Baal Review Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

Story: 9/10

The story is that you are a new arrival in a fictional town in Japan called "Inaba". You are living with your Uncle for a year because your parents are working overseas. After the first few days a dead body of a recently famous news reporter turns up dead. The dead body can not be identified as to the cause of death or any traces of the person who did it. A few says later another person is killed. The case begins to become deadly serious. One day you learn about a rumor of a program called the MIdnight Channel. Upon watching the Midnight Channel, you stick your hand into the TV to discover you are able to cross into another world inside the TV. Using this power you and your friend, Yosuke, go into the world of the TV and discover a bear-like creature named "Teddie". Upon meeting Teddie he takes you to another section of the TV World where you are attacked by creatures called "Shadows". Upon being attacked by the Shadows you discover a creature born from your inner thoughts called a "Persona". Using the power to cross over into the TV World and your Persona you must discover the truth behind the case and help those that are put into the TV world before the year ends.

The story starts of pretty slow. You don't get full control of the MC until about 3 Hours in. But damn! Is it an experience afterwards! Unexpected Plot Twists, Solving the case, and great characters! There are two non-bad endings. Normal and True. I have not obtained normal yet and went straight for true. Needless to say the true ending almost made me cry. And it's not the bittersweet ending crap we got from the last game, this is a happy ending. Well the true end is, I'm not so sure about the normal end. Really the only way I could fault the story is how slow it started.

Gameplay: 9/10
Well for starters the things they improved on. You now have full control of your team, compared to Persona 3. That's a big plus. Now when you hit one enemy with their weakness you get an extra turn even if you hit just one. You have one weapon now. THis is good because it was annoying managing the other weapons you would never use. About 70% of the roster of the Roster is the Persona from the last game. And the rest is well, new Persona.

Sound: 10/10
Let's begin with the voices. Not only are the voices fantastic, but they destroy the Original Japanese voices.

Johnny Yong Bosch as the main character, Yuri Lowenthal as Yosuke Hanamura, Danielle Judovits as Chie Satonaka, Amanda Winn Lee as Yukiko Amagi, Troy Baker as Kanji Tatsumi, Laura Bailey as Rise Kujikawa, Dave Wittenburg as Teddie, and Jessica Strauss as Naoto Shirogane make up the team and are fantastic! Music to my ears at how original the voice work is! David Lodge voices Ryotaro Dojima, Carrie Savage as Nanako Dojima, and Johnny Yong Bosch as Tohru Adachi. All of these are fantastic! Fitting voices that even surpass the original!

Now for the music. The music this time is given a more retro feel. Which to me is a major improvement. J-Pop and Rock cover up most of the songlist. All of the songs are sung in English. Notice how I said "English" and not "Engrish". There's also tracks that fit the situation of the story. When there's creepy music, you know this is a genuinely creepy moment. Intense moment is followed by intense music. And the boss tracks are fantastic as well.

Graphics: 8/10

Being on the PS2 these are of course good graphics. It keeps the feel of Persona that was in the last game.

Replayability: 8.5/10

Once you beat the game you'll find there is some incentive to keep you going. Maxing out other social links. Maxing the Persona Compendium. Doing certain quests. But it's pretty hard to keep the motivation going when you realize that you start back at level one. Then again I played on Normal and have no idea what easy is like.

Overall Score: 9/10

Forgot the summary of the story.

better then nocturne?

Most likely.

Raziel wrote:

better then nocturne?

Hard to say. Nocturne had better story but the music wasn't as good as Persona's 4.

Then again I give more credit to Nocturne for the fact that you could side with Lucifer.

Nice! This makes me wanna buy the game!

Quick question! How is the fighting? Like in Final Fantasy?

No.

Here's a video. The combat is a few minutes into the video.

Didn't make a lot of sense =/ Basically, choose attack and it will happen?

Okay. It's turn-based. You take turns attacking the enemy, healing, using persona, you get the point.

The enemy has weaknesses. If you exploit the weaknesses then not only do you do more damage but you get a turn.

Every character has a Persona. The main character can use multiple persona though because he is a wild card. He's not part of any particular arcana.

Weapons, Armor, and Accessories are what you equip you and your teammates with.

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