Game Journal: Persona 4

Blah, blah, blah. Spoilers. Oh fine.

THIS POST CONSISTS ENTIRELY OF GAMEPLAY AND STORY SPOILERS FOR PERSONA 4

As is not uncommon with me, I both love and hate Persona 4.

The game itself has two parts. I love and hate both.

I mostly hate the combat. Ever since I learned that I had to max out my Slime persona to get a key ability for a bonus boss, I've been trying to compulsively level everything, lest I miss a key power. So that makes the game grindy enough that I hate it. I suppose I could get a FAQ and just cultivate what I know I'll actually need. But that, to me, is the same things as just removing the combat element from the game entirely. There's no discovery. But so far the discovery aspect of the game has been absolutely no fun, so maybe that's for the best.

All the mechanics of the game seem obfuscated, but in a way designed to sell strategy guides, not to provide the player with any joy of discovery.

The social sim part is closer to fifty fifty. It still has ridiculous genre tropes. It takes an entire afternoon to turn in certain quests and not others. It takes an entire afternoon to get a toy from a vending machine. If your courage stat hasn't been raised enough, you can't choose certain dialog choices. And on and on and on.

But when it works well, it's interesting characters who actually develop. Yukiko was being groomed to take over the family hotel. But her experiences have made her decide that she needs her own life, and she's planning to move away now. Kanji was the town bad boy, but he's really just misunderstood and surprisingly down to earth. If the kids who were into sports at the schools I went to were half as personable as Daisuke and Jou, I might actually have played, or at least gone to games. And as cliche as her story may be, I wasted many afternoons I could have spent with my friends helping Ayane practice trombone for the big recital. Even when I didn't get any more upgrades to the Sun Arcana and she stopped talking to me after practice I went. But I'm sick of it now.

I want to collect all the pokemons and mix and match them. And I want to see where all the stories go. But grinding is boring and the social part of the game plays at its own pace, which often leaves me hanging for no good reason. It's a game that doesn't want to be played. Not by me, anyway.