Meh. Whatever. I liked Persona 3 better.
There, I said it. No one will deny the gameplay elements in Persona 4 are better. In particular it feels really good to be able to hit Square to move around the map. When exploring you can count on an easy supply of Goho-Ms to get out of the dungeon at any time. You can control your party directly. You can control your party directly. You can control your party DIRECTLY. Etc, etc. TBH I rather liked uncontrollable party members in Persona 3, but there’s no doubt that Persona 4‘s system is improved over P3 in every way imaginable.
When it comes to other elements though, I find it sadly lagging behind P3. Firstly the story feels really trivial. In theory a serial killer in a small town should make for a really tense and gripping game, but nobody really seems to care. When someone close to them dies they don’t even attend the funeral, and only one or two people are even upset by it. The townspeople go about their business just as usual and let their children run around town like nothing’s going on. For your party, which has appointed itself unofficial detectives, solving the mystery involves entering the TV once in a while, saving someone, then getting on with the rest of their lives, i.e. hanging out at the mall and eating steak. There’s never a sense of fear or urgency about the whole thing.
The characters are boring too. In fact I’m bored just writing this because it was such a dry game. I didn’t find the lame attempts at humor amusing at all. The cross-gender beauty pageant was an unfunny flop, Teddie was just annoying, Chie was a faint shadow with no real presence, Yosuke was meh in battle and meh outside, it just goes on and on. Not to mention if you don’t do their S. Links then their character development stops right after you face their shadows and is never referred to again. Haa.
The soundtrack was another let down. P3 was one of the few games where I rushed out and got the soundtrack right after finishing it. To be fully honest, P3′s soundtrack got on my nerves in the beginning, but in some sort of perverse Stockholm Syndrome way by the end of the game I loved it. P4… I remember the battle tune, goodness knows I heard it often enough. That’s it. Yah.
The graphics and colors in P4 somehow managed to be grayer and blander than P3′s, maybe to showcase the fact that it’s set in the boring countryside. The whole thing looks washed out, the blurry dungeon effects gave me a headache and writing this review is giving me another headache so I’m quitting.
I didn’t dislike P4, but I didn’t quite like it either. Plop down, do some S. Links (only good one was Death, IMO), do some more S. Links, fight and clear a dungeon in one day, do some more S. Links. Dating sim with fighting, I can live with that. And now that it’s over I can live without it.
Okay, now I’m reading some old entries and I found this one quite interesting.
I totally agree. I really like SMT and P4 had many improvements like command your party directly (I recently played P3P and when I switched back to FES I found it UNPLAYABLE although I have spent like 200 hours on P3 and its ports/remakes). BUT it’s more like a Persona 3 2.0, I didn’t like nor the story nor the characters (except for Kanji and the really secondary Nanako and Dojima). Chie was a self-copy of P2’s Ginko (aka Lisa Silverman) and I didn’t really find anything as new as refresing as Atlus had promised months before its release. And I bought it on day one! I felt trolled XDDD.
It’s not that I loved P3s story (in fact I hate most of its characters and the only ones I really enjoyed where Aigis and Mitsuru), but at least the game was really original. Since P3 and P4 sold so much, I’m afraid future Persona games will be like P4.
I should hope not. I played the Persona games in this order 3 – 4 – 1 – 2 (unfinished), and if anything I’d like future games to be more like 1 and 2 than 3 and 4, even though I really enjoyed 3.
I played 4 right after 3, and I too felt it was like “P3 2.0”, but worse. With 4 I thought Atlus was trying a little too hard to make “characters people would like” and found it off-putting. This was especially obvious with Teddie. I’d like P5 to be less fan-conscious and more focused on just being a good game.