Persona 4 review

Anime is just like any other genre - most of it is unmitigated shit, with an occasional nugget of goodness lurking deep within the mire. It gets a bad rap because, like the jack-booted imperialistic pricks we are, us privileged folk in the Western World constantly endeavour to grade the rest of the planet against our own halcyon cultural metrics. And, seemingly more so than any other oeuvre, contemporary populist Japanese storytelling is so impenetrable to somebody raised on a steady diet of Hollywood and Murdoch rags that it might as well have been beamed down from Neptune via a tinfoil helmet. It's all about adjusting your expectations accordingly: if you can sit through two consecutive episodes of any anime or anime-related activity without witnessing an act of child molestation or an attempt at humour that causes you to shit your own mind out through the eye of a needle, then it's a culturally significant artifact ranking alongside Beethoven and the Sistine Chapel.

Consequently there is much in Persona 4 that will likely strike the Japano-curious as dashed odd right from the get-go. The initial pacing is absolutely glacial, reducing your involvement to mashing the X button to wade through an interminable procession of expositionary dialogue before your first real battle. Then there's the Social Link system, a sort of in-game Facebook account that forces you to eschew vital dungeon-grinding hours at the whims of your simpering miscreant classmates. Actually, the game doesn't force you per se, but unless you want your player character to end up as a dribbling retard wanking alone in his room by level 20 you'll have to dance to their increasingly annoying tunes. Though it's not made explicitly clear, you actually have a fixed time limit within which to reach the end of Persona 4's storyline, and so this system instills a pervading sense of paranoia, giving you pause to consider whether you're doing what the strategy guide expects you to do at any given moment.

Previous installments of the franchise were less forgiving than the Schutzstaffel, continually presenting you with apparently interchangeable choices, any one of which could irrevocably shag up your save file, and as such I was so petrified at the thought of sitting through the endless fucking introduction again that I bent over sideways to accommodate every wheedling request. Yes, even in Persona 4's electronic fantasy world you cannot escape the sucking gravitational pull of peer pressure, and this makes for one of the most dispiriting gaming experiences ever. Every time you prepare an expedition into dungeonsville, lips smacking at the prospect of invaluable virtual trinkets, some twat phones you up and insists to be taken shopping. You'll want to tell him to fuck off and leave you alone, but of course you'll cave in, led about by the wriststrap of your cellphone like a manacled bitch, all for a handful of Arbitrary Magical Kawaii Kudos Points that only serve to inflate the sense of entitlement of your cosseted chums until they morph into co-dependent time-sponges whose suspiciously fragile existences are sustained only by your CONSTANT FAWNING ATTENTION.

While this may sound somewhat restrictive (and it is - frustratingly so at times) it's a quantum leap forward from Persona 3, which inhaled sharply through its teeth every time you contemplated exhibiting the barest glimmer of free will, and the actual RPG part of the game is satisfyingly streamlined if not a little shallow. You explore the randomly-generated dungeons of an alternate universe with a student exchange program with Silent Hill, murder a succession of demonic creatures, loot treasure chests for loose change, levelling up your party of extradimensional hooligans until you possess sufficient testicular fortitude to defeat a larger, palette-swapped creature, only to be informed that the princess is in another castle. The gimmick here takes the form of the titular Personae, which are like Pokemon that live inside your mind, complementing your anaemic combat abilities with a pre-determined skillset of magical powers and a rock-paper-scissor system of strengths and weaknesses. The player character is, predictably, The Chosen Thing and therefore able to employ a small of army of Personae providing that the relevant tarot card has been looted from a monster's still-twitching corpse, and although it's transparently obvious that this "gotta invoke 'em all" mechanic has been installed mainly to protract the grind for another 23 hours, it does add some much-needed flexibility and variety to the otherwise stodgy combat. The designs of the Personae are pretty snazzy too, mercilessly culled from a hundred mythological and religious texts and given their own wacky aesthetic twist.

Persona 4 is one of those games with an inverse difficulty curve, beginning on a punishing peak and gradually tobogganning down into a gentle valley of piss-simplicity once you've raised your protagonists to the status of Olympian gods. Unfortunately this requires a correspondingly superhuman time investment, which is the game's biggest turn-off. The combat is swift and cerebral enough to stave off the tedium for a while, but the environments are incredibly repetitive and the MMORPG-style eterno-grind left me hankering for something more expedient, like Final Fantasy XII's sublime Gambit system.

Ultimately it's the storylines that have been the Persona series' selling point and Persona 4 is no exception. It's a likeable mish-mash of Twin Peaks, Harry Potter, and CSI: Rural Japan, as an implacable serial killer abducts women through their television sets, leaving them to starve in existential prisons within a world of magic ghosts before stringing their corpses up on telegraph wires. My chief complaint is that, as fucking ever, it's beyond the wit of trained professionals from the X-Files to solve this supernatural whodunnit, and thus left to a team of adenoidal teenagers. Call me cynical if you like, but if a portal to the Phantom Zone opened up in my 26" Sony Bravia I'd want the situation rectified by a crack squad of the hardest, most murderous bastards from the Special Air Service, not a bunch of disenfranchised children. At the risk of sounding like someone who spends his evenings creatively redesigning my forearms with a Gillete Fusion while searching for hidden Satanic messages in Linkin Park songs, I actually think the writers missed a trick in not making the plot a searing satirical treatise on teen angst and disaffection: a story where television sets, the ultimate founts of placatory mind-balm, are subverted to become a surreal purgatory in which your deepest insecurities are given flesh in the form of bizarre ghouls could have carried some real weight. The story is still just interesting enough to warrant your perservance, and it deserves some special attention purely because, normally, there'd be no earthly way that anything as downright peculiar would ever see the light of day over here. In this case, the popularity of previous installments have caused the game to wash up on our shores only after cresting a tidal wave of foaming fanboy spunk, and, for once at least, it's gratifying to see that there's something of genuine outsider merit amid the used tissues and shame.

A word of warning - there is the obligatory harpy-voiced child NPC whose sole contribution to the plot appears to to be periodically crushing your pixellated arse beneath steamrolling great torrents of gurgling sentimental bullshit, but at the time of writing it doesn't seem possible to cause your player character to engage in illicit sex with her, so that's a big plus right there.

Grand Theft Auto 4 review

For all their censor-baiting controversy, we must remember that the first six installments of the Grand Theft Auto franchise have always fundamentally been about as "mature" as curling out a monster bumlog inside a crowded and badly air conditioned lift. Every attempt to evoke a gritty gangster melodrama was balanced out by a moment of abject cartoon stupidity: the original game awarded you bonus points for mowing down Hare Krishnas in a tank, Vice City introduced the time-honoured "fuck a whore to regain health" mechanic, and San Andreas deftly portrayed the urban plight of impoverished black Americans by inviting you to steal jet packs from Area 51 for Peter Fonda.

Grand Theft Auto 4, meanwhile, has simply glided into the eager gobs of the gaming proletariat like a lubed-up Greggs baguette full of hyperbole and wild dreams, wilfully jettisoning everything that might once have been amusing and fun. Gone is the giddy, coke n' Starburst-induced lunacy of old, replaced with a lifeless mess that somehow contrives to be simultaneously grim and gaudy AND incredibly boring, like Tim Westwood remaking Goodfellas for Men & Motors.

Foremost amongst the discarded is the characterisations. Okay, Tommy Vercetti and CJ Johnson might have been psychopathic thugs, but Niko, your morally reprehensible glove-puppet from somewhere frightful in the Eastern bloc, is an utterly unlikeable, emotionless prickwart, a Soviet-made Terminator with a profanity upgrade. This might be a refreshing change of pace from the usual chisel-jawed, all-American analogy for Christ, but if I wanted to play as an nihilistic, ugly, misanthrope from Europe I already have a remarkably authentic first-person RPG called Real Life. Niko has arrived on the shores of Yankdom looking for some unnamed third party upon which to exact revengement, but the storyline is advanced so sporadically that you'll either forget what's happening or make the conscious decision not to give a fuck.

The supporting cast are agreeably thick and generally useless and are therefore orders of magnitude more likeable than your snarky, one-dimensional asylum seeker. However, they're not beyond reproach, because outside of the traditional mission-based gameplay they insist on dragging you away from the storyline by phoning you up and demanding to be escorted to the theatre at the drop of the hat. Yes, Rockstar have at long last perfected the innovative "annoying friend who you don't really like but with whom nonetheless affect a superficial social facade in order to stave off their latent psychotic tendencies" mechanic and, having done so, ensure that you get your money's worth by ejaculating it out of your screen at every available opportunity. Combine this with the ranting roadside loonies spouting excerpts from Foucault's Pendulum and the spam emails for cock pills that show up every time you make use of the utterly pointless internet feature and you begin to wonder what other humdrum real-life inconveniences await us in the inevitable Grand Theft Auto 5. Teatime cold calls from Nigerian con artists? How about a minigame where you have to gingerly coax divots of dog shit out from the soles of your trainers with a toothbrush while trying not to gag?

Furthermore, while the pretensions towards turgid realism in a virtual world where evading conviction for serial murder is as simple as going to sleep are laudable, what do Rockstar think they're playing at by including the Internet inside a computer game? This is a worrying trend in danger of turning into some all-consuming multimedia ouroboros. Once we've accept this shit as de rigueur, it's a slippery slope towards games that include a fully-functional virtual console and virtual copy of the game you're already playing, and before you know it, our plasma TVs have been converted into infinity wells - sinister ontological puzzles of layered fictional universes from which there is no escape.

Also left emasculated by the Realism Bulldozer is the driving mechanic - which is frankly baffling, considering that despite the shooty bits and filigree of sidequests, Grand Theft Auto (see, the clue is in the title) has always been a driving game at heart. I was bitterly disappointed to learn that you can't drive at warp factor stupid all the time, and apart from handful of rare diamond-encrusted ultracars everything handles about as well as greased bricks in the cold vacuum of space. The game seems to be straining to guff the gritty urban experience into your lap, but it falls short, sticking in its anal pubes like a particularly persistent tagnut. The problem is that cities - while vibrant and bustling as the graphics and sound ably display - are, from a vehicular viewpoint, unpleasant and places to be. Once you finally find a decent set of wheels you'll have barely turned a corner before you've compacted it into a tinfoil veneer around a bollard, catapulting your Slavic avatar through the windshield with an urgent reservation at the asphalt buffet. Actually this is one of the best parts of the game, because in a rare condescension to dumb fun, the developers have implemented a bullet-time slowdown feature that allows you to savour the carnage in enough gruesome detail to make David Cronenberg jizz himself in half.

If that's the "auto" part of the game fucked, then at least they've got the "grand" in order. While the remade Liberty City may lack the incongruous diversity of San Andreas, it conveys the metropolis like nothing else committed to silicon. There's a sort of bleary mayonnaise filter on the camera which is obviously there to stop your GPU from going off like Three Mile Island, but at times it creates a transcendental Impressionist wonder - driving across a suspension bridge at dusk with the skyline glittering in the background is an authentic and truly haunting sight, and one of the few memories that linger on even after I've flogged the disc for pennies at Blockbuster.

Ultimately it's these flat impersonations of your own pitiful existence that contrive to make GTA4 a dull and listless affair, but admittedly I'm never going to be able to enjoy it on its own terms, purely because its older brothers and sisters were just too much bloody fun. These were the first true sandbox games, the ones that handed you a rocket launcher and a sprawling cityscape jampacked full of screaming artificial intelligences and positively encouraged you to turn the place into downtown Beirut like the Unabomber with a gutful of sweets and fizzy pop. GTA4 is a wrenching transition from a world which allowed you to binge on cheeseburgers until you resemble the pre-disaster Hindenburg, put on a gimp suit, parachute out of a Harrier jump jet onto the roof of a casino and then proceed to murder its clientele with a foot-long dildo.

For all the predictably awful "comedy" segments on the radio, Grand Theft Auto has just gotten too damn serious for its own good. It's still nominally a sandbox game, only now the best it can offer is anarchy distilled through the brain of an asthmatic accountant from Swindon. While it tries desperately to mitigate this critical pleasure haemorrhage by channelling the inner-city hell as depicted in uncompromising cop shows like The Wire and The Sopranos, it forgets that though these settings are relevant and enthralling to explore via tightly-plotted storylines and controlled camerawork, it's markedly less gratifying to be punted off a boat at midnight with a handful of coins and a bumpicking nonce for a sidekick and told to conquer the lot in the name of some arbitrary vendetta.