M:B #8: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

Atlus's Persona series of games have been known (at least in their most recent entries) for balancing a high school simulator with a dungeon crawling RPG with a remarkable amount of success. About a year ago, I decided that no matter what, I would push my way through Persona 3. I didn't think that the game was bad by any means. Rather, at the time I had already invested a good thirty hours into the game, yet the minutia of day to day life in a Japanese high school was beginning to get to me, and so I took a hiatus from the game. When I started to play the game again, I realized that I had begun to take it a little too seriously, trying to map out my schedule in order to maximize what I could get done in a given week and hence better "beat" the game. I started playing again with a much more lax approach where I would play through the social aspects of the game casually and then play the dungeon crawling all in bursts, and the new take on the game seemed to pay off as I made it to the end boss. However, after an hour and a half fight, the boss took control of one of my party members. The game does not allow you to have direct control over any of your teammates, and as a result none of my party "uncharmed" that party member, resulting in said charmed member healing the boss's health entirely. This effectively erased the hour and a half of progress I had just made, and it was at this point that I dropped the controller in disbelief, silently walked over to the system, and turned it off.

It's one of the worst recent memories I've had with a game, right up there with not being able to beat the first level of The Rocketeer on SNES as a kid. When I looked at an FAQ afterwards, I found out that I had been using a less than ideal team for the last battle, even though the same team had gotten me through the rest of the game with little to no problem. The prospect of leveling up these other characters to a satisfactory level and trying that marathon boss battle again was too much, and I just put the game away. At the time, Persona 4 had just been released and I had gotten a good deal on it online, so I thought maybe I could redeem myself through playing it. I got a total of 10 minutes in before I realized I just couldn't do it. It was the equivalent of having a dog you loved bite you, forcing your parents to put it down, but then getting another dog that looks almost identical the next day. And so Persona 4 sat in a pile of PS2 RPGs that I had bought but barely touched, and I really wasn't sure whether or not I could ever play it again.

However, Mission: Backlog stepped in and gave me the little resolve I needed to start it up, and I have to say that I wasn't surprised by the fact that I thought it was a great game, but rather was relieved it was. It addressed all of my major complaints about Persona 3, including the two that kept me from finishing the game, were addressed. The story is fairly different from Persona 3, and while both focus on a group of teenager trying to uncover a mystery, Persona 4 more took the vibe of a whodunit movie. Mysterious deaths have started to occur in a small town in Japan's countryside (which is kind of a laughable notion, as the "country" in this game looks more busy than a suburb in America) whenever fog sets in. Soon, the protagonist  hears a rumor about a channel that appears at midnight on nights when it's raining and shows your true love. It's established pretty quickly that the deaths and the channel are connected and the protagonist discovers he can enter into a world inside of the T.V. Someone has been throwing people into the T.V. which somehow leads to their death, and hence the protagonist attempts to enter the T.V. and save the victims before the world kills them. All the while, the protagonist comes closer to solving the mystery of who is throwing people into the T.V. world and what the T.V. world is in the first place.

As he rescues people, they join his party (with only a few exceptions) and help him rescue other victims. It's inside the T.V. that the game takes a dungeon crawler format, and this time, instead of having to go through 236 floors of a tower, you enter different worlds based on the character's hidden feelings. These hidden feelings seem to take on the form of sexual repression a lot, but what can you expect from a country with panty vending machines. Inside of each of these worlds, there are about 10 floors you need to battle through, with a miniboss around the halfway mark and a final boss at the end. The fighting itself is typical for a JRPG, with you selecting commands from a menu with no time limit. Each enemy has a set of strengths and weaknesses, and you're rewarded for exploiting these weaknesses with an extra turn. Hence the game becomes an experiment of discovering what the enemy's weakness is and then using this information to get through battles more efficiently. Each character in your party can call forth a persona, which is basically a battle avatar. These personas all have their own strengths and weaknesses as well as specific abilities (usually tied to their strengths), so to a degree you can rely on your teammates when trying to exploit an enemy's weakness. Since you now have direct control over them, it's much less frustrating than it was in Persona 3. However, for the most part you'll rely on the protagonist, who has the ability to switch between different personas. You gain new personas either by collecting cards at the end of battle or through a fusion mechanic where you merge two personas to create a new one. You can switch personas once per turn in battle, which allows you to adapt to almost any enemy situation. These personas all belong to a specific category which is linked to a Tarot sign, which in turn is linked to a relationship that you have with another character in the real world.

It is here that the other half of the game plays out, with the protagonist attempting to develop relationships with people by spending time with them in order to strengthen the personas he uses in battle. If you manage to finish the storyline connected to a specific person, then you gain access to the ultimate persona for that Tarot sign. Additionally, developing certain relationships opens up relationships with other people, so the game feels very interconnected and much more like a small town where almost everyone is connected to one another.

However, the world inside of the T.V. and the world outside are not quite balanced perfectly. The game requires you to save a person in the T.V. before the next time that fog appears in the real world. However, it is incredibly easy to just beat the entire dungeon in one in-game afternoon after the person has been trapped in the T.V., which results in you playing through a dungeon for 3 hours and then just doing social activities for 5. While it's not a major issue, the pacing here is definitely slightly off and the two world don't seem as well integrated as they could be.

Persona 4 represents a definite improvement over Persona 3 as it fixes several problems that made the previous entry needlessly difficult. This isn't to say that Persona 4 is an easy game, but I didn't feel as cheated as I did with Persona 3 (in particular, the last boss battle was much more fair and could be beaten with any character combination, so long as the characters were properly leveled). The only complaint I had with the ending of Persona 4 was that you pretty much needed a strategy guide to get the actual ending. I originally triggered the "Bad Ending" because I didn't choose the correct series of answers in the middle of a lengthy cutscene, even though the answers I chose didn't appear that different from the "correct" answers. Further, the hoops you had to jump through to get the "True Ending" instead of the "Normal Ending" after this was even more ridiculous, involving talking to every person you maxed out a Social Link with, followed by going to specific places and talking to specific people with specific lines of dialogue. It's forgivable in the age of online FAQs, but I really don't think I should need one to see the ending that explains all the events in the game.

Persona 4 is a solid JRPG that improves on a game that already had a pretty unique premise that hasn't been seen much stateside yet thankfully doesn't use this unique premise as a crutch. The game plays well and doesn't get repetitive in the 50-60 hours it'll take you to finish the game. Just remember to look at a strategy guide once the culprit is in the hospital.

Overall Score: 9.2
Recommended price: $30