someone who hate all parts of persona 3 please play this so i know whether it sucks or not!

You will not like it.

Dunno what else to say, but it's pretty much Persona 3. Kind of like Gears of War 2 is basically like the first but spiced up a bit.

Neophyte, the character development get better and better as you play the game. The casts during the midgame are very different from P3. I found the characters in P4 to be more likable.

I don't know if it's the English voice acting that does that, but Yukiko (the black hair girl) is really different from Mitsuru in P3.  She isn't that bossy and more polite. The reason why she has no boyfriend is because she's too busy managing the hotel and most of the time, she didn't realize that guys are hitting on her.

I agree to some extent that Yosuke is very similar to Junpei. But somehow I find them different.  You can learn more about the characters by rank up their social link(which is something they should have done in P3. ) so that's probably why I prefer Yosuke than Junpei.

holy shit why do you guys like this series? i haven't played it but from what i've heard it sounds like a big glob of everything shitty with jrpgs/anime.

Well the characters aren't bad, hima. But my first impression was that they are essentially the same. You have a mute hero, a clumsy guy who attempts to hit on some chicks, and the attractive girl who all the guys want to get with. It's not bad, and thankfully there are more characters this time around...but I'd like it to be something different.

But I haven't gotten that far yet, maybe when I get a few hours in I'll come back and see if anything changes. I'm not sure how the story progresses mid game, I didn't like how P3 did that either. Hopefully the game is more story driven, because right now that's what's keeping me interested.

@Neophyte
 Yeah I understand that. That was pretty much my first impression too. But you'll get to see some very different characters later on.

@headphonics
 I think that's what all the life/dating simulation game suffer. It's pretty repetitive and the story doesn't progress much. I think in P4, they solve this by reduce the point require for level up Social Link so that you can meet Social Link event easier.  There are also quests and fishing minigame, which I don't really like it by the way, for you to do too.

My complaint about this game has to be the way you got new equipments at the store.  Why can't the storekeeper just list all the new stuffs in one window instead of saying 'Oh that is XXX. Wait a minute I'm going to make something out of that. Here's YYY'. Repeat this 20 times when you sell almost all of your stuffs.

i haven't been following


but whoever thought it'd be a good idea to put life/dating sim concepts into a jrpg should be shot

i haven't been following


but whoever thought it'd be a good idea to put life/dating sim concepts into a jrpg should be shot

lol those crazi japans

wat will they think off next 

Persona didn't really become popular until the third game.

Which is kinda sad since the second one is WAY better.

It's definitely better where plot and character development is concerned, but the gameplay was utter crap. The battlesystem was about as clunky as can be, although it was still an improvement over the abysmal Revelations: Persona one.

I think the way they streamlined the gameplay was great. They balanced it so you could beat enemies at lightning speed, but you still had to stay on your toes cause they can just as easily kick your ass if you let them.

man i couldn't disagree more
demon contracts, fusion spells with other pt members, multiple persona's for pt members, CONTROLLABLE pt members(thankfully they brought this back in p4).  these are things that should have never been removed.

the knock down system, does not give the enemy the same advantages as you, they don't get the gang up option when your team is down and chances are you attacked the enemy from behind giving your team the first round to themselves(or you hit them face to face which at least guarantees the MC first attack) making it a quick battle, unless you or your computer team-mates do something stupid.

walking though Tarturus was boring(yet somehow better the the p1 dungeons, probably because they are short and not in first person)

rumor system is much more interesting then school/life-sim and really could have been expanded on, though coming up with something new would have been better.

i did enjoy p3(really!), but its got nothing on p2

Which is kinda sad since the second one is WAY better.

Seriously. I feel the games lost it's charm by the third. Now it just seems like the generic jrpg fare.... only this time being self aware... which doesn't exactly make it any more palatable.

I just got done explaining to a friend how broken some of the game mechanics are in this game. For example, the initiative system that allows you to attack the enemy (or not) to determine who gets the initiative in the fight is terribly coded and carries over some prominent flaws associated with it from Persona 3. It's pretty simple, you attack the shadow before it touches you and no initiatives are given. You get the advantage if you hit it in the back and the shadows get it if you are caught off guard, can't swing in time or the game simply doesn't register your attack.

There have been several times when I have hit a shadow in the back and didn't get the initiative in battle. This is pretty annoying because you can't actually sneak up on a shadow without alerting it, so it's pretty much impossible to do but it does work SOMETIMES giving you the illusion that it's functional when it really isn't. Sometimes my weapon will magically not hit the shadow and I'll get hit instead and start off the battle at a severe disadvantage - of course, this is due to the game having poor collision detection. However, I should mention that it sometimes miraculously works in my favor by not giving the advantage to the enemy, even though I missed my strike and got hit. One time, I have even hit the shadow as it approached me and the enemy STILL managed to get the initiative...that shit completely baffles me.

The part that makes it infuriating is when you find yourself up against five strong enemies and they all get to go before you and assault you with a barrage of high level magic and other annoying shit like fear or confuse spells that have a ridiculous success rate of at least 80%. This pretty much spelled disaster for me a few times because the persona I had on the MC was weak against wind and the AI appropriately decided to use Garu multiple times to kill him. The first hit knocked him down and left him with about 10 HP, that SAME enemy got another turn for using a knock-down attack which it used to cast the same spell again. Before I knew it, I had a game over because the main character died. Luckily, I'm on beginner mode and I still had 8 moon tsukubames in my inventory (each one revives your party to max health/SP if the MC dies). Even after using one, the next enemy did the same fucking thing and killed the MC before I could even get a fucking chance to change his persona. After that bullshit, I just reset the game since I had already wasted two of those items in a similar situation prior to that and I wanted to keep them for later on in the game when I absolutely needed them. There's no telling if I would have survived that battle anyway, because Teddie is a fucking faggot sometimes and takes forever to find an escape path.

Anyway, before that, I had just cleared a time-consuming 9 floor dungeon and defeated a mini boss and just needed to get to one of the scarce save points. You can imagine how pissed I was to lose to a few basic enemies that got the upper hand due to a glitch of some kind. But seriously, I expected the game to be a breeze on beginner mode, and yet I still have to level grind and it's already getting tedious because of how similar the game is to 3 (recycled enemies galore). Apparently Atlus boosted the difficulty because of the player now being able to give direct commands to characters, so beginner mode really isn't as easy as it sounds. Quite the opposite actually, I find myself being unable to progress quickly due to items and equipment being so expensive and enemies not dropping enough money. Why the fuck should I spend 20k yen just to restore my party's health while in the TV world? Why are medicines 1K each and only heal like 60HP? That's practically worthless...and why does summoning a level 2 Slime persona cost only about 200-400 less than a much higher level persona (the price is supposed to be level appropriate, but the prices don't reflect that)? So many things don't make sense. I must be missing something because I shouldn't walk out of a dungeon after level grinding and barely have enough to buy one piece of equipment.

This game also has terrible music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvieRMygJ6E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPogJsxnpAM

Did you try selling the stuffs you got from enemies? After all the grinding you should have tons of item by now.  Selling them also bring more equipments into the store. That's the reason why they don't drop that much money.

As for the advantage thing, I think it also has to do with the party agi and tarot card effect. Hit or being hit first just affect the probability.  As for the monsters, if your level is higher than them then it's easier to sneak up on them.  The reason for the price being not that different is probably due to the persona fusion. If it's too low then it'd too easy to create a big persona from keeping on buying low level personas and fusion them.

Personally, I think the difficulty is ok for a Megaten game (I'd even say it's easier than an average megaten game.). I went for Expert mode on my first playthrough and have no problem beating the game. I understand about the lack of healing item at the beginning, but I use food item that you can buy for like 200 or 400 yen instead. Later on you'll be able to heal your sp during you're in the tv world and then you can use healing magic instead.