To a make a long story short, the game is about the mystery of who has been targeting and killing people in the little town of Inaba. The victims have all wound up in strange positions, dangling from television poles and such. The police have no idea of who the suspect could be or how they are doing this. Also odd is the fact that victims appear on the Midnight Channel, a channel that only appears at midnight, before they are killed.

Even though the general system of the game (dungeon crawling + soul linking,) is the same as Persona 3, the experience, itself, seems different. For one thing, the main characters have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing for most of the time, unlike the characters in P3. These guys are mainly following their own instincts in trying to solve the case. It’s nice to play as people who aren’t total sheep.

And the game doesn’t really just take you out on a ride for the whole mystery. There are actually times where you have to figure out some things for yourself. This is usually done by talking to random citizens and finding out what they’ve heard around time. A few times, you have to piece out things with little input from the townsfolk (although, it still isn’t that hard.) It’s still nice that you at least have to do some things instead of just sitting there like a log, like the opening to the game.

From a technical standpoint, Persona 4 is a much more refined game than its predecessor. For one thing, the menus don’t take an obnoxious amount to load. For another, you can actually equip things on your party members without having to talk to them (which was pretty slow because of the time it took to load up the menu and dialog for each person.)

It’s also nice that they also included more things for you to do at night. I’m not sure about you guys, but later in the game in P3, I found that my only options to do at night were to either go into Tartarus or just go straight to bed. In this game, there are 4 different soul links that can only be done at night. Even if you don’t feel like doing social links, you can do other part-time jobs if you need the money/stat boosts.

Not only that, but they changed the dungeon aspects a bit, too. Instead of having one big and long dungeon like Tartarus, you have lots of smaller ones that are more closely related to the events that are going on in the story. The biggest dungeon is about 11 floors big. Most of the dungeons have only one or two minibosses as well. This makes dungeon crawling a bit less tedious than what it was in the previous game.

One thing that they removed that might make some people upset is what happens when you return from dungeon crawling back to the base point. Well, more like what doesn’t. Gone are the days where your party returns to full health when you return. Nothing at all gets healed, actually. There is an option to pay a fox for SP healing, though, but at the beginning of the game, the costs are outrageous (at the beginning, it can cost about 40K yen to get a full party’s SP healed.) This makes it a bit harder to do a dungeon in one day, minimizing the amount of time you have to soul links. I actually don’t think I beat a single dungeon in a day except for the very very very last one which the game forces you to do in a day.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of the previous game or new to the series, I would definitely recommend trying this one out. If, for some reason, you hated the previous game, then I wouldn’t really bother playing this. But you probably knew that already.

Picture source is Tamamon from the neoGAF forums.