Persona 4 Revival Will Be Easy — and That’s Nothing New for Persona

During a PAX West livestream, Persona 4 Revival showed off some new content, including a new feature called The Pathfinder — a golden trail of light that guides you to the next floor of a dungeon. The feature is entirely optional (it can be completely turned off in settings) but it set off a particular volley of comments and complaints, both on the livestream itself and later on Twitter, etc when the news began to circulate around social media.

Some replies were neutral, noting that they were glad it was a feature they could turn off if desired, but a subset of responses bellyached about the number of quality-of-life features the game was adding or made some variation of a “it’s too easy” comment. This is something I had been thinking about myself regarding the game for the last few months; during my interview with the game’s staff I specifically asked about how they were working to prevent making the game too easy.

Persona 4 Revival is adding a number of features to combat, including new ways to knock back enemies, guard in the overworld against hostile shadows, and launch powerful attacks. These features — by and large — make for an easier experience during the dungeon crawling aspect of the game. It was even noted during our interview that the staff had worked hard at making the game “so that you can play it without getting stressed.” But, making something too easy implies it wasn’t already too easy to begin with. Persona remakes have all added numerous quality-of-life features and things like DLC that are practically game breaking. I would argue that Persona as a franchise has leaned into broader market appeal rather than some FromSoft style reputation. However, I think features like The Pathfinder are emblematic of the way ease-targeting additions should be structured. Whether a game ought to impose a few particular levels of difficulty on everyone is a much more interesting question than whether a game is easy at all.

Breaking the Game

Persona 4 Golden was my very first foray into the franchise, and from my initial research into what games I was skipping by starting there, I quickly became aware of the games becoming easier before even start considering remakes. I think about easiness in terms of reducing the friction, cognitive burden, or amount of work needed to succeed within the game. Persona 3 had numerous features that were either removed or smoothed over as the franchise progressed, with games like Persona 3 Portable making “tired” status less arduous than in Persona 3 and Persona 4 doing away with the system entirely. Then, from Persona 4 to Persona 4 Golden, players are given access to a new Social Link that helps make the game’s core mystery easier to solve as well as gameplay additions like Tag Team and Cavalry attacks, skill cards, first playthrough Reaper farming, and more Personas. While the difficulty changes weren’t linear leading up to Persona 3 (I’ve read that Persona 2: Innocent Sin was quite easy, though I have not played it myself), they definitely felt like consistent moves toward ease for remakes following Persona 4.

The jump from Persona 5 to Persona 5 Royal is, in my opinion, considerably more stark than the jump to Golden and marks a real turning point. Royal adds too many features to list here, but combat was considerably enhanced with more ways to make your team laughably powerful, especially as it relates to opportunities to use the game’s technical, Baton Pass, and One More systems, alongside upgrades to the first two, to trivialize combat. To this day there remains active debate over which of Persona 5 Royal‘s “hardest” difficulties is actually the most difficult since the game’s Merciless difficulty, ostensibly the hardest, gives the player access to massive damage multipliers when abusing technical hits.

Most notable to my first playthrough of Persona 5 Royal, however, were DLC Personas. These were included for free in the release of Royal on modern platforms like PC and were obnoxiously powerful when used in the game. Persona 5 Royal makes accessing these incredibly powerful Personas easy and enticing. It isn’t as though more Personas are added to the game such that they require some sort of prerequisite. The strongest in the game can be summoned almost immediately. This game breaking pattern was even more aggressive in Persona 3 Reload, where DLC Personas featured unique skills that boosted their damage far and above what vanilla skills allowed and made the extra Personas outclass almost everything else available in the game — by a lot.

To me, this general shift toward an easier, more accessible game, as well as placing ways to make the game even easier represent deliberate choices about what kinds of consumers the Persona franchise wants to attract. The games are unique in that they have a lot more to them than just combat. This article has mainly focused on how easy the dungeon-crawler aspects have become, but any Persona fan knows that a large part of the games’ appeal are the immersive social and story aspects that happen alongside dungeons. Those have been made more accessible too (it’s generally easier to complete all of a game’s Social Links / Confidants in single playthroughs on remakes) and uniquely provide a means of enjoying the game via playing and watching that isn’t tied to difficulty. Instead, it’s tied to the quality of the characters and the story beats. Making the dungeon combat aspects of the game easier may seem to alienate more hardcore players, but if they were enticed in part by the other elements of the game too, then making things easier just lowers the barrier to entry for the series and brings in more kinds of players.

It may sound cynical to map these kinds of broad changes onto profit-seeking, but that does make them make a lot more sense, and I think it’s reasonable to examine the possibility of this being a broader strategy. Make the game easier to expand the potential audience, bring in more profit by allowing players to purchase game breaking features, then use those features as free bonuses to entice a fresh generation of players years later. So long as no part of the fanbase is completely alienated, you get more slices of a bigger pie.

Choose Your Own Adventure

So what’s the solution to the problem of the game being too easy? You may have seen the answer coming from the focus on the optionality of The Pathfinder: simply choose to play in ways that make the game harder. This was doable in very explicit ways in Persona 4 Golden; the game featured a variety of settings that could be individually tweaked to make the game easier or more difficult. Challenge runs have played around with this concept for years. Players would attempt to not make use of a helpful feature entirely, institute rules adapted from Pokemon Nuzlockes, or challenge the game without help from the party. Those are maybe more extreme examples, but I personally found myself immediately deciding that I wouldn’t be allowed to summon DLC Personas in Persona 5 Royal and only could access them by fusion. In Revival this will mean turning off features like The Pathfinder.

Ultimately, not every feature is something you’re going to be able to avoid. But, if you really want a difficult experience, not all of that difficulty has to be baked into the default game. There is always a way to add self-imposed difficulty and make for a gaming experience that perhaps better matches the level of difficulty you’d like. Personally, I want to see new features implemented in ways that allow Persona 4 Revival players to have as full control over the gaming experience as possible. I like it when games offer a variety of damage and scaling sliders such that pre-set difficulties are only suggestions and that players can really make their own flavor of the game. If a player decides some element is annoying and doesn’t feel like waiting for a balance patch, there should be a setting they can tweak. While I hope to see features like that in Persona 4 Revival, at the very least we’ll always have the option of getting a bit creative…and masochistic.

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