Persona 4

Persona 4 didn’t make any drastic changes to the gameplay. Statistics became more elaborate, and Social Links had more variants for restricting the player from forming a harem by dating everyone at the same time. The biggest change was the aesthetics. The previous 3 Personas were taking themselves seriously, they had mostly dark colors and the characters were experiencing constant mindfucks. Persona 4 has bright colors, it is much more light-hearted in tone, and in this particular case it worked in its favor.

The problem with Persona 3 was its lack of tension. The characters were still presented as tragic or occasionally suffering from mental issues, yet the actual game was hardly about that. The Social Links were sapping away any sense of drama, so when you spend the day going on silly dates (as if you are playing a date simulation) and the night in fighting Jungian horrors by constantly shooting yourself in the head (as if it’s an edgelord creep-fest) then you get an enormous tonal whiplash between the two game modes.

Persona 4 fixes this problem by adding a lot more comedy and by lowering the overall edginess of the atmosphere. The two modes are no longer that different in tone, and thus blend better. To the most part I was disinterested with whatever I was doing in Persona 3. I was having a blast with most of the activities in Persona 4. It knew it couldn’t be serious so it didn’t bother and that did wonders. By the way, I am not saying the serious atmosphere was bad for Persona 1 and 2. It was fine there because there weren’t Social Links taking up most of the game. If you can’t get rid of them, you might as well make the atmosphere more uplifting to match the tone.

So basically, as long as you convince yourself you are playing a romantic school comedy date simulation, that occasionally throws in a silly murder mystery for flavor, you are going to have a great time. If on the other hand you expect to find something heavily based on the social anxiety of chuunis, as they affect reality with their delusions before everything goes to hell because they realize it’s all hollow and depressing, then you are going to hate this game, because it’s not there anymore. And even if you do, it’s still way more honest and charming than the tonal mess that was Persona 3.

And it’s not like Persona 4 didn’t improve the whole fighting the shadows theme. In Persona 3 you were tasked to defeat these big shadows that didn’t have any personality or direct connection with the characters. They were just generic monsters you had to defeat. In Persona 4, every major boss is the inner demon of a character. The shadows represent the dark thoughts and desires of the main characters, going as far as openly saying it instead of leaving it up to interpretation, as was the case with people losing their emotions in Persona 3. Persona 4 is a romantic school comedy, but at least the monsters had some connection with what was going on. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

I can say the same thing about the main bad guy. Despite still lacking presence compared to Kandori and Joker, when the revelation came up it was like OH SNAP IT WAS HIM ALL ALONG? It was way more impactful because he was next to you the whole time and he wasn’t trying to stand out as important, like your serious boss turning out to be evil. But yeah, he was still not that great as a villain, and his motives were weak as hell. Also, a cosmic horror appears out of nowhere that seems completely unrelated with everything you were doing so far, and you are like “what the heck is that doing here?” Once again they are throwing in a final boss without proper foreshadowing, something which was not the case in Persona 1 and 2.