Happy Life
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Persona 4 Golden
I think the title says it all. After Catherine, I had a strong prejudice against Atlus, but, as is usually the case, I gave it a fair chance. Turns out, I was wrong.
Throughout the game, you have to walk around in 2.5 dead locations, where you can enter a rarely updated store or do something to get a bonus to a skill that gives you a stat boost (which isn't needed for anything significant). Sometimes you can bond with one of the ten NPCs – if you're lucky and have enough relationship points with them, there will be some kind of everyday scene.
You can also go to a procedurally generated (and therefore very bad) dungeon. The combat, and the entire system in general, is one of the worst I've seen in a JRPG. It's a primitive turn-based grind from the 80s about "attack-use skill-guard" (but guarding is almost unnecessary), only here it's one of those systems – spiced up with an awkward, uninteresting, and schizoid system of fusing skills and classes into others. You level up one Persona, and then ten more appear; you level up another, and after half an hour of leveling, you see that the other Persona has acquired a skill that you already had on the first one. You exit the dungeon, go fuse Personas together, the new Personas have the same skills, or even worse, and they also need to be leveled up from scratch. All the skills are completely uninteresting garbage, like "hit with fire-lightning-ice," "buff agility." The Personas don't differ from each other almost at all, except for a minimal difference in skills. All the skills and Personas have schizoid names that you have to dig through; all this fusing and other grinding doesn't give you any real sense of advantage; it just exists to stretch your playtime with menu-diving.
Anyone who has played even one JRPG with a similar system will get tired of this kind of thing the first time, to the point where they never want to do it again. There's also no point or desire to go to the dungeon (which the developers very often and insistently suggest, even without a specific goal, just to grind and level up) – it's procedurally generated, and it consists of one and a half corridors with generic drops as rewards.
There are side quests, and they're complete garbage. Bring a randomly dropped item from a mob in the dungeon to a random nobody for no reason.
The story is a typical anime about high school students fighting after school with some incomprehensible nonsense for no reason; it's presented well, but that's not Atlus's merit; it's simply presented as a typical anime slice-of-life about going to school – it's hard to mess that up.
There are funny scenes, and there are funny bonding events. That's the only good thing. The rest is a terrible combat system, a terrible RPG system, a terrible art style, decent music that's sometimes spoiled by terrible vocals, a terrible dead "world" consisting of two and a half locations, each of which has two and a half nobodies who repeat the same phrase for weeks, and which I stopped going to after school at one point because there was no point – it's dead and almost never updated, and when it is updated, there's no soul or interesting side content.
In conclusion. When I think about going to a dungeon, the first question is, why? It's garbage, the combat is garbage. When I think about walking around the city again, why? It's garbage, the NPCs are garbage, the quests are garbage. I thought about trying to speedrun just the scenes with the characters because there's no other game here, but the thought of launching it and going back to the 2.5 dead locations or, God forbid, the garbage dungeon immediately made me not want to launch it.
Overhyped garbage from bad developers and a deserved flop.
I think the title says it all. After Catherine, I had a strong prejudice against Atlus, but, as is usually the case, I gave it a fair chance. Turns out, I was wrong.
Throughout the game, you have to walk around in 2.5 dead locations, where you can enter a rarely updated store or do something to get a bonus to a skill that gives you a stat boost (which isn't needed for anything significant). Sometimes you can bond with one of the ten NPCs – if you're lucky and have enough relationship points with them, there will be some kind of everyday scene.
You can also go to a procedurally generated (and therefore very bad) dungeon. The combat, and the entire system in general, is one of the worst I've seen in a JRPG. It's a primitive turn-based grind from the 80s about "attack-use skill-guard" (but guarding is almost unnecessary), only here it's one of those systems – spiced up with an awkward, uninteresting, and schizoid system of fusing skills and classes into others. You level up one Persona, and then ten more appear; you level up another, and after half an hour of leveling, you see that the other Persona has acquired a skill that you already had on the first one. You exit the dungeon, go fuse Personas together, the new Personas have the same skills, or even worse, and they also need to be leveled up from scratch. All the skills are completely uninteresting garbage, like "hit with fire-lightning-ice," "buff agility." The Personas don't differ from each other almost at all, except for a minimal difference in skills. All the skills and Personas have schizoid names that you have to dig through; all this fusing and other grinding doesn't give you any real sense of advantage; it just exists to stretch your playtime with menu-diving.
Anyone who has played even one JRPG with a similar system will get tired of this kind of thing the first time, to the point where they never want to do it again. There's also no point or desire to go to the dungeon (which the developers very often and insistently suggest, even without a specific goal, just to grind and level up) – it's procedurally generated, and it consists of one and a half corridors with generic drops as rewards.
There are side quests, and they're complete garbage. Bring a randomly dropped item from a mob in the dungeon to a random nobody for no reason.
The story is a typical anime about high school students fighting after school with some incomprehensible nonsense for no reason; it's presented well, but that's not Atlus's merit; it's simply presented as a typical anime slice-of-life about going to school – it's hard to mess that up.
There are funny scenes, and there are funny bonding events. That's the only good thing. The rest is a terrible combat system, a terrible RPG system, a terrible art style, decent music that's sometimes spoiled by terrible vocals, a terrible dead "world" consisting of two and a half locations, each of which has two and a half nobodies who repeat the same phrase for weeks, and which I stopped going to after school at one point because there was no point – it's dead and almost never updated, and when it is updated, there's no soul or interesting side content.
In conclusion. When I think about going to a dungeon, the first question is, why? It's garbage, the combat is garbage. When I think about walking around the city again, why? It's garbage, the NPCs are garbage, the quests are garbage. I thought about trying to speedrun just the scenes with the characters because there's no other game here, but the thought of launching it and going back to the 2.5 dead locations or, God forbid, the garbage dungeon immediately made me not want to launch it.
Overhyped garbage from bad developers and a deserved flop.
My sword, my trusted ally, unphased by my aspect.
