From her high-pitched miming of the Junes jingle, “Every day’s great at your Junes,” to her precocious wisdom in tense social situations, I agreed with a number of Epilogue community members who have described Nanako as one of the most wholesome and pure characters in all of gaming. One of the reasons I didn’t give up on P4G early on was the inherent adorableness of Nanako, a little girl who becomes the protagonist’s surrogate little sister, living together under the Dojima roof. At that point, I was begrudgingly playing along to figure out the “truth” that the game’s theme song so catchily refrained, but not much more. In fact, I often debated giving up on P4G until I found myself almost accidentally halfway through the game. As the game started to integrate new characters and combat, I still found myself at a fundamental distance from the game, not intrinsically a part of it in the way that P5R had ensnared me. From the game’s humble beginning, to its admittedly tropey – at least within the Persona canon – setup for the story, my first impressions were tepid. Persona 4 Golden takes the life cycle of a regenerating jellyfish to get started, or so I felt. What I was not expecting, given this praise, however, was how incredibly slow the introduction to the game would be. Even when critics seemed to agree that P5R was in a class of its own, people still referenced P4G as a game in the same way that people reference Buffy when referring back to media that had a pro-social impact on the television medium. Part of my interest arose from how games critics like Joshua Garrity of Cane and Rinse often reference P4G in conversations about how characters can be written well in JRPGs. Sure, P4G bears the signs of obvious age, like the stiff combat and simple animations, but the overall package held my general interest. Even with a year’s break from the Persona series, I found my time with Persona 4 Golden to live decidedly in the shadow of P5R.ĭespite the inescapable comparisons between P5R and P4G, I actively reminded myself to separate the two in my mind while I was playing Golden. Thus, any game that shared remote similarities with P5R would be unfortunately cast in its long shadow. Not only was I coming off the back of the mighty Persona 5, but I was also playing the Royal version, which features all sorts of upgrades and changes that bring an already exceptional game up to masterclass level. But I think the deeper reason that I hesitated to begin my journey through Persona 4 Golden was the fact that I knew I’d be taking a massive step backwards in terms of quality-of-life improvements and gameplay systems. As per the ongoing meme, this might simply be understood as the difference between purchasing games and playing games as a hobby. Fast forward to 2020 when Persona 5 Royal ( P5R) managed to tide me over during a rough transition from teaching in a classroom to teaching from my kitchen, and I found myself with a rekindled love for the series that I didn’t realize was possible.ĭespite my rekindled love for the Persona series – be it a general burnout on high school life simulation, turn-based JRPG combat, or games with lengthy text-based dialog segments – I decided to hold off on starting Persona 4 Golden for almost a year after purchasing it. I enjoyed Persona 3 so much that this same friend and I would routinely burst out into spontaneous song, “Baby baby baby baby baby baby,” at seemingly any interval, per the catchy “Mass Destruction” battle theme. I recall picking up my first Persona game, Persona 3: FES, during my freshman year of college at my friend’s recommendation. Though the Persona series has only gained mainstream popularity within the past few years in the wake of the massively successful Persona 5, the series has maintained a well-earned cult status for years among JRPG fans. 2020 was a good year to be a Persona fan. Thus, when Atlus announced that they’d be porting the long-relegated Persona 4 Golden from its isolation on the Playstation Vita, I immediately snagged a copy on Steam. For many years, and for many people, including myself, the prospect of getting hands on a Vita was synonymous with playing P4G. Any time the Playstation Vita is mentioned in passing, whether as a sincere lamentation of portable Sony gaming or a meme of how few remarkable games have stuck around from that platform and era, Persona 4 Golden ( P4G) is not far to follow.
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