Developer: Atlus Released: February 2013 (Vita)

Played on: PS Vita

I checked out this updated version of the 2009 PS2 game purely based on the buzz around it online. I have never been a huge JRPG fan, but my Vita was bereft of games and it sounded like a fairly safe bet.

In the opening hours, I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. It was interesting enough being a high school student in a small Japanese town, but the game hadn’t hooked me yet. But by the 5th hour, I realised I had completely underestimated the game, and that I was now a massive Otaku and would never feel the same about Japanese gaming ever again.

Someone is murdering people by pulling them inside the TV, and you and your new high school friends are the only ones who can stop them. A major part of the game consists of day to day hanging out around school and your town, building up your relationships with people, increasing your skills through work or exercise. Its essentially a time-management game with a hugely compelling cast and script with a leveling up system that benefits when you enter the other game’s other main setting – inside the TV. Here it becomes a dungeon crawler with a well balanced turn-based combat system, where you fight… crazy shit. Oh and you’ve got “personas” who are basically gods that fight with you. You unlock them through your actions in both worlds.

The synopsis sounds completely ridiculous, and it is. But the wonderfully realised characters make you care about the world and the narrative in a way that can only be accomplished by an overly wordy JRPG. Not sure who did the localisation but they’ve done a tremendous job. Persona 4 is charming, earnest, naive, and full of surprises.

This game is certainly not for everyone. If you don’t like getting into long stories with pages and pages of dialogue, this might not be for you. The turn-based combat took me a long to get my head around as I was new to JRPGs, but once understood it can be incredibly rewarding.

I sank well over 60 hours into Persona 4 and if I ever played it again I would play it even slower and on a harder difficulty, now that I understand how the systems work and have worked out some of the ways to manage time better in the game’s outside world. This has even spurred me on to pursue other JRPGs – its hooked me on the genre!

Warning: save regularly. Especially when you get to the bit where one of the suspects is in hospital. You might think you’re near the end, and you might even reach an ending, but it is not necessarily the right ending! There is a good 20 hours yet to go! This part was annoying, and I had to address a guide to work out what the correct dialogue options were to keep going. An unfortunate annoyance in an otherwise fun game.

And don’t underestimate the power of maxing out your friendship bonds!

Verdict: This game alone is worth having a Vita for.

Should Bradley play this: I don’t know! My gut says no, but if he has a Vita, he should give it a try. If he got into it, he’d REALLY get into it!