School's In
Oh, hey, Persona 4 came out a while back. We should probably review the last great RPG for the PS2, right? Or we could play it safe and just go with this really, really good one.
Published: March 4, 2009
It's in the game's non-fighting bits that the visuals really shine, though. The world itself is mostly just a series of smallish little areas with a free-rotating camera), swapped between with static menus, but at any point you can press the Square Button to pull up a quick-hop menu of all the sub-locations in that area, which cuts down immensely on boring traversal. During these moments, some of the more involved, one-time animations are used, and they're all of them quite nice -- stuff like someone putting on a pair of glasses or reaching for an object. It sounds rather inconsequential, but plenty of the characters' personalities (which are really nicely varied and do a wonderful job of side-stepping many typical JRPG clichés, though the MegaTen games have always been good about that) pop because of their animations. The rest of things are propped up by fantastic little character portraits and some slick traditional cel animation that I wish there was more of; it really is amazing stuff and looks awesome.
Much of the characters' personalities come down to Atlus' fantastic localization and the great voice work, which is characteristically awesome stuff. Many of those served by more import-friendly publishers like Atlus and NIS America are naturally more fond of the original Japanese voices, but when they sound this solid, it's hardly a chore to listen to the English dub, though none of the voices approach the brilliance of Vic Mignogna's performance as Junpei in Persona 3. Shoji Meguro's soundtrack is, of course, great stuff, and there's more than a few songs that manage to bubble up into my daily routine without warning, and I'm all too happy to hum along to them.
Persona 4 does dungeon crawling right. Like all games in the genre, it takes a particular mindset to slog through some of it, which I'll fully admit to buckling under from time to time, but there's so much other stuff to juggle that keeps one's relationships and duties like jobs (also new, as are the few new disciplines that can be leveled up by accomplishing tasks and talking with others) at the fore as much as all that exploration that it all feels like there's always something to. In every way imaginable, Persona 4 is a deeper, more entertaining and easier-to-digest game than its predecessor, which was already great. If this is to be the PS2's last major RPG, it's a hell of a way to bid the system adieu.
