I have never played a Persona (or Atlus) game before in my life. In general, for a long time I had very little interest with anything from Japan. Anime, manga and anything with that art style. My experiences with JRPGs comes solely from Final Fantasy games. I've owned a Vita for probably a year and a half now and in all that time everyone has told me that P4G has been the game to play. It went up on sale on the PSN a while ago for twenty euro bucks so I took the dive and went for it.

In this blog I aim to chronical my time with it as someone who knows nothing of what to expect from it from either an Atlus game, an anime(?) game, a JRPG that isn't Final Fantasy and someone whose unfamiliar with most of what I imagine the culture the game comes from.

I'm about 12 or so hours in, I've just finished up getting Kanji out of the TV realm. I'm enjoying the story so far. I didn't really think the idea of playing a game as a teenage boy with my time divided up into at most 4 periods a day would be that interesting but it is. I decided to focus on studying, drama and took a job as a translator, which ended up syncing up well so far.

I think I'm enjoying the story and the "real" world a lot more right now and that mostly comes down to my biggest complaint about the game. Which is the music. Not all of the music. Specifically the battle music. I hate it. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have repeating lyrics. The actual melody is fine but the vocals just drive me mad. Especially since you can wind up in very short fights. I'm already sick of hearing "It's a war out there everyday" and having the fight end around the line "It's time to make history, yeah!". Combined with Teddie constantly telling me things I'm aware of it makes the dungeon/combat part of the game pretty irritating.

The combat itself is enjoyable though and I like the little things they've put in like "1 more", team up attacks and when Chei punts an opponent to oblivion. I hope there's a few more actions like that in it. And the flow of dungeons is just right. Several times I've felt like I need to go back out to Teddie and leave it for the day but then I end up getting some more SP and I'm good to go on. I really appreciate that there are no random encounters and that for the most part you can straight up avoid fights.

The characters all seem interesting. Yosuke and Chei make for some good comedy. Not too big a fan of Yukiko. She's not terrible, I just don't have much of an interest in the story of a good looking girl set to inherit a successful business but whose not happy with the cards she's been dealt.

I can definitely see myself playing more of it, I dunno if I could do a second play through though. That will all depend on how tolerant I end up becoming of hearing "It's a war out there everyday" over and over.