Just finished Persona 4 with my final save file clocking in at 82 hours and 12 minutes. Since this was my first Shin Megami Tensei game, I thought I'd jot down my thoughts while it's still on my mind.
Though they are totally different games, Persona 4 correctly does with mythology and structure what Odin Sphere failed to do. I loved the concept behind Odin Sphere in that it's gameplay and story telling devices seemed to mirror the forms as well as the subject matter of epics such as Orlando Furioso and Nibelungenlied. After I got passed Odin Sphere's still unsurpassed beauty and it's innovative structure, I realized that it just was not fun to play. The bite sized battles followed by long stretches of inventory management ultimately could not hold my attention long enough to finish the game. Persona 4 takes this repeating bite sized gameplay and makes it work. Rather than finding inspiration in the strophic forms of epic poetry however, Persona 4 creates an addictive cycle out of something much more mundane... the daily routines of a suburban Japanese high school student. At first this structure seemed prohibitive. You can only accomplish a handful of tasks in one in-game day before the calendar forces you to advance. While most JRPGs allow you to put saving the world on hold indefinitely while you grind up your stats and do side quests, Persona 4 gives you a genuine sense of urgency as the game propels the player forward to solve the mystery and rescue friends. I quickly began to appreciate the constraints of this pace and gladly utilized a skill rarely required in a JRPG... time management. I found myself looking at my clock aghast to see that it was 2, 3, sometimes 4 am and still thinking, "I'll just do one more in-game day."
But what was really compelling me to play day after in-game day was main mystery of the plot. It's hard to discuss a murder mystery without giving away whodunnit. But I love how Persona 4 weds Japanese mythology with modern life in a coherent way. Persona 4 is not the first to combine Animism with modern characters... Miyazaki's Spirited Away accomplished this wonderfully. But Miyazaki's tale had the modern invading the ancient. Chihiro left her modern world temporarily and entered a pocket of reality governed by spirits. In Persona 4, the ancient animist gods are updated for a technological world. An ancient Japanese creation myth with parallels to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice forms the ultimate basis for a story based on modern understandings of science and human psychology.
Persona 4 is the first Shin Megami Tensei game I've ever even touched. I'm sure everything I've written here comes as no surprise to veterans of the series. I'm really glad I picked finally got to see what all the fuss was about. This was definitely a high point in my game experiences.
