Recently I’d been playing the (US edition of the) PS2 video game Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4, and today I got around to beating it. I played the game in a really obsessive manner and with the aid of various online guides like this one I never faced any difficulty and managed to get or see just about everything important in my first playthrough. The game has a lot of variability in its non-story events, like getting a slightly different scene depending on who you have lunch with, and I wasn’t so compelled by the game that I reset just to see how things went with different characters. So I didn’t really see “everything” the game had to offer but I did complete all the quests (I’m surprised you don’t get anything for that), max out all the relationships, see the different endings, and get all the personas.

My play time was something like 120 hours which really does seem a bit too excessive no matter how I look at it. I possibly spent as much as 20 hours reading information about the game too. I’m positive that everyone reading this can find a better way to spend a couple of weeks, but if you’re a fan of massive RPGs or just Japanese Highschoolers then you should check it out.

To say a few things about the game, there’s a lot wrong with every part of it, but I was somehow not bothered by any of its faults. Probably the three most annoying things gameplay wise are constantly having to shift the camera and open doors when exploring the “dungeons,” the menus (other than not being able to sort items or persona they work but….), the horrid exp requirements for leveling up the main character’s persona, and fusion. Without a doubt the most damn annoying thing in the game is trying to get certain skills on certain persona through fusion. Even if you go to great lengths to increase the chances of getting the skills you want on a given persona, you still have to deselect and reselect the fusion over and over again until you have what you want. In general there are only a few really choice persona and skill combinations that you’ll be desperate to get multiple skills onto a single persona through fusion with, but every time you do a fusion you’ll want to pass on the best skills from previous persona. I suppose that they don’t just let you select which skills your new persona can have since that would make it too easy, but it seems like they could have come up with some kind of convoluted manual selection system. Either blocking the inheritance of certain types of skills (which happens anyway) or ranking the skills and only letting a certain value be inherited which became greater the higher ranked the persona was. So for example you wouldn’t get anything that good on Oberon (an early persona) but you could put almost anything you want to on Lucifer (the last persona that becomes available to you to fuse).

Other than gameplay and some of its redundancies, the plot ends out being spotty. It’s not that bad, but the “truth” ends out eventually being explained in detail and when that happens you can’t help but think “if that was the case then wouldn’t more have happened?” which of course is less then ideal. After all, you want your conclusion to wrap everything up neatly instead of contradicting itself somewhat. Hmm that might be saying a bit too much.

Just to mention it, I didn’t really play Persona 3 even though I do own it (I recall how pleased I was that I only bought the US edition of Persona 3 FES since that ended out being drastically cheaper than other options). I was somehow intimidated by the idea of trying to complete all of the social links in one round of play [round one maxed social links] and never advanced past the first part of the game. I was similarly held off by P4, but I got into a random mood to play it one dark early morning, and the guide I used to achieve the “ROMSL” made things pretty easy. It wasn’t even really that much of a challenge to clear almost all of the dungeons in one shot without going out and upgrading equipment. Actually it’s kind of funny how equipment was almost redundant by the end of the game since armor didn’t do anything against enemy spells (which bosses used against you almost exclusively) and weapons didn’t factor into your own technique damage….

Now that I’ve beaten Persona 4 I can’t decide whether I want to go ahead and play a 2nd cycle (on “expert” difficulty perhaps, I played on “normal” the first time) so I can get the hidden “ultimate” persona and fight the special boss, or just do something else. Even playing Persona 3 seems like it might be a better way to spend my time at this point, though I remain a bit put off by it. Maybe the real reason I beat P4 before getting serious about P3 was just because I preferred the looks of P4’s protagonist. Actually there are all kinds of games I have sitting around that I should probably finish off first. Sacred Blaze comes to mind. I’m not even sure whey I never finished that game, things just worked out that way. It would be good to complete SRWZ and SRW Alpha 3 some time as well since that wouldn’t be the least bit difficult.

As a final note I recall dying twice in P4 during random encounters, but never against a boss. Actually the two things that happened are worth noting since they’re the only way you’re likely to die as long as you play carefully. The first time I died was because I used Mazionga (mid-level group attack thunder spell) with Seiryu against a large group of enemies (the max might be 5, but it could have only been 4) who all reflected electric attacks. I’m not sure why Seiryu nulls wind instead of electric, but after that point I was more careful to either not use group spells for exploratory attacks, or to only do so when my persona could absorb the attack. The other time I died was from a barrage of group attacks that my character was weak to, which of course allowed the enemy to keep attacking and prevented one of the other characters from taking the hit for me. I imagine that’s one of if not absolutely the most common ways to die, but after the mid-point of the game you can get persona who aren’t weak against anything (almost all of the initial special fusions (as opposed to the maxed arcana special fusions) are like that) that enemies will have to avoid that. I would have died from the special death skill of the final boss (who gets two straight attacks no matter what), but I had gone to great lengths (which I don’t recall) to get Enduring Soul onto the persona Yoshitsune who I was using. I had it on a few of the other personas I took with me into that fight and it was worth it, but if you just happen to find and equip one of the null fear or null ailment accessories then you’d be fine too. Of course, the regular endure skill, or the accessory, would also work in that situation but I don’t know if endure dark would or not… hmm… Actually I had been miffed that I couldn’t manage to fuse Arms Master onto Yoshitsune no matter how many times I reset the fusion so I kind of settled for that skill, but it worked out pretty well!