[PS Vita] Persona 4 Golden ROM Download

Persona 4 Golden ROM Screenshots

Persona 4 Golden ROM Description

Story and Characters

Persona 4 Golden is the modern take on the RPG. You play as a young high school student from the big city that migrates to a small suburban town. Shortly after your arrival all hell starts to break loose. I won’t go too deep into the story for spoiler purposes but the game revolves around a group of high-school kids trying to solve a serial murder case all while making sure they go to class, study and make basketball and drama practice.

The narrative throughout the game is excellent from top to bottom. Though even though the story has an after-school special feel to it with you trying to solve a murder all while dealing with typical high school stuff, this is able to succeed because the characters and character development in the game are so strong. I haven’t cared or felt this attached to a group in a long time. Each character feels unique and while they may start out as typical cliches like the shy girl or the bad boy, they grow in ways that I never ever expected all while never losing the fact that they’re high schoolers with all the fearlessness and eternal hope and crippling insecurities that go along with that.

One thing about the story is that the beginning of the game is incredibly narrative-heavy. In the first couple of hours you’ll probably just fly through tutorial-style battles so watch out for that. But all that talking is building to something.

Gameplay

Gameplay-wise Persona 4 Golden is a blend of many different elements – part traditional RPG, part social sim combat, part time management sim, part high school drama, part murder mystery, and part dungeon crawler. Whenever a game splits its focus over many different gameplay elements the game generally suffers from being a jack-of-all-trades master of none syndrome. This is not the case with Persona as the game strikes an amazing balance of it all.

The game allows you to do what you want to do when you want to do it. Do you spend the afternoon going to basketball practice or going to work or do you visit the velvet room and work on building up your personas? The choice is yours and while the game is formulaic it never feels formulaic. If you decide to hang out with one of your friends to raise your social link the game doesn’t just say “you hung out with Yukiko and used 2 time slots to increase your social link”. It shows you hanging out with her and the conversations that you have. You learn about her and you learn about her feelings and you watch her grow up over the course of many hours of gameplay.

The best part of the whole thing is that it fits perfectly into the portable experience. I’ve often been wary of playing portable RPGs because they can be so involved and they don’t always conduct themselves to pick up and play gaming. Thankfully Persona 4 Golden’s gameplay setup involving days and the calendar allows you to really feel like you can accomplish something even if you only have 10 or 15 minutes to log on and play. You may not have time to do a full multi-level dungeon but surely you have time to jet off to basketball practice or study for midterms.

Combat in the game revolves around what’s called personas – and basically, these are the manifestations of your characters that do battle for you. I’ve seen people compare it to Pokemon and I guess that would be a fair representation. The combat is turn-based and elemental based and you can level up each individual persona by using it in combat but you also level up your main character as well.

Leveling your main character is important because the higher level you are the higher level personas you can fuse together. This allows you to collect different personas, combine them together to make stronger more balanced personas, and it also brings your social link into play. When you form bonds with people you will create a social link and the bonds with certain people will strengthen certain different personas in the fusing process.

If all that sounded incredibly confusing don’t worry it’s really not and the game does an excellent job of explaining each aspect of it. In short, the combat may be a bit basic but it’s certainly more than serviceable. The enemies are challenging and the leveling system makes grinding feel valuable and satisfying to the point of mild grinding. I did find it necessary to grind at multiple points in the game, perhaps I was supposed to be working on my skills instead of going to basketball practice or riding my scooter around town, or working my garden, but I would usually be able to get up to the boss floor no problem only to be smacked down rather quickly. Fortunately, the penalty for dying is simply respawning at the beginning of the floor. However, for those people who had any kind of hatred towards grinding be advised that I did find it necessary at times.

Graphics and Audio

Graphically, Persona 4 Golden is a good-looking title. Sure, you can still tell it’s built from an older game, but it does translate really well into HD on the Vita’s beautiful screen. Certainly, there are some jaggies and some bland textures around but nothing about the experience feels cheap or rushed. The sets are imaginative, the enemies look good if blocky, and they repeat themselves quite a bit from dungeons to dungeons. Graphics in a game like this aren’t weighted all that heavily but they do certainly get the job done.

Special mentions to the audio focus of the game in both the voice acting and musical parts. The voice acting in the game is all-around excellent, and with so much dialogue and characters there’s so much room for mistakes. But each character sounds original, and while the game isn’t completely voice-acted from top to bottom the characters are so memorable that you’re able to connect with just the plain text parts as well. The soundtrack in the game is also top-notch. The upbeat and easygoing pop-like melodies are infectious, and I catch myself humming the theme song from time to time when I’m out and about.