Persona 4 Review

December 1, 2008 by admin
Filed under: PSP News

For all of the restless hand-wringing over how Japanese role-playing games must evolve from their dusty, dated conventions and myopic cultural perspectives in order to appeal to Western gamers, I think it’s telling that one of the most successful recent Eastern RPG exports is also the most unapologetically Japanese. Atlus imports Persona’s modern-day Japanese trappings completely intact, requiring Western players to juggle myriad polysyllabic Japanese personal and place names, a host of linguistic honorifics (sure, everyone knows -san, but how about -tan?) an unfamiliar Japanese academic and holiday calendar (when was the last time you celebrated Respect for the Aged Day or lugged your backpack to school on a Saturday?), and plenty of exotic cultural conventions. Oh, and this is all on top of a series in which the protagonists summon “Personas” — obscure mythological figures from various worldwide religions and folk traditions that take the form of demons — in order to battle evildoers.

Of course, Persona succeeds not because it’s intrinsically Japanese — it succeeds because it’s simply so unique.

And with Persona 4, you can add one more descriptor to this controversial demon collector/school sim/dungeon crawl/Japanese cultural primer: stylish murder mystery. A serial killing spree’s gripped the quaint rural Japanese town of Inaba, and it’s up to a scrappy band of high schoolers to nab the culprit. So if Persona 3’s secret shadow-slaying society played out like Harry Potter in a metropolitan Japanese high school, this adventure’s more small-town Scooby-Doo — complete with a (shockingly not annoying!) fuzzy anthropomorphic teddy bear sidekick.