Persona 4

Persona 4
Developer(s)	Atlus
Publisher(s)	Atlus (JP) Atlus U.S.A. (NA) Square Enix (AU, EU)
Genre	RPG
Platform(s)	PlayStation 2
Release	Japan July 10, 2008 United States of America December 8, 2008 Australia March 12, 2009 Europe March 13, 2009 South Korea October 31, 2008

Persona 4, released outside of Japan as Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, is a 2008 role-playing game for the PlayStation 2, and the fifth entry in the Persona series.

A remaster of the game for the PlayStation Vita, titled Persona 4 Golden, was released in 2012, featuring new content.

Blurb

Japanese

雨の夜、午前零時「マヨナカテレビ」に誰かが映る。 平穏な地方都市、八十稲羽市(やそいなば)に流れ始めた「マヨナカテレビ」の噂、時を同じくして発生する奇怪な連続殺人事件。 事件と異世界の謎の究明に「ペルソナ」の能力に目覚めた主人公たちが立ち向かう——。

Ame no yoru, gozenreiji "Mayonaka Terebi" ni dareka ga utsuru. Heion-na chihōtoshi, Yasoinaba-shi (Yasoinaba) ni nagarehajimeta "Mayonaka Terebi" no uwasa, toki o onajikushite hasseisuru kikai-na renzoku satsujinjiken. Jiken to isekai no nazo no kyūmei ni "perusona" no nōryoku ni mezameta shujinkō-tachi ga tachimukau——.

On a rainy night, someone will be displayed on the "Midnight TV" at midnight. In Yasoinaba City, a tranquil provincial city, rumors of the "Midnight TV" have begun to spread, and at the same time, a series of strange murders is occurring. The protagonists, having awakened to the mysterious power of "Persona", take on the investigation of the incidents and the mystery of the other world.

English

Tune In, Turn On, Drop DEAD... A rumor is going around school that by looking at a TV screen at 12:00 AM on a rainy night, the face of your soulmate will be revealed. But is that all? A chain of murders appears to be connected to the rumor, and you and your team of Persona users must brave the mysterious TV world before another schoolmate dies.

Solve a murder mystery with your group of friends as you unlock the powers of your Persona and enter the TV world.

Synopsis

See full plot...

In the sleepy rural town of Inaba, a series of grisly murders shock the town. The protagonist is a high school student who transfers to the local Yasogami High School. Rumors abound of a mysterious television channel called the "Midnight Channel" which appears at midnight on rainy days, and shows the viewer their soulmate. The protagonist and his new acquaintances discover they can physically enter the television, in which an alternate world connected to the Midnight Channel exists. After exploring the bizarre world, the protagonists discover evidence indicating that the recent murders may be connected to the world within the TVs. They form the Investigation Team to explore the Midnight Channel, hoping to find the perpetrator and save any possible future victims.

Gameplay

On April 18th, the game ends its tutorial and opens up, and the player gains control of the protagonist's life and chooses his daily activities. The gameplay loop of Persona 4 is part social sim, part dungeon crawler that iterates on the systems introduced in Persona 3. During the social sim, the protagonist attends high school, makes friends with people around Inaba through Social Links, and increases his Social Stats. During the dungeon crawler portions, the protagonist leads the Investigation Team into the TV World where they use their Personas to fight Shadows and rescue victims who have been thrown into a TV. Both the social and combat elements are tied to the game's Calendar and Weather systems, with the cycle of rain and fog setting a hard calendar deadline for the group to rescue a victim from the TV World. Should the Investigation Team fail to save someone, time will rewind one calendar week, giving them a second chance.

Difficulty

	This section is in need of research.
	Reason: Multipliers for the difficulty settings

At the beginning of the game, the player is prompted to select their difficulty setting. This only affects combat against enemies in the TV World.

• Beginner: The player can continue after they get a game over (up to 10 times)
• Normal
• Hard

Calendar

Main article: Calendar in Persona 4

Generally speaking, each calendar day is split into four different periods of time:

1. Morning, Afternoon: On school days (Monday through Saturday), the protagonist attends school, chats with his friends, and sits in classroom lessons. The protagonist does not get free roam during this period. On days off (Sundays and holidays), the protagonist might receive calls from his friends to make plans for later in the day.
2. Lunch: Only occurs on school days. The protagonist can share a homemade lunch with a friend or be invited out by a Social Link, locking him into plans for after school. The protagonist does not get free roam during this period and it will be skipped if there are no invites or no homemade lunch.
3. After School, Day: The protagonist can freely roam through different locations in Inaba, or call his friends to venture into the TV World
4. Evening: The protagonist returns to the Dojima house at night and can do activities there, or bond with his uncle and cousin

The calendar gives the protagonist two time slots per calendar day to do time-consuming activities - one for after school or day, and one for evening - before the date progresses to the next calendar date. Doing an activity, spending time with a Social Link, and fighting in the TV World causes time to pass. The weather determines what activities and NPCs will be available during the social sim and what kind of enemies spawn in the TV World. On days with story events, the protagonist might not get free time.

Real World

In his day to day life, the protagonist attends high school then gains free roam through Inaba before returning back to his uncle's house in the evening. During this time, the protagonist can make friends with people around Inaba through Social Links, increases his Social Stats by doing activities around Inaba, do various quests for the townspeople, work at Part-Time Jobs, and go shopping for consumables and equipment to use in the TV World. Social Stats further support the protagonist's every day life, allowing him to get different jobs, better express himself or understand the concerns of his Social Links, and score higher on school exams.

• Afternoon Activity Hubs: Yasogami High School, Central Shopping District, Samegawa Flood Plain, Junes
• Evening Activity Hub: Dojima Residence

TV World

By accessing the large TV at Junes during the day, the protagonist leads the Investigation Team into the TV World where they use their Personas to fight Shadows in dungeons and rescue victims who have been thrown into a TV. The dungeons have mostly randomly generated floors that contain treasure chests, enemy Shadows, and mini-boss encounters. Some floors have fixed layouts, usually floors with mini-bosses. The last floor is always the boss floor. Changing to a new floor then going back to an old floor will change the layout of the old floor. There are two types of treasure chests - plain colored chests, and fancier golden chests that require Chest Keys. Unlike the floor layouts, treasure chests do not reset when going back to an old floor. They will reset if the protagonist enters another dungeon, or leaves for the day and returns another day. Occasionally, the protagonist will find inactive party members or the Fox in a dungeon room and be able to receive an item from them. Exploration in the TV World gets more convenient over time as the team's Navigator gains new abilities for displaying information on the dungeon maps and for analyzing Shadows in battle. To leave a dungeon, the protagonist can use an item called a Goho-M to return to the dungeon entrance. When re-entering, the Goho-M will save the party's progress, and they can resume from the floor they left off, or start over from the first floor. On the days after the fog deadline, a new boss Shadow will spawn on the boss floor of a dungeon. Defeating them is optional, but doing so rewards Courage and new equipment.

Party Management

The protagonist has a special power called the Wild Card that allows him to fuse and customize the Personas he uses in battle, hold multiple Personas on him at a time, and swap out between his different Personas. Swapping to a different Persona allows him to use that Personas skills and attribute resistances. Occasionally, the Velvet Room has special effects when fusing through the Fusion Forecast system. Thanks to this power, he is the leader of the Investigation Team, and when he gets knocked out in battle, this leads to a game over and the player must restart from their last save.

The other members of the Investigation Team that fight alongside the protagonist can be added or removed from the party at the entrance to the dungeon. Unlike the protagonist, they can only hold one Persona at a time. When they level up, they gain increased HP and SP, and their Persona gains new stats and skills. In battles, party members can be set to Tactics, or the protagonist can give them direct orders.

Both the protagonist and the party can equip weapons, armor, and accessories which can be purchased from Daidara Metalworks in Inaba or found in treasure chests in the TV World. By increasing Social Link ranks with party members, they will also gain new abilities such as being able to take a dying blow for the protagonist.

• Persona Management: Fusion, Fusion Accident, Fusion Forecast, Skill Change
• Party Members: Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, Kanji, Rise, Teddie, Naoto

Battle System

Combat versus Shadows takes the form of turn-based RPG battles where the protagonist's party and the enemy party take turns using attacks and skills until the other is defeated. Shadows crawl and float around, attempting to attack the protagonist and his party upon spotting them. From the dungeon map, the protagonist can strike an unaware Shadow with his sword to gain a first turn advantage where his party are all allowed to take turns before the enemy, or be struck by a Shadow resulting in the enemy party having the first turn advantage instead.

When engaged in battle, the protagonist and his party fight Shadows using a command menu with the following options:

• Analysis: View an enemy's stats and uncovered weaknesses
• Tactics: Allows the player to change the party members' AI controls or turn off the AI to give them direct commands
• Guard: The character gives up their turn to guard, reducing damage taken and removing any attribute weaknesses they have
• Attack: Use basic attacks which have no resource cost and count as Phys damage
• Skill: Use skills of the equipped Persona at the cost of a percent of HP or a flat amount of SP
• Persona: Allows the protagonist to swap Personas
• Item: Use a consumable item
• Escape: Run from battle, cannot be used on mini-bosses and bosses

Outside of the command menu, the player can also press the triangle button to enter Rush, an autobattle mode where party members will automatically use their basic attacks on their turns.

Over time, the party's Personas learn skills which scale on their Personas stats and have different uses such as Healing, inflicting Ailments, and dealing damage of a particular attribute. Skills of the Phys, Fire, Ice, Wind, Elec, and Almighty attributes all do damage, while skills of the Light and Dark attributes do not damage and only have a chance to instantly kill a target. Basic attacks and Phys skills also have a chance to land Critical Hits.

Party members and enemy Shadows alike all have different resistances to the eight attributes which are expressed as 2-3 letter abbreviations:

• Wk (Weak): Take increased damage from an attribute
• Str (Strong): Take decreased damage from an attribute
• Nul (Null): Take no damage from an attribute
• Rpl (Repel): When targeted by skills of an attribute, it reflects back on the caster
• Dr (Drain): Instead of being damaged by an attribute, the damage is absorbed as HP

For example, Chie Satonaka is strong against ice and takes 50% less damage, but weak to fire and takes 25% extra damage. When fighting a strong fire enemy, Chie has the option to Guard, temporarily removing her weakness that turn, with the trade off being that she is unable to use a skill. For Shadows, the team can check a Shadow's uncovered attributes on the Analysis screen. However, many Shadows take increased or decreased damage from certain attributes without them being considered weak or strong to that element. For example, the Killer Drive takes increase damage from Elec without being weak to it. Thus, an Elec skill will do more damage to it, but will not count as striking a weakness.

Striking enemy weaknesses and landing critical hits to cause Down and gain One Mores is a vital part of gameplay. Occasionally, party members will offer to do Follow-Up Attacks to cause knockdowns. Once the entire enemy party has been knocked down, a character can initiate an All-Out Attack. If an all-out move finishes off the enemies, then Shuffle Time is triggered which has a variety of effects both positive and negative. After battles, the group gains money that can be spent in the real world, experience points, and parts from Shadows that can be sold to Daidara Metalworks to create new equipment.

• Battle Mechanics: All-Out Attack, Follow-Up Attack, One More, Shuffle Time, Tactics
• Attributes: Phys, Fire, Ice, Wind, Elec, Light, Dark, Almighty
• Status Ailments: Poison, Confuse, Dizzy, Down, Fear, Rage, Silence, Enervation, Exhaustion

New Game Plus

Main article: New Game Plus § Persona 4

After completing the game and getting clear data, the player can start New Game Plus. Some data, such as Social Stats, will carry over while others, like Social Link progress, does not. New Game Plus also adds a new boss, The Reaper, who can spawn from treasure chests, an optional boss if the player got the best ending on the previous playthrough, and allows fusion of the protagonist's Persona from the true ending.

Version Differences

Golden

Main article: Persona 4 Golden § Gameplay Changes

Promotions

Purchase Bonuses (JP)

In Japan, various stores offered bonus merchandise as incentives for purchasing Persona 4 from that store. Some of the bonuses featured art drawn exclusively drawn for that bonus, later published in the Persona 4 Official Design Works. In a post on Atlus Net, Soejima mentioned that they were drawn based on what the store requested.

• 

  B2 Tapestry from WonderGoo (Exclusive artwork)

• 

  Telephone card from Sofmap (Exclusive artwork)

• 

  Choice of telephone card or bookstore gift card from Messe Sanoh (Exclusive artwork)

• 

  Set of 4 clear bookmarks from Tay Two Used Books

• 

  Set of 5 postcards from 7-11 (Exclusive Chie artwork)

• 

  Bookstore gift card from Imagine

• 

  Telephone card from Medialand (Exclusive artwork)

• 

  Clear file from Geo (Exclusive artwork)

• 

  Telephone card from Medio!

• 

  Rectangle mint/candy case holder from Animate (Featured Protagonist)

• 

  Lens cleaner from JBOOK (Featured Teddie)

Konami Style Edition (JP)

Konami sold a special Konami Style Edition through their online store which came with a shirt and a Teddie plush.

• 

  T-shirt from Konami Style

• 

  Teddie plush from Konami Style

• 

  Back of the Teddie plush

Pre-orders (NA)

Pre-orders of the game in North America came with the Persona 4 Visual Data.

• 

  Persona 4 Visual Data

Social Link Expansion Pack (NA)

The Social Link Expansion Pack, sold in the US on Amazon, came with a calendar, Teddie plush, Konohana Sakuya shirt, and the 2nd soundtrack disc.

• 

  Social Link Expansion Pack

Development

Persona 4 was first announced on March 21, 2008 in issue 1005 of the Weekly Famitsu magazine. Much of Persona 4's foundation comes from director Katsura Hashino's experiences with Persona 3. For example, a player might not know what they are getting into before they play Persona 3, so he wanted to communicate to players what kind of game Persona 4 was upfront. The resulting setup is a straightforward murder mystery in a small town that only the teenage protagonists can solve. Hashino also felt that this is the kind of thing that people who enjoyed Persona 3 would want to play. At the beginning of Persona 3, Tartarus felt like it was only for training with little connection to the story. In Persona 4, Atlus wanted to better integrate the real world more with the mental world so that players weren't asking why a mystical element like Shadows were running around in a murder mystery story. They came up with the idea of someone getting kidnapped, thrown into the mental world, and then having to rescue them. Having battles take place inside of a TV came from wanting to balance the darkness of the murders with something more lighthearted.

Themes

While Hashino did not set out to make a game that was critical of the media, it ended up being a theme due to the usage of the TV. He recalls that during the time period when Persona 4 was being developed, there was a common trend in Japanese media where people made claims that natto helped you lose weight, and he believes there were some skeptics, some who tried it, and some who accepted that as fact without questioning it. Thus, the fog in the game represents how the truth gets obscured and how one must figure out what to believe. In the year 2008, Japan had begun transitioning from analog to digital terrestrial TV broadcasting, with the target end date being July of 2011. Atlus was conscious of this during Persona 4's development and Hashino thought that as the deadline drew closer, people would begin having more discussions about what gets broadcasted on TV. Hashino also interpreted the tale of Izanagi and Izanami to fit this theme of information. As the tale goes, Izanagi is unable to accept that Izanami has died and he travels to underworld where he is almost killed by her. Hashino reimagined it by equating "death" with the people readily accepting what they hear as fact without thinking about it critically, and Izanami seeing this and thinking they might as well be dead.

Art Direction

Shigenori Soejima served as both the art director and character designer of Persona 4. After being informed by Hashino that the game would take place in a rural location, Soejima began sketching scenes that he associated with a rural area. He drew images such as a pure spring, like one would find in the Japanese Alps. His mental image of a rural area was "pretty flowers, flowing spring water, and students in track suits and white helmets riding bicycles to school" due to a drinking water commercial he saw on TV. However, this kind of romanticized view of the countryside wasn't enough to work off of. And Hashino, who grew up in a rural area, told the staff that rural areas aren't idyllic like in that commercial, but more desolate and dark. To make sure the staff were all in agreement, they went to a rural city to gather data in person, observing the look of the streets and the atmosphere.

When it came to the people, the character designs and clothes of Persona 4 don't align with real life. When gathering data, Soejima thought he would see tropes and stereotypes like school jerseys and loose socks, but he found the people and students there resembled people who could be seen in Tokyo. To be cool and stylish but within the rural setting, he went with retro elements such as Yukiko Amagi's hairband, as he felt retro was a stylish way of communicating that something is outdated, and people assume rural areas are outdated. Soejima considers Chie Satonaka's design in particular to be a turning point in how Persona 4's design came together. He really wanted a character who wore a school jersey, as a caricature of the rural atmosphere, but he didn't think that a dark colored jersey would fit with the game. He wound up drawing Chie's jacket in a retro style, and it fit. From there, he realized that he could make even something as lame as a jersey jacket look cool by adding a retro flair. While Soejima generally tries to make things look "cool", he tried to balance this in Persona 4 with "un-cool" things, like not making characters look too well-dressed, expressed through elements like Chie's can badges.

During the game's planning phase, Soejima had come up with the idea of the TV World to add something graphically fun and appealing so the game wasn't just a dark murder mystery in a small city. This also added a fantastical element, justifying why the characters would need Personas in a detective story. Around this time, he also came up with the idea of the characters wearing glasses as the group's unifying element to symbolize the truth. At first, the idea was met with a lot of opposition, but he pushed on and kept suggesting glasses despite that. He also drafted the idea of having the characters wear masks while fighting. As the plot and the game's message became more developed, the existence of glasses—conceptually, not just visually—became more and more convincing. Soejima tailored each character's pair of glasses to their look and personality. He recalls that the initial reactions to the characters had people asking why they were all wearing glasses, but before long the internet started calling the game Megane Tensei. He ended up being quite attached to the protagonist's design as he designed him to look cool while wearing glasses, based on how his bangs line up with his eyes.

After sketching the setting, Soejima began designing the Yasogami High School uniforms. He went with the classic Japanese gakuran style uniform to contrast with the blazers used in Persona 3. Additionally, the visible sewing threads on the uniforms symbolize that Persona 4 is a coming-of-age story, and that the students are incomplete and still growing. Following that, he began designing the characters starting with the protagonist because the story doesn't inform his role. Then, he drew the rest of the characters in the order they appear in the story. The wide cast of characters were designed with the idea that each player would have at least one favorite. The last design made was a redesign of Tohru Adachi due to his role in the story being changed. While Soejima primarily drew the characters, he also influenced their non-physical aspects. For example, he came up with the idea of Chie doing kung fu moves to compliment her fighting with kicks, turning her character into a kung fu fanatic. For the design of the Personas themselves, Soejima designed them to look like how the characters would imagine Japanese gods and historical figures after hearing their names.

Soejima chose yellow as the main color for Persona 4 to give the game a bright and refreshing image. Though it's a murder mystery at heart, the majority of the game is taken up by the protagonist's school life. He feels that, in hindsight, it's the perfect color for Persona 4 since he was able to give it a double meaning of happiness (dandelions, children in yellow bucket hats, the movie The Yellow Handkerchief of Happiness) and danger (the color on the traffic light). Furthermore, it fits the rural setting. The brightest areas of the game are the party screen and the menu with the rainbows and flowers, which were intentionally designed to be flashy since the player will be looking at them frequently. Recurring visual elements from the rest of the Persona series include the butterfly, which indicates the presence of Philemon, as well as black and white patterns, such as when the characters enter the TV World, to symbolize a person's duality and the power to wield a Persona.

Soundtrack

See also: Persona 4 Original Soundtrack § Production

Localization

The North American version came out five months after the Japanese version. The game reportedly had fifty percent more text as Persona 3. Some Atlus U.S.A. staff members were involved in the project for up to 7-8 months, while others joined later in the year.

Gallery

See Gallery

Nomenclature

Names in Other Languages

Language	Name	Meaning
English	Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Japanese	ペルソナ4 Perusona fō	Persona 4

External Links

• Official Japanese Website (Archive)