As the PlayStation Vita port of the PlayStation 2’s Persona 4, Persona 4 Golden not only needs to be evaluated on its own terms, but also compared to its original incarnation. Originally developed for the PlayStation 2, Persona 4 is the in-universe sequel to Persona 3, though their stories are quite different and the nature of their antagonists are at the moment unrelated.
There are some similarities between Persona 3 and Persona 4 in both ludic and narrative senses, but ultimately they’re pieces of intellectual property that take divergent paths. Whereas Persona 3 is an inwards look on nihilism, suicide, and meaning, Persona 4 has a much campier, brighter outlook on life that rewards hard work and perseverance. Likewise, while in Persona 3 your drama against the enemy is ultimately external, Persona 4 is an inwards experience that looks at the needs and fears of its victims.
Set in the rural town of Inaba, Persona 4 is about Yu Narukami, the protagonist who arrives at his uncle’s house and must live there for a year while his parents are away for work. The game doesn’t make any considerable effort to explain or divulge Yu’s character from his past: we don’t know whether he was popular or ostracized beyond a brief flashback, we don’t know whether he excelled, and we don’t know whether there are any bonds worth keeping. All we know is that he’s a high school student.
Coincidentally, at the same time Inaba is beset by a bizarre murder: a woman is found hanging upside from a telephone pole the morning after a foggy night. The victim is disgraced former news anchor Misuzu Hiiragi, whose love affair with (now) former politician Taro Namatame paints the headlines in the story’s first arc.
During the timespan of these events, Yu is newly enrolled in Yasogami High, the largest (and only) secondary school in the area. Here, he quickly befriends martial arts-loving Chie Satonaka, graceful inn heiress Yukiko Amagi, and ostracized but fun-loving Yosuke Hanamura. At Yosuke’s behest, they form a scrappy, impromptu investigative team to figure out the nature behind these murders. By doing so, they come across a startling truth: there’s another world inside the TV.
The game’s pacing and linearity ensures that the game’s slightly convoluted nature can be easily consumed. It moves at a snail’s pace, but Persona 4 is a product with care: all of the characters are fleshed out well enough that their motivations aren’t entirely hackneyed, the mystery is overwhelming and interesting enough to keep their motivations consistent and ongoing, and the nature of the Personas - the Shadows, Teddie, and everything else in-between - provides so many questions that you become enamored with any sense of payoff.
Likewise, there’s an effective juxtaposition in Persona 4 that’s much more effective here than Persona 3. In Persona 3 the ongoing threat of Apathy Syndrome gave a persistent sense of gloom; in Persona 4, the mystery isn’t oftentimes the central theme of the plot. While there’s definitely a much more powerful visual, audio, and symbolic element underlining Persona 4 through an oppressive fog, the majority of the game is focused on a bouncy, excitable high-school story peppered with rescue missions.
In that respect, Persona 4 is a much more inward journey than Persona 3. The game tries – and sometimes succeeds – in creating characters that are more than plot devices. Though the observation of most of these characters is primarily through Yu’s eyes, the unfolding of their personal arcs has a sort of beautiful sobriety to it. The game is littered with humor and jokes, and the audio certainly doesn’t help: the soundtrack is dominated by peppy, somewhat synthesized vocals and music: emphasizing the high school rom-com feel that underlines most of the things you do.
Mechanically, Persona 4 attempts to force player interaction with the characters through the use of Social Links. Each Persona is tied to an Arcana, and the more resonant Arcana lead to higher leveled or more powerful Personas. To level up these Arcana, you focus on Social Links, which are levels that are multipliers to Personas created by fusing corresponding Persona to that specific Arcana. If you have a high level Social Link in the Tower Arcana, then Personas fused from that category will gain more starting experience, mitigating the need for extensive grinding.
The narrative result is also similar to Persona 3, though not entirely identical. In Persona 3, your companions become more powerful and gain their resolve through the plot. In Persona 4, there’s much more player agency for that same resolve; whether Yosuke or Chie or anyone in the Investigation Team goes through their character arc ultimately depends on whether Yu takes the time to do so.
There’s moments where this idea works and moments where it doesn’t. On one hand, it gives a more personal and emotional relationship with those you speak to. Whereas Persona 3 depends upon the player speaking and addressing concerns with many party members, their resolution is fixated upon particular plot points. Only after certain periods are they willing to move on; their progression is not one of the player’s choosing. In Persona 3, regardless of what the player does, Mitsuru, Yukari, Akihiko, Ken, etc., all develop their largest arcs irrespective of the main character’s Social Links.
In Persona 4, this is the opposite. The team doesn’t move as individual characters without Yu’s involvement: if you don’t talk to Yosuke, he won’t come to gripes with his crush’s death; if you don’t talk to Yukiko, she won’t find meaning in her position and her work; if you don’t talk to Kanji, he won’t be comfortable in his self-identification. In this sense, Persona 4 is more effective at making you feel like these people are people that you should care about because they’re directly affected by that care.
But the benefit of individual development that comes in Persona 4 is at the cost of team development. In Persona 3, each member moves and acts regardless of the main character’s behaviour. SEES (the name of their team) can grow along pre-defined plotlines, becoming more cohesive as a unit by the end of the story. A unified sense of resolve comes off as more realistic as team members are more willing to discuss, confide, and trust in each other.
It’s a baptism by fire. You’re not the one who helps Mitsuru after the death of her father, you’re not the one who cradles Shinji to death, and you’re not the one that deals with Fuuka’s bullies. Instead, the main character in Persona 3 inhabits the space around these events, watching and slightly influencing them, but he doesn’t engineer or direct them.
In Persona 4, it only happens because of you, but since the game needs to move through the plot regardless of whether the player chooses Social Links relevant to the party members or not, you’re stuck dealing with a slightly dissonant experience. The mechanisms that move from Point A to Point B in the plot of Persona 4 don’t translate very well with the characters that are central to it.
Whether you help Yosuke deal with his issues in Inaba or not, the game doesn’t care; it chugs along at a slow pace, blindly moving the characters without any semblance of personal arc. Because the game has no way of accounting for differences based upon Social Links and Yu is the center of these developments, the members of the Investigation Team don’t really change their interactive behaviour between one another or the main character outside of their Social Links.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it’s not something that needs to be a major concern; it’s just different. Because each Social Link and each character’s arc is determined by Yu, the sense of play between each individual player will be different. The plot isn’t compelling in terms of character development, so it depends upon the Social Links for that sense of character arc.
Of course, there are mandatory Social Links: Teddie’s Social Link progresses alongside the story, but is highly functional. Its purpose becomes clear later on as a way to reverse Nanako’s death scene in a somewhat convoluted fashion, and it cheapens her suffering, the emotional stakes, and Teddie as a character. However, this isn’t the norm in Persona 4.
Furthermore, the Social Links in Persona 4 are decidedly easier than those in Persona 3, to the extent that relationships are much simpler. In Persona 3, quite a few relationships – and each romantic relationship – can be compromised by a lack of devotion. In Persona 4, there’s very little degradation. There’s only one Social Link that bears a realistic risk of degradation, and none of the girls you romance will reverse Social Link statuses, even when caught or neglected.
It’s somewhat insidious and lackluster at the same time, putting the girls in Persona 4 on a pedestal. They’re treated less like women and more like trophies; it cheapens their value as emotional and powerful human beings with their own worries. In Persona 3, an uncaring protagonist is an unloved protagonist, and the relationships that grow out of repeated interaction are gifted by trust. Here, trust is highly functional and sort of gatekeeper-esque: the player is gifted not with trust, but rather an upgraded Persona, implying that such an unbreakable bond is inevitable.
You help people not because you want to, or because you want to remain good friends with them (as the secondary objective for Social Links in Persona 3 seems to be), but because there’s a visible, tangible benefit in the form of stronger Personas that are waiting to be unlocked. When you couple that with the game’s inability to effectively reconcile the divergent paths individual characterization takes in comparison to the linearity of the plot, Persona 4 comes off as a messier, more fan-service-y game that doesn’t really need to be. Unfortunately, complexity comes off as a byproduct of the game, not as a goal to be attained. However, some people are rewarded by character complexity and misjudge it as an end-goal. It never was and never is: the upgraded Personas are the end goals. You help someone with their problem, you acquire a new Persona, you move on. There’s no consequence other than a false sense of scarcity with in-game time.
The characterization issues don’t hold a candle to the plot’s. Compared to Persona 3, Persona 4 seems to be a game fixated on convenience and coincidence. You happen to be in the town where Izanami is active and you happen to be one of the chosen Wild Cards. It’s a weird confluence of events that aren’t as effectively explained as Persona 3. In Persona 3, the main character’s ability stems from his poor luck in being an unwitting vessel for the Death Arcana; Tatsumi Port Island was the area for Tartarus because it’s the site of Shadow experimentation; Nyx as a being has a much larger reach and can span as a global threat. Persona 4 lacks that same sense, and instead opts to rely upon mythology that isn’t very well explained, nor does it clearly explain why Inaba and why Narukami.
Persona 4 Golden is an accentuation of Persona 4’s strengths. It’s a polish of Persona 4’s gameplay system, making the experience much easier and streamlined. In Persona 4, your skills that carry from one Persona to another in a mixed fusion are determined by type and some randomization. In Persona 4 Golden, you’re free to choose which skills are transferred, eliminating much of the time associated with rouletting the fusion chart.
We have mixed opinions on that. There’s obviously some benefit in being able to choose and deck out what sort of Persona you want to play instead of settling for whatever encapsulates the closest form that’s within the player’s realm of patience. We get that. It saves time.
Persona 4 Golden’s decision to place Rise in a more active role removes a lot of tension. Since Rise can protect the party from damage during a battle or provide random buffs and debuffs, the flow of a battle can be disrupted based upon what she decides to do. It eliminates a lot of the planning that you’ll see is the staple on more difficult levels of Shin Megami Tensei games. It’s not that bad, per se; it just accentuates an element of luck that I don’t believe needs to be accentuated.
These changes are a layer placed on top of the turn-based mechanics present in Persona 4. Since you’re spending time taking turns attacking mobs of enemies and trying to exploit their weak points, the flow isn’t changed too much, but it’s noticeably easier. Persona 4 Golden’s gameplay is pretty much the same as Persona 4’s – you’re free to travel to the beach or go to Okina city or walk around at night - but you’re confined by the exclamation prompts present in Persona 4. It’s an addition to a set of mechanics, not a restructuring.
Persona 4 has always been defined by people with fears that are masked by upbeat, colorful, ostentatious-ness in their daily lives. Persona 4 Golden provides more of the same thing, and it works flawlessly. You have a new opening, can hang out at night, have a skiing event, a Halloween event, etc. The juxtaposition between the long, dark dungeon crawls and the months of ‘rest’ through hanging out with your friends gives you a welcome breather.
It also makes the romances a bit more complex; one gripe in Persona 4 is that the women are treated like objects to be acquired, and that there’s no consequence for polygamy. Persona 4 Golden still has the mindset that the women are easily attainable by the handful, but it does attempt to punish players for romancing everybody. We’ll admit: we romanced everyone. The Valentine’s Day event in Persona 4 Golden is a fantastic addition because it’s the first in-your-face situation where the game has you choose only one girl and reject the others. The underplayed and muted disappointment that comes from the others are pretty effective at making you reluctant to repeat polygamy on a second playthrough. While the Christmas Eve event in Persona 4 is a choose-one-and-one-only scenario, you aren’t exposed to the others’ disappointment. Here, you’re being shown that you’re letting them down. It’s phenomenal.
Persona 4 Golden is a definite purchase option for fans of Persona 4 and PlayStation Vita owners alike, but it’s not the console seller that some people may argue it to be. In many respects, it’s not as substantial a port as Persona 3 Portable, where major story arcs change based upon your gender and your choices from your gender. Persona 4 Golden remains steadfastly Narukami-centric, and doesn’t mess around with the canon it establishes in Persona 4.
In fact, much of its additions magnifying comedy and bounce with more comedy and more bounce. There’s small, minute additions to the soundtrack; but the most noticeable one will be the quirky and upbeat intro song smashed together with vibrant cutouts of bodies hanging upside from telephone poles. It’s as brash and confident as ever, strolling through at least 100 hours of worth of content with an unabashed swagger as brazen as the popped collars on its protagonist. Ultimately, it’s a phenomenal game as a port, and that’s all it needs to be.
Joe Yang
@yaochongyang
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