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What is this game??? What kind of game is it, what do you do. I've heard a lot of people talking about this game and I have no idea what it is. It'd be awesome if someone would fill me in on this game, thanks guys!
A Japanese RPG with some life-simulation stuff. Go to school, interact with people, do stuff to gain extra abilities and / or stats. That's about it.
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crdy123: What is this game??? What kind of game is it, what do you do. I've heard a lot of people talking about this game and I have no idea what it is. It'd be awesome if someone would fill me in on this game, thanks guys!
Persona 4 is a JRPG that I think is really good. It's not very traditional (nothing like Final Fantasy), it's combat system is deep and interesting (where you actually focus on looking for and exploiting weaknesses).

It's hard for me to really explain it as a way to make sense though, but the PErsona games are a subset of the Shin Megami Tensei games...they're known for being very hard though, it's sort of a 'know what you're getting into' type of thing. You have to manage dungeon delving on top of the character's life as a student and his social life (which, I actually enjoyed, as it lets you bond with your party members and get to know them more).
I'm kind of hesitant to suggest the obvious but I'm going for it anyway. There is a let's play on YouTube which may be a good way to get acquainted. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pDmLTYUUpk
It's a dungeon crawler/dating sim.

essentially you fight monsters at night, and go to school and interact with npc's during the day. If you're interested, you should start with Persona 3 imo.
Honestly the difficulty of SMT games tend to get overrated, to make people feel better about themselves for playing a "hard" niche series. You just have to actually use magic and stuff like buffs and debuffs and such instead of just mashing attack. Like in Devil Survivor, it's not really hard, it's just that physical mc/party builds are absolutely terrible (because there's only enough skills to make one good physical attacker, and you already have a physical oriented character in your party for most of the game) and grinding is pretty much pointless so you can't use it to fix your mistakes.

Most of the difficulty is in the final bosses and optional bosses some of which can get pretty cheap, like the Demifiend which basically has only one viable strategy and still kinda sorta heavily luck based. But the difficulty level in say P1 and 2 (at least the first part anyway) is considered to be pretty trivial even if you jack up the difficulty, and the only things that can really kill you can kill you on pretty much any difficulty. P3, most of the game is trivial but the Tartarus bosses have a tendency to be random spikes and ebbs, and pretty much all the difficulty is from being forced to rely on shitty AI that doesn't even work properly and the inability to customize your party members. Thankfully P4 has a more even difficulty throughout.
It's a game that takes ideas from a JRPG, Pokemon and a visual novel, and shoves it all into one amazing PS2 game. It came out in 2008, so it's not dated at all, and the game is just...amazing on every level. It's my personal favorite game of all time.

Also, I recommend starting with this one over Persona 3. They're much different games, even though they have almost the exact same idea and gameplay.
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ovoon: It's a game that takes ideas from a JRPG, Pokemon and a visual novel, and shoves it all into one amazing PS2 game. It came out in 2008, so it's not dated at all, and the game is just...amazing on every level. It's my personal favorite game of all time.

Also, I recommend starting with this one over Persona 3. They're much different games, even though they have almost the exact same idea and gameplay.
Mmm, I second starting with 4.

Persona 3 and 4 are really hard to talk about until you just 'get them' because essentially most elements of persona 4 don't sound that good... But combined they make something really special.

Persona 4 is being ported to the vita and Persona 3 felt much better as a portable title.

Also, they aren't that hard compared to many other games, you will get killed if you are stupid though.
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mrcrispy83: Honestly the difficulty of SMT games tend to get overrated, to make people feel better about themselves for playing a "hard" niche series. You just have to actually use magic and stuff like buffs and debuffs and such instead of just mashing attack. Like in Devil Survivor, it's not really hard, it's just that physical mc/party builds are absolutely terrible (because there's only enough skills to make one good physical attacker, and you already have a physical oriented character in your party for most of the game) and grinding is pretty much pointless so you can't use it to fix your mistakes.

Most of the difficulty is in the final bosses and optional bosses some of which can get pretty cheap, like the Demifiend which basically has only one viable strategy and still kinda sorta heavily luck based. But the difficulty level in say P1 and 2 (at least the first part anyway) is considered to be pretty trivial even if you jack up the difficulty, and the only things that can really kill you can kill you on pretty much any difficulty. P3, most of the game is trivial but the Tartarus bosses have a tendency to be random spikes and ebbs, and pretty much all the difficulty is from being forced to rely on shitty AI that doesn't even work properly and the inability to customize your party members. Thankfully P4 has a more even difficulty throughout.
I found a lot of my problems with Persona 4 were, the beginning dungeons until you develop a few party members, and trying not to get distracted. I call it difficult because even the non-boss battles can be dangerous if you do something stupid (or they sometimes just get lucky shots). and compared to the rest of it's genre it will punish you for thinking you can get away with anything.

I find that once you start planning on how you're going to end up and how you're going to get there, then you really don't have any actual problems with the game.

@link 6616: I actually haven't played through P3P, but I think the biggest help for me was the fact that you can control your entire party in P4, which is a godsend to me because you don't have to worry about compensating for a dumb mistake by the game.