Persona 4: The Golden Review

[pokoko]

kupomogli said:

pokoko said:
The only thing I really disagree with is that "Design - 5" part. In my opinion, P4G is one of the best designed games ever made. It's so tight and the pacing is so good. It only starts to drag a bit toward the end when you begin to run out of things to do. With a lot of RPGs, they kind of run into a lull, but P4G pulls you along by controlling the pace.

The only thing that I hated was the ending. I almost threw my Vita.

And also wealth hands. Fuck those cowardly, cheap-ass bastards.

Design isn't just the games pacing problems at times, but that whole paragraph about dungeon design and quests.  The enemies don't drop the items until after the quests activate, and the quests don't activate until "after" you complete the dungeons in the game, each one being the exact same layout as the last.  One main portion of the game and then two thirds of the quests.  I thought a lot about it before posting the review and came to that conclusion. 

Infact, if there was the whole year and no dungeons.  the design would have been much higher, as the whole time management thing is overall pretty good.  It has pacing problems at times, but that's it.

Yeah, I guess that's true.  Dungeons often felts like the weak link.  The quest triggers bothered me at first, especially since I knew that I'd just sold the stuff being asked for, but then I simply stopped selling items until after the quests came up.  Still, yes, it could have been handled better.  I feel like the positives were so strong, though, that they out-weighed the negatives by several tons.