Persona 4 Golden

I first played Persona 4 Golden in early 2016, shortly after getting a Vita, purely because whenever I looked for recommendations for the best games on the system, it literally always came up. I went in completely blind - I'd literally never even heard of the Persona [ペルソナ] franchise before this - and loved it, as both a cozy year spent making friends in rural Japan and as a reminder of the PS1 Final Fantasy [ファイナルファンタジー] games I'd loved so much as a kid. Returning to it in 2023, I wasn't so sure that would still be the case. Would knowledge of how much better Persona 5 was throw its predecessor into a worse light? And maybe more damningly, did all that discourse that's arisen in recent months about the homophobia of Kanji's storyline and the transphobia of Naoto's have a nugget of truth to it?

So let's deal with that first. On my first playthrough, I immediately understood Kanji's storyline to be one of internalized homophobia, and that his journey of self-actualisation was one of unlearning that, and embracing the parts of his life and personality he'd been taught to see as unmanly. On this second playthrough, I can see that the way this story is told is occasionally clumsy, but ultimately I'm going to go even further: Kanji is the best character in this game, with the best story to tell, and of all the characters across the three Persona games I've played, he is the one I recognise the most of from my own time at school. I simply cannot get on board with the idea that his journey, which is essentially a commentary on toxic masculinity that predates the popularisation of that phrase, is homophobic in and of it itself, rather than a confrontation of homophobia as applied to non-traditional masculinity. (Yosuke is clearly homophobic, that much is true, but Yosuke is also clearly an idiot; you're not supposed to identify with him.) As for Naoto, her story is really just a bit quaint and old-fashioned more than anything - it's again a clumsy attempt to confront traditional gender roles, but it was clearly written by somebody who was completely oblivious to the existence of trans people. If you read Naoto as a trans man, then it's bad, but while that would be an understandable mistake to make based on the very early parts of her story, it would take an extremely bad faith reading to still feel that way after completing her story. Her journey is really just the inverse of Kanji's, a woman learning to navigate the parts of traditional womanhood that she doesn't identify with.

(None of which means that this game gets to be let off the hook entirely. There is a character in this game called Hanako, and holy shit. The fatphobia is absolutely off the scale every single time she appears. She literally adds nothing to the game beyond her size being used as a punchline, and the majority of the punchlines don't even work unless you believe that fat people are fundamentally unlovable. If you're looking for something in this game that's truly inexcusable, here it is. There's also a couple of adult women who are really weirdly sexually aggressive toward underage boys, which is creepy as all hell; funny to think that Sadayo Kawakami ended up being so controversial when Noriko Kashiwagi exists.)

The gameplay, on the other hand, holds up. The dungeons here are procedurally generated with only cosmetic differences to distinguish them from one another, but that's not actually as much of a problem as you'd expect; the carefully crafted dungeons in Persona 5 are obviously better, but navigating your way through the ones here is still very solid turn-based RPG gameplay. (Truthfully my instinct wasn't to compare the battling here to its sequel, but to Yakuza: Like a Dragon [龍が如く7　光と闇の行方], which is the last turn-based game I played before this; it's also a game where the turn-based combat was a significant weakness, and playing a game that does it badly really helps to highlight when a game does it well.) The combat itself looks a lot less stylish than it would next time around, but the actual mechanics underpinning it mean that the actual content still shines without the window dressing. And as for the parts of the game that take place outside the dungeons, as the protagonist lives his life in Inaba....dare I say that some of it is actually even better than the Toyko equivalents in 5? The social links are where this game truly shines - outside of the aforementioned Kanji and Naoto links, there is some truly moving warmth and humanity to be found here, sometimes in the most unexpected places. Yumi from the drama club, whose father abandoned her and her mother when she was young, only to return now to makes amends on his deathbed; Nanako and Ryotaro, the main character's niece and uncle, trying to navigate a life together after the death of Nanako's mother; Shu, a boy you can tutor who is being crushed under the pressure his parents are placing on him; Naoki, whose elder sister is murdered in the game's early stages and who is struggling to work out how to move forward in a town where everybody knows, pities, and judges him for not being seen to be grieving sufficiently; Eri, a lonely woman struggling to connect with her stepson while her husband is out of the country; Hisano, a widower unpacking the guilt that her marriage left her with...it's a shame that it's possible to play the game without ever even encountering a lot of these (as I did first time around), because so much of what makes this game so great, and so distinct from Persona 5, is found here. There is a smallness and an intimacy that permeates and defines the entire game, but is especially evident here in the quiet moments of reflection and growth you can spend with these characters.

And that's really the story of Persona 4 in 2023. It is easy to identify areas where Persona 5 improved upon this, but it's much more important to acknowledge that the two games have very different tones and moods - pitting the two in competition against one another ignores how complementary they are, taking similar ideas and mechanics and putting them in different settings, with differing scopes and emotional aims. It's well worth a revisit if it's been a while since you played through it, and even more worthy of investigation if you're a fan of Persona 5 who's yet to get around to this one. (And on a more personal note, I had seriously bad Covid symptoms throughout almost my entire second playthrough, and it was just the kind of relaxing, pretty, and absorbing experience I needed.)