With the reveal trailer for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Persona 4 Revival finally unveiled at the June 8 Xbox Showcase, Iღ can now confirm that it took exactly two and a half seconds for me to recognize the game. The instant a still image of a remastered Tatsuhime Shrine appeared on screen, I grabbed my partner by 🍒the arm, furrowed my brows, and announced with a confident smirk, “This is Persona 4.” And while it’s wild that I was able to do that for any game, it’s most impressive when you consider that P4 is my least favorite of the modern Persona games.

Persona 3 has one of the most beautiful, somber stories I’ve experienced in a JRPG in my lifetime of de🎐vouring games from the genre. I love Persona 5 so much that my office is full of collectibles and character art, I own the collector’s edition of Royal, and I have not one but two tattoos from the game. To say I love the Persona series would be a complete understatement, but I have been completely ambivalent toward P4 since I first played it.

Maybe Right After Persona 5 Was The Wrong Time To Try It?

I entered the Persona series with P5. As an avid Zelda fan, I teased my brother about Breath of the Wild taking 2017’s Game of the Year title from Persona 5, but he stood his ground. Instead of engaging me in playful debate, like he has been since we began gaming together on our shared Nintendo 64 in the late ‘90s, he replied, “No, if there’s anyone I know who does, you need to play Persona.” He described it as “Hot Topic Pokemon,” going on to mention demons and adventures and cute characters and dungeon-crawling galore – okay,🎐 enough said, sign me up.

He sat with me as I began the game, too. We shared the experience of me figuring out what the heck the Metaverse was, meeting Ryuji and Morgana and my pervy teacher Kamoshida, and then awakening to Arsene. When he was confident that I was hooked, he left me to my own devices to continue feeding the fire, and continue I did. I’ve been a completionist as a hobby long before it became my full-time job to be one, and I finished vanilla Persona 5 with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:126 hours of playtime and a full Compendium. That game consumed me for weeks, and I was starving for more Persona once🅺 I rolled credits. Curious himself, my brother and I split the cost to buy a PlayStation TV on eBay along with a copy of Persona 4 Golden.

But when the game came a few weeks later, neither of us had the time to play. He dabbled a bit here and there, but I picked it up out of boredom a few months later while I was off from my customer service job with a back injury. I knew I was playin൲g the series backwards, but the differences between the games staggered me when I first arrived in Inaba.

The graphics were completely different, even given the grace of remembering it was a handheld port of an old PS2 game being played on a modern TV. The combat felt somewhat clunky, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I didn’t much care for Teddy as a sidekick, and the only classmate I enjoyed talking with was 🐼Yukiko, so I guess there was merit to saving her first. But this brought me into a dungeon-crawling style I didn’t click with. Coming from Persona 5’s mapped dungeons, generated floors like Mementos being the only real combat wasn’t doing it for me.

Maybe The Story Was Too Dated By The Time I Played?

Don’t get me wrong – I would die for Nanako Dojima, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the twist with the mastermind was very cool, and I sing the Junes theme song to myself at least once a week. I’m not an ardent Persona 4 hater, but the overall story just kind of felt underwhelming at best and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:dated at worst. I thought so even before I tried the game a second time when it port𝐆ed to modern consoles alongside P🔯3P in the winter of 2023, too.

I got my first hint of it during Kanji’s storyline – it’s very 2008 to bully guys for an interest in traditionally non-masculine hobbies like sewing, but Atlus wasn’t even going to full-send his sexuality in the end, anyway. I know being a singular woman in the United States who grew up with plenty of LGBT+ friends and fami💖ly gives🅺 me a different view than a massive Japanese game company, but still. There was also Naoto’s storyline not all that long after, with heavy emphasis on working on exactly what her gender is before she joins the team and tells you, with people referring to her as the Detective Prince.

I can appreciate trying to strike a balance between a personal and public life – my job makes me want to open my social media accounts to use for networking, but my lifelong introversion and dislike of being perceived has kept my personal pages private. I loved the twist in who the culprit was, even if we did do the whole police thing again in Persona 5. Visiting some of the social links, riding bikes with friends, and watching these characters learn to accept themselves and come into their own had 🌄their heartwarming moments.

But when the game you played right before it set you on fire the way Persona 5 did for me, watching kids ✃learn to stand up for🤪 themselves in a way you’re only recently learning to do in your real life, a disconnected “just okay” feels underwhelming.

Maybe A Full Revival Will Turn That All Around?

I knew going into my first playthrough of Persona 4 Golden that it was going to be dated and clunky. It was a PlayStation 2 title, ported to a smaller handheld in 2012, that I was playing years after launch on an HD television. It was an older story from before the Persona series became the JRPG juggernaut it’s become in the West since, and I was riding the high of really, re🌄ally loving Persona 5

Now, after Revival was maybe the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:worst-kept gaming secret in years, I’m hoping there might be another chance for me to actually connect with it. Despite my trepidation, I’m eager to follow its development; I’ll hold my tongue for the moment and tiptoe cautiously back onto the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:oddly-rendered train to Inaba when Persona 4 Revival launches.

But even if I did recognize Tatsuhime Shrine right away, I also recognize that I’m not blown away by Revival just yet. I hope this is what it takes to make me fall in love with P4 as deeply as I love the other modern Persona titles, but I’d be lying if I said 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Yu Narukami running for a few seconds has me ready to preorder. And we all reme🦹mber what happened in Persona 4 when people lied to themselves about their true feelings, right? No thanks.