives were so important. They were teens to start with. Not super heroes, not brave warriors. They were just some dudes who happened to have this happen to them.
Characters: Another solid improvement over Persona 3. Although the same archetypes were hanging around (you can draw several fairly close correlations between the two casts), they felt a lot better developed and less one-note than the Persona 3 cast. I think a lot of this stemmed from the fact that the P4 cast simply had more time and more chances to develop. The growth of the group as a whole served to help the individual development of the characters a lot more. Add in that the entire cast got social links to develop off of, and you can see why the P4 cast is leaps and bounds above the P3 cast. I'll do a complete character thing in a future post, because man, I'd like to finish this for a bit.
Gameplay: Another area where P4 distinctly improved. The addition of complete party control is about the best thing ever. Period.
Beyond that, combat was far less irritating. Generally speaking, fights were significantly more challenging in that they required you to think, deal with boss patterns and occasionally even plan ahead, while, for the most part, I managed to just muscle through the majority P3. Random groups were much more synergistic and bosses had solid attack arrays and patterns that required you actually address what they were doing. The final three bosses were a bit disappointing compared to Nyx for the relative ease with which I beat them, but hey, you can't have everything. The fact that I was struggling to beat bosses and having close fights for most of the game (partly a symptom of my low levels, but hey, it simply enhanced the experience) was quite gratifying.
It was also a wonderous surprise to find that the game relied far less on cheese for both sides. First and foremost, the implementation of allies taking attacks for the main was a good idea and solved a lot of the issues with "FUCKING LUCKY CRITS" of "SON OF A BITCH INSTANT DEATH" wiping out the main. Furthermore, the inability for enemies to chain lock the main was good times as well, as that was probably the most frustrating part of P3.
In return, the loss of the ability to do that to enemies made general fights a little harder, as did the fact that the main character was not quite as stupidly overpowered, nor did he always go first.
This, in turn, made the rest of the cast feel a LOT more useful. For most of P3, especially near the end, the other PCs felt like pretty weak groupies. They could occasionally help out, but, for the most part, were weak assistants to the main. In P4, the other PCs often proved incredibly helpful and were pretty formidable in their own rights until the main started getting the really broken Personas.
Money/Equip grinding worked all right, but felt a bit annoying. Due to my tendency to not make multiple TV runs, I was often behind in getting new equipment and, when I did, it was quite expensive. It stands out to me that I think I couldn't buy new girl armor for about 3 or so dungeons.
Stat grinding and social links remained generally good and flowed together pretty well. The part time job dynamic and general interactions just felt more natural and worked well.
Shuffle... I liked less. I found it much harder to track certain cards because of the way they moved intially, and the roulette stood out as particularly obnoxious to me. Arcana chance was fun though.
**END SPOILERS**
And that sums it for this post. I'll add more in a future post where I get more into the nitty gritty of the characters and social links I completed ^_^
