Why Do I Only Update About Games All Of A Sudden?
There's a scene in a Hong Kong movie I'm very fond of (She's A Man, He's A Woman) where a stuck up singer asks her former producer how his latest "project" is coming along. The project - a girl not overflowing with singing talent - was picked by the producer to demonstrate how he could make a success out of anyone. The producer fumbles for a reply and says, "Oh, it's going well. She... has heart." The already established star scoffs at this and retorts: "Heart? Do I have 'heart'? Is that all it takes?"
Obviously films, albums, games and any creative product need more than just heart to be successful. Yet heart carries such weight with me in these matters. Having finished it tonight, I'd say Persona 4 is very similar. Heck, one of the main themes of the game is friendship, support, and the strength of the human heart (nicely, for a change, aimed towards finding the truth, and not just "saving the world"). P4 isn't a perfect game: the plot is straight out of Scooby Doo with its group of rascally kids going around solving murders (at least most JRPGs feature some adults in your party). The corridor dungeons are still a bit repetitive and can RPG designers please stop recycling the same enemy with a different colour scheme?
Yet for all that I'd venture to say that P4 is the best RPG of this generation.
I've already laid into the plot, but it's not that bad. As I alluded to, pretty much every JRPG is based around groups of impossibly young children saving the world. If one is going to get into a hissy fit over that then one might as well not like a vast majority of JRPGs. So if the Scooby Doo nature of the storyline is a minus then at least the story's development does through up a few surprises.
Most importantly, the eventual murderer is someone vaguely important. I was convinced it was just going to be a nobody character because one of the game's more important characters couldn't be turned evil like that. Yet that wasn't the case. I'm not sure how well they manage to convince me about this character's initial motives, but I appreciate that the murderer wasn't someone we'd never seen before.
The later half of the game actually flows together rather nicely too. Going into detail about the characters and dungeons you deal with would be a little too spoiler-ish. Yet if the first few dungeons are by the books "go here, get this character for your party," the game does well to deviate from that.
It's the social links and the characters that really make this game shine though. I've said before this side of things was something that I liked a great deal even in Persona 3. Yet P4 improves upon this so so much.
Firstly, as I think I've mentioned before, your party is functions so much better. In P3 they felt like a random assortment of people living in the same dorm just because they had to; not because they really wanted to, or had much to do with each other. By contrast, in the sequel here the group actually feels like a party of friends. Chie and Yukiko feel like old friends, Yosuke and the protagonist share that "transfer student" thing, and everything rolls on from there with the other characters who join. They feel far more close and link a unit than the group in P3 ever did.
Even the outside social links feel a lot better integrated. There were some very random ones in P3 - people you'd just meet sitting around where ever. In P4 everyone - perhaps the sole exception is the Death link - seems like a proper part of your life. They're either your classmates, or your sports friends, or your club friends, or part-time work associates, or the people you live with. They're not "that bum who sits in the park every Sunday." They're a proper part of your life, as you'd expect, and the experiences and developments within those social links resonate all the more as a result.
That's where the heart is. Towards the end of the game when you start maxing out social links some of the characters' stories and developments are very touching. Doujima getting over his wife's death is really gratifying to watch. Not all the social links are brilliant - the Devil link, which starts out so amusing slightly peters out - but overall, of the ones I completed, or came close to completing, they were very good.
For the first time in a long while I cared about a lot of characters. It reminds me a lot of FF VII. All the party characters there had to overcome past obstacles in order to move on. Most of P4's characters actually deal with present issues but it's that sense of them overcoming those mountains that is so gratifying to watch and which really made me love this game.
Plot and characters aside what else do we have here though. Yeah... the dungeons are corridor after corridor. But then since the PSX generation and pre-rendered backgrounds became a thing of the past I haven't come across any RPG world I've really loved. There have been locations here and there that I've liked, but it's not the same. So I don't hold this against P4 too much. Especially given how it's such a MASSIVE improvement over the dull-as-hell grindfest that was P3's tower.
And even without pre-rendered backgrounds Atlus make Inaba seem like a real place, with its own heart. Tale of Symphonia's Tethe'alla is probably the only world from the 128bit generation that comes close to matching Inaba for an appealing and well constructed world. P4's town is simple and nothing out of the ordinary, and for once in an RPG that's what works best. The shops that have closed down, the rumours that fly along, it's all pretty real and makes the horrific events all the more unsettling as a result.
All the enemies get recycled but the boss dynamics are something a lot of games could learn from. Or at least S-E could. After the head-bashing antics of FF XII and its temporarily invincible bosses, S-E could learn from Atlus how to do tough, but fair boss fights. I know Atlus have always made tough games but I thought P4 trod a nice line of being hard, but not excessively hard. Grinding in general wasn't needed - so long as you fought all the enemies that came your way in a dungeon you were pretty much always at the necessary level to take on the boss at the end.
I racked up 65 hours of gameplay on P4 and very little of that was devoted to time spent solely on leveling up. I also believe that figure of 65 hours, with so little leveling, is a testament to all the interesting ways you can spend your time in P4. I was expecting a game of about 40 hours but the story kept on evolving and there was always plenty to do - sometimes it even felt like there was a little too much to get one with!
So what else? The soundtrack is okay. It's not amazing or anything but it's nice and it's a hell of a lot better than what existed within Final Fantasy XII or pretty much any RPG of this generation. Not to mention that Reach Out To The Truth is one of the most awesome battle themes ever and that even after so many hours spent fighting my way through this game I still got pumped up when it commenced. And when it comes intergrated instrumentally into that final boss theme tune... Yeah, that's further awesomeness right there.
I've found that the sign of a really good game, book, film, anime, or whatever is that bittersweet feeling at the end. You know, that - for the most part - happy ending feeling tinged with sadness as you know there's no more to come from the story and characters you became so attached to. Persona 4 left me with that feeling.
Will I replay it and use my New Game + save? Much as I've enjoyed this game... I have to say I don't know. It has taken just under 70 hours to complete; that's a lot longer than I expected. This is another bittersweet aspect of P4 - it has been great fun to spend 70 hours on a game for the first time in years, and I'm glad I've still got what it takes to spend that long on a game and not get tired. But.... 70 hours is a big chunk out of my free time. It's no longer like the school holidays / vacation where I had days on end that I could spend sat in front of the TV zooming through on RPG, desperately awaiting the arrival of the latest must-have game in case I ran out of things to play. These days I wish I didn't have so many games still lying around. I want to play them all but,really, where's the time for them without sacrificing my other interests?
I've been playing P4 for a month maybe? That's a couple of hours every night on average. That's a movie a day. I know I go through cycles of spending most of my time on anime, then on watching films, then on gaming, but not like this. Not 70 hours in one such period. I feel a little drained and, love this game like I do, I still can't face going back through it now, even with NG+. It'll have to wait a little while and then I can really enjoy the nostalgia of re-visiting old friends.
So... I make that claim. Yet I've still got the likes of Shadow Hearts: Covenant (that fabled RPG that set off so many boners back at FFO) and Xenosaga III to play through if I want. Of course there are other RPGs from the last generation I could still play, but I view those two as probably the final ones I need to have a go at in order to complete my personal round up (I'll skip XS2 after all the bad things I heard).
But those two games would really have to be something special to knock P4 off its top spot, or even to dislodge Growslanser II. If it were hard to decide on a definitive "Best of the Gen" RPG from the 16 and 32bit eras, it's a much easier case when it comes to the 128bit gen. I can count on one hand the number of really good (or maybe even just *good*) RPGs that I've played across that generation. That's a shame, and it's things like that that have made me repeatedly question my love of video gaming and whether my heart was still in it.
I'm glad I picked P4 up on a whim - given I didn't think enough of P3 to finish it - and I'm equally as glad it reminded me what a great RPG is like and why I like this genre of games above all else. For that alone I'm sure it'll stay at the top of my favourites list for this gen.
*yawm*
Well, I stayed up late finishing the game tonight, and even later bashing this entry out. So, the usual apologises if it reads in a terribly incoherent and rambling matter. Later ~
Obviously films, albums, games and any creative product need more than just heart to be successful. Yet heart carries such weight with me in these matters. Having finished it tonight, I'd say Persona 4 is very similar. Heck, one of the main themes of the game is friendship, support, and the strength of the human heart (nicely, for a change, aimed towards finding the truth, and not just "saving the world"). P4 isn't a perfect game: the plot is straight out of Scooby Doo with its group of rascally kids going around solving murders (at least most JRPGs feature some adults in your party). The corridor dungeons are still a bit repetitive and can RPG designers please stop recycling the same enemy with a different colour scheme?
Yet for all that I'd venture to say that P4 is the best RPG of this generation.
I've already laid into the plot, but it's not that bad. As I alluded to, pretty much every JRPG is based around groups of impossibly young children saving the world. If one is going to get into a hissy fit over that then one might as well not like a vast majority of JRPGs. So if the Scooby Doo nature of the storyline is a minus then at least the story's development does through up a few surprises.
Most importantly, the eventual murderer is someone vaguely important. I was convinced it was just going to be a nobody character because one of the game's more important characters couldn't be turned evil like that. Yet that wasn't the case. I'm not sure how well they manage to convince me about this character's initial motives, but I appreciate that the murderer wasn't someone we'd never seen before.
The later half of the game actually flows together rather nicely too. Going into detail about the characters and dungeons you deal with would be a little too spoiler-ish. Yet if the first few dungeons are by the books "go here, get this character for your party," the game does well to deviate from that.
It's the social links and the characters that really make this game shine though. I've said before this side of things was something that I liked a great deal even in Persona 3. Yet P4 improves upon this so so much.
Firstly, as I think I've mentioned before, your party is functions so much better. In P3 they felt like a random assortment of people living in the same dorm just because they had to; not because they really wanted to, or had much to do with each other. By contrast, in the sequel here the group actually feels like a party of friends. Chie and Yukiko feel like old friends, Yosuke and the protagonist share that "transfer student" thing, and everything rolls on from there with the other characters who join. They feel far more close and link a unit than the group in P3 ever did.
Even the outside social links feel a lot better integrated. There were some very random ones in P3 - people you'd just meet sitting around where ever. In P4 everyone - perhaps the sole exception is the Death link - seems like a proper part of your life. They're either your classmates, or your sports friends, or your club friends, or part-time work associates, or the people you live with. They're not "that bum who sits in the park every Sunday." They're a proper part of your life, as you'd expect, and the experiences and developments within those social links resonate all the more as a result.
That's where the heart is. Towards the end of the game when you start maxing out social links some of the characters' stories and developments are very touching. Doujima getting over his wife's death is really gratifying to watch. Not all the social links are brilliant - the Devil link, which starts out so amusing slightly peters out - but overall, of the ones I completed, or came close to completing, they were very good.
For the first time in a long while I cared about a lot of characters. It reminds me a lot of FF VII. All the party characters there had to overcome past obstacles in order to move on. Most of P4's characters actually deal with present issues but it's that sense of them overcoming those mountains that is so gratifying to watch and which really made me love this game.
Plot and characters aside what else do we have here though. Yeah... the dungeons are corridor after corridor. But then since the PSX generation and pre-rendered backgrounds became a thing of the past I haven't come across any RPG world I've really loved. There have been locations here and there that I've liked, but it's not the same. So I don't hold this against P4 too much. Especially given how it's such a MASSIVE improvement over the dull-as-hell grindfest that was P3's tower.
And even without pre-rendered backgrounds Atlus make Inaba seem like a real place, with its own heart. Tale of Symphonia's Tethe'alla is probably the only world from the 128bit generation that comes close to matching Inaba for an appealing and well constructed world. P4's town is simple and nothing out of the ordinary, and for once in an RPG that's what works best. The shops that have closed down, the rumours that fly along, it's all pretty real and makes the horrific events all the more unsettling as a result.
All the enemies get recycled but the boss dynamics are something a lot of games could learn from. Or at least S-E could. After the head-bashing antics of FF XII and its temporarily invincible bosses, S-E could learn from Atlus how to do tough, but fair boss fights. I know Atlus have always made tough games but I thought P4 trod a nice line of being hard, but not excessively hard. Grinding in general wasn't needed - so long as you fought all the enemies that came your way in a dungeon you were pretty much always at the necessary level to take on the boss at the end.
I racked up 65 hours of gameplay on P4 and very little of that was devoted to time spent solely on leveling up. I also believe that figure of 65 hours, with so little leveling, is a testament to all the interesting ways you can spend your time in P4. I was expecting a game of about 40 hours but the story kept on evolving and there was always plenty to do - sometimes it even felt like there was a little too much to get one with!
So what else? The soundtrack is okay. It's not amazing or anything but it's nice and it's a hell of a lot better than what existed within Final Fantasy XII or pretty much any RPG of this generation. Not to mention that Reach Out To The Truth is one of the most awesome battle themes ever and that even after so many hours spent fighting my way through this game I still got pumped up when it commenced. And when it comes intergrated instrumentally into that final boss theme tune... Yeah, that's further awesomeness right there.
I've found that the sign of a really good game, book, film, anime, or whatever is that bittersweet feeling at the end. You know, that - for the most part - happy ending feeling tinged with sadness as you know there's no more to come from the story and characters you became so attached to. Persona 4 left me with that feeling.
Will I replay it and use my New Game + save? Much as I've enjoyed this game... I have to say I don't know. It has taken just under 70 hours to complete; that's a lot longer than I expected. This is another bittersweet aspect of P4 - it has been great fun to spend 70 hours on a game for the first time in years, and I'm glad I've still got what it takes to spend that long on a game and not get tired. But.... 70 hours is a big chunk out of my free time. It's no longer like the school holidays / vacation where I had days on end that I could spend sat in front of the TV zooming through on RPG, desperately awaiting the arrival of the latest must-have game in case I ran out of things to play. These days I wish I didn't have so many games still lying around. I want to play them all but,really, where's the time for them without sacrificing my other interests?
I've been playing P4 for a month maybe? That's a couple of hours every night on average. That's a movie a day. I know I go through cycles of spending most of my time on anime, then on watching films, then on gaming, but not like this. Not 70 hours in one such period. I feel a little drained and, love this game like I do, I still can't face going back through it now, even with NG+. It'll have to wait a little while and then I can really enjoy the nostalgia of re-visiting old friends.
So... I make that claim. Yet I've still got the likes of Shadow Hearts: Covenant (that fabled RPG that set off so many boners back at FFO) and Xenosaga III to play through if I want. Of course there are other RPGs from the last generation I could still play, but I view those two as probably the final ones I need to have a go at in order to complete my personal round up (I'll skip XS2 after all the bad things I heard).
But those two games would really have to be something special to knock P4 off its top spot, or even to dislodge Growslanser II. If it were hard to decide on a definitive "Best of the Gen" RPG from the 16 and 32bit eras, it's a much easier case when it comes to the 128bit gen. I can count on one hand the number of really good (or maybe even just *good*) RPGs that I've played across that generation. That's a shame, and it's things like that that have made me repeatedly question my love of video gaming and whether my heart was still in it.
I'm glad I picked P4 up on a whim - given I didn't think enough of P3 to finish it - and I'm equally as glad it reminded me what a great RPG is like and why I like this genre of games above all else. For that alone I'm sure it'll stay at the top of my favourites list for this gen.
*yawm*
Well, I stayed up late finishing the game tonight, and even later bashing this entry out. So, the usual apologises if it reads in a terribly incoherent and rambling matter. Later ~