I finished Persona 4 early this morning, having logged a total of 59 hours and 26 minutes from 13 December to 20 December. Above is a list of how long I logged in each session and, once I down-vert each video, how long each part will be on YouTube when I start posting them next week.

Day 7 Recap:

Anticlimactic to the max

After complaining about Shadow Mitsuo, I felt the final fight (for the ‘Normal’ ending) against the last boss to be ridiculously easy. It was all an endurance match, pitting more my ability to last out than any tricks many of the other bosses use. I just used the strongest attacks over and over — and over — again to win. Other than occasionally guarding, I didn’t even need to look at what was chosen for each character. The last action was nearly always the one I wanted for the current turn.

That difficulty might have to do more with it being on Beginner than anything else, though. It might very well be that Ameno-sagiri takes more planning and thinking on Normal and Hard than what I saw. And, of course, I’ve read that Izanami-no-Okami is a great deal harder on any difficultly setting, being the final battle for the ‘True’ ending to Persona 4. She uses all of the ‘-dyne’ attacks, including those of darkness and light.

Eye see you

The symbol of an all-seeing eye being a boss in Persona 4 is not lost me. Yes, I get that the game is all about the ‘facades’ people construct to deal with reality and thus, an eye that pierces through to the ‘real’ desires of humanity makes sense. After fighting through the reflections of individuals, the main characters confront a literal ego from the fragments of Shadows as mirrored in The Midnight Channel. Makes sense to me.

So, yeah, that works. It’s an easy battle too. But then, maybe that is the point. It is, at least as the game tries to make the point, much more about the journey than the end goal. Raising social links and making connections between people is what is more important, it says. The friends along the way and all that.

Whatever. I’m being kinda dismissive, I guess, but I was rather over it all by the end. I liked the Social Links stuff, but had managed to wear through the ones I cared about several days before the ‘Normal’ end dungeon. Then, knowing I didn’t want to invest several mores hours in one sitting to get through the last, secret, dungeon, I just choose an ending I liked and stopped playing after the credits.

Maybe, if it did not take me about 60 hours to go through the game, I’d consider playing it again to see the stuff I missed. But, yeah, now that it is over, I’m over the game too. It was fun. And now it’s done.