Last night I officially conquered Persona 4, saw the best ending and beat the crap out of the final boss. My final stats were 64 hours and 74% of the compendium finished and now I’m starting a 2nd cycle to go for 100%. So it looks like this is going to be my last entry on Persona 4; for this one I’m looking at the game as a whole. I’m not going to go into specifics regarding combat, fusion, or the storyline as I’ve done that over the past 3 days so there is no need to worry about spoilers.
Alone each mechanic of P4 is well executed, together they add up to a very engaging experience. Like P3, you have a set number of days to play P4 before the end comes and whatever choices you make during those days will have an effect as you play on. The player has 5 stats that make up his personality: courage, understanding, expression, diligence, and knowledge. These stats affect whether or not you can unlock certain S links which as you know from my last entry determine if you can create the best personas in the game. Similar to spending time with your friends, you can also spend parts of the day improving these stats which can take a long time to reach their maximum. Early on you will be faced with the choice of improving your stats to unlock new S links vs raising the S links you have, both choices take a long time to max out and you only have so much time to spend. Let’s not forget the other detail that you only have so many days before someone will die meaning that some of your time must be spent in the dungeons to reach and defeat the boss before the time limit. Thus the player has 3 different yet equally important factors to juggle in P4. I also really liked how they are also balanced by the fact that you are a high school student.
Just like in the real world, a high school student’s life is never without surprise. There are many days in P4 that you have no choice in what you can do forcing you to plan your schedule around them. Exams will easily kill a week of time that could have been spent doing something else. During the summer time, all S links that revolve around after school clubs are unattainable as the school is closed. These fixed dates add another factor for the player to keep track of and fits into the ever tricky balance of managing friends, stats, and fighting.
In the end chances are I will never completely master any of the SMT games. However I do feel proud of the fact that I managed to use the triangle fusion for the first time aiding me in creating one of the most useful personas in the game which I’ll take as a victory on my part. Hopefully for those that read this you will take a look at one of the best Playstation 2 RPGS around and hopefully become a fan of this great and very niche series like I have. With another SMT game successfully completed I can now turn my attention to maybe beating Nocturne or returning to Persona 3 FES; here’s hoping that a new SMT game will be announced soon.
Josh
