Persona 4 Golden Review | Japanator

Japanator: "Persona 4 Golden is the game to take the Persona formula formula to its zenith, employing the strange alchemy that birthed such an unusual game design in the first place to turn an already sterling title, well...golden."

[MrDead]

“You begin to suspect that your bowl is a portal to the Meat Dimension”. Brilliant!!

[Canary]

Persona 4 would totally be a perfect game if not for the rigid break between gameplay modes. Made it too predictable shifting between school life and combat. Would have been cool if they could've implemented some of the sim elements in the dungeons and some of the dungeon elements in the everyday life portions.

Not a lot, but enough to keep everything from being so damned predictable.

[Hicken]

That doesn't even make any sense.

[Canary]

Then maybe you should work on your reading comprehension? Persona 4 (and Persona 3, for that matter) suffer from a really bad case of story/gameplay segregation. The two core gameplay mechanics (turn based combat & dungeon crawling and the social sim aspect) are complete segregated from each other and rigidly scheduled.

This means that you always know, well in advance, what's going to happen, when. Want to know when the next boss fight is? Check the calendar. It makes things predictable. Imagine if you had the occasional side-quest inside the Midnight Channel/Tartarus section where you had to find an NPC and talk to them (re: dialog choices) to expand a certain social link--or, rather, just having s-link events inside the "combat" portion. This would do a lot to curb the monotony of dungeon-crawling.

And, conversely, adding the -potential- for combat OUTSIDE of the regimented routine would curb the predictability of the social links. Imagine walking to school one day and, I don't know, getting into a boss fight or a random battle with a stray shadow, or even other persona user--something that you didn't CHOOSE to do, something that you didn't know was going to happen well in advance.

The greatest weakness of the latest Persona titles is that the gamely adheres too closely to too regimented a structure.

And if that still doesn't make any sense to you, read it again. Read it a third time. If that doesn't work, consult your second or third grade teachers, because they clearly failed to teach you basic reading skills.

[MasterCornholio]

I really miss old school turn based jrpgz which is why I will probably get this game.

Motorola RAZR i

[animegamingnerd]

persona 4 hands down my favorite game of all time

[belac09]

another perfect score for the perfect game.

[LiViNgLeGaCY]

Agreed. I love everything about this wonderful game. Everyone who has a vita and has even a slight interest in RPG's needs to grab this game!

[sdozzo]

Never played one of these games... But it's getting perfect scores non stop!