Persona 4 and Prince of Persia Impressions

Two games have come out over the last couple weeks that I'm interested in - Prince of Persia and Persona 4. I have them both right now, one in from GameFly and, the latter, I picked up at GameStop yesterday.

Monday I got quite a bit of play time in with Prince of Persia. I wasn't quite sure about this game because, as I've said before, I'm not really an action game fan. But, this seems like more than just an action game, in fact there's a moderately low level of actual fighting involved. Through the first four "levels" so far, the majority of time has been spent going to and from various story locations. At each of those locations you would fight a boss, and then be done with it. One time I ran into a single enemy outside of a boss fight.

I like this. I'd much prefer focusing on the running, jumping, wall climbing and swinging that is the platforming part of the game as opposed to the beat-em-up part. Also, its not as difficult figuring out what to do and where to go, let alone performing actions, as a first person title like, say, Mirror's Edge (sorry, had to take that shot).

I'll touch on this briefly now and possibly more in depth in my actual review - a lot of people are complaining about the ease of play. There's one difficulty and that difficulty level seems awfully easy. Its nearly impossible to get a "Game Over" screen. Every time you miss a jump or fail to grab hold of something you should have, your ever-faithful traveling companion Elika is there to save you. On the one hand, this saves you from repeatedly having to go through a "restart from last checkpoint" mechanic. On the other hand, it lessens the consequences of performing badly. In my opinion, the former is more important than the latter. Also, in my opinion, the story and game mechanics are more important than some insane difficulty roadblocks that the developers could have decided to throw in.

Last, but not least, the graphics are absolutely beautiful.

Persona 4, how I love thee. Let's backtrack a bit. Persona 3 came out and I pretty much ignored it, given the fact that I had a lot of other games to play at the time. Persona 3 FES came out and I got it, figuring it was high time I did so. Played it, loved it, best RPG I had played in a long while. Fast forward to yesterday - Persona 4 finally hit store shelves here in North America. Picked it up (I had it pre-ordered) and played it for several hours last night. I got engrossed in it as quickly as I did in the previous game. I'm sure I'll review it, as well, in the coming days, so I'll hold off most of my thoughts until then. Needless to say, this game might actually be better than its predecessor, if that's even possible. My PS2 will definitely be working overtime in the coming weeks.