Persona 4 retains the unique balanced feel of Persona 3 while introducing an entirely new and murder mystery to solve.
STORYLINE:
This game is all about the story. A deep character interaction along with a compelling and bizarre murder mystery is the main dish for this game, otherwise it's not much more then a semi bland dungeon crawl.
The game starts with the nameless main character arriving into a small rural town to live with his uncle and cousin while he attends the near by high school as a transfer student. As it turns out just as was getting situated, a bizarre murder strikes fear into the hearts of the town's people when a corpse of a famous reporter appears hung upside down on an antenna after a fog clears one day. Her cause of death unknown the police don't have many answers when a second body appears in a similar fashion: after a fog and hung upside down from a telephone pole. The second victim by chance was a girl that your new friend was interested in. Somehow this leads you to help him investigate the murder and discover that murder might not be able to be solved by the typical police investigation…since the murder's tools seem to be nothing more than victim's own inner demons…literally.
Aside from this main plot there are a bunch of characters with their own side stories to discover. Many of them are not long and require almost no effort to breeze through, but the more socializing you do, the more power in battle you can gain. So the game almost requires it. Part of managing your character's typical teen age social life in modern Japan all the while trying to solve the case and prevent future victims from meeting their doom in a twisted supernatural turn of events is part of the fun.
GAMEPLAY:
While the battles themselves can be fairly challenging, the monsters, the personas, and the random dungeon crawling aren't exactly new to anyone, especially to those who have already played any of the Persona 3 versions. Persona 4's dungeon crawling experience is so similar to Persona 3's that the noticeable changes are almost non-existent. The dungeons are randomly generated hallways that still average around 10 floors with a boss, mini boss, and easily solvable trap. So, yeah, the "other world" not only looks lackluster, it also is fairly repetitive and eventless, so trudging through it became more of a chore then anything after a while. At least you can skip floors you've already completed this time.
If anything, this is probably what the developers want to improve before Persona 5. If your going to make another world to cross over to make it a "world", not just a bunch of hallways. Breath a little life into it, add reoccurring characters (not just one), add more unpredictable events to add depth to it, make it explore able, give it some rules to make the two worlds more interact able. Otherwise no one will want to go through the dungeons. Personally I always preferred to play the "real world" in the game because it was the only place where your character had any power to create some sort of difference.
GRAPHICS:
I've always loved cartoons, American or otherwise, so I personally was thrilled with the fully animated cut scenes and character art. That said, I was disappointed a bit that the CG wasn't done for the PS3. Sure, I know Persona 4 is a PS2 game and it still looks beautiful for what it was made for. It's just that…well, why isn't it on the PS3 or PSP? It would have gotten more recognition on the new gen platforms and it would have been a rare and welcome edition to the PS3's exclusive collection. I'm not sure of the reasoning behind it, but it would have been nice to have seen this game visually on par with other JRPGs such as "Tales of Verperia".
SOUND:
The sound quality was amazing, at least when it came from the voice actors. I honestly wasn't expecting much, since Persona 3 seemed to get lucky last time with an enthusiastic cast that did amazingly well, I didn't think they could get nearly as close with another cast, but they did get close enough to be nearly as convincing though. The music on the other hand…well I was not as enthusiastic about the selection. To me they ether sounded to recycled, or the new songs just weren't as great as the "new" ones in Persona 3. They weren't terrible or anything, but I just wasn't pumped up when I heard them in a battle sequence.