Tuesday 25 February 2014

Games That Changed My Life: Persona 4 Golden

Some games catch your eye out of nowhere. I saw the Persona 4 Golden trailer (below) while I was flicking through IGN's Youtube stream and I just liked it. Maybe it's because it had anime. Maybe it's because I like yellow. Maybe it's because the music was cool. Silly reasons aside, I was drawn to Persona 4 Golden. It happens sometimes and as I learned with it, usually they end up being some of my favourite games.

Persona 4 Golden is a JRPG cross dungeon crawler where you live life as a truth searching high schooler who moves to the fictional town of Inaba where a serial murder case is beginning to unfold. While this protagonist sleeps, an old guy with a big nose tells him about his destiny and on his second day in his new town, he finds he can go inside TVs and fight monsters with a thing called a Persona. There are also shadows, school exams and relationships to uphold and the story grows into a full-blown mystery. I played it for 8 months and what changed my life was its focus on relationships, friendship and the power of perseverance. It reminded me of the importance of nurturing my own personal relationships at a point of my life where I was all work and not much else. It reminded me not to forget about the people who are important and to make time for them.

What Persona portrays best is time and this made me think about what I choose to do with my time. And that's what's great about Persona as a series. It makes you think and it makes you want to make the right choice. Hell, it even gives you bad/not as awesome endings when you make the wrong choices. Partnered with great dungeons and fun gameplay, I'm still in love with this game even after a month apart. Thankfully, I still need to finish Persona 4 Arena. I'm also waiting for Persona 5, Persona Q and Persona 4 Dancing All Night (which I originally though was a complete cop-out, but then remembered I loved Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F....so I'll probably love it.). Life will be okay....but until then, Persona 3 FES is on the PSN Europe/Australia store and in my downloads!

If you like JRPGs and haven't played Persona 4 Golden, do yourself a life enriching, fun favour and just play the game. Just do it.



2018 Edit Note: This article is still really special to me as one of my first big ones, so I didn't want to edit it too much, but I'm linking it in a more recent article so I edited some grammar and word choice errors that I've learned since writing this.

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