On the eve of Persona 4 Golden's 8th anniversary, SEGA surprised gamers with a sudden PC announcement and release of one of their most critically acclaimed JRPGs of all time. We spent some time in Inaba ahead of release and got to see just how well this beloved classic runs on newer hardware.

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　　Coming in at a size of 13.63GB, this PC port of Persona 4 Golden offers remastered visuals that go above and beyond what the PlayStation Vita could output on its 544p display. The majority of the improvements are in the unlockable framerate and character models themselves. From what I could tell, the still images for dialogue and menus remain the same from the PlayStation Vita release with only some antialiasing touch ups to make them look better on full HD displays. The environmental textures and signage are cleaned up but so have a fuzzy and muddied look compared to how much the character models stand out. Cutscene videos also seem to suffer a bit of compression. Persona 4 Golden might not be the prettiest JRPG to grace PC's in 2020 but the style and presentation still hold up more than a decade after original release.

　　With V-Sync enabled, Persona 4 Golden hits a rock-solid 60 FPS on my rig without any issues during events with high amounts of fog or other effects that may tax the GPU. However, once V-Sync is turned off, the framerate can be unlocked to varying success. During most in-game conversations, I was averaging around 130 FPS on my machine with frequent performance down to around 90 FPS. The other unfortunate side effect of disabling V-Sync is the horizontal screen tearing that happens somewhat frequently while walking around or navigating the city map. It's by no means a distracting affair but when you're trying to overanalyze a PC port of an 8-year old PlayStation Vita exclusive, there's always something to keep an eye out for. For the sake of clarity, I tested out Persona 4 Golden on a Ryzen 7 3800X and GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER.

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　　Out of the box, the PC port of Persona 4 Golden offers gamepad support and works perfectly with a DualShock 4 controller plugged in. All of the keyboard prompts switch over to native PS buttons and touchpad for bringing up the dungeon map. While you can certainly explore Inaba with your keyboard, opting for a controller is definitely the way to go with this classic RPG.

　　Persona 4 Golden doesn't feature a full EFIGS localization, at least during the initial launch. With both Japanese and English audio available, the text is focused on subtitles in four languages: English, Japanese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese. The voices can be changed at any time in-game just by heading into the settings menu but if you want to change the text, you'll have to dive into the Steam Properties to change everything into your preferred language.

　　Persona 4 Golden is available right now on Steam with two versions available. The base game itself will cost $19.99 with a Deluxe Edition available for $24.99 (some of you that have an eagle eye for steamapps might have noticed that Persona 4 Golden features some DLC). The bonuses in the P4G Deluxe Edition include a digital artbook and digital soundtrack featuring 9-select tracks. Beyond that, there is no other DLC available for Persona 4 Golden as all of the previous Vita DLC is bundled in with the game as well as both English and Japanese voices.