When comparing Persona 4 Golden vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best JRPGs on Steam?” NieR: Automata is ranked 9th while Persona 4 Golden is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Intriguing story about helping your friends conquer their "Shadow" selves
With the supernatural murder mystery that overtakes the town of Inaba, the friends you make are each forced to face their dark sides, or their Shadows. These are the parts of their personalities that they don't want to accept, such as one character's disdain toward her friend for being more comfortable with boys, and another's fixation on her audience's voyeuristic obsession over her body as a sexual object. Some of the themes can get quite heavy, but they're all intriguing in their own ways, showing how the group of friends encourage each other to accept their dark sides and push forward as a unified group.
Pro You get to collect and control many types of demons and angels as your Personas to fight in battle
Your Personas are demons and angels that you summon to use their spells and special abilities in battle. Fusing different Personas together lets you create stronger ones with better abilities. You can switch your Personas in and out of battle as needed to exploit enemy weaknesses you come across. And there are hundreds of different types of demons and angels with their own fitting designs and relevant mythological lore, ranging from familiar names like Shiva, Lilith, Valkyrie, Phoenix, Raphael, and many many more.
Pro Building friendships with characters through Social Links gives you an edge in battle
There are all sorts of characters to get to know and befriend through the Social Link system. You can make friends with your classmates, your party members, and a few other characters in the community of the city you live in. Spending time with them gives you a contained, and often touching story where you get to know them more and help them solve a personal struggle. After reaching the end of their Social Link, you're able to fuse special and powerful Personas that can help you tackle some of the game's hardest challenges. It's a neat system that gives you a gameplay incentive for building relationships.
Pro Fun and rewarding turn-based combat that focuses on exploiting enemy weaknesses
The battles in Persona 4 Golden are fun, especially once you get the hang of the system. You fight with your Personas and your party members, who have their set Personas of their own, aiming to pinpoint your enemy's elemental weaknesses and exploit them. Once you find the weakness, you and your team are rewarded with an extra turn; if you keep landing the right attacks, then the game lets you chain a finite number of turns one after another. If you don't look up a guide, then finding weaknesses is a matter of trial and error.
But this also applies to your enemies -- if they exploit your weaknesses, then they get extra turns instead. The bosses are pretty hard since they hit for a ton of damage, so you absolutely need to take advantage of gaining extra turns. And as you get farther along in the game, you get access to buffs to your party's attack, defense, evasion, and more, as well as debuffs to debilitate your foes. As you get better with the combat and earn some tough victories, the sense of satisfaction you get helps you to keep pushing forward.
Pro Cool and modern sense of style with the visuals and soundtrack
Everything in Persona 4 Golden is stylistically on-point. The recurring yellow in the eye-catching menus and UI, and text boxes gives the game a distinct aesthetic. The character designs are also really cool, with slender forms and a modern yet laid-back sense of fashion. And the trip-hop/hip-hop soundtrack blends classical, rock, pop, and synthwave sounds together in such a unique way that no other game really comes close to. Despite all the different ideas, it all comes together as a cool and cohesive look.
Pro Features some nice bonus additions over the original Persona 4
Persona 4 Golden is the definitive edition of the game, with lots of great improvements. Aside from the slightly updated graphics, there are a ton of gameplay bonuses, with new Social Links, stronger Personas to collect, new ways to hang out with your friends, fun school events, an extra ending, and a new Golden epilogue that you earn from completing the optional dungeon.
While going for the True Ending and/or Golden epilogue, you also get to play through an extra month and a half or so in the winter, with new music to go with the time of year. The quality of life improvements make gameplay smoother as well, making this an excellent option for both new players and longtime veterans.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Takes a long time to get going at the start
There's a good two or so hours of story exposition and tutorials that you have to sit through before the game picks up. It's a lot of reading and hand-holding, and explaining story concepts over and over again until you absolutely understand what's going on. If you decide to pick this up, be prepared to spend those first couple of hours on rails.
Con The murder mystery is repetitive
The story in Persona 4 boils down to a "flavor of the month" mystery, with each of them playing out mostly the same. You find out that a character is in danger of being murdered, so you go around town asking people for more information about the person to learn more about them. And then you go save them, fight a boss battle, the character faces their Shadow self, and then rinse and repeat with someone new. Things don't really switch up until later on in the game, which makes the story feel formulaic, especially if you don't care for the characters.
Con The story gets weighed down by cheesy anime tropes
If you dislike anime because of the tropes, then Persona 4 may not be for you. You have your standard, blank slate main character who's loved by everyone just for listening to their problems like a reasonable person, a cast of characters who fit squarely into stereotypes, and a typical anime and JRPG plot where you defeat a god with the power of friendship. It's nice that this game has such a cheerful tone, and that the characters are likable for the most part, but a lot of it is pretty tropey and predictable: love it or hate it, basically.
Con If your main character gets hit with an instant kill spell, it's game over
The most frustrating part about the combat is that there's a certain degree of unpredictability and randomness to it because of instant kill spells. There are light or dark spells that, if they hit any of your characters, there's a good chance that they will die in one shot. If they have resistances to light or dark, then they stand a better chance. But if your main character gets hit, and they die, it's an automatic game over, possibly throwing hours of progress down the drain.
Con The new Persona 4 Golden character, Marie, is insufferable
It would have been better if the writers had left this new character out. Marie doesn't quite fit in Persona 4 Golden, with her personality that's constant angst and anger, all the time. She has her reasons for being like this, yes, but you won't learn these unless you complete her entire Social Link and the optional dungeon. Before you learn of her motivations, she seems one-note in a way that clashes with the game's happy themes. It's hard to find anything to like about her.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.