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Kinfin's Game Reviews

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Kinfin
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« on: June 17, 2015, 12:31:08 am »

So first thing's first. If this winds up being a bust, I'll have Kloud remove the topic.

But apparently I'm really good at describing/reviewing games so I figured why not give it a shot here. Granted I'm kinda choosing a doozy as the first thing to go on this page, but eh, whatever. Again, if this seems overly annoying, I'll get the topic taken down.

Oh, and don't expect brand new AAA titles here. I can't afford that shit. This is Retro Reviews.


So, the game that's been on my mind a lot lately, and the game I've been playing a metric f*ckton of lately, is the one and only, Persona 4. Now, i know this is a super popular game for what it is, but tons of people have never even heard of Shin Megami Tensai, so why not give them a description of a great as f*ck reason to.

Before I get into this, if you have a Vita, play the Golden Version. It adds a buncha stuff like two new Social Links, some bonus content, a f*ckton of personas, and two new voice actors that, if they're the first ones you hear, will be much easier on you than me, who grates my teeth every time I listen to the new Chie talk...

Now, fair warning Yu Dareader, this game does have a long as f*ck opening sequence. I'm talking 3 hours of cutcene after cutscnen after cutseene. See, I can't even spell it the same way, let alone correctly, that's how many of them there are. But it's worth it if you make it through all of them. But if you just wanna mash the big ol' O button til your thumb falls off and get to the action, I'll go over things up until that point for ya.

So Persona 4 starts off with Yu Daplayer, AKA, Yu Narukami, AKA whatever the F*CK you wanna name him, sitting on a train. Okay, no, that's a lie. The game actually starts off with a dream sequence of a freaky, but loveable wackjob named Igor giving you a tarot reading saying big things are ahead of you. Now, already, this game's off to a great start since it's giving you a level of wonder and mystery. What's going on? What great things are going to happen? Why am I in a space limo? This strange little sequence creates almost as much interest in the game as say, an anime cutscene of a girl shooting herself in the head. (Now where have we seen that before?)

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention 14 year old girls in bikinis. That's in the opening too. So...


But back to the Train. See, our Player Character, the Protagonist, bla bla bla, I'm just gonna call him Yu from now on because canon. Yu is on his way to a small little town in the sticks called Yasoinaba, or just Inaba to you 'muricans. The reason, his parents are business people who do business. Which has lead them to leaving the country, forcing you, a city slicker, to move out to the boonies to live with your weird uncle, who likes to talk about how he changed your diapers once, and your cousin who's depression level is only equaled by how cute she is when she sings 'Everyday's Great at your Junes' (Love you Nana-chan). While you're eating dinner with them, you hear on the news that an announcer lady is in hiding in the town because her husband who is a businessman who does business, was cheating on her with a Kabuki Theater woman... why she was in hiding is beyond me.

But that doesn't matter because you're off to school the next morning. At school, you meet three pivotal (and one pitiful) characters. Yosuke, former city boy who's the son of the guy running the department store that is eating the local economy, Chie, the Kung Fu Loving Tomboy who is best friends (and suspiciously close one at that) with Yukiko Amagi, Heiress to the town tourist trap, the Amagi Inn and Hot Spring. You also meet your asshole teacher, King Moron AKA Mr. Morooka. You're supposed to hate him FYI. Things are happy go lucky until an announcement goes off saying nobody should leave the school. So obvously, you and your new friends immidiately leave the school. All except Yosuke because he pissed off Chie and

Yeah, that.

So, you and the girls walk home, chat a f*ckton about the town, and then come across a murder scene being investigated. And this ain't no chalk outline on the sidewalk. This corps is hanging upsidedown from a rooftop antenna. So there's that image for your heads... well, that and this one.

Freaky, right?

Now, the next day, you help Yosuke out of a bind and he offers to reward you with Steak. But Chie's still pissed off, so she forces herself upon you two, so instead you get cheep food at Junes where you meet Yosuke's Love Interest, Saki. Who it's revealed was the person who initially discovered the body before. (by the way, the body was the announcer from that first news report. Forgot to mention that but it's such a small thing in the bigger scale that I honestly forget about it by dungeon 1). Fast forward to that night and you see the Midnight Channel, a paranormal phenomenon where if you look at a turned off TV on a rainy night at midnight, stuff happens and you see someone who's supposed to be your soul mate. It's supposed to be ambiguous but the person on the channel is Saki, spoilers I guess. It really doesn't matter.
Oh, and that's when you mention that you tried touching your TV during the midnight channel and your hand slipped through the screen. Yosuke and Chie laugh at your idiocy and take you to the biggest TV they can find at Junes to try it out. HAHAHA-it works. And the three of you wind up tumbling into a weird world covered in Yellow Fog. Yosuke nearly pisses himself about 6 times due to poor bladder control in general, and you see a freaky room with a noose in it.


Anyway, after leaving that room, you meet a weird Bear thing that rushes you out of the TV world through a stack of TVs it conjures from nowhere, and the lot of you continue your day as normal.

Anyway, a little more time passes and now, Saki's the one dead hanging upside down, and Yosuke's a wreck. And he comes to a weird conclusion that the TV world and the bear have something to do with it. Honestly, I forget where is logic comes from, but I'm pretty sure Midnight channel bla bla bla, TV WORLD TIME.

So, you and Yosuke team up with the bear with Chie holding a useless rope. Monsters attack, Yu learns he can summon a Persona to defend himself, and then you go look for signs that Saki was there. Guess what? She was. And she died, but not before leaving behind some personal thoughts of how much she hated Yosuke and Junes for ruining her family and their business. Then a Yosuke Clone shows up and taunts him mersilessly with claims of how he knows Yosuke hates Inaba and everything in it due to how boring it is. He yells the deadly phrase of the Game 'YOUR NOT ME' and a fight ensues. Afterward, Yosuke admits he does think these thougts sometimes and gets a disco ninja frog persona. No seriously. This is what it looks like.


MOVING ON, the team sets out to return to the real world where Chie is blubbering with worry, bla bla, Midnight Channel, bla bla, Yukiko goes missing bla bla Freaky ass Princess Yukiko's Hunt for Her Prince Charming on the Midnight Channel, and we finally get into the meat and potatoes of this game.


Yeah, that's a lot of opening, isn't it. But it gets better because now that all the tutorials are out of the way, after a mini dungeon crawl and a fight with

Chie gets a persona of her own and you finally get to proceed as you want to.

Now, this game's gameplay is both straightforward and open ended at the same time. You've got a calendar that determines what's happening when with everything pre-determined, a limited time to save people thrown into the TV world, and lots of freedom do determine how you spend your days. You can either go into the TV world to fight and maybe save the day, or alternatively, you can prowl around town and build friendships with your fellow students, club mates, or other people in general to make better personas (i'll get into that in a second) or improve how your combat team behaves. You also have 5 personality stats that you can and should raise to allow you to do different interactions through the game, such as Courage to say you think Chie's cute when she's scared, or Expression to help converse with someone who's fumbling to find the words to speak. It's a real balancing act between what you can and should be doing with your days, but it's worth it in the end because it keeps you always on your toes doing something different, even if it's just a cutscene with someone else this day or that day because every person you meet with a face has a Social Link, which means you get to learn a lot about them as a person, and help them through their problems.

But that's the real world side of things. Let's talk TV world.

The combat in this game is standard RPG fair with a few things to keep in mind. You can either set up a (surprisingly smart) AI to play your team for you, or take direct control, and Yu Daplayer have the ability to collect, train, and create multiple Personas. Which is good because everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses and you wanna be strong where your part is weak to balance everything out. From there, it's standard dungeon crawling, but it's fun because the locations, while a little bland to navigate, are all unique with their own feel. I mean, you've got a castle, a homoerotic sauna, a video game throwback, a strip club, and even heaven as levels, and each has their own background music. And even though the battle theme is constantly interupting that music, that theme is the anthem of awesome in my mind, so that's worth it.

But the real reason to play persona 4 is the story. Between the issues your uncle has with not being a great father ever since his wife died, to helping a girl come to terms with her deadbeat father's surprisingly hard to take death, there's so much feeling you can have for everyone. Even the people you're meant to hate, you love to hate. Especially Morooka. Definitely love to hate him. Now, in the interest of not making this one post into a mini novel, I skimmed the opening a lot, but that's the important bits, But if you play this game, for the love of god, during those long cutscenes, set your controller down on the hardest surface in the room and just enjoy, because there's so much character development, it's almost too much to handle. Almost.


So summary
Gameplay: Two catagories
      Combat: Simple but fun.
      Character Building: varied and interesting
Music: Phenominal
Story: To cry over.
Graphics: Above average for the time.

What more could you need? Buy Persona 4. The original PS2 version is available on PS3 though the PSN store, but if you own a Vita, go for golden. You won't regret it... unless you get the accomplice ending.
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Must...resist...creepy urges... too many witnesses... would look weird...

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