Comments on: Persona 4 Review (12-2-09)

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 19 May 2012 07:37:00 +0000

I know this is horrendously late to bring up, but you can negate a character’s weakness for a turn by having them guard. Granted, that means you’re essentially down a party member for most of the fight if you can’t identify a pattern, but it’s better than Shadow Yukiko getting an extra attack at random and means you’re not blowing turns healing the character every round.

Persona 4 is probably one of my favorite games of all time because it feels so polished- they took the good from Persona 3 and fixed the bad, which is one of the things I like to see in a sequel.

Being able to control your allies made combat feel smoother, the social links were easier to improve and you had more time to max them out as opposed to the maddeningly careful schedule required by 3, you learn more about your party members sooner so it’s easier to get attached, helped by their problems being more relatable and mundane than a number of the P3 cast.

Little touches like the square button to quick move, introducing the plot MUCH earlier, making social stats easier to grind (which allows more time for your Social Links, letting you take them at your own pace and immerse yourself easier), ease of grinding (no Reaper stalking you for taking too long on a certain floor), better dungeon layout (unlike Tartarus in P3 which felt like 100s of floors with different wall paper every 40 or so spaced out by the occasional short 1-time plot dungeon), more involving plot (you feel like you’re a part of things right from the get go)…

By: Daniel Wong Sung Peng

Daniel Wong Sung Peng — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:03:00 +0000

Hmmm, it’s weird. Maybe they adjusted the difficulty level for Persona 3 Portable, but I haven’t really had much difficulty with the boss fights in P3P. I didn’t really had to grind as much, as all that I did was go through tartarus to get the documents, then get the quest items and finally, only going back to Tartarus when Elizabeth tells you about the people trapped there. Other than that I didn’t really need to grind, so it never felt too grindy to me. Though the boss fights are horribly long, which is okay for the psp because of the whole off and you still can continue later function. Also there is always the good ole guard which negates your weakness, so sure you take a longer time to kill the boss, but you don’t die. I have had trouble with Devil Survivor on the DS, though needed to grind quite a bit to be able to win the boss battles.

Side note: One strategy I’ve been using is to use criticals to trigger the all out attacks, so once you can get personas that can allow you to increase critical rates, then, you can just use multiple physical attacks to crit your enemies and then trigger the all out attack. Works for some bosses, for the rest I rely on buffing up and then attacking. It’s worked so far, and has only become a less viable strategy in the bonus dungeon in the New game+

By: Semyon Vasylyev

Semyon Vasylyev — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:38:00 +0000

I played P3 on emulator and dropped it because of the framerate issues and texture popping but what I played, I liked much more than P4 in the sense of the story. Because: a)Teddy(oh that furry fucker).
b)**SPOILER if it’s not obvious**Morooka character and his imminent death.
c)Setting – sooo fucking happy, ideal, merry world that made me feel bad playing the game because it seemed almost like was making me unwillingly compensate for absence of friends with it.
d)TRUE FUCKING ENDING it pissed me off real good because the boss design was crap(which should never be the case with an SMT title), and because the ending itself was more fitting a Square Enix title. In fact the way you kill the boss kinda reminds of The 3rd birthday last boss battle.
Gameplay-wise it’s superiour in every way, I guess.

By: Victor Gominho

Victor Gominho — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 06:04:00 +0000

Just pointing some things out. Persona 3 and 4 are both awesome, but 4 has much better gameplay. BUT! 3 has a better soundtrack, i mean, Mass Destruction is just nuts.

Shadow Yukiko is indeed hard, but i think it’s so worth it. Yukiko is one of the best characters to have in your party, because her magic is awesome for attacking AND healing.

I don’t know about you guys, but leveling up on 3 was much easier. You had the wand cards that increased your experience AND you had the secret dungeon were enemies were the strongest, but gave hundreds of thousands of EXP. My level on 3 was 99, easy. My level on 4 was 98, but ONLY because i wanted to fuse Lucifer. SO MUCH GRINDING.

By: Mavros St. John

Mavros St. John — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:15:00 +0000

“I want to see what they do with the boss at the end”
*every fan of the game cringes for the results of him finding out*

By: Alex Perez

Alex Perez — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:19:00 +0000

I’m guessing Spoony played Persona 3 on hard difficulty from the start, because the game was actually insultingly easy for me in the final third of normal mode. Well, sort of. Random weakness-hitting shadows still screwed me over plenty, but that wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if I was more careful. If you’re ever able to fuse Messiah, the game will pretty much be over, as the final boss will basically offer no challenge whatsoever from that point on.

I really need to replay that game on hard mode and share Spoony’s pain…

By: Harman Sidhu

Harman Sidhu — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:39:00 +0000

Prolly gonna get shit for this cause i have before but Devil Survivor is fricken AWESOME!

By: Nathan Pfarr

Nathan Pfarr — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 05:38:00 +0000

Persona 4 is one of my favorite games. It is an amazing game and I loved every second of it.

By: Ignacio Nemirovksy

Ignacio Nemirovksy — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:33:00 +0000

Great vid and i agree with most of the things that spoony says in this video, except the difficulty part: Indeed, it’s a hard game in terms of boss fights (shadow yukiko sucks) but that’s because in most rpg you have some kind of standard strategy: the entire party uses their best attack and someone it’s healing all the time, but in most of the Shin Megami Tensei games, the battle system it’s different in terms that you have to use your turns wisely and things like critical hits or weaknesses have a major importance. Also, buffs and debuffs and the “guard” option in persona 4 are a must when you fight a boss. Another thing it’s the fusion system: if you understand how it works (it’s not that hard) you will be able to create personas (or pokemons xD) according to the bosses weaknesses. Anyway, persona 4 it’s a great game =O

By: Sam Park

Sam Park — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 02:45:00 +0000

and he didn’t even see Mara yet