Persona 4 - TV Tropes

Persona 4 is an Urban Fantasy Role-Playing Game, and the fourth numbered sequel in the Shin Megami Tensei JRPG franchise's Persona sub-series, developed by Atlus for the PlayStation 2 and later the PlayStation Vita and PC. It was released in Japan and North America in 2008 and in Europe in early 2009. In April 2014, the original game became available for download on the Play Station Network for PlayStation 3.

You are an Ordinary High-School Student, staying with your uncle and young cousin in the rural town of Inaba for a year while your parents are working abroad. Soon after settling in, a series of impossible murders begin to rock the sleepy town: victims suddenly disappear and their bodies are found hanging upside down from telephone poles with no obvious cause of death. All while the sleepy town is undergoing a massive upheaval when a respected politician undergoes a messy divorce and the small town's bonds are being eroded by the presence of bigger businesses, causing distrust in the town.

Meanwhile, you decide to check out a new Urban Legend called the "Midnight Channel": supposedly, if you stare into the screen of a switched-off television set on a rainy midnight, an image will appear that shows your soulmate. However, when you try it out, you instead discover a strange alternate world on the other side of the television screen, shrouded in a perpetual, oppressive fog.

Someone or something is kidnapping innocent people and throwing them into this world, where the monstrous Shadows that inhabit it will eventually kill them. Using a mysterious inner power called "Persona", you and your friends form an investigation team to rescue the kidnapped victims before they are killed and solve the mystery of who is responsible.

Persona 4 takes place in the same universe as all the other Persona games, and begins almost exactly a year after the events of "The Answer" in Persona 3 FES. The game runs off the Persona 3 engine and even on the same console, but with some upgrades to the graphics and different game mechanics. Most of Persona 3's main features return, including the popular Social Links and the calendar day system - just as in Persona 3, the game takes place within an entire school year.

One major difference is that instead of the player climbing one long tower for much of the game's combat, the player instead enters the TV World and has access to multiple dungeons that unlock as the story progresses. Plotwise, the setting is rural versus the urban setting of Persona 3, which creates an entirely different feeling and plays against the game's main themes. Notably, some of the sexual overtones present in earlier Persona titles have returned in this one.

An Updated Re-release, Persona 4 Golden, was released in 2012 for the Play Station Vita. Its new content includes new events, two new Social Links, new gameplay mechanics, enemies and areas, new endings and on top of all of that, a completely redone opening animation by Madhouse. Golden was later released on Steam on June 13, 2020, making it the first mainline Persona title to hit non-Sony platforms since the first Persona^note , and on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch on January 19, 2023.

Spin-offs 

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I am a Troper... The true self...

• Tropes A to F
  • Foreshadowing
• Tropes G to N
  • Mythology Gag
• Tropes O to Z

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"We're all trapped in a maze of relationships,
Life goes on with or without you
I swim in the sea of the unconscious,
I search for your heart, pursuing my true self..."

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