This post is just going to be some ramblings I have after completing Persona 4 Golden in 2023. Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. The game has amazing music, UI, art style and theme. The team has always been excellent in these aspects and are often brought up in case studies in my classes. With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on my playthrough.

As a disclaimer, this is just my first playthrough. Here's some context before I put my thoughts:

• I followed a guide for awhile then decided to do things my own.
• I played lots of P3P, so I'm familiar with some of the mechanics.
• I did not manage to max all social links, so I won't be focusing commenting about characters yet. If I made any comments about them it's hopefully just from the main story.

Alright, let's talk gameplay.

The first thing I noticed in P4G was the breaking down of dungeons into 10 levels per 'section'. When I thought about it, P3P also did that so why did I feel it's different in P4G? I suspect that the different is in presentation.

P3P presents its dungeon as a tall tower (Tartarus) that our characters need to climb.
Even though they segmented Tartarus into 10 level sections, it felt like I was climbing a tower forever.

P4G dungeon 'sections' have their own theme and identity, and are strongly tied to a character in the game. Every section you complete in P4G is directly tied to some kind of a closure in the story. This allowed me to go "Oh this person's dungeon is 10 levels", instead of "Argh, okay I managed to complete 10 out of 100 floors of a dungeon".

This is possibly an interesting case study, where two ideas that sound similar on paper can have different outcomes depending on execution. Perhaps it's because I did not 'see' an end to the dungeon in P4G, and with each section strongly tied to the story, it diverts my attention to the story and characters themselves.

But though that is an improvement, a part of me can't help but feel that the story took a hit because of that. Generally the story and the development of characters felt oddly paced, compared to P3P. It might be because the story is so strongly coupled with the dungeons.

Having the story tied to an RPG pacing is always a difficult problem to deal with which I don't really have an answer for. The general problem is this: the player needs to experience mechanics in a certain pacing so that they wouldn't feel bored. In P4G, it's the loop of game progression where players explore the town -> fight in a dungeon -> explore town -> etc... to advance the story. This means that a dungeon must be introduced every once in a while; otherwise players might spend too much of their time "exploring the town".

Since in P4G, the ideal is that every playable character gets their dungeon, and that a dungeon reveals a major part of the character and their development, I can see why the story can seem awkwardly paced at certain points. For example, I felt that some characters had not much depth to them because they are tied to the earlier dungeons, which means that they must have a quick personality for players to emphathize, then quickly introduce some insecurities in time to have a theme for a dungeon.

Maybe, just maybe, that's why the first-year characters seemed more interesting than the second-year characters; they were the later ones to be introduced and by then, the writer has a lot of room to play with.

Other than that, another thing I noticed is that the earlier trash mob fights are more interesting than P3P's. We got over the pokemon-style strategy of just finding all elements to deal with enemy weaknesses really fast. Status debuffs and buffs felt much more effective in P4G than P3P, which is good!