//Spoilers will follow but I don't give a shit because Atlus doesn't either lol

Fuck me dude this one is so weird. Never before have I ever been so frustrated with a jrpg like persona 4. It kinda big sucks too because I still find the core SMT gameplay loop entertaining enough to sit through and whatnot; fusing broken demons with Yu and watching health bars vanish in like a turn or two has never been easier to do, and the decision to let you control your own party members I'd argue was a necessary change from Persona 3. (I'm sorry, but not having access to your teams full moveset and relying on vague AI options slowed battles to a crawl too much for my liking.) Granted, I've never been a fan of Persona's overreliance on randomly generated dungeons, and here it's even more awkward due to how every one of them puts you into tight hallways making escaping encounters you don't wanna do more of a chore. You have to back up from AI aggro range and kind of awkwardly circle around them to run past them and it's just kinda annoying n shit, and the gimmicks they put into each dungeon to make them slightly varied from one another boils down to "do X task on this floor and this room will open". Kinda lame when mainline SMT does a lot more to make their dungeons interesting.

Other than my gameplay gripes, the real source of my frustration lies in Persona 4's lame-o cowardly story. It's a fuckin mess dude, and it's also like... unapologetically conservative? Any idea it presents that could be considered progressive is immediately backpedaled once the character that idea is associated with reaches their arc's conclusion. "Oh Yukiko might want to follow her own career goal rather than take up her family's business?" "Oh never mind she's gonna take it up anyways." "Oh Kanji is struggling with his sexual identity, could he possibly be gay?" "Oh never mind he's just really into feminine activities like sewing I guess". (We're still gonna throw homophobic "jokes" his way) "Oh Rise might want to give up her idol career and pursue her own passions, whatever that may be?" "Oh never mind she's gonna continue being an idol anyways". Probably the most eye-rolling one of all is doing Naotos dungeon and getting to the end and seeing her on a surgery table after the game numerously questioned her gender and after her boss fight she something along the lines of "I will never be a man, I was just moreso frustrated the police treated me like a child because I was young and a woman unlike all of them."

It's all just so baffling to me. I don't understand how this is a satisfying and engaging way to tell a narrative. What's the point of telling a story of your party members trying to figure out the truth of their identities if you're just gonna constantly press the fuckin rewind button on all of them? It does a huge disservice to these characters. It'd be whatever if it just did this once, but every party member follows this trend and it's incredibly grating. Having the plot threads revert their decisions like this is not only unsatisfying but makes the story really boring and predictable to me. That's why when I got to Nanako's "death" for the first time I felt nothing about it because I knew right then and there it was gonna be resolved by some kind of deus ex machina because this story refuses to do anything committal, and I was right. Persona 4 uses a child's death just for an in-the-moment scare for the party to find out who the real culprit actually is, which I only find more gross and manipulative the more I think about it. And for what? All in service for this scooby-doo and the mystery gang ass plot which was the result of a corrupted cop having a joker moment? In which the party members argue with him by simply calling him a crybaby piss boy? They couldn't even commit to Adachi being the real culprit of this conflict, no it turns out it was all the work of some evil deity hiding in an Exxon wanting to merge the TV world with the real world or whatever in which Yu saves the day with the power of friendship!!! Fuckin woopie doo

But it's like, I get to this conclusion and I felt like I didn't really earn this happy ending. I slayed these shadows within our characters only for them to barely change, I've only made them earn new friends, and that's cool n all and I can see why this narrative works for some people if you just look at it as a happy countryside fun vacation stay with pretty fast and fluid turn-based mechanics to tie it all together, but I can't get behind these characters if they don't really progress themselves and their problems are seen as nonissues in the end. Persona 4 is cowardly not because its heart isn't in the right place, but because it's so willingly regressive to commit to its ideas and I think that's a damn shame because the truth of the matter is this game could've been so much more.