Persona 4 Golden

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

tl;dr very problematic exploitative sexual behaviour of minors. Made me feel very uncomfortable in a way no other game has. I really wanted to like this game. And mechanically, it's really fun. I love the gameplay loop of leveling up relationships and that feeding into combat power with a strategic turn-based combat system. But as the game went on I felt more and more uncomfortable, until I decided to uninstall. There are a number of minor issues, from teachers hitting on students to your in-game best friend being a downright perv, but I could dismiss that as caricatured evil teacher and teenage boy behaviour respectively. The representation of the gay community, however, made me feel very uncomfortable - particularly the male characters response being afraid to sleep in the same tent as the guy who just came out as gay without addressing that as homophobia. The real cinch though was when your male friend demands a favour from your 2 female friends, making them put on skimpy bikinis he picked out to go swimming with us when they clearly didn't want to. This is demanding a sexual favour and made me feel sick to the core, but as the main character you have no option other than to participate - no option to intervene. And then your two dialogue options are either to sexually objectify the girls when they return in the bikinis or insult their appearance - both options are disgusting. It was at this point I decided I could no longer continue. Very sad. From a game design standpoint it was stellar, and was very hard for me to put down and make the decision to uninstall, but I just can't abide with the sexualisation and objectification of women - particularly minors - to the degree that this game does.