The best thing about Persona 3 was the way the cute kids would slowly put a gun to their head and wince just before they pulled the trigger. Every time you needed to summon a Persona it looked like they just couldn’t take it any more and decided to end their teenage lives. It was thought provoking, shocking and hilarious all at once. And it’s been taken out of Persona 4.

Why? Because it gave the game a bad reputation as you can’t have kids shooting themselves. But what’s giving Persona 4 a bad reputation is the incredibly slow and dull start and the constant exposition given by the characters and semi-internal narration. Not from your character of course, he’s still as mute as the last one and just like that last guy he gets involved in the bizarre plot while having to go to school, get a part time job and hang out with friends.

There’s been a murder. Shortly after arriving at a new school your character, you get to name him, gets caught up in a very strange murder mystery. Luckily he’s staying with his uncle who happens to be a detective at the local police department. Within a few days he’s made friends with people at the school, gone to bed, gone to bed a few more times, eaten some ramen, gained points on his intelligence stat for answering a history question correctly and traveled through television into another dimension.

In this dimension he gets attacked by shadows, evil creatures, in randomly generated dungeons, which he and his friends can fend off by summoning their personas, but not shooting themselves in the head. Again it’s all about exploiting the enemies’ weakness to get another turn and again the names of the attacks and spells could have been made a lot clearer. For example a lightning attack is called Zio which is just confusing until you’re about 20 hours into the game and don’t have to keep looking it up in the game’s glossary.

It mightn’t have been so bad if the plot wasn’t explained to you over and over, and how the kids are all so slow on the uptake. You’ve usually worked out what’s going on a good 15 to 20 minutes before their speech finally ends and you can get on with the game. Oh and you always have to hit X to get whoever’s talking on to their next sentence. We hate that.