Persona 4 Golden

The beauty of this game is it will take you back to a time when things were simpler. When friendships mean the world to people, when fighting for the greater good meant something, when planning your day slow and steady lead to greater things. This game is nothing less than perfection, which includes the music, which after almost a decade of me playing it, still actively listen to its soundtracks. This will go down in my family linage as a must play at some point in my children's lives, and beyond.

Excellent story and really fun to a point that when I stop playing I kinda feel sad lowkey!

Only downside is that I think "normal" difficulty is a little bit too hard for normal, but still u can change it to easy anytime if u want.

Personally I changed difficulty to recieve small damage and do big damage and get more XP, do this if u are looking for fun and playing otherwise u must grind hard even for normal.

TLDR: super fun, play on easy.

I mean there are so many problems that suck any fun I had with this game. First with the positives: 1.Characters-Most of the characters are interesting & have a good arc to them. 2.Story/Plot-The mystery in this game is suspenseful as it was the biggest reason I kept playing this game. 3.Location-Inaba is a quiet, peaceful, & happy town where there isn't any dark gloomy atmosphere like there is in Persona 5. However, the negatives take a lot of the fun away as so: 1.Gameplay-Oh my goodness, what a disappointment. It's a pain to learn & get used to. Plus the enemies (even on normal mode) spam the most powerful attacks that takes half your health away! (Jesus!) 2.Save Points-SRSLY! Only ONE save point in each dungeon & that's at the very end of each dungeon! That's stingy & speaking of stingy: 3.Chest Keys, SP, & Yen-I've never had a game that was so stingy on allowing you to unlock chests, earn plenty of money, & limited SP. This game is the most stingy game I've played ever! 4.Enemies-Not much variety & again, they love to spam the most powerful moves even on the easiest difficulty! This takes all the fun away from the game when I have to restart hours of gameplay! Overall, very overrated & disappointing game. Made me write a serious review on it. This game is average at best & go play Persona 5, it's sooooo much better!

It's quite unbelievable how good this game is, the writing is amazing as it make you feel a whole lot of emotions, the cast is incredible and every single one of them are likable with their own set of problems that you have to solve through their social links and with the edition of golden there are a lot of new added scenes which makes the party to feel even more alive than the original p4 and most of their interactions are very funny and heartfelt to the point that it actually feels like these kids are your real friends which makes the ending all the more emotional when you know that you have to say goodbye to them.

10/10 One of the best in the series, characters, music, story, combat... They all stood the test of time so it's definitely a must buy, with the fact that now it's on steam you can easily pick it up and enjoy this masterpiece of a game.

I decided to write this review to counter the one that said "it isn't as good as Persona 5".

That might be true (yet to play Persona 5 due to not opening a PS4) but it is sort of like saying "Back to the Future 1 is terrible because it isn't as good as Back to the Future 2" or "Godfather part 1 is terrible as Godfather part 2 is superior". You could technically say those statements but it is dismissing all the work that the previous entry put into establishing the universe and system.

Prior to playing Persona 4, I couldn't envisage how any game could top the story and characters of Persona 3. The overall system was a lot of fun, the characters and interactions memorable and the conclusion was brilliant. After playing Persona 4 though, I struggle to go back to Persona 3 as so many quality of life improvements were implemented in the 4 that makes 3 seem clunky by comparison. Somehow they also wrote even more engaging characters (Yusuke is more relatable than Junpei, Yukiko is more real than Mitsuru, Chie is more fun than Akihiko, Rise is less annoying and more helpful than Fuka, Margaret is way better than Elizabeth), a better location (spent a couple of years in rural Japan and Inaba is spot on for how these towns look and feel), and the gameplay was even better.

The main downside for the game is that once the mechanics are understood (which is not difficult, the game holds your hand quite a bit) it becomes relatively easy. A few battles are still complex but mostly you want the shadow world sections to finish so you can get back to the story. Spend a bit of time at the beginning grinding extra levels and the game is very easy as you are almost always ahead of the difficulty curve.

I can imagine that with everything that is great about Persona 4 is made even better in Persona 5 and the few problems are fixed up making Persona 5 seem like the better game. That is the nature of game development. But if you have played 5 and want more of the series, go back and play 3 and 4 but judge them on their own merits and enjoy the story and the people you meet along the way.