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coffeerocketSO EVERYONE WHO KNOWS ME KNOWS I love Persona 4.
Everyone also knows I hate Persona 4 with everything I am.
And yet, here I am, with Persona 4 posters on my wall, Chie and Yosuke on my key ring, a Persona 4 desktop background, the Persona 4: The Animation opening as my alarm, making Persona 4 icons more than any other canon, and playing a Persona 4 character as one of my main and favorite characters.
"How the fuck can you hate Persona 4 and still put so much into it???"
Well, flist, I figure I ought to finally explain this, since plurk is down and I wanted to finally explain myself.
You know in high school when you half-assed a paper, but it was okay enough, and you handed it in to the teacher? You were confident you'd get a solid B on it, but you got a D? And someone in the row next to you who couldn't write for shit, with a paper a page and a half shorter than yours with the wrong MLA formatting got a B? And you went to the teacher asking why you got a D, and s/he looked at you and said "Because this isn't your best work"?
I am that teacher when it comes to fiction.
Particularly video games that I manage to play.
I don't judge on how good a game actually is--if that was the case I'd hate every video game ever. I judge on how good of a video game the creators can make, and then compare it to how close they got. The size of that gap is what decides whether I like it or not.
Persona 4 is not a bad video game.
But it's no where near as good as it could've been.
"But, Justyne," you say, "why do you hate it so much but still love Persona 3, which has many separate flaws?!"
There's another thing I judge on--how many risks a work of fiction takes.
SO HERE IS WHERE MY OPINIONS GO:
The Good:
What works for Persona 4 works really well. The characters do seem like a group of rag tag friends, and there is some great interaction between them. Most of them act like real teenagers, even if they annoy the shit out of me. That makes the character personalities realistic to some extent. Yosuke is a homophobic, sexist bastard. Chie is hyperactive and has no control of her temper. Even Yukiko has something that I've seen in a lot of teenagers--an uncontrollable, stupid laugh and a really bad sense of humor. (Uh. I guess I should mention I have one, too. I choked on my drink when she said "Chie Pet" in the anime.)
The humor in the game is fantastic--I found myself laughing a lot when I played. The dialogue was amusing and well done a lot of the time.
The mood shift from Persona 3 was a complete one, and it did make the game easier to complete, since you didn't feel like OH GOD THE WORLD IS ON MY SHOULDERS.
I like the plot and idea of the game--both the murders and the TV world. I like, at the end of the game, that you find out the Midnight Channel reflected what the people wanted to see--it was interesting as a point.
I like that shadows and personas were finally portrayed as two sides of the same coin. Your darkest secrets can be molded into your greatest strengths once you've come to accept them, and in some cases, defeat them.
The gameplay was much easier. If you wanted to control your party, you could. If you wanted to stick with the AI system, you could. It gave you a good option, there, for party control. I liked each character's special move (Chie's galactic punt remains my favorite thing ever to this day). For all it's made fun of, I do love the YOSUKE IS YOUR FRIEND! YOSUKE WILL NOW DIE FOR YOU, and I liked how it tied into the plot of the true end. Dungeon crawling wasn't much different from the previous game, except for different settings. The settings weren't bad at all, either, with interesting shadows, if they were predictable.
The music oh my god the music. Music is one thing that can make me love or hate a game, and the vast majority of the time, I loved it. I couldn't wait for cloudy days to hear "Heartbeat, Heartbreak" and I would sit in the TV world for hours at a time to listen to "Backside of the TV" while I read or as background noise for roleplaying (I recently did the smart thing and just downloaded the song). Reach Out to the Truth is also one of my favorite battle songs ever, and it really gets me pumped.
And of course, the game dealt with a lot of real, here and now issues. Sexuality, gender identity, responsibility, self-confidence, and being honest with yourself.
The Bad:
The game half-assed just about everything good about it.
The characters were poorly developed with little back story or empathy. The connection was greatly diminished by the actually realizing you knew next to nothing about them, and for me, it was completely severed by the fact that immediately after the shadow, the characters' personalities stopped developing for the most part.
The social links, which contained the bulk of development for the team, often portrayed the characters against the personalities that were already shown. I remember playing Chie's S.link and spending a lot of time going "but she doesn't--she wouldn't--would she?" This happened every time I went to do someone's S.link. I take issue with the fact that they were also the bulk of the development. I don't know, maybe it's the fact that I spent my entire life studying character development and writing, but I still think it's in bad form to contain 80% of development in an optional side route--and I say optional very strongly. It is completely possible to beat the game to the true end without ever maxing any S.links other than Teddie's. This says to me "lol those characters who you're supposed to get along with? They're not important to the story in the end." Aside from their shadows, the characters do very little to further the plot. (I compare this to Persona 3, where Junpei's story leads to major changes in both SEES and Strega.)
The mood shift made everything in the game seem like a joke. "Someone was murdered? OH LOOK ADACHI'S THROWING UP HAAHAHAHA..." "Our teacher was found dead? WELL NO ONE LIKED HIM ANYWAY, HAVE THIS TEACHER WHO IS TRYING TO GET WITH EVERY GUY EVER." It detracted from the idea that you were chasing someone who is killing people. Aside from boss fights (which were often humorous, too) and the very last battles of the game (Adachi and Izanami), the game seemed to rarely get serious. I might be the only one this bothered.
The gameplay was boring and repetitive. Someone gets kidnapped, fight through a few floors of shadows, fight shadow!victim, level up to be prepared for next kidnapping. (I would consider this a flaw of Persona 3, as well, but the monthly battles always had something a little more, be it puzzles to find the right mirrors to break or fighting through Tartarus alone and lost, and the majority of them had a story change in there more than YOU HAVE GAINED ONE (1) PARTY MEMBER.) Added that, well, to be honest? I think the levels were too short, but that's probably just my opinion.
The music was one of the biggest disappointments for me. Despite the fact that there was new music for every dungeon, and I even loved 90% of that music, sometimes it was just very hard to get you pumped to it. Especially Heaven which is a nice song, but god it put me to sleep. I'd also like to note that most of the songs had the same sort of... sound to them. Sauna, Striptease, Game and Long Way all sounded sort of the same. Castle sounds sort of the same, too. It seemed like they didn't care much for what they were actually writing when it came to music. The overall sound was wonderful, but the dungeons all sounded the same to me. MAYBE THAT WAS THE INTENTION. After all, what can I say, when Tartarus was the same song with slight changes every time? But when you compare Secret Base it feels very different. AGAIN, maybe this is just me. While I love a lot of the music outside the dungeons, I wish there had been something different sometimes :\.
Probably one of my earliest issues and one of my biggest, still is that the issues Persona 4 tries to deal with are not properly resolved. Gender identity has always been my biggest one in the game. Outside of Naoto's social link, there is little to nothing done about it. Another big issue of mine was the fact that Chie's deepest, darkest secret was treated as a joke through the rest of the game. Chie admits she feels inadequate because she's not a super girly girl. Yosuke goes on to tell her that she's not as girly as the rest and can't find a thing to compliment her on during the pageant scene. This bothers me. Partially because no one tells him to shut his mouth. Something can't go from being someone's major issue to just being haha funny. The gay jokes on Kanji through the game and the "lol ur not girly enough" to Chie have always rubbed me the wrong way.
And my biggest issue is the actual flow of the story. You have an exposition that's pretty good. People are dying. They're kidnapped and thrown inside a TV, where they're faced against the darkest, most hidden side of themselves. Those dark sides are so desperate to be acknowledged they kill the people they come from. If the dark side is accepted it becomes a protector and a weapon within the world. You can use them to fight against the monsters and save others who will be thrown in the TV world in the future. Unless you find the person throwing the victims in the TV, more people will die.
Okay good.
Then you have fifty hours where the story is at a halt. You have no clues so all you can do is save people. The people remember nothing. It's just. Grinding and picking up the rest of your team while you wait for the next person to go missing. There are literally no clues. Sure, you're thrown two fake murderers, but that's it.
... bad.
Then you have the last few hours of the game. SUDDENLY THE MURDERER IS THIS GUY but it's really not because he thought he was saving people. HE'S ACTUALLY BEING CONTROLLED BY THIS GUY because this guy is a dick. Who never showed any signs of being the bad guy. Okay. BUT THEN HE'S BEING CONTROLLED BY THIS RANDOM GOD. Wait, what?
Bad.
AND THEN SUDDENLY THE LAST DAY YOU'RE FIGHTING THE MOTHER OF THE GODS BECAUSE SHE'S MAD AT YOU AND YOUR PERSONA IS HER HUSBAND.
... okay what the fuck.
The pacing of the game is horrible. I've fallen asleep trying to get through the introduction before (face first, in a pleather couch, in the middle of summer with the air conditioning off). The story comes in quick, heavy moments with hours of nothing but grinding between them. The story doesn't make any sense simply because, in a murder mystery, there are supposed to be clues. There aren't. And the sudden entrance of two gods who weren't played up at all in the story makes it feel like they're just trying to mimic the ending of Persona 3.
Except in Persona 3 it worked. The mythology was consistent through the entire story, from Tartarus being the place in the underworld for souls which deserved punishment to the fact that everyone in your team had a Greek or Roman god or legend for a persona. It's like they were trying to pull what they did with Aigis and Death again in Persona 4. In Persona 3, Aigis bound Death within the body of the Main Character, making the entire story of Persona 3 possible. When the 12 major shadows were defeated, they came together with the piece that was sealed inside Minato. Due to living in the body of a human for so long, Death became a human, himself, with no memories until he was confronted again by Aigis, when he realized that he was the harbinger of Nyx, and the end of the world. Nyx only wants to bring the end of the world because it is the secret desire of many do die, so their pain will end. In Persona 4, Izanami, disguised as a gas station attendant, gave the Main Character the power to enter the TV world, as well as two others, who all moved to Inaba around the same time. She lets them do their thing and then you beat her into submission. Izanami only did what she did because she truly desires humanity to be happy, and people can't be happy when they're hiding from themselves (or... something. It was really fucking convoluted).
It just doesn't work. The mythology of P3 tied into everything about it, from the dungeons to the personas to the personalities of the characters themselves. In Persona 4, they play up having a human enemy very strongly, leaving the Izanami reveal to seem like a cop-out.
Why I came to my final verdict:
Persona 4 is a good game. It's a fantastic game! It's creative and a lot of fun to play. But it is the shittiest good game I have ever played. There was no heart to this game, and it felt like a money maker after the success of Persona 3 (and we all know Atlus loves our money from FES and P3P, as well as P4A, P4G and P4U). So much of it half-heartedly mirrored P3, and what didn't contained most of the gimmicks from it's predecessor--social links, class trips, dating girls, the qualities system. These were introduced in Persona 3, and were different and a risk when they first came to be.
But Persona 4 took no risks. In fact, it appears more that they took steps backward in risks, removing the controversial summoning system (WHICH WAS 90% OF THE REASON I PLAYED PERSONA 3 IN THE FIRST PLACE) and an emotionally impacting end with true sacrifice. The actions of the characters had little to no impact on the plot, and there were no true sacrifices ever made. The creators were incredibly full of themselves at the end, originally stating there was "no way to improve the game." I think there were a lot of ways to improve this game.
I love Persona 4 for what it could've been, for what did work. I had so much hope for this game, coming out of playing Persona 3 for the first time, and seeing everything seem desaturated and empty was a real disappointment.
I don't think Persona 4 is a bad game. But it could've been so much better. And that's why, despite how much love I put into it, I hate this game.
Everyone also knows I hate Persona 4 with everything I am.
And yet, here I am, with Persona 4 posters on my wall, Chie and Yosuke on my key ring, a Persona 4 desktop background, the Persona 4: The Animation opening as my alarm, making Persona 4 icons more than any other canon, and playing a Persona 4 character as one of my main and favorite characters.
"How the fuck can you hate Persona 4 and still put so much into it???"
Well, flist, I figure I ought to finally explain this, since plurk is down and I wanted to finally explain myself.
You know in high school when you half-assed a paper, but it was okay enough, and you handed it in to the teacher? You were confident you'd get a solid B on it, but you got a D? And someone in the row next to you who couldn't write for shit, with a paper a page and a half shorter than yours with the wrong MLA formatting got a B? And you went to the teacher asking why you got a D, and s/he looked at you and said "Because this isn't your best work"?
I am that teacher when it comes to fiction.
Particularly video games that I manage to play.
I don't judge on how good a game actually is--if that was the case I'd hate every video game ever. I judge on how good of a video game the creators can make, and then compare it to how close they got. The size of that gap is what decides whether I like it or not.
Persona 4 is not a bad video game.
But it's no where near as good as it could've been.
"But, Justyne," you say, "why do you hate it so much but still love Persona 3, which has many separate flaws?!"
There's another thing I judge on--how many risks a work of fiction takes.
SO HERE IS WHERE MY OPINIONS GO:
The Good:
What works for Persona 4 works really well. The characters do seem like a group of rag tag friends, and there is some great interaction between them. Most of them act like real teenagers, even if they annoy the shit out of me. That makes the character personalities realistic to some extent. Yosuke is a homophobic, sexist bastard. Chie is hyperactive and has no control of her temper. Even Yukiko has something that I've seen in a lot of teenagers--an uncontrollable, stupid laugh and a really bad sense of humor. (Uh. I guess I should mention I have one, too. I choked on my drink when she said "Chie Pet" in the anime.)
The humor in the game is fantastic--I found myself laughing a lot when I played. The dialogue was amusing and well done a lot of the time.
The mood shift from Persona 3 was a complete one, and it did make the game easier to complete, since you didn't feel like OH GOD THE WORLD IS ON MY SHOULDERS.
I like the plot and idea of the game--both the murders and the TV world. I like, at the end of the game, that you find out the Midnight Channel reflected what the people wanted to see--it was interesting as a point.
I like that shadows and personas were finally portrayed as two sides of the same coin. Your darkest secrets can be molded into your greatest strengths once you've come to accept them, and in some cases, defeat them.
The gameplay was much easier. If you wanted to control your party, you could. If you wanted to stick with the AI system, you could. It gave you a good option, there, for party control. I liked each character's special move (Chie's galactic punt remains my favorite thing ever to this day). For all it's made fun of, I do love the YOSUKE IS YOUR FRIEND! YOSUKE WILL NOW DIE FOR YOU, and I liked how it tied into the plot of the true end. Dungeon crawling wasn't much different from the previous game, except for different settings. The settings weren't bad at all, either, with interesting shadows, if they were predictable.
The music oh my god the music. Music is one thing that can make me love or hate a game, and the vast majority of the time, I loved it. I couldn't wait for cloudy days to hear "Heartbeat, Heartbreak" and I would sit in the TV world for hours at a time to listen to "Backside of the TV" while I read or as background noise for roleplaying (I recently did the smart thing and just downloaded the song). Reach Out to the Truth is also one of my favorite battle songs ever, and it really gets me pumped.
And of course, the game dealt with a lot of real, here and now issues. Sexuality, gender identity, responsibility, self-confidence, and being honest with yourself.
The Bad:
The game half-assed just about everything good about it.
The characters were poorly developed with little back story or empathy. The connection was greatly diminished by the actually realizing you knew next to nothing about them, and for me, it was completely severed by the fact that immediately after the shadow, the characters' personalities stopped developing for the most part.
The social links, which contained the bulk of development for the team, often portrayed the characters against the personalities that were already shown. I remember playing Chie's S.link and spending a lot of time going "but she doesn't--she wouldn't--would she?" This happened every time I went to do someone's S.link. I take issue with the fact that they were also the bulk of the development. I don't know, maybe it's the fact that I spent my entire life studying character development and writing, but I still think it's in bad form to contain 80% of development in an optional side route--and I say optional very strongly. It is completely possible to beat the game to the true end without ever maxing any S.links other than Teddie's. This says to me "lol those characters who you're supposed to get along with? They're not important to the story in the end." Aside from their shadows, the characters do very little to further the plot. (I compare this to Persona 3, where Junpei's story leads to major changes in both SEES and Strega.)
The mood shift made everything in the game seem like a joke. "Someone was murdered? OH LOOK ADACHI'S THROWING UP HAAHAHAHA..." "Our teacher was found dead? WELL NO ONE LIKED HIM ANYWAY, HAVE THIS TEACHER WHO IS TRYING TO GET WITH EVERY GUY EVER." It detracted from the idea that you were chasing someone who is killing people. Aside from boss fights (which were often humorous, too) and the very last battles of the game (Adachi and Izanami), the game seemed to rarely get serious. I might be the only one this bothered.
The gameplay was boring and repetitive. Someone gets kidnapped, fight through a few floors of shadows, fight shadow!victim, level up to be prepared for next kidnapping. (I would consider this a flaw of Persona 3, as well, but the monthly battles always had something a little more, be it puzzles to find the right mirrors to break or fighting through Tartarus alone and lost, and the majority of them had a story change in there more than YOU HAVE GAINED ONE (1) PARTY MEMBER.) Added that, well, to be honest? I think the levels were too short, but that's probably just my opinion.
The music was one of the biggest disappointments for me. Despite the fact that there was new music for every dungeon, and I even loved 90% of that music, sometimes it was just very hard to get you pumped to it. Especially Heaven which is a nice song, but god it put me to sleep. I'd also like to note that most of the songs had the same sort of... sound to them. Sauna, Striptease, Game and Long Way all sounded sort of the same. Castle sounds sort of the same, too. It seemed like they didn't care much for what they were actually writing when it came to music. The overall sound was wonderful, but the dungeons all sounded the same to me. MAYBE THAT WAS THE INTENTION. After all, what can I say, when Tartarus was the same song with slight changes every time? But when you compare Secret Base it feels very different. AGAIN, maybe this is just me. While I love a lot of the music outside the dungeons, I wish there had been something different sometimes :\.
Probably one of my earliest issues and one of my biggest, still is that the issues Persona 4 tries to deal with are not properly resolved. Gender identity has always been my biggest one in the game. Outside of Naoto's social link, there is little to nothing done about it. Another big issue of mine was the fact that Chie's deepest, darkest secret was treated as a joke through the rest of the game. Chie admits she feels inadequate because she's not a super girly girl. Yosuke goes on to tell her that she's not as girly as the rest and can't find a thing to compliment her on during the pageant scene. This bothers me. Partially because no one tells him to shut his mouth. Something can't go from being someone's major issue to just being haha funny. The gay jokes on Kanji through the game and the "lol ur not girly enough" to Chie have always rubbed me the wrong way.
And my biggest issue is the actual flow of the story. You have an exposition that's pretty good. People are dying. They're kidnapped and thrown inside a TV, where they're faced against the darkest, most hidden side of themselves. Those dark sides are so desperate to be acknowledged they kill the people they come from. If the dark side is accepted it becomes a protector and a weapon within the world. You can use them to fight against the monsters and save others who will be thrown in the TV world in the future. Unless you find the person throwing the victims in the TV, more people will die.
Okay good.
Then you have fifty hours where the story is at a halt. You have no clues so all you can do is save people. The people remember nothing. It's just. Grinding and picking up the rest of your team while you wait for the next person to go missing. There are literally no clues. Sure, you're thrown two fake murderers, but that's it.
... bad.
Then you have the last few hours of the game. SUDDENLY THE MURDERER IS THIS GUY but it's really not because he thought he was saving people. HE'S ACTUALLY BEING CONTROLLED BY THIS GUY because this guy is a dick. Who never showed any signs of being the bad guy. Okay. BUT THEN HE'S BEING CONTROLLED BY THIS RANDOM GOD. Wait, what?
Bad.
AND THEN SUDDENLY THE LAST DAY YOU'RE FIGHTING THE MOTHER OF THE GODS BECAUSE SHE'S MAD AT YOU AND YOUR PERSONA IS HER HUSBAND.
... okay what the fuck.
The pacing of the game is horrible. I've fallen asleep trying to get through the introduction before (face first, in a pleather couch, in the middle of summer with the air conditioning off). The story comes in quick, heavy moments with hours of nothing but grinding between them. The story doesn't make any sense simply because, in a murder mystery, there are supposed to be clues. There aren't. And the sudden entrance of two gods who weren't played up at all in the story makes it feel like they're just trying to mimic the ending of Persona 3.
Except in Persona 3 it worked. The mythology was consistent through the entire story, from Tartarus being the place in the underworld for souls which deserved punishment to the fact that everyone in your team had a Greek or Roman god or legend for a persona. It's like they were trying to pull what they did with Aigis and Death again in Persona 4. In Persona 3, Aigis bound Death within the body of the Main Character, making the entire story of Persona 3 possible. When the 12 major shadows were defeated, they came together with the piece that was sealed inside Minato. Due to living in the body of a human for so long, Death became a human, himself, with no memories until he was confronted again by Aigis, when he realized that he was the harbinger of Nyx, and the end of the world. Nyx only wants to bring the end of the world because it is the secret desire of many do die, so their pain will end. In Persona 4, Izanami, disguised as a gas station attendant, gave the Main Character the power to enter the TV world, as well as two others, who all moved to Inaba around the same time. She lets them do their thing and then you beat her into submission. Izanami only did what she did because she truly desires humanity to be happy, and people can't be happy when they're hiding from themselves (or... something. It was really fucking convoluted).
It just doesn't work. The mythology of P3 tied into everything about it, from the dungeons to the personas to the personalities of the characters themselves. In Persona 4, they play up having a human enemy very strongly, leaving the Izanami reveal to seem like a cop-out.
Why I came to my final verdict:
Persona 4 is a good game. It's a fantastic game! It's creative and a lot of fun to play. But it is the shittiest good game I have ever played. There was no heart to this game, and it felt like a money maker after the success of Persona 3 (and we all know Atlus loves our money from FES and P3P, as well as P4A, P4G and P4U). So much of it half-heartedly mirrored P3, and what didn't contained most of the gimmicks from it's predecessor--social links, class trips, dating girls, the qualities system. These were introduced in Persona 3, and were different and a risk when they first came to be.
But Persona 4 took no risks. In fact, it appears more that they took steps backward in risks, removing the controversial summoning system (WHICH WAS 90% OF THE REASON I PLAYED PERSONA 3 IN THE FIRST PLACE) and an emotionally impacting end with true sacrifice. The actions of the characters had little to no impact on the plot, and there were no true sacrifices ever made. The creators were incredibly full of themselves at the end, originally stating there was "no way to improve the game." I think there were a lot of ways to improve this game.
I love Persona 4 for what it could've been, for what did work. I had so much hope for this game, coming out of playing Persona 3 for the first time, and seeing everything seem desaturated and empty was a real disappointment.
I don't think Persona 4 is a bad game. But it could've been so much better. And that's why, despite how much love I put into it, I hate this game.
