Definitely the Coup De Grate of the PS2's reign.
Story: The story begins as you, a silent protagonist, starting a new life at his uncle's town of Inaba, Japan. Quickly you begin learning about the town and the people in it. You meet characters such as Yosuke, Yukiko, and Chie. Quickly you learn of a myth stating that when you look into a turned off television set at midnight on a rainy night, you would see your soul mate. In reality, it's a supernatural doorway to another world. As crazy of a premise that is, mysterious murders begin to start. You and your friends start to investigate and learn about the murders and themselves as people.
Gameplay: Persona 4 is a JRPG dungeon crawler and a Dating Sim at the same time. One of the features I loved was the Social Links. Social Links, or making friends, is interesting and gave me a lasting appeal to play more and more. You can have social links with your party members and help their roles in battles. In conjunction with that, there is a mysterious room called the Velvet Room that helps create or store your personae. Persona fusion is extremely fun and is a great way to make a persona of your fitting. When you create a persona, you can gain experience points depending on your social link with a special arcana. For example if I had a social link level of 4 with Yukiko, I would be able to gain about 3000 or so experience for my Priestess persona if I make one. When you max a character's social link and they happen to be female, you can date them. Although this doesn't do much, it also splits the scenes of either friends or couples. Battle in Persona 4 is your typical turn base battle system. Your enemies are called Shadows. Characters may use normal melee attacks, or consume spirit points to summon their special Persona, a manifestation of the character's psyche. Each character has only a single persona, but the Main Character has the ability to summon multiple Personae. There is also a feature that returns from Persona 3 called 'One More' which allows a character that damaged a Shadow, either by critical hits or weaknesses, to attack once more. This increases strategy and the options to experiment on shadows until you find their weaknesses. Boss battles are extremely fun and difficult at the same time. Some bosses might just last you an hour or so as well.
Music: This is absolutely my favorite parts of the Persona games. In comparison with Persona 3, Persona 4 is more jazzy and upbeat. Both have Japanese pop in English lyrics. The battle theme made myself want the battles to be long just so I can listen to it more and more.
Characters: The characters of Persona 4 felt very realistic. Social links make character development very smooth, however, made it a necessity to do just to love the characters whereas in P3, the Social links created more development, and the story did the same. Since the game is about being true to yourself, the characters generally hold a facade to block themselves from others. All the characters look good with their cloths and give them a flare that others don't have.
Persona 4 is possibly the best RPG I have ever played on the PS2 and will make a lasting impression on me for the rest of my life. The game also taught me life lessons as well as long as you look and research the information withing the game, you will learn as well. The ending of the game was also one of the few only games that made me feel something more than the adventure I just did, but also made me feel as if I was in a position similar to the Main Character.
Pros- Characters, music, gameplay, emotional link to story
Cons-The game can be too hard at some times.
Score- 9.8/10