After Persona 3 Reload, you pretty much know what to expect for Persona 4 Revival. It’s not a drastic overhaul of the beloved title, keeping the same story beats and overall gameplay the same but getting it all up to par with Persona 5. That doesn’t make me any less excited for the game, as sometimes you just want to get away to Inaba; goodness knows the town could use some love. I recently attended a SEGA event where I got to play about two hours of the game split into three sections, and love was the operative word here in every sense.
My demo started in the Investigation Team’s second visit to the TV World, just before the protagonist awakens to his Persona. Having played P4G far too many times, it was immediately uncanny to me how I could now rotate the camera to look down the street. It’s a small thing, but seeing this place again without the fixed camera angles is surreal. The game looks fantastic too, and the models all seem to be a slight step up from P3R. Character portraits also have a nice flat shading to them that reminds me of the anime. Appropriate to the TV theme, everything has also been covered in a massive amount of film grain, making your display look like it’s actually a projector and screen setup. I generally don’t like film grain in games, but it fits really well here.
Once I got done admiring the gas station, I finally proceeded with the plot. The script here feels like it’s seen a lot more changes than P3R did. Teddie was a lot more distant—literally walking further back from the party—and less… helpful to Yu and Yosuke, while Yosuke was a lot more distrustful of our beary favorite mascot (yes, there are more bear puns). That’s for good reason on both sides, as Teddie is expecting Shadows to descend at any time, which leads to our first anime cutscene. The animation is very similar to Golden’s new cutscenes and just a bit more detailed than character portraits. It looks stellar, with a lot more movement and effects.
Of course, the first thing I did in battle was admire the new UI and menus. There’s so much style here, with the game drawing on the cards the party crushes to summon their personas, various TV effects and iconography, and of course a ton of yellow and orange. I especially love the command menu, which looks like an old-school TV dial, and the Persona summoning menu, which shows the character’s persona and skills in their head before they summon. The actual layout of the controls is more similar to Metaphor and P5, with basic attacks on the left face button and guarding on the right bumper, but I’m sure you’ll be able to remap everything to your liking in the full game.
The first battle is always easy, and this shadow went down after a few Zio casts. This demo was set to easy difficulty, and a feature called Prime Time was also specially set to build up, so as someone more used to Normal or Hard, this was a cakewalk. The story and dialogue were definitely the focus in this demo, and Yosuke’s conversation with his Shadow just before the boss fight felt a lot more raw than the original or Golden. It still follows exactly the same beats, but even though Yosuke is denying being unhappy with his lot in life, you can tell he knows it’s true deep down. Maybe it’s Paul Castro Jr.’s performance; the man can scream real good, but I felt a lot more fear and resentment from the character here. The same goes for Chie’s awakening in the next demo segment. I adore P4’s voice cast, including the original and Golden voices, and while I’m a bit sad they’re not reprising their roles here, what I’ve heard is great. Teddie’s is still going to take some getting used to, as his voice is a lot deeper here, but I’m always glad to hear new voices in games.
The boss fight with Shadow Yosuke goes as you’d expect: cast Zio to knock him down, deal some damage, and repeat until dead. He can, of course, knock you down with a wind-aspected move, which you can guard to avoid, but he never used the extra turn he got from it for anything but laughing at me. Everything I said about the previous cutscene also applies post-boss fight. The writing and acting are both top-notch.
Next, we had a dungeon demo, specifically the section of Yukiko’s Castle where Chie runs off ahead of the party. I got a taste of the normal dungeon crawling gameplay here, and it seems like the game is still using randomly generated floors with a few pre-made ones sprinkled in. If you just want to head to the stairs as quickly as possible, though, there’s a new sparkling trail that’ll take you right to them. Hopefully you can toggle it on or off in the full game, as I prefer to explore on my own. There’s also more reason to explore, with breakable TV cubes littered around, which can restore your HP and SP or give you items. All you have to do is attack them with the left face button, which is also how you start a battle with a Shadow, just like P3R. You also have a new guard move, as it’s harder to sneak up on Shadows, and blocking, then retaliating, will give you an easy advantage at the start of battle.
Starting battle with advantage not only lets you go first, but it also gives you this game’s new battle theme, which I vastly prefer over this rendition of “Reach Out to the Truth”. In fact, I wasn’t really sold on all the returning tracks here. They lack the punch of the originals, with these arrangements sounding a lot softer. It does fit the small-town vibe better, but the catchy pop and rock is a huge part of Persona 4’s appeal for me. I don’t want to make a judgment here; it’s just an early preview after all, and these songs might just take time to grow on me.
Exploring dungeons and battling do feel like big steps up from the original Persona 4 and Golden, though, as those versions did feel a little slow and stiff in comparison. Here, it’s all about letting you get to the action, flowing in and out of combat as you please. It feels great and is far from lacking in style, especially with the results screen. Whoever dealt the final blow will smack the camera towards a big stack of CRTs, just like that key art or the original game, which will then display your experience and items earned as your party poses around them. It’s super cool, and I never got tired of seeing it.
Chie’s Shadow fight went about the same as Yosuke’s, just a bit longer, though I will say her head no longer looks like a banana, appearing more like the pointy hood it's intended to be. Chie’s awakening, like Yosuke’s, felt a lot more pointed, and you can really hear the guilt in her voice as she denies her other self. It seems like Anne Yatco will deliver a fantastic performance as well.
After this demo, I got to spend 3 days in Inaba as I wished, though I couldn’t capture this portion as it wasn’t quite as polished as the rest of the demo. I spent the first two days focusing on Social Links and getting my Social Stats up, heading into the dungeon on the third day. Inaba is stunning here, from the shopping district to the school entrance where the light streams in through the doors. In the original, I always felt Inaba was pretty lively despite some of the shuttered stores, but you can definitely feel more of a stark contrast between the shopping district and Junes here. There are construction signs littered about, old posters (including several for Mayumi Yamano, the Midnight Channel’s first victim), and everything just kinda feels run down.
After exploring the town and noticing that the moped from P4G does in fact return here, I spent time with my first Social Link, Marie. I didn’t notice any changes in the writing here, but Social Links are fully voiced now, which is great. I took Marie to get some Fsteak (yes, the Hiimdaisy joke is still here and hearing it spoken aloud is transcendent), and got the Aeon link to level 1. This not only gave me an experience bonus when fusing a Persona of that arcana, but it also instantly gave me a new Persona. The same happened with my next link, the basketball team. It was weird at first, and made me worry about my stock being full in the future when starting new links, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. It instantly connects the two styles of gameplay, social and combat, in a substantial way, and allows you to spread out fusing more often rather than just after a dungeon crawl.
Heading into the dungeon on the third day, I got to test out Revival’s newest gameplay feature: Prime Time. Like Reload’s Theurgies, this is a meter that builds up as you fight, and you can activate it on any character’s turn with the right trigger. Unlike Thurgy, though, this is party-wide, and it doesn’t matter who activates it. Turning on Prime Time will give your party a set of totally free actions according to how many icons you had. Since I had three people in my party here, I had three icons, so presumably once you get a full party you’ll have four (or more, as this system really feels like Press Turn from the greater Shin Megami Tensei series), and you can freely Baton Pass the turn between party members. While Prime Time is powerful, especially since all actions ignore resistances during it, it doesn’t feel as game-breaking as Theurgies. You still have to put the work in to use it effectively.
Case in point, I played up to the 5th floor boss of Yukiko’s Castle, and even on easy mode that thing was fairly difficult to take down. I still wouldn’t call it hard by any stretch of the imagination, but it was better than the one or two-hit enemies would take. Without access to a fire ability to hit the boss’s weakness, I relied on Prime Time to deal my real damage, using some of my normal turns to buff the party and debuff the boss. I could see it becoming a key part of strategies later on in the game, especially with a sub-optimal party composition.
I knew Persona 4 Revival would be great, but I don’t think I knew just how good it would be until I put my hands on it. The game is so addictive I accidentally spent most of the event on it and had to plan out the rest of my day to fit most of the other games at the event in. I’ll admit I was initially skeptical of a Persona 4 remake, but now I’m totally sold. I mean, more sold than I already was as a massive Persona and SMT fan.
Persona 4 Revival releases February 17th, 2027 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.
