Persona 4 Golden mod turns it back into your granddaddy's Shin Megami Tensei, fixing the gravest aesthetic crime of its non-PS2 version
Fogging up your glasses.
Persona 4 is, for reasons almost entirely to do with the legendary Endurance Run, a profoundly important game to me. So important that when its whizzbang Golden version finally got its PC release back in 2020, I put a hundred hours into it in the blink of an eye.
But something felt a little off, and now I know what it was. Turns out, Persona 4 Golden had some distinct visual differences from the game's original 2008 PS2 release. It was much clearer, for one thing. Where the base game was bathed in a sickly fog, P4G was cleaner, sharper, more colourful. I've never been sure if it was an aesthetic choice or an accommodation Atlus made for Golden's appearance on the itsy-bitsy screen of the PS Vita—where it first released—but I knew it felt kind of wrong. It wasn't the Persona 4 I knew.
Well, good news: The Persona 4 I knew is being painstakingly restored by fans with precisely the same kind of obsessively weird brain I have. Meet P4 Fog Restoration, a mod from BrawlerAce that restores the glorious aesthetics of the PS2 era to P4G's sharpest, 4K-est PC version.
Per its GameBanana page, P4 Fog Restoration is actually only 40% done, and the plan is to eventually cover the entire game. As it currently stands, "All dungeons present in the original Persona 4 have received full visual overhauls, including to normal and boss battles, to match P4 PS2 as closely as possible." It's also touched up the Velvet Room and a few assorted other areas, though it sounds like P4G's exclusive dungeon hasn't been touched yet. Inaba itself—P4G's overworld—hasn't been affected yet either.
It's very well done, I reckon. It'd be easy to go overboard and cover the game's dungeons in a thick yellow soup, but BrawlerAce and co have shown clever restraint. The result is a bunch of screenshots that look exactly like the PS2 game I remember, just at a higher res, and Marie is there for some reason. While you're at it, why not plug in the OG Chie Voice Replacement and really take things old-school? It's not really Persona 4 if Satonaka-san doesn't sound like a 35-year-old who got held back til she passed her exams.