Persona 4: Redefining Mature.

Role-playing survival game is willing to take risks

By  Jan 6th, 2009 11:00 pm UTC

I’m now close to 50 hours in Persona 4 and I’ve come to realize two things. One that P4 may take over Kings Legend’s position as my favorite RPG of 08 and two that it deserves more from me then a 2 page review. So starting today I’m going to go over some of my favorite elements of P4 starting out with the story itself.

As I’ve spent my time talking to other students and fighting through dungeons I keep on forgetting that P4 is actually rated M. There is very little profanity, no blood and the graphics don’t actually scream highly sexualized characters. However P4 deals with a lot of complex issues that show how mature the game is easily proving that there is more to being mature then just having gore, sex, and profanity in your games. Without spoiling it too much, here are just a few of the issues presented in P4: gender confusion on both sides/ dealing with death from a child’s, teenager’s, adult’s and elderly point of view/ learning about who you are deep down/ accepting choice instead of having it forced on you/ and the main theme of accepting one’s weakness. The part that hits me is that a lot of these issues are those that most high school students would have to face. This along with the excellent writing and voice acting has really helped me connect with these characters.

The big difference in character development from P4 compared to P3 is in the characters you can talk to. In P3 the characters were so focused on their particular faults or quirks that they became cliché in my opinion. In P4 the characters while having faults, were not ruled by them and many of the people kept them buried deep down; allowing the player to see the person for other things along with their fault allowing for more realistic people. The brilliance of P4 compared to most RPGS is that it doesn’t hit you over the head with all these themes and spreads them out and asks you to investigate further. Story events happen at set dates during the year and talking to people must be done on your own time allowing you to see that storyline on your own terms.

P4 is proof that there is more to being mature then just having over the top violence and the story is above and beyond most RPGS because of that. I haven’t even gone into the most interesting part of dealing with someone’s shadow self which is great for someone who has a psychology background. Up next I will look at the combat system.

Josh

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  • Miramon

    I generally agree with your comments about the maturity level and interest associated with the little story elements in P4. These things are hard to find in any game, much less any association of such themes with actual gameplay and decisions that actually affect the course of the game.

    On the other hand, P4 has some flaws in this regard. You can never tell whether a dialogue choice is trivial or not. Some choices will all lead to the same outcome regardless what you say, and some are absolutely critical to the course of the game.

    For example, there is one point where if you don’t make the right (highly debatable) choice 6 times in a row, you will eventually wind up with a “bad” ending.

    Furthermore, the three-dialogue-line approach to choice-making where the dialogue doesn’t usually reflect an action, but is just an excerpt of something the character will say, can be very confusing at times.

    So anyhow, I think Persona 4 does a much better job than most other games at presenting mature situations and moral choices (including the supposedly moral-alignment-based RPGs from Bioware for which the “bad” binary choice is always petulant childish evil), but it does have plenty of room for improvement, too.

  • I agree that the dialogue choices aren’t as meaningful compared to P3 however I’ll take that hit when the S link stories are more interesting.

    I reached that point late last night and I do agree that the game really needed to say something like “this decision is very important” . I had the guide on hand so I can’t look at it from the point of view of someone without the guide. I do wonder how many people would screw up at that point, from the choices there is a pattern in the right ones but I could see people choosing different anwsers to see if something else happens.

    With all the different personality stats I was hoping for more dialogue choices that required a stat.