The Shin Megami Tensei series of games is one with a large popular following in Japan, multiple titles under its umbrella, and a rich in-game history.  I knew absolutely none of this when I first picked up Persona 3 in 2007.  The “3″ in the title, of course, indicated that there were at least upwards of 2 games prior to it in the series, but I had been informed that I could jump into P3 without any prior experience with the series.  This, it turns out, was completely true.  The Persona games tend to be fairly standalone titles,  a la Final Fantasy, and while you may miss some subtle (or not so subtle) nods to the older titles, you can easily play them as their own entity.

Persona 3, on the whole, was a great game.  It was not without its flaws, however, and some of them could be amazingly frustrating.  An “expanded edition” of P3 came out shortly after I had beaten it called Persona 3: FES.  FES was said to contain many, many hours of additional content and expansion to the story, but having just sunk 60-odd hours into P3, I was not quite ready to jump back in.  As the months passed, and I geared myself up to tackle FES, Atlus announced that Persona 4 would be coming out soon. More importantly, it would be coming out on the PlayStation 2 and not the PS3, which meant I was actually going to be able to play it on launch day.  Thoughts of FES were pushed aside as I eagerly anticipated the next installment.

IT’S A MYSTERY!

Persona 4 begins with you, the silent protagonist, being shipped off from the unnamed “big city” to the small country town of Inaba.  Your parents have been whisked overseas for their jobs and decided to leave you behind with your country kin for the next year.  Your parents, it must be noted, are total jerks and don’t call or write you even once.  This is not relevant to the plot in any way, but seriously; pick up a damn phone once in a while, virtual parents.

In Inaba, a sleepy Japanese village built around the banks of a prone-to-flooding river, you are met by your uncle, Dojima, and his young daughter Nanako.  Dojima is the town’s detective, and by that fact alone you know that mystery must be afoot in this quaint locale.  Great detective though he may be, Dojima is a little slack in the parenting department (must run in the family) as his work keeps him away from home most days, leaving Nanako completely alone.  She, of course, is thrilled to have a new “big bro” around, if only to take away some of the loneliness she must feel on a daily basis.

Not long after you arrive in town, strange things begin happening.  You are summoned to the Velvet Room in your dreams, and told by the strange Igor that this year will be a turning point in your destiny, and that great mysteries lay ahead.  Shortly after that, the body of a local television newswoman is found mutilated, strung up to a TV antenna.  Murder is almost unheard of in Inaba, especially one so grizzly.

In the meantime, life continues on for the average Japanese teenager, and when one of your new friends suggests you watch the Midnight Channel, well, what else is there to do in a sleepy town?  The rumor says that if you watch a turned-off television at midnight on a rainy night, you’ll see your soul-mate.  Now, it’s bad enough that the first time you watch the channel, all you see is a blurry shadow; what’s worse is that you get sucked halfway into the television.  Now the fun really begins.

FRIENDS, FOES, AND FUSION

Peronsa 4 is split into two main types of game play. In the real world, the town of Inaba, you spend your time attending school, working night jobs, and hanging out.  Inaba is where you make friends with whom you can develop all-important Social Links. These Social Links, as they strengthen, allow you to gain more power when fusing Personas for use in combat.  Combat, of course, is the other half of the game.  Inside the television world, you spend your time progressing through dungeons, battling Shadows and collecting new Personas.  The game is divided up into several “chapters,” with each chapter having a new dungeon associated with it.

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Developing Social Links works pretty much identically to Persona 3: you find someone whom you can befriend, and by spending time with them, you engage in little scenes that further their particular story.  Depending on how you interact with them, you gain more invisible points towards leveling up their link.  Once a link hits level 10, you are BFFs forever and don’t have to worry about spending time with that person anymore (because that’s how friendship works).  Persona 4 introduces one nice change to the link system: you now have several social links that you can develop at night, in addition to your “daily” activities.  These include your temporary family of Dojima and Nanako, as well as several night jobs your character can work.  Additionally, there are occasional events that allow you to earn points with several people at once, as well as extra activities you can undertake to earn a few more points (such as making lunch for someone).  Combined, these additions help you level up links faster, thus meaning you can potentially develop more to completion.  They also help keep the pacing up, as there is usually at least one or two links you can tackle in any given day.  This is a nice change from P3, where it occasionally felt like you were just wasting afternoons if you didn’t choose who to hang out with properly.

Also, as far as I can tell, the penalty for not hanging out with someone regularly enough has been removed in P4, getting rid of one extra headache.

HE AIN’T HEAVY, HE’S MY SHADOW

When you aren’t busy making friends and spreading love, you’ll be busy smashing Shadows to bits with various implements of destruction.  The television world, where you go to work on solving the mystery of Inaba, is a twisted, foggy place.  Built from what lurks in the hearts of man, it changes its shape to reflect the inner secrets of whomever enters it.  Unlike the tower Tartarus in P3, Persona 4 is split into multiple dungeons, each ranging from 8 to 11 floors.

If you think the tongues are bad, you should see what years of smoking have done to their lungs

The switch to individual dungeons provides a nice change, as each dungeon is suitably different from the others, and the relation to certain characters gives each a unifying theme, right down to what kinds of Shadows are found within it.  Also, there are plentiful items to leave the dungeon at any time, and the game is kind enough to let you return to the highest floor you previously visited, eliminating an awful lot of trudging through the same floors again and again.

Combat itself follows the same basic format as P3, with turn-based rounds played out through either attacking or using one of your Persona’s skills.  Just as in P3, if you as the main character are defeated in combat, it’s game over.  No do-overs.  Now, as I have said before, this lead to some amazingly frustrating situations where you could lose large chunks of progress due to having the wrong elemental weakness at the start of a battle, an enemy getting the drop on you, or just pure dumb luck.

P4 makes several changes that help remedy some of this frustration, and all of them are welcome. First off, getting hit by an element that you are weak to does knock you down, as it did before, but getting knocked down does not cause you to lose a turn on its own.  If you are hit again while you are down, you will become dizzy and miss a turn, but this two-step process gives you a better chance to recover in between.  On top of that, you now also have a “guard” command which causes you to both take less damage, as well as eliminate the chance of being knocked down by an attack; excellent if you know the enemy is powering up for something, or if you have a critical weakness in play.  Finally, and most importantly, Persona 4 allows you to give direct commands to all of your party members.  I’m sure I am not alone in occasionally shouting “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?! HEAL ME!!” at my P3 party, and the addition of direct commands takes away that frustration. You can still leave your party members to act on their own, if you like, but I found that as the game progressed, I more or less took control of everyone constantly to make battles smoother.  Also, I think it would be almost impossible to beat some of the bosses without direct control.

Of course, one side effect of direct commands is that battles take longer on average.  Personally, I love turn-based RPG combat, and find that there is a certain wonderful satisfaction in stringing together (what feels like) a brilliant series of commands to get out of a tight spot.  If you are someone who thrives on fast action and instant gratification, this combat system isn’t for you.  In fact, this entire game isn’t for you.

EVERY DAY’S GREAT AT YOUR JUNES

Beyond the combat and fusing of Personas, the real root of Persona 4 is its characters and their stories.  Persona, as a Japanese RPG, takes the bold step of being set in the real world in the present day (ok, technically it’s 2011, but that’s close enough).  This is not a tale of knights and princesses, or of underwater soccer players on distant worlds – this is a story about teenagers growing up.  It’s easy to set a game in a fantasy world, because the designer gets to set all the rules; they make the decisions about what this society is like, they get to say whether or not sixteen-year-olds should be tromping off across the world, sword in hand.  But when you set a game in the real world, you lose the option of making up those rules – you have to deal with the day-to-day experiences we are all familiar with.  This is why you rarely see an RPG set in the modern day: it’s much harder to make it feel right.

Persona 3 shared the same setting, but it fell flat in a few ways.  The characters seemed a little too privileged, a little too above the day-to-day grind of being a teen. They were interesting, don’t get me wrong, but they weren’t always entirely easy to identify with. Persona 4, however, does an excellent job of creating compelling, believable characters.  These are teens dealing with issues that anyone who is or was a teen can fathom: coping with the expectations of your parents, sexual identity, gender equality, or simply feeling like you just don’t quite fit in.  Even Nanako, your young cousin, manages to genuinely come across as a lonely eight-year-old girl.  It is a great credit to the creators of the game that they were able to keep the characters both honest and consistent.

Be honest: You wish your inner self carried a friggin’ cruise missile

Characters, of course, are best served when they have a story in which to reside.  P4, as said, is at its core a murder mystery.  The game does take several twists and turns in getting you to the ultimate whodunnit, and there are several ways you can veer off course (to the indignity of the “bad ending”).  The entire game, from the lessons you learn in school to the Personas themselves, is steeped in both Japanese and world-wide mythology.  As a mythology buff, I was familiar with some of the stories told, but a lot of the Japanese-rooted material was new to me.  It is quite possible to play through the game with no knowledge of Japanese myths and legends at all, but I found that taking the time to do a little outside reading about some of the things introduced helped make it an even richer experience.  So, to all you detractors out there, here’s a video game that encouraged me to do some reading.  Stew on that one for a while.

One other very important thing to note: there is almost no point during the game (in fact, I can’t think of a single one) where you, as the player, do not get to make a decision about what your character says or does.  This is not a case of you getting to control the character most of the time, but the game taking over when it is important to advancing the plot – you have the final say as to who you are in the game. From things as simple as complimenting someone on their cooking to things as serious as trying to talk a man back from the brink of murder, you make the decision on how to handle any situation.  And, minor though some may be, almost every choice has a consequence, be it as simple as gaining a few extra social points to determing the outcome of the game.  It gives the player a sense of connection to the world, and in a game as long as this, and with a slower pace, it keeps the player involved almost constantly, which is incredibly important.

One minor quibble is that which ending you get to the game is, as you might guess, based on what actions you choose at certain points.  However, the exact sequence of events needed to get both the “good” and “really good” endings struck me as a little too exacting, and something that most players would never stumble upon on their own.  A little more direction from the game to guide the player towards the “right” ending would’ve been appreciated.

ALSO: BEAR PUNS

Overall, Persona 4 is a wonderful game, and a fantastic addition to the Shin Megami Tensei series.  It takes the foundation of the already-great Persona 3 and builds upon it with some excellent additions, and the few aspects it removes (such as dual-Persona skills) were not even missed.  The combat system, especially, gets some much appreciated upgrades that take away some complaints lodged against its predecessor.

The game is long, and it is definitely on the slower-paced side of things.  Fortunately, it does not suffer the sense of dragging in the middle that P3 fell into, and thanks to the constant feedback requested of the player, the player is almost always involved.  There is an awful lot of reading, though most scenes are (excellently) voice acted; but if you are not a fan of reading in game, this probably won’t be your cup of tea.

The story is an intriguing murder mystery, with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing, but the real strength of the game’s world comes from its rich characters, who provide depth and believability to the little town of Inaba.  Each character has their own story, and you’ll find yourself wanting to know more about them, and that’s the sure sign of a winner.

So if you’ve still got a PS2 sitting around and some time to spare, dust it off and pick up Persona 4; you’ll find it well worth it.