I’ve got to admit, I have a warm spot in my heart for any role-playing game that manages to shed the high-fantasy shtick in favor of a modern-day setting. Of course, Earthbound is probably the first thing that pops into your mind, but Atlus’ Persona series is another chief example. Persona 3 blew me away. Its stylish interface, beautiful art, and catchy music made me forget that I was still playing a PS2 game in 2007. It was a pretty amazing way to close out the last console generation.

Only it turns out that Atlus wasn’t quite done yet. When they announced Persona 4 for a December release, I was dumbfounded. Of course, I wasn’t expecting much. I figured that it would be a rush job - just Persona 3 with a new story. What I wasn’t expecting was that this last hurrah for the PS2 would be the best RPG of that entire generation.

Persona 4 takes us away from the hustle and bustle of the big city into the Japanese countryside. Your (mostly) silent protagonist has been stranded with his uncle and niece in the hamlet of Inaba for a year while his parents travel the world. Fortunately, things aren’t boring out in the boonies. Within hours of your arrival, a national celebrity is found dead in the middle of town. Your uncle, a police detective, wants you to stay far away from the case. After all, you’re just a high school student. No need to get involved with police business. However, before things are over, you’ll be drawn into something far deeper than a simple murder. You think that some people get way too absorbed into a television program? Just wait until you are actually sucked into your TV to rescue Inaba’s hapless residents.

One of the things that truly sets the Persona series apart is the deliberate pacing. The game isn’t just about getting from cutscene to cutscene. Instead, Persona 4 is more focused on your life as a resident of this town. Time is constantly passing while you play, and you are limited in what you can do in one day. You wake up each morning, go to school during the day, and you have some afternoon time to yourself. At night, you’ll go out and fight the demons that plague Inaba’s residents. All the while, you have to make sure that you get enough sleep. After all, you wouldn’t want to catch a cold.

Just because Inaba is a small town doesn’t mean that you don’t have much to do. Persona 3 took an innovative step in introducing this time system, but there were stretches where you’d just go home after school and skip straight to the demon fighting. Persona 4 adds all sorts of new things to do. If you have any time left after all of the extracurricular activities, you can apply for jobs, go fishing, learn to cook, or hang out at the bookstore. So what’s the point of all of this? These activities all tie into Persona’s trait system. Going to work on time will increase your diligence, while reading a book might increase your knowledge. Making a particularly risky choice will increase your courage.

Sitting through all of these daily activities just to get to the nighttime demon fighting may sound like a chore, but it really isn’t thanks to an incredible localization and some great voice acting. You actually get just as much of the story out of these day-to-day chunks. By interacting with the same set of people every day, you’ll come to care about them. The main characters are actually believable, compelling human beings. As you become a part of their lives, you’ll learn more about their troubles, about their secrets and their desires. Very few RPGs have made me care about the characters, but Persona 4’s cast is just about as compelling as it gets.

In most role-playing games, your stats just determine how well you do in battle. Persona is basically the Facebook RPG. Those stats that you build through daily activities and your answers to the questions posed in conversations will build, alter, or destroy your social links. These links determine simple things like who will be your friend or how well you’ll do on a test. They also have deeper effects on combat; for instance, increasing the strength of a social link might grant you a new Persona.

What are Personas? They are, as their name implies, personifications of the feelings in a character’s mind. Think of them as the Pokemon dredged out of a crack addict’s imagination. There are over a hundred of them to collect, each offering different special abilities or stat upgrades when you equip them. Later in the game, you’ll be able to combine Personas to form new, more powerful ones. Collecting all of them isn’t required, but you need to spend some time cultivating them if you want to do well against the stronger enemies.

The combat has been completely overhauled since Persona 3. For a game that blew away so many other RPG conventions, Persona 3’s combat was fairly archaic. It’s basically just the standard turn-based system. You can attack, use a special move, consume an item, defend, or run. Persona 4 doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but it makes things a bit more exciting. For starters, you can now directly control your entire party instead of just suggesting a behavior style for the supporting members. As your party members level up, they gain new abilities like special blocks or assist moves. While you can certainly get through most of the game by just attacking and using the Persona’s special moves, these new tweaks let you plan out more complex battle strategies.

Persona 4 is a PS2 game, so it is definitely showing the console’s age in the graphics department. Everything has that fine fuzzy jaggedness to it. Amazingly, though, it really isn’t all that distracting. The developers have mitigated the system’s limitations through smart art direction. The visual presentation is very, as much as I hate the word, hip. The menus and on-screen elements make use of jagged lines, bold colors, and weird fonts. The character art is stunning, totally overcoming the generic anime feel that most Japanese RPGs succumb to. There are also several gorgeous 2D cutscenes that keep the story moving.

Even the soundtrack is fantastic. It’s definitely Shoji Meguro’s best work to date. I’m really not a big hip-hop fan, but I dug how Persona 3’s soundtrack worked with the stylish, urban feel of the game. Persona 4 trades the Japanese rap for more traditional pop beats. The change in musical style is a little ironic (you’ll understand once you get into the plot), but it works. What is the real test of an RPG soundtrack? When you still find yourself humming it despite hearing it hundreds of times in-game. The awesome part is that Atlus is actually giving away the soundtrack with the retail release of the game (I’m a little bummed that the review copy didn’t come with it).

Persona 4 is the PS2 generation’s Chrono Trigger. Both were released late into their respective system’s lifespans, both eschewed genre standards and presented stories far from the norm. Both were masterpieces of presentation, with beautiful art that pushed the limits of the system and soundtracks that we will listen to for years to come. This isn’t light praise, as Persona 4 deserves more than that. Sure, it isn’t as revolutionary as Persona 3. But Persona 4 took its predecessor as a starting point and ended up weaving a far more powerful, poignant experience. If you’re at all a fan of the genre, you need to play this game. If you want a game with memorable characters and a mature storyline rife with social commentary (corporatism, fame, and repressed sexuality are just the tip of the iceberg), you need to play this game. Seriously, winter is the best time of the year to sit down with a big meaty game, and Persona’s hundred or so hours of gameplay should fill those long, snowy days pretty nicely. It’s time to dust off the PlayStation 2 and send it off in style.

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