Thursday 27 June 2013

First Impressions! Persona 4 Golden

So last Friday I picked up a Playstation Vita due to the fact that I got Playstation Plus and had a bunch of free Vita games I could play. The one game I actually picked up in-store was Persona 4 Golden, because I'd heard a lot of good things - a LOT of good things - and I love me a good RPG. I had only very passing knowledge of the game, but knew it had to do with being a high schooler who also fought monsters in some alternate reality.

Well, that's pretty accurate as it turns out. You spend most of the game attending school and deciding who to hang out with after school, or, enter the TV World to fight monsters. The game is pretty slow to start, with the first 30-60 minutes being a full-on railroad as your character is introduced to the town of Inaba (which looks a whole lot like a small city to me based on the map. Bigger than the town I live in at least...), his new high school and the other main characters of the game. Once you finish that section though the story starts amping up and you're let loose a lot more. You have a lot of activities open for the after school hours in the game, most of which relate to increasing Social Links. Social Links are used to create Personas for your character - the other party members in the game only have access to their own personal Persona. The Personas all have different arcanas, like Fool, Strength, Justice, Magician, Priestess, etc. They loosely correlate to your typical classes: healer, mage, fighter, etc. They're differentiated by the skills they can learn, so for example, a Justice Persona will learn support skills as well as special physical attacks. Each of the Social Links upgrades with a "story event", which I quite like, being a sucker for story. Each of the Social Links seems to be some kind of mini-story within the main storyline. This alone makes it worthwhile for me to advance, let alone the bonus to Persona fusing.

The only time combat enters the game is when you enter the TV World. Inside the TV, you can go back to any location you've previously discovered. They exist as randomly laid out floors of corridors with enemy Shadows roaming about. There's no random encounters, which is awesome, instead you see the Shadows in the hallways and rooms and try to get behind them and smack them before they hit you, giving you the advantage instead of the other way around. Once in battle, the party and Shadows take turns making attacks. By default, party members will work off AI, meaning you don't have to do anything. This isn't exactly the best idea unless you're in an area you've cleared, meaning the fights will be fairly easy. Each Shadow has a weakness and/or resistance with some exceptions. The idea is to find a Shadow's weakness, hit them with it, gain an extra action, do it again, etc. until all the Shadows have been knocked down. This enables you to do an All-Out attack where all the party members charge into a cartoon fighting cloud and deal some pretty good damage against all the enemies. If it doesn't kill them though, it means they're right back up and can act on their turn. It's likely you can't do this all on one character as well, you'll need the help from your party members, who will all learn different spells of different elements and effects. You, of course, have access to multiple Personas and many skills, and once per turn you can swap Personas without moving to the next person in line. This means you can hit one or more enemies with their weakness, gain an action, swap Personas, and knock down the rest. I really like the combat system, it's snappy, stylish and fun. Battles often go quickly, but always require you to think about each move to make sure you're hitting the right enemy with the right skill. It helps that the battle music is pretty sick too.

At the time of this writing, I'm something around 14 hours into the game, and have just rescued Kanji from his Shadow (the in-game date is around June 6th or 7th). Yeah, 14 hours seems like a long time for a "first impression", but considering the game is like, 60+ hours long... percentage wise it still fits! I'm really enjoying the game, and if I manage to actually complete it I'll try and review it, although the game is pretty big.

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