r/persona4golden

I’m currently lvl 35 rn playing on hard but having a hard time surviving certain attacks. Anyone got any tips?

I spent like 30 minutes fighting the first final boss and then the second final boss just one shotted me. I ain't gonna even try again 🫩

One of the most common requests for persona 4 revival is that Yu should be a voiced protagonist, while I'm not against the idea of fully voiced protagonists in future Atlus games, I don't think persona 4 should be changed to have one.

Atlus's previous attempts at a voiced protagonist have either not worked, or have had other factors that made it work: 2 voiced protagonists that people use as an example are Will and Ringo but those 2 fall into the former and latter.

Part 1: Will: Maybe it's just me but I found Will really boring in Metaphor, all of his dialogue options were extremely "samey" and never really contributed much to the conversation, and often enough someone like Strohl would decide to talk for Will, there are a couple lines where Will says the same thing regardless of player choice but those lines are extremely dull, most characters have a speech when they awaken but Will just screams "awaken" or for the final battle he just says "come on everyone, let's go" and those lines are exceptions rather than the standard, he usually doesn't have forced lines despite being called a voiced protagonist. While you can say that being silent doesn't really change that, what does help is knowing they're not supposed to be a complex character and they're just whatever you want them to be which is why they usually have more whacky dialogue choices than someone like Will.

Part 2: Ringo: she's one of the only voiced Atlus protagonists that worked in my opinion (Vincent is the best one) but she had circumstances that made her work over Will, for one she just talks a lot more and says actually useful things and 2, her dialogue system while having "samey" options makes it interesting enough to warrant having choices, she usually has 3 options each being meant to "appeal" to 3 very different characters, for example in a mission all of the dialogue choices are about getting the mission done, but one choice prioritizes getting it done no matter what, one is about making sure there's no casualties and another is about is making sure the team is safe first and foremost, I don't really see Atlus restructuring their whole dialogue options for a system like this however since it'll be a lot of work and really different from p3 and p5.

Giving Yu his character arc from the anime would be sloppy for a video game: So Yu's arc in the anime was about his fear of being alone, it got 2 episodes dedicated to it, being the Mitsuo episode and the finale, the first episode about his character would probably need to be longer for it to be more convincing, where Yu was given an illusion about beating Mitsuo and having time pass where everyone forgets about him, to do that we'd probably need to see Mitsuo captured which will add a bunch of time between another with him, the amount of time there was between the first and second fight in the anime was around 10 minutes but like I said it'll probably be longer since we'll need more gaps filled to actually convince some people which I don't see working in a gameplay sense. The finale is a completely different can of worms, in that episode we actually see Yu confront his shadow, though putting into a game gives it some issues, for one it happens during the Margaret fight which is a new game plus exclusive so either Yu's character arc is only completed if you do ng+ or they'd need to move Margaret to the base game while adding a new ng+ boss or move his shadow to a different scene in an extremely bloated finale, there's already so much happening in the finale especially in golden that I don't think adding another boss and another scene is the best idea because of that. The original was able to get away with it because Yu wasn't really a character, he was a silent protagonist so he didn't really need an arc.

Most dialogue would need to be rewritten if Yu was voiced: like I said before Will was really boring and a big part of that was because he barely chimed in, so the natural solution would be to have Yu talk more, the issue with that was the original script was written without Yu talking in mind so most dialogue would need to be rewritten, while you could say to just use the script in the anime, that was written to where Yu would only say one thing so they'd need to rewrite every single dialogue choice which I don't think is worth it for Atlus since their games have always sold pretty well despite having a silent protagonist.

Silent protagonists work in Japan with their values and beliefs: if I don't explain this well, watch the video by Lady Virgilia on the concept of silent protagonists. But basically in Buddhism, the biggest cause of suffering is the "ego" or focussing on yourself, without having a "self" the silent protagonists become a literal embodiment of good which is a big part of their appeal in Japan, you can disagree and I get why you would, but this is how their Japanese audience feels and the west is usually an afterthought with Atlus

Silent protagonists have more personality than you think: so a big part of writing a silent protagonist in the persona series is "how should we make them silent?" and they've had interesting results because of it, Makoto was quiet because he was apathetic, due to his parents death, or Joker was someone who wanted to talk more but tried to keep his mouth shut because of his record.

Silent protagonists give the opportunity for other mediums to interpret a personality: this one is for silent protagonists in general but a big appeal for stuff like the persona animes and mangas for fans is to see what the writers do with their personality, a big reason people didn't like the persona 5 anime was because they didn't do much with Joker, while a highlight of the p3 movies and p4 anime was their protagonist, it gives other people the chance to do something new with them since a silent protagonist doesn't work as well in an anime or manga.

It's a series staple at this point: while innovation is a good thing, it's also important to remember that if you stray too far, it's barely the same franchise anymore, look at final fantasy, and silent protagonists are one of the staples of the persona franchise so why change it when you can still work with it? that's also why persona is probably never going to college. And if Atlus is trying to make Reload, Revival and Royal into a trilogy, why make one vastly different from the rest? they should either all be different or all similar (I'd rather they all be different tbh)

Tldr: Wow this was way longer than I was expecting but basically I don't think Yu should be voiced and isn't worth it on Atlus's part because of their previous attempts either not working, having a reason they did that p4 won't have, his character and dialogue needing to be rewritten, and the fact that they still have appeal in Japan, and giving the anime and manga more of a reason to exist. When people say they want Yu voiced, what they really want is Persona 4: the animation: the game