While traditional Turn Based JRPGs fell out of flavor shortly after the turn of the 2000s, Altus is really an RPG company that stuck with them and continued to make critically acclaimed games in this genre. Persona is actually not that far from something like Dragon Quest when it comes to battles, you have HP and MP (well called SP here) with each character having his own spells with strength and weaknesses. I'm a big fan of this type of game, it feels a little bit of comfort food since this is mostly what I've played in the 90s. The only thing with Atlus games is that they are locked into old platforms, and they have finally started to port their classics to old systems.
Persona is a big franchise now, but upon release Persona 4 didn't sell that well. Released in late 2008 in North America for the PlayStation 2, people had upgraded to the next gen of consoles at that point and it really made a bigger splash when it was released in its definitive Golden edition for the Vita, and instantly became a best-seller for that system. Of course this brings us to the massive success of Persona 5, the most successful game of all-time for Atlus. A lot of people wanted to try out the older titles, but unfortunately weren't easily available until we finally got a Steam port and its incredible sales for a 12 year old game really shows the interested that people have for games like this. I have not played the PS2 or PSVita but for me this was a great port and I never ran into no issues. The controls took a minute to get used to, but once you get those locked it becomes quite easy to play and sink in so many hours.
I ended up with 91 hours on my playthrough. If you want to jump into Persona 4, you should prepare for a large time investment but it's really worth it. The biggest strength of the game is the story, you get to spend a full year with the cast of characters and you'll get to love them all as quirky as they are. Each day you'll have to decide who you want to spend time with, and over 20 of these social links have their unique storylines that you get to choose where to advance. I felt like Persona 4 was a little bit like watching a TV series of multiple seasons, when you get to the end you feel a little empty and will miss spending time with these people. The English voice acting is excellent, each one brings a lot of personality and they aren't any generic characters in the cast. Doing the social is a lot of fun, although around the end of the game it becomes a little redundant, it's still a pretty great system that is quite well executed here.
Perhaps the little lackluster point is the dungeons themselves, once you've done the first one they sort of all follow the same concept with the same designs of enemy locations, floors, and chest placements. The dungeons feel more like a test of endurance, how long can your party last by climbing with the tough enemies to defeat after one or the other. When you leave the dungeon to heal, you will make a day pass and you need to complete them after a certain time limit. The battle system is pretty good. It feels very classic and traditional, but there's nice touches like knocking enemies down and your party making a special group attack if everyone is knocked down. Even the bosses are another test of endurance, you have to grind them out slowly and uses your abilities correctly to survive. Unfortunately there were a few instances where I had to grind out a few levels because the bosses got too strong, but that's probably my fault for me going a little too fast in the dungeons.
Overall Persona 4 is a really complete and unique game. It definitely stands as one of the best RPGs of its era, especially at a time where the genre was moving a lot towards open world and action battles. It's got great art and a great story, challenging gameplay and it did not feel dated at all for something that originally came out in 2008. I would highly recommend it to RPG fans, it's great value for the price and the amount of hours that you will poor into it. Now is just hoping that Atlus will bring more of their great games to Steam.
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that's literally what people from my hometown did, and the impact Wal-Mart had on the small businesses in town among other things is the same impact Junes had on Inaba. It's an accurate depiction of rural life, or at least the similarities between Japanese and American rural life.
I just got the Revenge bad ending and... wow. Things went from 0 to 10000 really fast. Has to be the darkest ending to an otherwise very light in tone game I've ever experienced.
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