Persona 4 Golden

Persona 4 Golden is an expanded version of the cult JRPG from PlayStation 2, and on PlayStation Vita it became the single strongest argument for owning the console at all. You play a student who moves for a year to stay with relatives in the sleepy rural town of Inaba, only for the quiet backwater to soon be stirred up by a series of mysterious deaths linked to a strange television channel that appears after midnight. The hero and his classmates discover that it's actually possible to step into the television, and they find themselves in a foggy world where the suppressed sides of human personalities take the shape of monsters.

This is where the game's dual rhythm comes from. During the day you go to school, take tests, work part-time jobs, and above all cultivate relationships with the people around you — the so-called Social Links, which directly strengthen your combat abilities. In the afternoons and at night you descend through the randomly arranged floors of the television world, using a weakness system in turn-based battles: hitting an opponent with the right element knocks them down and opens the door for a devastating all-out attack from the whole party. Collecting and fusing Personas, the summoned beings reflecting each character's psyche, gives builds surprising depth.

The Golden version added a new character, extra story threads, an epilogue, new social activities, and online features that let you see how other players chose to act in the same situations. On Vita the game looks great: a stylized yellow-and-black interface, a sharp display, and smooth performance make it a showcase of what the small console can do. The soundtrack, mixing pop, jazz, and funk, is among the most distinctive in the genre, and the small-town atmosphere with its rains, fog, and changing seasons remains unmatched to this day. Critics received the game enthusiastically, and it ranks among the highest-rated titles on the entire platform. Even today it remains the ideal entry point into the Persona series, because the combination of detective story, school-life routine, and turn-based combat has aged remarkably well.