Persona 4 Revival's revamped combat looks great, but those dungeons are still a concern

Atlus held a Persona 4 Revival Broadcast recently, giving the first real look at how the remake — built on Persona 4 Golden — is changing up combat and dungeons. The reaction has been mostly positive, though a few design questions are already surfacing.

On the combat side, three new mechanics take center stage. Baton Pass carries over from Persona 5, letting you hand your turn to another party member after knocking an enemy down. Send Flying is genuinely new: inflict a shadow with a status ailment like fear, then attack it to launch it into another enemy, spreading the same debuff on impact. Prime Time is a meter that charges during battle and, once full, drops all skill costs to zero and triggers a finishing move that looks closely related to Persona 3 Reload's Theurgy attacks. There's also a new Guard maneuver in the overworld — if an enemy strikes you while you're guarding, it bounces off and becomes dazed, letting you either enter the fight with advantage or just escape cleanly. All of it is flashy and well-animated.

The concern is balance. Persona 4 was never a particularly hard game to begin with — Yukiko's boss fight aside — and stacking this many new offensive and defensive tools on top of an already forgiving system risks making battles feel completely trivial. Whether Atlus is giving shadows new tricks to compensate is still unknown.

The dungeons are the other open question. Yukiko's Castle and the Bathhouse both appear to follow the original's procgen corridor structure across many floors — the same design that drew criticism in P4 and P4G for being a slog. Persona 3 Reload added more events and NPC dialogue to break up similar dungeons, and Atlus has likely done the same here, but the broadcasts only offer brief glimpses. Whether the studio has gone further — toward the handcrafted, character-driven palace design of Persona 5 — remains to be seen. Right now, it doesn't look like it.