PlayStation 2
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
| Graphics: Sound: Gameplay: Overall: |
8.17 8.63 8.22 8.48 |
| Votes: | 54 |
| Reviews: | 1 |
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| Reviewer: green blanket | Date: Jul 13, 2019 |
| Hi. I've played all the Persona games and I'm getting started with SMT at the time of reading this. Oh, yeah, by the way, spoilers ahead. Don't read this if you don't want to be spoiled.
Graphics: 9 It's definitely a cut above the previous games, obviously. I can't say much for the "quality" part of the graphics per se since I don't really have much to compare it to, right now. But hey, it still holds up today, it's good to look at, the artists in charge of the project played around with colors a ton, and the graphical themes of each of the dungeons, the "Heaven" dungeon in particular for me, fit not only the story, but also everything else around it, from the soundtrack to the enemies' in each dungeons' design. Why not a 10 instead of a 9, despite me complimenting it for seemingly everything? Some of the shadows (the enemies) designs are re-used, albeit in a recolored version, which is perfectly fine, but leaves some crawling space for improvement and more variation. It doesn't hurt the overall game, though. I'm just nitpicking it. Sound: 8 OK. I'm gonna be honest here. For most of the game, I had music playing on the background or I was busy listening to podcasts. That's just what I do while I play videogames or read books and shit. I like to multitask, alright? As to say, this point doesn't really hold much value to the overall score of the game given how I missed out on a number of tracks. The ones I listened to were cool, though. Heaven and the Sagiri's themes were my favorite. Again, this could be a 10/10, for all I know, but I'm judging it from my personal experience. Sorry. Gameplay: 7 Well, let's kick this off by saying: you can actually control your teammates in this game rather than bark orders at them as you would in P3 (except P3P, but that doesn't count). That's a big fucking improvement right there, and no, not because it was difficult to control your teammates in P3, the real issue lied in the AI, which, given its age, was okay and could have been looked over, but given the fact you had to rely on your teammates for many parts of the game, the crippled AI would fuck you over sometimes. So, yeah! Anyway, onto the actual meat on the bone, the gameplay doesn't switch up alot from its predecessor, keeping pretty much the same elements, empathizing again that status effects are useless, and not fixing the move "Charge" or "Focus" (which would make the character who used it deal 2.5x more damage the next turn), which, funny enough, trivializes alot of the bosses and, to be completely honest, most of the game. Not changing the formula isn't necessarily a bad thing, obviously, since the formula's great, it's fun to play, but I will discount points just because of the lack of originality and how much more they could have played with it, and fixed some of the more "overpowered" and "underpowered" parts of the game. Overall: 8 I know I shat on the game a few times throughout this 5 page essay which went on for far longer than I would have wanted it to, but to be completely honest, the game can absolutely stand by itself. I appreciate how Persona 4's story stands on itself and requires no previous knowledge of the series, while at the same placing a few easter eggs in its game to give a nod or two to fans of the older games in the series. The story's also fine, despite it being painfully obvious that Adachi was the killer, given he's the only major character in the game without a social link, and a few more things. The twist that Izanami was behind the fog was kinda eh, though, in my opinion. It was unnecessary, and the whole game's story suffered because of it. But that's fiiiiine. It's a cool game. You won't have your time wasted, even if you have to stop and grind a few times in order to catch up to the games' bosses, but even then, the game doesn't demand any extraordinary knowledge of the genre, nor does it have any serious difficulty spikes. And if you say otherwise, you're just bad. |
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