Persona 4’s dungeon-crawling gameplay is excellent (if old school RPG combat is your thing). Upon encountering enemies in the dungeon area, the action cuts to a self-contained, turn-based battle, and players select commands from a menu full of options. There are four basic elemental attack types, and enemies are vulnerable to specific types. A scan ability helps players to keep track of these weaknesses. Character stats aren’t tied to the traditional RPG-style leveling system.  Stats like strength, endurance, etc, are attached to whichever persona the player has equipped at the time.  Leveling the player will allow him to equip higher-level personas, which can either be acquired during minigames following a battle, or synthesized from existing personas. Players directly control every member of the party, though AI control is still available, and is serviceable for most run-of-the-mill encounters.  The game’s unmercifully hard boss encounters provide a much tighter and rewarding challenge without the wildcard of spastic AI.  

Persona 4 is a tight and lovingly-crafted game, but it’s not for everyone.  The game is very long, with the core story taking 50 hours or more to complete.  Thanks to optional quests that direct the player back to old dungeons (which can be re-populated with difficult bosses) and various other activities, playtime can easily exceed 80 hours.  That doesn’t even account for time lost to dying, which will happen frequently.  If you’re an old-school dyed-in-the-wool gamer that wants a traditionally long and challenging game, Persona 4 is everything you’re looking for.  Those with full-time jobs and social obligations may never see the ending, though.

Aside from length considerations, a few other nagging annoyances pop up from time to time.  The game tries to bring up a dialogue option every few minutes just to keep the story sequences from being long boxes of text, but often these options all say the same thing in different ways or the character’s reactions will match a line of dialogue other than the one the player picked.  This is pretty par the course for JRPG dialogue, but in a game where so many other gameplay aspects are new and fresh, the dated mechanics stick out. The game also has pacing issues in the first fifteen hours.  Whether it’s long story sequences or extended dungeon-running segments, sometimes the game forces the player to spend too much time doing one or the other.  Near the beginning of the game, after going through so much story setup, I wanted to spend some time in the dungeon only to be shuffled from one story sequence to another, clicking through text.  This issue abates as the game goes on, however.  Once most of the story is established, the player is given more freedom to choose what to do and when.

Even if stuck in an extended story sequence, the stay isn’t horrible thanks to Atlus’ superb dialogue, translation, and voice acting.  The characters are very believable, if sometimes a bit too eloquent and well-spoken to be average high school students.  The dialogue is well paced and clever enough to genuinely entertain, though I could do without the "–sans" and "–chans" still present in the translation.  NPC dialogue is often bizarre and refreshingly humorous. For example, one girl sitting outside a store is just listing off things she can think of that are both white and square.  The game’s music is stellar as well (which is mandatory because players will be listening to nigh 60 hours of it).  Mostly the soundtrack falls in the same jazzy-synth-pop vein as Persona 3 or The World Ends With You.

With Persona 4, Atlus has not only made a great game, but displayed their earnest desire to make a great product for gamers.  The developers didn’t just go through a check list of problems with Persona 3; they went back and reworked the whole idea from scratch, thinking, “how can we make this a better game in every way?” and they made a product that is fundamentally better all around. The game’s manual even has explanations for some Japanese culture and mythological backgrounds referenced in the game, which is just a small example of the concern Atlus has for their customers.  Persona 4 is a successful combination of modern innovation and reverence for the RPGs of the past, and as such is one of the best (if not last) games to grace the PS2.