Persona 4 Golden is a narrative mystery game with style and depth applied to every choice along the way.
At a pure systems level, the Persona mechanics are fascinating enough. By building social links through meaningful engagement with the folks about town, you then drive forward your ability to fuse more powerful monsters significant to some central tenant of each person’s identity.
This is not only appealing on a mechanical front, as the entire narrative wraps around allotted time for the player-granted story you want to tell. Want a romantic relationship or perhaps never to talk to this person?
So, beyond mechanical layers of how Persona games work, they also feed into this visual novel choice system slotted perfectly into an RPG.
Not every moment is inspiring but so many are inspired. It’s the little things, a big accumulation of little things that begin to resemble one big story about a kid from outside town wrapped in a surreal murder mystery.
The Midnight Channel, as the wraparound thematic storytelling device, is a fascinating lens that pairs with the era just before the game in Japanese media, about appliances, technology, and translating the traditional Ghost story into the context of device culture.
That we visit these abstract dungeon crawling spaces through the access point of a television is an interesting device to create strange worlds with equally strange shadows.
Every device and element of Persona 4 Golden is reflected back unto itself. Each layer affects another layer. There is a whole depth of role-playing systems at work, which allows more nuance, if not more intrinsic focus, to popular companion RPGs, with Personas being more engaging at a system level than Pokémon, and allowing a multi-sided fight mechanic that pushes the RPG Battle Concept forward in many ways. Hard to imagine going back to anything like this game, that is not this game.
The Atlus house style is so immediately striking. The gold-black menus are beautiful and provide a thematic feeling to how the game presents itself. The jingle inside Junes plays delightfully in your mind long after the game. The audio motifs are as specialized and focused as the visual ones, and just as unique.
The visual layer, where the player moves around spaces and interacts with the game, are equally singular. It feels like a one-of-a-kind town, with memorable residents, and branching choices of what to do for work, friendship, and good old grinding. All the systems work together, even in the overworld that is largely a hub to decide what the characters do that day.
It’s a fascinating game to break apart and look at the systems inside. All of them are good and complimentary. There are peculiar choices, a couple characters with regressive messaging (especially Kanji, but occasionally everyone), and there’s that weird end point before the actual end of the game, not at all telegraphed, so you’ll need to grab a guide.
Part of these abstractions are inherent in the appeal, wherein you’re finding your way around systems and obscure personality types while trying to also solve for a puzzling murder. As a cumulative example of role-playing design across multiple levels, Persona 4 Golden is one of the best out there.
Most importantly, you’ll never forget so many of the small moments or how the game makes you feel, and it makes you feel so many things but most of all it is delightful.
At a pure systems level, the Persona mechanics are fascinating enough. By building social links through meaningful engagement with the folks about town, you then drive forward your ability to fuse more powerful monsters significant to some central tenant of each person’s identity.
This is not only appealing on a mechanical front, as the entire narrative wraps around allotted time for the player-granted story you want to tell. Want a romantic relationship or perhaps never to talk to this person?
So, beyond mechanical layers of how Persona games work, they also feed into this visual novel choice system slotted perfectly into an RPG.
Not every moment is inspiring but so many are inspired. It’s the little things, a big accumulation of little things that begin to resemble one big story about a kid from outside town wrapped in a surreal murder mystery.
The Midnight Channel, as the wraparound thematic storytelling device, is a fascinating lens that pairs with the era just before the game in Japanese media, about appliances, technology, and translating the traditional Ghost story into the context of device culture.
That we visit these abstract dungeon crawling spaces through the access point of a television is an interesting device to create strange worlds with equally strange shadows.
Every device and element of Persona 4 Golden is reflected back unto itself. Each layer affects another layer. There is a whole depth of role-playing systems at work, which allows more nuance, if not more intrinsic focus, to popular companion RPGs, with Personas being more engaging at a system level than Pokémon, and allowing a multi-sided fight mechanic that pushes the RPG Battle Concept forward in many ways. Hard to imagine going back to anything like this game, that is not this game.
The Atlus house style is so immediately striking. The gold-black menus are beautiful and provide a thematic feeling to how the game presents itself. The jingle inside Junes plays delightfully in your mind long after the game. The audio motifs are as specialized and focused as the visual ones, and just as unique.
The visual layer, where the player moves around spaces and interacts with the game, are equally singular. It feels like a one-of-a-kind town, with memorable residents, and branching choices of what to do for work, friendship, and good old grinding. All the systems work together, even in the overworld that is largely a hub to decide what the characters do that day.
It’s a fascinating game to break apart and look at the systems inside. All of them are good and complimentary. There are peculiar choices, a couple characters with regressive messaging (especially Kanji, but occasionally everyone), and there’s that weird end point before the actual end of the game, not at all telegraphed, so you’ll need to grab a guide.
Part of these abstractions are inherent in the appeal, wherein you’re finding your way around systems and obscure personality types while trying to also solve for a puzzling murder. As a cumulative example of role-playing design across multiple levels, Persona 4 Golden is one of the best out there.
Most importantly, you’ll never forget so many of the small moments or how the game makes you feel, and it makes you feel so many things but most of all it is delightful.