5/5 ★ – Drakkyr's review of Persona 4 Golden.

Persona 4 Golden a must play for those who want a JRPG with a strong story focused on personal connections and an engaging turn based combat system. You play as a high school transfer student in Inaba, a normally peaceful city. That quickly changes as you and your newly acquired friends try to solve the mystery behind the new murderer in town and the Midnight Channel. Persona 4 Golden manages to fuse together a Life Sim and JRPG dungeon crawling successfully. The life sim consists of going to school Monday through Saturday, but once you’re out of school you can hang out with your friends, improve your Social Stats, get a girlfriend, and many more things around Inaba. However, you must balance life with your life saving act in the TV world. In the TV world the game takes a 180 and turns into a dungeon diving turn based JRPG. You and your friends awaken to your personas after facing your true selves. As the Fool, you are able to wield multiple personas, while your friends can only wield one. These personas grant access to powerful elemental spells, devastating physical attacks, and stat boosting spells as you power them up. The “Once More” combat allows you to gain one extra turn for every enemy you manage to knock down by landing a critical attack or hitting an enemies elemental weakness. After knocking down all enemies, you can go for an All Out Attack. This will be your regular gameplay loop for normal encounters. It may get slightly bland after a while, but powerful enemies and bosses sprinkle just enough difficulty to keep the combat engaging. Being a game that derived from the Shin Megami Tensei series, buffs and debuffs are an important part of handling difficult encounters. This is a game where I would definitely recommend looking up where everything around town is and what all the social link schedules are. I would also recommend familiarizing yourself with the Persona Fusion Calculator on GitHub if you want to learn how to become strong. There are a few points that can end your game early, and also includes a true ending that requires specific conditions to achieve. If you decide you want to Platinum this game, a spoiler free true ending guide is recommended so you can get the platinum in only 2 play throughs. It took me 75 hours, not including time I lost when I had to back track to previous saves because I am a dumb dumb. Around the 70 hour mark I was expecting to be close to being at THE end, and would have been completely okay with it. Those 5 extra hours that I wasn’t expecting were very enjoyable, but had me wondering when I was actually going to be at the real ending. If you came from Persona 5 like myself there are a few quality of life features that aren’t present in this game, and it’s age does show in comparison. However, I believe this game holds up amazingly well in 2021. While Persona 5 reimagines the dungeon crawling into a current gen experience, I think 4 Golden’s characters and story are much stronger. I played on the PS Vita with no problems at all, and P4Golden has finally received a Steam port last year that is reliably stable after its first few patches. The Steam port also supports modding. I strongly believe you won’t regret the $20 price tag on the PlayStation Store or Steam. It was also on sale for $15.99 for the first time during the Steam Winter Sale making it worth checking the sales and buying it even if it’s just for a quick backlog purchase. This is an easy 5/5 for me.