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| The new student arriving at his school. Note how the game keeps track of the time of day and the weather. |
A new student arrives at the small town of Inaba at the same time of series of unsolvable murders occur. The new student soon discovers that the murders are being committed by throwing the victim into a dimension on the other side of the TV where they are killed by monsters called Shadows. Using his ability to enter the TV, the new student and a couple of likeminded friends must discover who the murderer is and prevent anymore murders from occurring, while still going to high school.
The game takes place over the course of one school year. Every month a new person is thrown into the TV and the student and his friends have to go save them. The missing person is found at the end of a dungeon inside the TV, usually ten levels long and filled with monsters, that the player has to traverse by the end of the month. Also at the end of the dungeon is a large boss that the player has to kill.
To fight the Shadows, the student and his friends have access to Personas, physical manifestations of their egos that take the forms of mythological figures with special powers. Each character’s Persona specializes in a certain type of magic, like ice magic or fire magic. The main character though can have multiple Personas, which he obtains from defeating Shadows. Most Shadows have a weakness to a certain type of magic, so it is important to have a variety of Personas available. The player can also fuse multiple Personas together to make really strong Personas.
When fighting Shadows, everyone in the party gains experience points and levels up, making them stronger. A lot of time in the game is spent fighting Shadows over and over again until all the characters are strong enough to fight the boss at the end of the dungeon. This can become really tedious as this can take several hours. It is not a difficult or unfair, but the process did not have to take so long.
The other half of the game is going to high school and making friends. When the player becomes friends with someone, they establish a social link. By spending time with a friend the social link becomes stronger. Each friend is connected with several Personas, and by strengthening the social links the Personas become stronger.
The challenge of the game is finding time to both explore the dungeon and visit friends. The player can only visit a friend or go to a dungeon once a day. It is impossible to stay in a dungeon indefinitely until everyone is strong enough because eventually their magic power will run out, and friends have to be visited regularly because the stronger Personas are essential to winning.
The game comes very close to being repetitive and dull. If fighting Shadows was a little more difficult, if reaching and fighting bosses was more frustrating, if it took any longer to level up characters, the entire game would be an exercise in tedium. Luckily all of those activities never feel too difficult, and most repetitive actions at least feel like there is some progression while being conducted.
The storyline is interesting, in that unlike most role playing games, it sticks to the murder mystery the entire way through instead of becoming only about saving the world.
The characters are interesting and unique. None of them are really annoying, which is good, because they are the only interesting parts of the story that are not related to the mystery.
The friends that the player can make all have entertaining stories as well, which fill out the rest of the year. As each social link progresses, the friend goes through an arc where they deal with an emotional problem that is always a little fun to watch.
The only real problem is that the game is both too long and too short at the same time. The whole game could have been shorter; dungeons could have had fewer levels, it could have taken less time to level up, and there are at least two months that could have been cut without losing much of the main story. At the same time there are not enough days the school year to complete all the social links and find out how everyone’s character arcs finish. There is nothing more annoying than almost seeing the resolution to a friend’s story, only for the game to end.
At the very end there are a couple of questions the player has to answer to get the right ending. Those questions are not fair, since they are based more on the player’s opinions than facts.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 is a fun role playing game/life simulator that barely manages to avoid being tedious. It is still longer than it could be, but it is addictive and entertaining enough for that to not matter too much.
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