Underwhelmed by Persona 4

It'll feel like an epic. Right?

Persona 5 was a big hit on the PS4. It got a lot of press, and I saw a lot of people playing it when it came out. After I got my Vita, I looked up a lot of articles about the best games on the platform, and one that was mentioned, time and again, was Persona 4. In fact the Metacritic Best Games for PS Vita list places it at number one. Being late to the Playstation scene, I wasn't familiar with the series, but that seemed like a solid recommendation.

A couple of hours into the game, however, I'm scratching my head. Yes, the production values are great, even for a game that's six years old. There's original music, a great stylized design motif that permeates the entire game, original characters, animated sequences, the whole nine yards. There's even a limited three dimensional space to move around it, sort of.

But the game is billed as one of the greatest Japanese Role-Playing Games of all time, and I have to raise an eyebrow at that. I made it through the first major boss fight, so I'm through the introduction portion of the game, and I had to stop playing because my thumb hurt, from stabbing the x button repeatedly to wade through scene after scene of one-line dialog. And I swear that the playtime counter on the save game is lying, because it felt like three times as long as it said.

The game is very dialog heavy, so far, and very action light. Every so often, there is a branching path to the dialog, and I get the impression that the path I choose has some impact on the flow of the game, but they are few and far apart compared the rest of the one-line dialogs that you have to manually advance, line after line. And yes, I feel like I've gotten to know the characters, and they are good characters, but I would much rather watch an anime then sit through another set of screens where the character's face changes to reflect their mood as they say the next sentence. I'm not kidding about my thumb hurting -- it's like trying to read a book and getting a paper cut every time you turn the page.

The only other action has been two fights. There was a dream sequence where I got to move, but only forward down a corridor with no branches, which is apparently by design since the dream mentions that you can only move forward. You get a chance to "explore" the old shopping district at the start of the game, but it's just a series of store fronts that you can run up to and look at, and maybe two people whom you can speak with, for no discernible gain. At points, the game tries to give you then sense that you have agency and can do whatever, but the non-desirable paths are usually blocked, followed by an admonition from the game that you're pretty tired and should go to bed so that we can advance to the next set of talking heads.

Again, this is pretty early on. The story has just gotten rolling, and I find myself thinking about it, wondering what's going to happen next. I've already thought of a possible twist that if it actually happens in the game, I'll be a little pissed, because if I can pick up on a twist, it must be pretty blatant. And I'm sure that parts of the game will open up as we make our way forward. At the start, the game made a point of how you were going to be living in this town for a whole year, and marks off each day after you sleep like a chapter being concluded. It already feels like 15 chapters took a long time. If it actually takes 350 more chapters, it'll feel like an epic.