Up until recently, I’ve never taken a shot at a Persona game before.  Both my college roommates, Chris and Paul, were big fans of the series and both of them had played Persona 3 and 4 during school, and I remember seeing snippets here and there.

I also recall calling Paul a whimp every time he skipped Shuffle Time due to fear of losing the fight exp with penalty cards.

Sooooooooo I loaded up Persona 4 this week and…

…omg wat.

It takes two hours to get to anything that even resembles a video game.  This is not a joke.  You basically press X to advance text for two hours before any gameplay happens.  That’s absolutely insane.

The major issue for me however, is that the gameplay subverts the narrative.  According to the folks on Twitch chat, the idea is to go into the dungeons, get X amount of the way through it, and then leave and come back the next day, so on and so forth.

Which is all well and good, but… people are dying.  The player is told that every time you go on a rescue mission, you have until a foggy day before the person dies.

In my personal (sane) opinion, any time not spent in the direct act of rescuing that person is wasted time.  Sure, you have a couple of days… but what if you wait until the last day and you’re not strong enough?  Making matters worse is that the characters are trying to live their regular lives while all this nonsense is going on.

YOUR FRIENDS LIVES ARE IN THE BALANCE AND YOU’RE FAFFING ABOUT.

Wat.  All my wat.