#i'm not gonna lie the fucking rap discourse is really getting to me.

[mangoazalea]

please let the Black people in your life know you like, care about them

[arcplaysgames]

P4G Post-Mortem

deep breath. this is a LONG post.

it's still not as good as P3P but it's pretty good

What I Liked:

The characters in P4 are pretty fucking good, I'm not gonna even try to lie. They are all much rougher and messier than SEES. I noticed right from the start that the maturity level of this cast was a huge step down from P3P, and that actually bore out through the entire game. For this game and for this tone, it worked. Just due to P3P's solemnity and its obsession with death, I don't think anyone in P4 would fit into the P3 cast. They each suit their environments well. .

The voice acting in this game is tremendous and frankly saves the game from its dodgiest moments of writing. If Yosuke was not performed with so much depth, he'd be nothing more than The Teammate Everyone Secretly Hates. All of Chie's flaws and the times her personality chafes are smoothed by how fucking consistent and empathetic her performance is. And I feel like both Rise and Teddie are character I would have straight up not liked if they were not performed so fucking well. Also Troy Baker turns in another stellar role, what the fuck else is new. .

The villain was just better in P4G. Strega was a fucking joke that I could never take serious because who the fuck could with trashy coachella jesus? Adachi though? My god. What a fucking great villain. The unfurling of his character was tremendous and I loved almost every minute of it (except for the shoe-horned sexism that the game itself basically dropped the second it could lmao). .

I went into P4G braced for impact re: a lot of ambient discourse over the years, and I wound up flinching much less than expected. I think it's a very flawed game in how it tackles sexuality and gender, but I think personally it has a bad rap that is maybe undeserved. Kanji is truly a bisexual king and while I totally get the disappointment around Yukiko deciding to stay in Inaba, I think the nuances of her arc get glossed over a lot because it's fairly complex. And while I wish Naoto got the actual exploration he deserved, there was a lot fewer microaggressions than expected. Which, low bar, but the bar was there nonetheless. .

Yosuke is such a fucking complicated nugget of a character. I found I really enjoyed the rollercoaster of our resident closet case, because I really did genuinely grapple with what I felt about him for the entire game. And I think my favorite moment of the game is still Yosuke's quiet moment with Reverie after the talk with Adachi. That was great. If anyone could have survived in SEES, it's Yosuke honestly. .

Until the Izanami thing, I did really like the plot of the game a lot. Like with P3P, I think the ending is....... Fine. Honestly, its interesting that they seem to have opposite problems. I found Reverie dying at the end of P3P kind of unnecessary and disappointing. The sheer sunshine happiness of P4G was a little too neat for me. But the way the plot got SO fucking crunchy when you finally meet Namatame, that was tremendous. .

The writing is just better overall on a technical level, I have to admit. I like the plot and themes and twists of P3P more, but the writing was much rougher and we all know it. The writing in P4G is better, more naturalistic, and is so frequently genuinely funny, I'm a big fan. .

I am going to have some Stuff to say about the protag in a bit but one thing I did like about P4G: You can play this game gay. Oh my fucking god you can play a huge flaming homosexual in this game. At almost every single turn when the game asks you to be het, there is a Get Out Of Het option available, and they are often really fun picks. Does it fucking suck that Yosuke is transparently in love with the MC but is not romanceable? YES. I THINK EVERYONE WHO CAN SHOULD INSTALL THE MOD TO RE-IMPLEMENT THE YOSUKE ROMANCE. But I cannot deny that Reverie Vantas was fucking gay as hell and I was a big fan of that aspect of the game. .

This game has Kanji Tatsumi in it. Like. What else can even be fucking said?

What I Didn't Like So Much:

yeah yeah blah blah arc is a nerd no one cares but some of the arcana associations here just weren't stellar. Some were good, so I forgive it, but Yosuke was not a fucking Magician, Yukiko was not a High Priestess at ALL, Dojima as the Hierophant frankly baffles me, and why the fuck is Nanako Justice? Are all Persona children obligated to be Justice? .

The music sucked. I'm sorry. I played all of P3P and all of P4G and even though P4G had more variety of tracks, I found myself actively annoyed by the music fairly often. I think the battle themes are either mediocre or Actively Bad (god i hate Reach Out To The Truth). I'm literally going to go put on FeMC's battle theme to detox right now. .

Naoto. Naoto was a huge disappointment once they joined the party. Oh, in main scenario scenes I loved Naoto and he got a few of the funniest lines in the game. But the way the game went in so hard on the gender thing in Naoto's recruitment only to just whistle and non-nonchalantly nudge all that under the rug after-- I have thought about it a lot and I think I would have preferred they tried ANYTHING with Naoto rather than just wussing out on the entire thing. It's so palpable that Atlus didn't know wtf to do with what they set up with Naoto, and I literally would rather they have tried and landed on something offensive and bad than the completely anemic SLink Fortune turned out to be. how the fuck did you make FORTUNE boring? Goddamn. .

Unfortunately I think the ending might just be really mediocre. The final reveal felt like a joke, the last boss was so blah after Adachi-cum-Ameno-Sagiri. It feels like the game peaked with Adachi and the rest of the story coasted with a slow miasma of diminishing returns all the way to the final ending. Izanami just is so boring as True Villain. LIKE HERE IS THE THING I KEEP COMING BACK TO. Nyx, right. Nyx is technically revealed as the final villain very late in P3P. But with the themes of P3P and its foreshadowing, it feels like you were always fighting Nyx. P3P is truly and deeply about what it means to be alive, and that to live is opposition against an inevitable outcome. You will someday fail, but there is beauty in struggling each and every day until your eyes finally close. Even if it is not named Nyx until the end of the game, you have been fighting Nyx the entire game. Izanami just.... sucks because Adachi has already covered the ground she does and better. Adachi is the actual confrontation against falsehoods and complacency. He's already given the player the question (and frankly at least he HAS some arguments, unlike Izanami). And then another 20 to 30 hours later, Izanami is all "wait do humans NOT want to live in a fog of lies? fucking wild." It's just a very meh ending. .

Which is not helped by the pacing. Holy shit I got impatient when P3P made me wait a month to give Ryoji an answer, but P4G is so badly paced it drives me kind of batshit. .

I've talked about this a lot but I really miss characters having their own stories together. Yosuke and Teddie eventually get this, but literally every single time this game HINTED that the characters were off hanging out together instead of with Reverie, I was thrilled, and it just didn't happen enough. There is no equivalent of Yukari and Mitsuru's promise, there's nothing like Ken, Akihiko, and Shinjiro's shared history, there isn't a wrench in the plot like Junpei and Chidori. P4G is afraid of that friction, of letting the characters exist outside your influence, and it's a fucking shame because it makes everything more shallow.

And the biggest problem I have with P4G...

actually i'm gonna put that in its own post, this is already long