How I Lost Respect For ‘Persona 4 Golden’

Any time the Playstation Vita is mentioned in passing, whether as a sincere lamentation of portable Sony gaming or a meme of how few remarkable games have stuck around from that platform and era, Persona 4 Golden (P4G) is not far to follow. For many years, and for many people, including myself, the prospect of getting hands on a Vita was synonymous with playing P4G. Thus, when Atlus announced that they’d be porting the long-relegated Persona 4 Golden from its isolation on the Playstation Vita, I immediately snagged a copy on Steam. 2020 was a good year to be a Persona fan. 

Comparisons Within the Persona Series

Though the Persona series has only gained mainstream popularity within the past few years in the wake of the massively successful Persona 5, the series has maintained a well-earned cult status for years among JRPG fans. I recall picking up my first Persona game, Persona 3: FES, during my freshman year of college at my friend’s recommendation. I enjoyed Persona 3 so much that this same friend and I would routinely burst out into spontaneous song, “Baby baby baby baby baby baby,” at seemingly any interval, per the catchy “Mass Destruction” battle theme. Fast forward to 2020 when Persona 5 Royal (P5R) managed to tide me over during a rough transition from teaching in a classroom to teaching from my kitchen, and I found myself with a rekindled love for the series that I didn’t realize was possible.  

Despite my rekindled love for the Persona series – be it a general burnout on high school life simulation, turn-based JRPG combat, or games with lengthy text-based dialog segments – I decided to hold off on starting Persona 4 Golden for almost a year after purchasing it. As per the ongoing meme, this might simply be understood as the difference between purchasing games and playing games as a hobby. But I think the deeper reason that I hesitated to begin my journey through Persona 4 Golden was the fact that I knew I’d be taking a massive step backwards in terms of quality-of-life improvements and gameplay systems. Not only was I coming off the back of the mighty Persona 5, but I was also playing the Royal version, which features all sorts of upgrades and changes that bring an already exceptional game up to masterclass level. Thus, any game that shared remote similarities with P5R would be unfortunately cast in its long shadow. Even with a year’s break from the Persona series, I found my time with Persona 4 Golden to live decidedly in the shadow of P5R. 

Despite the inescapable comparisons between P5R and P4G, I actively reminded myself to separate the two in my mind while I was playing Golden. Sure, P4G bears the signs of obvious age, like the stiff combat and simple animations, but the overall package held my general interest. Part of my interest arose from how games critics like Joshua Garrity of Cane and Rinse often reference P4G in conversations about how characters can be written well in JRPGs. Even when critics seemed to agree that P5R was in a class of its own, people still referenced P4G as a game in the same way that people reference Buffy when referring back to media that had a pro-social impact on the television medium. What I was not expecting, given this praise, however, was how incredibly slow the introduction to the game would be. 

Persona 4 Golden‘s Incredibly Slow Start

Persona 4 Golden takes the life cycle of a regenerating jellyfish to get started, or so I felt. From the game’s humble beginning, to its admittedly tropey – at least within the Persona canon – setup for the story, my first impressions were tepid. As the game started to integrate new characters and combat, I still found myself at a fundamental distance from the game, not intrinsically a part of it in the way that P5R had ensnared me. In fact, I often debated giving up on P4G until I found myself almost accidentally halfway through the game. At that point, I was begrudgingly playing along to figure out the “truth” that the game’s theme song so catchily refrained, but not much more. 

One of the reasons I didn’t give up on P4G early on was the inherent adorableness of Nanako, a little girl who becomes the protagonist’s surrogate little sister, living together under the Dojima roof. From her high-pitched miming of the Junes jingle, “Every day’s great at your Junes,” to her precocious wisdom in tense social situations, I agreed with a number of Epilogue community members who have described Nanako as one of the most wholesome and pure characters in all of gaming. Considering I generally hate children in games, as well as want nothing to do with them in real life, this was almost revelatory. Nanako secured herself as a character that I would protect at all costs, à la Haruka from the beloved Yakuza series.  

Reluctantly, I slowly opened up to Nanako’s father, Ryotaro Dojima, as well. There’s no doubt in my mind that Dojima is a bad father, full stop. Even if he clearly cares for Nanako and loves her more than anyone else in his life, that isn’t enough to redeem him as a father figure. Routinely – whether playing in sequence with the game’s main plotline or maxing out Dojima’s social link on the side – Dojima says that he wants to be better and then isn’t. He says he will prioritize family and doesn’t. He’s a bad father and I have no bones about condemning him all the way to the core in that regard. But Dojima’s character arc was nevertheless interesting to me because it demonstrates an unusual perspective in fiction, that you can be a bad father and a good person at the same time. Or, at least, the two categories are not antonymous as I might have believed going into the experience.  

Another stand-out aspect of P4G was the music, which, as a veteran of the Persona series would expect, is a consistent highlight all the way from title card to credits rolling. Every time I booted up the game, I would sit through the entirety of the opening song, “Shadow World,” at least twice – something I often skip in other games. The battle songs, while not as varied as P5R, still bring a unique energy to the combat that enhances the entire experience. “Time to Make History” still gets my blood pumping, especially towards the shrill ending of the chorus. Even most of the moment-to-moment music as you spent time with social links or attended classes were memorable, if sometimes depressing. There might be no “Rivers in the Desert” moments of sonic mind-blowing, but P4G still boasts one of the most memorable soundtracks in JRPGs that I’ve played. 

Unfortunately for P4G, this is largely where my praise ends. Sure, there are funny aspects to the experience that put a smile on my face like the notorious “Mystery Food X” scenes. And, of course, I enjoyed the subversive aspects of romancing a nurse in a haunted hospital, amongst other peculiar social links. But none of those aspects stick out in the way that the Dojimas or P4G’s soundtrack do in my mind. In fact, if Persona 4 Golden hadn’t taken two specific missteps with its characters that threw me out of the experience, it might be one of the most forgettable JRPGs I’ve ever played. 

In order to properly appreciate my tuned-down opinion of P4G, we should first explore the two characters who I feel this game let down above all: Kanji Tatsumi and Naoto Shirogane. These two characters become integral to your fighting party as you enter the supernatural TVs and battle your way through endless shadows. Kanji is one of the first characters that the game presents you with, and Naoto arrives in your party much later, but both characters feel intertwined in a number of ways that the game explicitly hints at but never delivers on, at least by the time the credits roll.  

Exploring Kanji Tatsumi’s Character Arc

Weirdly enough, I didn’t like Kanji at first. The game frames his character as a rebellious punk – as indicated by his bleached-blond hair style, signifying resistance to authority in Japanese culture – who fought off a biker gang with his tenacity during middle school. Quickly, however, this rough façade melts under the nuance of his character. That is, Kanji’s exterior is far from representative of his depth as a person.  

We learn that Kanji’s overtly masculine appearance and behavior is a performative front. The true Kanji prefers traditionally feminine hobbies like sewing and cooking, which primarily serve as occasions for comic relief – not that the story needed much – rather than character development. Seeing Kanji as a nuanced character seems less the goal of the writing than adding in an unusual or unexpected dynamic to the already-fraught gender relations of the main game’s cast. The game does, however, reveal these aspects of Kanji’s personality to be birthed as a traumatic response to emasculating remarks made by his father during Kanji’s childhood. And we see the most protective or defensive side of Kanji’s personality emerge when he briefly thinks his mother has been hospitalized. Though you might easily relegate Kanji to a “momma’s boy,” the game clearly offers more to his character than that reduction. 

One of the framing devices for Kanji’s character that almost worked for me took place in his dungeon early on in the game. Like most dungeons throughout Persona 4 Golden, Kanji’s serves as a place that manifests unspoken or repressed aspects of his inner, shadow self. Specific to Kanji is the interrogation of his “feminine” heart, which the game seemingly translates to homosexual desire. Shadow Kanji laments this desire when discussing his relationship to women as well as his own relationship to masculinity, but I think the game – and we will see this with Naoto – is too afraid to see these ideas to their logical conclusions. The themes present in Kanji’s character are, like his sexuality, underexplored. In fact, the game gleefully plays with Naoto’s gender – both for the audience and the main characters – in a way that confuses Kanji. For if Kanji is unsure if Naoto is a man or a woman – gods-forbid Naoto be non-binary – then he worries that his attraction to her as masculine might reveal his romantic attraction to men, something that characters and the game itself poke fun at.  

Persona 4 Golden wants to have its gender and perform it too. We unfortunately see this issue manifest in an even more frustrating fashion with Naoto’s gender expression. 

The Portrayal of Naoto Shirogane’s Gender

Naoto is cast as the most mature of the investigation team in P4G, but her place within the main cast of characters takes the longest to establish and, in some sense, fails to resolve itself in the way that other characters do. Naoto’s primary desire is to be seen both as a detective and an adult, which she interprets as needing to be expressed in traditionally masculine ways. She correctly worries that her femininity will be a barrier to the career she seeks, knowing that femininity is seen as frivolous and unserious, childlike even. This perceived sexism creates an identity crisis for Naoto, causing her to express the gender she knows people in her field expect. Not only are her fashion choices impacted by this identity crisis, but Naoto behaves in ways that deliberately obfuscate or confuse her assigned birth gender. In fact, Naoto is introduced to the player with an explicitly masculine identity and is recognized by the public as such until the inevitable confrontation with her shadow. 

Like Kanji, Naoto’s shadow self ridicules Naoto in a way that refuses to accept her chosen masculine expression and detective identity. As with Kanji, this shadow confrontation is oriented towards accepting herself. But strangely, also like Kanji, this shadow confrontation results in a rejection of the self, a counterintuitive acceptance of the parts of Naoto’s identity that she didn’t choose. Naoto’s detective disguise – for lack of a better term – is interpreted by the characters as Naoto hiding her true, feminine self to serve the expectations of the patriarchal detective field. Though, with one hand, you might applaud the game for undermining and questioning the exclusively male role of the traditional detective, I found myself, on the other hand, condemning the game for reducing the question of gender identity purely to an external struggle. That is, while the game pats itself on the back for effectively showing the player that a woman can take a man’s role, the writing unwittingly commits the same sin that it wants to expose: Naoto plays along and adopts a gender role because it’s what her shadow self essentially says she needs to do.  

In fact, the epilogue to Persona 4 Golden – as well as some of the additional scenes present in the animation – exaggerate the differences between masculine Naoto and feminine Naoto in a way that reveals the moral lesson that the writers clearly intended the player to learn. We can see masculine Naoto as what the game considers the inauthentic self, while we can see the feminine Naoto as the authentic self. In fact, the game emphasizes both Naoto’s breast size and hair length as signifiers of how she has “grown into” her femininity by the game’s end. (Careful players will notice the not-so-subtle allusions to chest binding, a practice often adhered by trans men, that are conspicuously absent in later scenes where Naoto’s femininity is remarked upon – either by the characters or the camera itself.) Whereas Naoto vocally questions her own expression of gender, wondering aloud whether she should have been born a man or a woman, the game presents the solution to her moral conundrum as a simplistic return to what one has been assigned – the “truth” – at birth.  

I’m not simply concerned with Naoto’s gender expression because video games are a medium in desperate need of positive trans representation, which they are. Rather, I think the game does trans people a disservice by even hinting at her confusion. Players are instead left to infer that their own confusion might be rectified by stubbornly following life’s prescriptive gender paths. 

Like so many things in the Persona universe, characters can be boiled down to their past traumas – this is doubly true of trans characters in pop culture in general – and Naoto is no exception. To this extent, the noble aim of most Persona arcs involves the characters confronting a past event that caused them to overreact. This overreaction, whether manifesting in a wrongful act or a confused gender expression, is treated interchangeably across most of the game’s characters as something worth correcting. Thus, with both Kanji and Naoto, the game seems to be saying that you shouldn’t spend energy questioning either your sexuality or your gender expression, respectively. If you do, the game seems to conclude, then you are mistaken; you should simply accept the “truth” of who you are. 

Ultimately, I’m perfectly able to view Naoto as a woman who simply experiments with alternate gender expression. Regardless of why she experiments with her identity – whether reacting to the victimizing circumstances of her chosen patriarchal profession or simply an authentic desire to become closer to one’s inner feelings – my concern lies with the way Persona 4 Golden gleefully totes her around as some sort of solved puzzle to the “problem” of gender variance. The same is true of Kanji’s ambiguous sexuality. 

My concerns do not end with the game’s mishandling of Naoto’s and Kanji’s identities, unfortunately. For there is one scene in Persona 4 Golden in particular that I could not forgive: the camping trip. 

The Moment I Lost Respect for P4G

One of the memorable scenes in P4G is the camping trip in which the high schoolers hike their way into a scenario ripe for comic relief. Some of this comic relief involves the girls horribly ruining their dinner, hence the aforementioned Mystery Food X. The guys, as a result, go back to their tents with empty stomachs. Later in the evening, Kanji – a first year student – sneaks into the guys’ tent where Yosuke and the main character are preparing to sleep for the night. In the midst of deciding who will sleep where, including the suggestion that Kanji will sleep on an uncomfortable rock underneath the tent floor, Yosuke steals Kanji’s animal crackers, which he was saving in hopes of finding a legendary penguin cracker. This whole setup feels like a gag – until it isn’t.  

Yosuke makes an uncomfortable 90 degree turn midway through this lighthearted scene, asking Kanji, “…Why’d you come to this tent?” Yosuke’s question – or rather the implication of it – becomes abundantly clear when he follows up by saying, “This is as good a time as any, so…I-I want you to be honest with us.” Kanji assents.  

Yosuke leads with the dehumanizing question, a version of the classic, “What are you?” regarding people of deviant gender or sexual expression, when he asks, “A-Are you really…you know…?” Reading into the ellipses, it becomes obvious that Yosuke is uncomfortable with even asking the question, “Are you gay,” or a variation thereof. Even with this badly formed question, I could forgive both Yosuke and the writers, for ignorance is not a sin. What follows, however, feels inescapably pernicious.  

“What I mean is, uh…Are we gonna be safe with you?” 

This is a question that did not need to be asked, either from a character development or plot perspective. And my blood appropriately boiled as a result. It was the first moment in the entire game where I put my controller down, leaned back in my chair, and audibly groaned.

Peeling off the slime of centuries-old homophobia, Kanji’s immediate reaction to Yosuke’s question is, “Wh-wh-what the hell’s that supposed to mean!? I-I already told you guys I’m not like that!” Kanji’s response to Yosuke’s disgusting question that implies gay people are sexual predators is to distance himself as far from that identity as possible, to deny its very existence. If Kanji is “not like that,” in other words, then he is safe from suspicion, which suggests that Yosuke’s question was justified in the first place.  

Again, it would be fatuously easy to object to this critique of the camping trip, defending Yosuke’s question as normal within adolescent circles. Indeed, such attitudes within groups of teenage boys are prevalent, but the game could have handled this moment in a million better ways that didn’t dehumanize gay people in the process. If P4G was genuinely interested in humanizing gay people, it could have addressed Yosuke’s – and by extension, Kanji’s – entrenched homophobia in a way that was instructive or insightful. Instead, this scene is neither of those things. It’s simply homophobic for the sake of, as with the rest of the camping scene, comic relief.  

As this homophobic scene unfolds within the guys’ tent, Yosuke holds Kanji’s feet to the proverbial campfire, claiming that his stuttering and defensive responses to Yosuke’s violating questions prove that Kanji is more “suspicious.” Again, the language of fear and criminality pervade this moment. Kanji, grasping at straws, trails off with his response, “Right now, I’m…Well..How do I put it…? Uh…” And instead of allowing this moment of uncertainty to be seen as normal – the fact that it’s okay to not know your sexual preferences – it is instead seen as something that further freaks out Yosuke.  

This scene surges back towards comic relief when Yosuke challenges Kanji to prove that he isn’t gay. If Kanji doesn’t agree to Yosuke’s challenge, then Yosuke claims that he and the protagonist will be “stuck here all night half scared to death.” At the risk of being a broken record, note how the stated fear implies centuries-old stereotypes of gay men as predators. Thus, as the comic relief unfolds, Kanji naively traipses out of the guys’ tent to invade the girls’ tent to “prove” his sexuality and masculinity. 

This camping trip scene shocked me, not because it reveals overtly conservative attitudes towards sexuality in mid-2000s Japan – which is no surprise to anyone who follows the genre – but because the game practically drops the subject of Kanji’s sexuality from this point on. All the way until the game’s end where Kanji is comedically portrayed as a straight-laced version of himself – glasses, natural hair color, and all – it’s as if the game forgets that it cheekily used sexuality as a comedic plot point. Rather than being a moment that allows for sincere character development and insight into human sexuality in general, this camping trip could easily belong in the recipe for Mystery Food X – which is to say, disgust. 

I think most players of Persona 4 Golden will interpret this camping scene in a way that absolves Yosuke of the nasty implications I’ve revealed here. For, often times, those who express moral disgust at gay people are often grappling with their own insecurities and self-loathing. People in this situation often manifest their self-hatred by choosing sacrificial scapegoats with which to scorn. In this camping trip scene, Kanji becomes Yosuke’s scapegoat, a reading we can reach through the game’s hints at Yosuke’s unhealthily closeted sexuality – something he overtly compensates for in cringe-worthy scenes like “operation: up close and personal.” (Modders have even retroactively restored a cut romance path for Yosuke’s character.) 

It might, therefore, seem understandable how Yosuke’s inner turmoil about his own sexuality could bubble over into this denigrating behavior towards Kanji during the camping trip. And so the question for many players who encounter this scene will be whether to forgive Yosuke or not. I was not able to forgive Yosuke, nor did I feel that his character – or the game – took additional steps to seek forgiveness for this homophobic incident.

I don’t want to beat the drum that “imperfect representation is bad and therefore shouldn’t exist,” as would be simple to do with the examples of Naoto and Kanji. Rather, representation should extend beyond plot device, beyond instrumentalization. Persona 4 Golden’s treatment of gender and sexuality is purely instrumental, purely plot device, and that’s beyond disappointing. For a game with such word-of-mouth acclaim, I didn’t expect these gut-punches. And maybe, as when you rewatch a beloved television show and encounter that one transphobic episode, you have to roll with said punches in order to enjoy any media. But when a game is consistently discussed for its believable characters and strong writing, it deserves to be looked at without the charity of caveating that this is simply mid-2000s Japanese culture. Persona 4 Golden doesn’t suddenly get a pass even though it proudly believes it has earned one. 

How the Persona Series Can Do Better

The portrayal of Kanji and Naoto didn’t sour my overall experience with P4G, but instead cast a dark cloud over something that is otherwise just a decent game. Extrapolating from P4G’s treatment of gender and sexuality, it saddens me to reflect on P5R, a game superior in almost every respect, and realize that the writers didn’t learn any lessons from their missteps with either Naoto or Kanji. The same homophobic jokes – heck, P5R has more explicitly transphobic jokes than P4G – pervade the next game in the series, even though it released about a decade later.  

Plenty has been said about the need for the Persona series to introduce a female protagonist in the way that the portable version of Persona 3 once did. While I completely agree and would be refreshed to play a Persona game as my own gender, I think I am equally concerned about future Persona games treating gender and sexuality variance with respect. I don’t think of P4G as a high point in the series, whether we are looking at it as a game or as a socially-responsive text. To that end, I think even games that are typically above scrutiny like P5R deserve a second, more scrupulous pass. I have written before about how I tend to be more critical of games that I otherwise love, and the Persona series is no exception. I can demand the series treat LGBTQIA+ people with greater dignity and respect even as I fully anticipate that I will be pre-ordering the next mainline Persona entry.

Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.