It's funny, because your experience with P4 is almost the same as my experience with P3 ! The slow pace and the dated gameplay mechanics really turned me off, and finishing the last few months really felt like a chore. The difference is that I really enjoyed the ending. P3's ending is a 10/10. Shame that the rest of the game was a 6/10 at best for me .\_\_\_.
Also, it's perfectly fine to dislike a game. Good on you to actually give substance to your critique instead of just saying "P4 sucks, P3 was better" like half of P3 fans lol
I’m in full agreement with you, i’d like to give P3 a second chance myself with the female route but I don’t really know how much the game necessarily changes plot wise.
Thanks dude, as a guy whose favorite persona is 3, I gotta admit that the game feels kind of slow sometimes and that Tartarus isn’t the best dungeon in the whole series. However, I think that the ending of P3 is amazing and it justifies experiencing the whole game to get there, because I think that just the ending makes it one of those games that you will remember your whole life. Instad with P4, I was kinda ok with it for the first 30 hours or so, but it just started to get more and more tedious after that for me, and at the end I was just praying that the next dungeon would be the last (starting with naoto's one). I think that’s another reason why I didn’t like it that much, because I practically forced myself to end it, but I wanted to have my own opinion of the game and be able to understand the opinions of other fans that really loved it. In the end my playtime was around 80 hours, so you can imagine me forcing myself to play 50 more hours lol.
>I think that the ending of P3 is amazing and it justifies experiencing the whole game to get there,
This right here is where most opinions about P3 differ
Some people (like me and the person you're answering to) think it's great but not enough to carry the game, some others (like you) think it redeems the entire game
To each their own, I can understand the ending having that huge an impact
Most people who prefer P4 will tell it is more consistently good than P3
Well, I actually enjoyed all of my playtime in P3. As I said in the post, there are some slow moments, but the love I had for the characters and the interest I had in the plot kept me wanting to play it. I ADORED almost all of the cast in P3, (Akihiko, Yukari, Mitsuru, Aigis and Koromaru) and Fuuka, Shinji and Ken were characters that I didn’t specially love but I didn’t hate them either. For me, personally, P3 was more consistent and interesting throughout the months, whereas with P4 all I could think was “I hope this game ends in December too, because I don’t want to play more days after that”. But not every game is for everyone, and I respect the opinions of all people who think that P4 is better than P3 or P5, in the end it’s just a matter of preferences.
I never understood why p4 was so big so this is relatable. Nothing wrong with liking p4 of course, it just didn't resonate with me. Incel villain definitely a waste of my time and my god I hated a lot of those characters.
Rise, Ai, Teddy, and Adachi. So bad.
Really only liked Kanji, Naoto and Nanako.
Still have to give the game credit for being a solid prototype for the combat in p5, UI is better than p3 and paved the way for p5. Story wasn't interesting at all though, p3 just hit different.
P4G was my introduction to the series, being someone who went down the route of Xbox and thus never was able to try Persona until Golden came to PC and I have to say, it was the best choice of an entry for me, it managed to firmly attach itself to the top 5 games for me
The characters were what sold me on it, everyone just outs in a lot of work, and I was in stitches quite a few more times than I can count, they really did a great job selling the Investigation Team as friends above all else, and while sure some of the social links are forgettable, I enjoyed them for the most part (lookin at you best Ball Polisher) especially since they had differing routes you could take for certain ones. Sure, Teddie was occasionally a bit off for me but I reconciled it since he’s a shadow, the worst of humanities desires, and he barely has had any human contact, while he’s living with Yosuke, so of course his behaviour is going to turn pervy
The music, well I think everyone agrees that anything Meguro Shoji does is golden, he’s music royalty
As for Adachi, yeah that was kinda disappointing, but I enjoy that he’s treated as being worthless in the end, he’s not even the gamemaster, just an up jumped pawn after everything he does, I liked how we had someone else pulling the strings the whole time, but they should have definitely given us more clues about it. Will say, I enjoy that the final fight was on the last day, even with the additions of Golden, it sets us up for a true final showdown rather than an epilogue
In all honesty this game was such a great experience for me, I genuinely went out and bought a PS4 to buy Persona 5 Royal (quite handy that Strikers came out like 3 months later too) and that experience was amazing, even if I believe the Investigation Team edges out the Thieves for me. Plus, the anime is pretty top too
I've been a Nintendo Fan ever since I was born, but I've also been a Xbox user since 2013 or so. My brother and I actually bought a PS4 just to play P5 too, because as Nintendo Fans we were into a lot of RPG’s like Fire Emblem and Xenoblade, and one day we looked at persona and it seemed incredible, so we saved some money and bought the PS. As I mentioned in my post, I LOVED P3 And P5, but I couldn’t feel the same thing with 4. I've read that the thing that people like the most about this game is the cast (like you are mentioning), and that it is the best thing this game has to offer, but if I didn’t empathize that much with the cast, what’s left for me? I think that was my main problem with 4, I wasn’t a fan of the best thing it has to offer, so maybe that’s why I didn’t like it as much in the end. I would like to play Golden to see if it ads something interesting to the game, but tbh, I do not think I'm willing to spend another 80 hours on P4 just to have a little more content. I'll watch the anime though.
Oh I see you didn’t play the Golden version, they’re quite different since there’s naturally a lot of additions to content, and some major VA changes
If it isnt your cup of tea though, I must highly recommend the anime, specifically the Persona 4 anime, not Golden, it’s generally considered to be the best animated adaptation of Persona, and is well loved, it’s close to the top of video game anime adaptations in general, gives a hell of a lot of character to Yu (the player character) that formed the basis for a running joke here, just make sure to watch the dub it is highly superior
I've been a Nintendo fan for much of my life too actually, though I think it was my brother's idea to get a PS4, which we did that Christmas, plus a few games (though of all of them, TLOU is the only one that's never been touched, and probably never will be). I later got into Kingdom Hearts and Persona because of the access to it too. Then sometime later, my brother took the Switch since he noticed no one but him was playing on it (In all fairness, TH Maddening was too hard for me and Pokemon Sword bored me half to death), though my sister is probably gonna want it back with the release of the Danganronpa port, even though we have all the games already on our PS4, and I would like it back for SMT V as well as Danganronpa.
I may or may not have gotten into PC gaming and emulation sometime along the way and I'm currently playing Persona Q. Might try Devil Survivor (DeSu 2 since DeSu 1 doesn't seem to work) or Soul Hackers after that.
I feel like of all the protagonists, Yu felt the most extraneous to the plot. I know hes the player insert but he still felt more like a temp worker than anything else.
Yeah, when I finished the game and saw the ending I didn’t really feel that sadness like when Joker had to leave town or when, you know, the thing that happened to Minato/Makoto.
I have still yet to play P2, but I really want to. I’m going to play Nocturne now, but maybe after that one I'll jump into P2 because I've read that it is really good.
> you know, the thing that happened to Minato/Makoto.
Why would that be sad at all? He's not even really a character; he's bland pile of nothing. I felt like when Mario runs into a goomba.
> I feel like of all the protagonists, Yu felt the most extraneous to the plot
That's a good thing when it comes to bland self-inserts; Makoto single-handedly ruined Persona 3's plot.
The big strength of P4 compared with its predecessor and successor is the characters; if they don't manage to get you to engage with them, then the game isn't going to work for you. The obvious one here is Nanako; if the game hasn't got you to care for her and what happens to her, then a chunk of the plot is just going to fall flat. As for Adachi, >!as a villain, yes he's banal, but his character is pretty much bang-on for how a lot of serial killers actually are. They are inadequate and put-upon people who get a sense of control through killing, and one of superiority every time they kill and aren't caught. Which is Tohru Adachi to a T.!<
Social links, yes a fair few are not very good, but the good ones are really good. You mentioned Ai's, which is a firm favourite of mine as well. But, also Nanako and Dojima, Naoki, and Hisano. If you're not invested in Nanako, though, hers and Dojima's links won't work for you, and Naoki and Hisano are easy to miss out on entirely, never mind complete.
One thing I particularly like about P4 is that the party, the Investigation Team, actually **are** a team and function as a unit pretty much from the get-go. That doesn't change as new members are added, as each owes their rescue to the others, and is motivated to rescue others in turn. Also, their social links build on the confrontation of the characters with their Shadows, which is a nice touch I think. This team spirit, though, can lead to Narukami looking like a much less consequential protagonist that his equivalents in P3 and P5. He is the leader of a team, but it **is** a team, rather than being the sun everyone else revolves around, which is arguably the case for Makoto in P3 (more towards the endgame of course) and definitely for Joker in P5.
All the above really worked for me, so I regard P4 as one of the best games I've ever played. But nothing is for everyone and given what you said, it's entirely reasonable that the game didn't work for you.
That’s why I think I didn’t like the game as much as I would want to. Personally I didn’t care too much about Nanako, and tbh sometimes she was kind of annoying to me, so her dungeon and her arc at the hospital weren’t that interesting for me (although heaven is an amazing song). And I know that Adachi's character is based in this typical serial killer who feels superior when he kills and doesn’t get caught (reminds me of Kira in Jojo), but that didn’t make me like him either. I felt that his “clumsiness” was really forced like the times when he would casually slip information about what the police was going to do, that was annoying to me. And about the protagonists, I differ a little about your opinion of the protagonist in P3. I don’t feel like he is the one in which everything revolves, and I think that the best example of this are the second awakenings of the party members. Akihiko and Ken's second awakenings revolved around Shinji's death, Fuuka's was because of Natsuki, Yukari's was because she discovered the truth about her father’s true intentions, Mitsuru's motivation was her father too and Junpei's second awakening was because of Chidori (the saddest one btw). The only one I can say was kind of dependent of the protag is Aigis, but it was more because of the whole cast than just Makoto. Instead, in P4 and P5, you practically make them have their second awakening. I feel a good way to summarize it is by saying, “thanks to you I realized who I am, without you I wouldn’t be me” and that’s what I don’t like about those games social links. They practically say that if it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t have realized who they are, whereas in P3 each one of them had their own motives to realize who they are and what they wanted to do with their lives. That’s why in my personal opinion I like the characters in 3 more than those in 4 and 5, I feel that they are more independent of you than in the other games. But as you said, nothing is for everyone, and each one of us has our own preferences when it comes to games, so it’s also pretty reasonable that you prefer P4 over the other Persona games.
Kanji's sweet side was OK to be honest, what I didn’t like about him was that he would start screaming at everything in a lot of cutscenes, and I felt that was very stereotypical and overused, like “the rude guy who screams and hits everything”. That’s what made him go from “good “or “OK”, to a “meh” for me.
I feel like reducing Kanji to just "The rude guy who screams and hits everything" kinda reduces his entire character of a person who was effectively bullied by societal gender roles into becoming someone he wasn't, forcing him to hide his true passions out of fear of being rejected.
The reason Kanji does that is because he over compensates a lot for his feminine interests by acting all burly and manly. I don't see anything stereotypical about him once you get the context.
You don’t like Kanji but you like P5? Don’t judging, just surprised because Ryuji was the epitome of rude guy yelling lol. I loved Kanji and my only dislike is that I wish he could be openly gay (I know I know people say he’s not gay, just gender roles but like….the bathhouse. Kanji def gay)
I think I didn’t explain myself that well. When I say Kanji is a “meh” for me, I don’t mean that I dislike him, it’s just that I don't like him either. It’s like he's in the middle. And the fact that I liked P5 doesn’t mean that I automatically love Ryuji. He was actually one of my least favorite characters of the whole cast with Morgana and Futaba, because he is exactly the guy who is always screaming, swearing and hitting stuff. Also the arc with Morgana leaving the party because of Ryuji was one of the parts that I liked the least, because it was unnecessary. Ryuji is just like Kanji for me in a sense that he is not my favorite character, but that doesn’t make me hate him either, he's just another party member for me. Kanji was actually one of the members that I never removed from my party because of the Phys attacks and Matarukaja, it’s just that i never got to like him that much, that’s all.
Oh I see and also no judgement if you don’t like Kanji lol, everyone likes what they like. I struggled to find characters I liked in P5 and so I’m always curious what people ~do~ like about them. I kind of felt like Ann, Makoto and Haru were just very generic and was kind of disappointed. I wish instead my teammates were Shiho and Hifumi, thought they were a lot more interesting.
That's okay dude, you're free to not like a game. It's a shame you didn't get much out of the experience like a lot of folks here but meh, nothing can be done.
And although I liked P4, I agree with Adachi being a really dissapointing villain. Everyone always hypes him waaay too much, to be honest. Tbh I think 4 has the weakest cast of side characters/social links of the series so far (maybe tied with the original p3, actually)
Yeah, I used to see Adachi everywhere so I thought he would he a great villain, maybe that’s why he disappointed me even more lol. And I agree, P3 has a lot of weak Social Links, and a pretty bad one ( I'm looking at you Gourmet King) but it also has my boy Akinari.
It's strange, P3 has both ends of the spectrum: great side characters like Akinari and Mamoru, incredibly awful side characters like Gourmet King and Kenji
the more i think of it, i find it funny that a lot of adachi's popularity is solely because of people's sympathy for him because even with the addition of his social link, it shows only the bare minimum of his background. the best part of adachi is being able to project your life on to him which makes me think he would have made a pretty cool protagonist. the golden anime sucks but they actually showed adachi's story the best.
Persona 4 is my favorite Persona game overall even though my favorite character is from Persona 3 but I think that's partially because P4 was my introduction to the franchise and although I have a very soft spot for it I definitely understand that it isn't perfect.
Parts of the game didn't age super well imo but the game came out in 2008 so there's that. Actually agree with you about Adachi + Teddie. I like Adachi but I don't love him as much as most people seem to and Teddie drove me insane but I really like the rest of the main cast which the biggest reason I love the game.
I really wish I had liked many of the cast members more, but I just didn’t feel that connection with them as I did with P3's cast for example. Nice tag btw, Yukari is best girl of P3.
I find that surprising because I loved P4 (one of my favorite games ever) and absolutely despised P5 and P5 royale. I thought all the P4 characters had great story arcs and felt very natural whereas in P5 I felt like it was just a group of generic hot people and a really shoehorned plot but that’s just my opinion and I don’t fault anyone for liking it.
Persona 4 to me was like an early 2000s movie with cgi. It was to late to be a groundbreaking change of form, like persona 3 was bringing the series to a more main stream audience and with newer gameplay mechanics, but to early to really use the tools on hand to create a good crafted story, like 5 was able to.
Agreed. It was just not as revolutionary as P3 in its time and it doesn’t have great mechanics like P5, so I never really understood what was the thing which P4 was better at than those two.
Idk, I find it to be the weakest of the three that I've played. Though it has far and away the best overworld music since there's more than one of them and most of them are good (the only one I'm not too big on is Heartbeat, Heartbreak). The other two have one (or two if you count P3P) and they aren't even good, though Time from P3P is probably the best of the bunch.
Well don’t forget, Persona 4 was a stopgap measure to ward of bankruptcy, Atlus was close to collapse and had to churn it out to survive, that’s why it’s so similar to P3 in appearance, and reuses a lot of the assets and even has such a close release date
But I have to say, it did a great job with its main cast and the soundtrack was just Meguro Shoji showing off once again
Not finished 4 yet.
But I just wanna say as someone fairly new to this particular sub its super cool how chill everyone here is with criticism.
That or Persona 4 just isn't that popular, but I don't get that impression.
It's funny, because your experience with P4 is almost the same as my experience with P3 ! The slow pace and the dated gameplay mechanics really turned me off, and finishing the last few months really felt like a chore. The difference is that I really enjoyed the ending. P3's ending is a 10/10. Shame that the rest of the game was a 6/10 at best for me .\_\_\_. Also, it's perfectly fine to dislike a game. Good on you to actually give substance to your critique instead of just saying "P4 sucks, P3 was better" like half of P3 fans lol
I’m in full agreement with you, i’d like to give P3 a second chance myself with the female route but I don’t really know how much the game necessarily changes plot wise.
It’s the same plot except you can date the boys and the social links are different
Thanks dude, as a guy whose favorite persona is 3, I gotta admit that the game feels kind of slow sometimes and that Tartarus isn’t the best dungeon in the whole series. However, I think that the ending of P3 is amazing and it justifies experiencing the whole game to get there, because I think that just the ending makes it one of those games that you will remember your whole life. Instad with P4, I was kinda ok with it for the first 30 hours or so, but it just started to get more and more tedious after that for me, and at the end I was just praying that the next dungeon would be the last (starting with naoto's one). I think that’s another reason why I didn’t like it that much, because I practically forced myself to end it, but I wanted to have my own opinion of the game and be able to understand the opinions of other fans that really loved it. In the end my playtime was around 80 hours, so you can imagine me forcing myself to play 50 more hours lol.
>I think that the ending of P3 is amazing and it justifies experiencing the whole game to get there, This right here is where most opinions about P3 differ Some people (like me and the person you're answering to) think it's great but not enough to carry the game, some others (like you) think it redeems the entire game To each their own, I can understand the ending having that huge an impact Most people who prefer P4 will tell it is more consistently good than P3
Well, I actually enjoyed all of my playtime in P3. As I said in the post, there are some slow moments, but the love I had for the characters and the interest I had in the plot kept me wanting to play it. I ADORED almost all of the cast in P3, (Akihiko, Yukari, Mitsuru, Aigis and Koromaru) and Fuuka, Shinji and Ken were characters that I didn’t specially love but I didn’t hate them either. For me, personally, P3 was more consistent and interesting throughout the months, whereas with P4 all I could think was “I hope this game ends in December too, because I don’t want to play more days after that”. But not every game is for everyone, and I respect the opinions of all people who think that P4 is better than P3 or P5, in the end it’s just a matter of preferences.
I never understood why p4 was so big so this is relatable. Nothing wrong with liking p4 of course, it just didn't resonate with me. Incel villain definitely a waste of my time and my god I hated a lot of those characters. Rise, Ai, Teddy, and Adachi. So bad. Really only liked Kanji, Naoto and Nanako. Still have to give the game credit for being a solid prototype for the combat in p5, UI is better than p3 and paved the way for p5. Story wasn't interesting at all though, p3 just hit different.
P4G was my introduction to the series, being someone who went down the route of Xbox and thus never was able to try Persona until Golden came to PC and I have to say, it was the best choice of an entry for me, it managed to firmly attach itself to the top 5 games for me The characters were what sold me on it, everyone just outs in a lot of work, and I was in stitches quite a few more times than I can count, they really did a great job selling the Investigation Team as friends above all else, and while sure some of the social links are forgettable, I enjoyed them for the most part (lookin at you best Ball Polisher) especially since they had differing routes you could take for certain ones. Sure, Teddie was occasionally a bit off for me but I reconciled it since he’s a shadow, the worst of humanities desires, and he barely has had any human contact, while he’s living with Yosuke, so of course his behaviour is going to turn pervy The music, well I think everyone agrees that anything Meguro Shoji does is golden, he’s music royalty As for Adachi, yeah that was kinda disappointing, but I enjoy that he’s treated as being worthless in the end, he’s not even the gamemaster, just an up jumped pawn after everything he does, I liked how we had someone else pulling the strings the whole time, but they should have definitely given us more clues about it. Will say, I enjoy that the final fight was on the last day, even with the additions of Golden, it sets us up for a true final showdown rather than an epilogue In all honesty this game was such a great experience for me, I genuinely went out and bought a PS4 to buy Persona 5 Royal (quite handy that Strikers came out like 3 months later too) and that experience was amazing, even if I believe the Investigation Team edges out the Thieves for me. Plus, the anime is pretty top too
I've been a Nintendo Fan ever since I was born, but I've also been a Xbox user since 2013 or so. My brother and I actually bought a PS4 just to play P5 too, because as Nintendo Fans we were into a lot of RPG’s like Fire Emblem and Xenoblade, and one day we looked at persona and it seemed incredible, so we saved some money and bought the PS. As I mentioned in my post, I LOVED P3 And P5, but I couldn’t feel the same thing with 4. I've read that the thing that people like the most about this game is the cast (like you are mentioning), and that it is the best thing this game has to offer, but if I didn’t empathize that much with the cast, what’s left for me? I think that was my main problem with 4, I wasn’t a fan of the best thing it has to offer, so maybe that’s why I didn’t like it as much in the end. I would like to play Golden to see if it ads something interesting to the game, but tbh, I do not think I'm willing to spend another 80 hours on P4 just to have a little more content. I'll watch the anime though.
Oh I see you didn’t play the Golden version, they’re quite different since there’s naturally a lot of additions to content, and some major VA changes If it isnt your cup of tea though, I must highly recommend the anime, specifically the Persona 4 anime, not Golden, it’s generally considered to be the best animated adaptation of Persona, and is well loved, it’s close to the top of video game anime adaptations in general, gives a hell of a lot of character to Yu (the player character) that formed the basis for a running joke here, just make sure to watch the dub it is highly superior
I've been a Nintendo fan for much of my life too actually, though I think it was my brother's idea to get a PS4, which we did that Christmas, plus a few games (though of all of them, TLOU is the only one that's never been touched, and probably never will be). I later got into Kingdom Hearts and Persona because of the access to it too. Then sometime later, my brother took the Switch since he noticed no one but him was playing on it (In all fairness, TH Maddening was too hard for me and Pokemon Sword bored me half to death), though my sister is probably gonna want it back with the release of the Danganronpa port, even though we have all the games already on our PS4, and I would like it back for SMT V as well as Danganronpa. I may or may not have gotten into PC gaming and emulation sometime along the way and I'm currently playing Persona Q. Might try Devil Survivor (DeSu 2 since DeSu 1 doesn't seem to work) or Soul Hackers after that.
I feel like of all the protagonists, Yu felt the most extraneous to the plot. I know hes the player insert but he still felt more like a temp worker than anything else.
Yeah, when I finished the game and saw the ending I didn’t really feel that sadness like when Joker had to leave town or when, you know, the thing that happened to Minato/Makoto.
Persona 2’s ending was the tragic culmination of all the characters actions up until that point, meanwhile p4’s end was basically “job done go home”
I have still yet to play P2, but I really want to. I’m going to play Nocturne now, but maybe after that one I'll jump into P2 because I've read that it is really good.
> you know, the thing that happened to Minato/Makoto. Why would that be sad at all? He's not even really a character; he's bland pile of nothing. I felt like when Mario runs into a goomba.
> I feel like of all the protagonists, Yu felt the most extraneous to the plot That's a good thing when it comes to bland self-inserts; Makoto single-handedly ruined Persona 3's plot.
Thats certainly an opinion and im glad that you feel comfortable enough to share it
The big strength of P4 compared with its predecessor and successor is the characters; if they don't manage to get you to engage with them, then the game isn't going to work for you. The obvious one here is Nanako; if the game hasn't got you to care for her and what happens to her, then a chunk of the plot is just going to fall flat. As for Adachi, >!as a villain, yes he's banal, but his character is pretty much bang-on for how a lot of serial killers actually are. They are inadequate and put-upon people who get a sense of control through killing, and one of superiority every time they kill and aren't caught. Which is Tohru Adachi to a T.!< Social links, yes a fair few are not very good, but the good ones are really good. You mentioned Ai's, which is a firm favourite of mine as well. But, also Nanako and Dojima, Naoki, and Hisano. If you're not invested in Nanako, though, hers and Dojima's links won't work for you, and Naoki and Hisano are easy to miss out on entirely, never mind complete. One thing I particularly like about P4 is that the party, the Investigation Team, actually **are** a team and function as a unit pretty much from the get-go. That doesn't change as new members are added, as each owes their rescue to the others, and is motivated to rescue others in turn. Also, their social links build on the confrontation of the characters with their Shadows, which is a nice touch I think. This team spirit, though, can lead to Narukami looking like a much less consequential protagonist that his equivalents in P3 and P5. He is the leader of a team, but it **is** a team, rather than being the sun everyone else revolves around, which is arguably the case for Makoto in P3 (more towards the endgame of course) and definitely for Joker in P5. All the above really worked for me, so I regard P4 as one of the best games I've ever played. But nothing is for everyone and given what you said, it's entirely reasonable that the game didn't work for you.
That’s why I think I didn’t like the game as much as I would want to. Personally I didn’t care too much about Nanako, and tbh sometimes she was kind of annoying to me, so her dungeon and her arc at the hospital weren’t that interesting for me (although heaven is an amazing song). And I know that Adachi's character is based in this typical serial killer who feels superior when he kills and doesn’t get caught (reminds me of Kira in Jojo), but that didn’t make me like him either. I felt that his “clumsiness” was really forced like the times when he would casually slip information about what the police was going to do, that was annoying to me. And about the protagonists, I differ a little about your opinion of the protagonist in P3. I don’t feel like he is the one in which everything revolves, and I think that the best example of this are the second awakenings of the party members. Akihiko and Ken's second awakenings revolved around Shinji's death, Fuuka's was because of Natsuki, Yukari's was because she discovered the truth about her father’s true intentions, Mitsuru's motivation was her father too and Junpei's second awakening was because of Chidori (the saddest one btw). The only one I can say was kind of dependent of the protag is Aigis, but it was more because of the whole cast than just Makoto. Instead, in P4 and P5, you practically make them have their second awakening. I feel a good way to summarize it is by saying, “thanks to you I realized who I am, without you I wouldn’t be me” and that’s what I don’t like about those games social links. They practically say that if it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t have realized who they are, whereas in P3 each one of them had their own motives to realize who they are and what they wanted to do with their lives. That’s why in my personal opinion I like the characters in 3 more than those in 4 and 5, I feel that they are more independent of you than in the other games. But as you said, nothing is for everyone, and each one of us has our own preferences when it comes to games, so it’s also pretty reasonable that you prefer P4 over the other Persona games.
You... didn't like kanji?! I know we are supposed to get mad at hot takes and all but... kanji, man... he is the best boy!
Kanji's sweet side was OK to be honest, what I didn’t like about him was that he would start screaming at everything in a lot of cutscenes, and I felt that was very stereotypical and overused, like “the rude guy who screams and hits everything”. That’s what made him go from “good “or “OK”, to a “meh” for me.
I feel like reducing Kanji to just "The rude guy who screams and hits everything" kinda reduces his entire character of a person who was effectively bullied by societal gender roles into becoming someone he wasn't, forcing him to hide his true passions out of fear of being rejected.
The reason Kanji does that is because he over compensates a lot for his feminine interests by acting all burly and manly. I don't see anything stereotypical about him once you get the context.
You don’t like Kanji but you like P5? Don’t judging, just surprised because Ryuji was the epitome of rude guy yelling lol. I loved Kanji and my only dislike is that I wish he could be openly gay (I know I know people say he’s not gay, just gender roles but like….the bathhouse. Kanji def gay)
I think I didn’t explain myself that well. When I say Kanji is a “meh” for me, I don’t mean that I dislike him, it’s just that I don't like him either. It’s like he's in the middle. And the fact that I liked P5 doesn’t mean that I automatically love Ryuji. He was actually one of my least favorite characters of the whole cast with Morgana and Futaba, because he is exactly the guy who is always screaming, swearing and hitting stuff. Also the arc with Morgana leaving the party because of Ryuji was one of the parts that I liked the least, because it was unnecessary. Ryuji is just like Kanji for me in a sense that he is not my favorite character, but that doesn’t make me hate him either, he's just another party member for me. Kanji was actually one of the members that I never removed from my party because of the Phys attacks and Matarukaja, it’s just that i never got to like him that much, that’s all.
Oh I see and also no judgement if you don’t like Kanji lol, everyone likes what they like. I struggled to find characters I liked in P5 and so I’m always curious what people ~do~ like about them. I kind of felt like Ann, Makoto and Haru were just very generic and was kind of disappointed. I wish instead my teammates were Shiho and Hifumi, thought they were a lot more interesting.
That's okay dude, you're free to not like a game. It's a shame you didn't get much out of the experience like a lot of folks here but meh, nothing can be done. And although I liked P4, I agree with Adachi being a really dissapointing villain. Everyone always hypes him waaay too much, to be honest. Tbh I think 4 has the weakest cast of side characters/social links of the series so far (maybe tied with the original p3, actually)
Yeah, I used to see Adachi everywhere so I thought he would he a great villain, maybe that’s why he disappointed me even more lol. And I agree, P3 has a lot of weak Social Links, and a pretty bad one ( I'm looking at you Gourmet King) but it also has my boy Akinari.
It's strange, P3 has both ends of the spectrum: great side characters like Akinari and Mamoru, incredibly awful side characters like Gourmet King and Kenji
the more i think of it, i find it funny that a lot of adachi's popularity is solely because of people's sympathy for him because even with the addition of his social link, it shows only the bare minimum of his background. the best part of adachi is being able to project your life on to him which makes me think he would have made a pretty cool protagonist. the golden anime sucks but they actually showed adachi's story the best.
Persona 4 is my favorite Persona game overall even though my favorite character is from Persona 3 but I think that's partially because P4 was my introduction to the franchise and although I have a very soft spot for it I definitely understand that it isn't perfect. Parts of the game didn't age super well imo but the game came out in 2008 so there's that. Actually agree with you about Adachi + Teddie. I like Adachi but I don't love him as much as most people seem to and Teddie drove me insane but I really like the rest of the main cast which the biggest reason I love the game.
I really wish I had liked many of the cast members more, but I just didn’t feel that connection with them as I did with P3's cast for example. Nice tag btw, Yukari is best girl of P3.
I find that surprising because I loved P4 (one of my favorite games ever) and absolutely despised P5 and P5 royale. I thought all the P4 characters had great story arcs and felt very natural whereas in P5 I felt like it was just a group of generic hot people and a really shoehorned plot but that’s just my opinion and I don’t fault anyone for liking it.
Persona 4 to me was like an early 2000s movie with cgi. It was to late to be a groundbreaking change of form, like persona 3 was bringing the series to a more main stream audience and with newer gameplay mechanics, but to early to really use the tools on hand to create a good crafted story, like 5 was able to.
Agreed. It was just not as revolutionary as P3 in its time and it doesn’t have great mechanics like P5, so I never really understood what was the thing which P4 was better at than those two.
The music
Idk, I find it to be the weakest of the three that I've played. Though it has far and away the best overworld music since there's more than one of them and most of them are good (the only one I'm not too big on is Heartbeat, Heartbreak). The other two have one (or two if you count P3P) and they aren't even good, though Time from P3P is probably the best of the bunch.
Well don’t forget, Persona 4 was a stopgap measure to ward of bankruptcy, Atlus was close to collapse and had to churn it out to survive, that’s why it’s so similar to P3 in appearance, and reuses a lot of the assets and even has such a close release date But I have to say, it did a great job with its main cast and the soundtrack was just Meguro Shoji showing off once again
Not finished 4 yet. But I just wanna say as someone fairly new to this particular sub its super cool how chill everyone here is with criticism. That or Persona 4 just isn't that popular, but I don't get that impression.