Persona 4 is a third person game developed by Atlus. Notice how I leave out what kind of game it is? Well that’s the best part of Persona 4. It is a weird amalgamation of games. Imagine if an anime movie mated with a dating/friendship sim, then picked up some Pokemon, and threw in some dungeon crawling rpg–ness for good measure. Then you are beginning to scratch the surface of what kind of game Persona 4 is.
You step into the shoes of the main character, a young male going to live with his uncle for a year. There are unexplained things afoot and you become one of the Scooby Gang trying to discover the culprit. The story progresses from there, and for the most part I will try not to spoil it, but needless to say the twists and turns will leave you constantly thinking, just one more day…
The game progression is based on a calendar year. Each action you do takes a block of time in the game and when the time passes, it becomes a new day. Actions are tied to certain times of the day and are usually mutually exclusive. The Early Morning block is usually filled with school, or cut scenes setting up story. The Afternoon Block is your own. You can run around an talk to people, but must decide to either work on your social links or enter the dungeons.
Social Links are exactly what they sound like. They are the rating given to your social connections with other characters in the game. Each major character is associated with a Tarot figure and you have to try to build them up to level 10, the max social link. Fortunately this time is not wasted as the stronger a social link is, the better the bonuses in the dungeon for it are. This is the dating sim part of the game.
Dungeons are worlds of nightmare and shadow you enter to save your friends and combat the darkness creeping into your own world. In dungeons you collect persona, all taken from folklore and myth, then you can blend and level these persona and use them in battle. This is very much the Pokemon part of Persona 4 and is not only complex but endlessly engaging as you get new Persona and out grow old favorites.
I, as a level designer, categorically disagree with procedurally generated play spaces. Too often they create confusion and jogging simulators (where you spend a great deal of time running doing nothing). Persona 4 has a majority of procedurally generated dungeons, and while they are not great, they are better than most. But unlike most games dungeons in Persona 4 seem to be focused on single run experiences. The most effective way to progress is to clear a dungeon in one night then come back and clear all of them in a row when you have quests and need for more persona. The cut scenes and encounters are all setup as if they happen in a single night. The lore of the dream world even supports the random shifts in the layouts and levels of the dungeons. It isn’t great, but it doesn’t impede the gameplay.
The largest fault I can find with Persona 4 is the cultural adaptation. When many of your social link progression matters on choosing the “correct” answer it makes it difficult as an American determining what the correct answer is. Many of the correct choices seemed needlessly harsh or mean to me. Or I will be give three options that all mean the same thing to me. The indication that you chose the correct choice is shown by music notes above your character’s head. It almost enforces the save, then test, and take notes so you can reload and re-do with the best options, gameplay. Which is bad.
Persona 4 is a great step into a strange and unique style of game long popular in Japan, but not as much here in America. There are 3 preceding Personas but all have inherent design problems that were fixed for this game making it quite a bit better and cohesive.