After 146 hours (and 38 minutes), I've seen the true ending and rolled credits on Persona 4 Golden. This was my first time completing any Atlus RPG and I'm so happy I did.

If I didn't already have an answer to "Are video games art?", P4G would be a decisive "YES!"

Yet, as much as I loved it and loved the experience of it...I can't really recommend it to anyone.

There's so much you have to be willing and able to look past; and even though that stuff's a small part of the game...it looms.

One thing that I am happy about: I spent all of my PTO to take a long end-of-year vacation. I didn't work a single day in December.

I have 3 more days before work starts back on Jan 6.

So ending P4G now where Yu has to say goodbye to the good life of Inaba while I am saying goodbye to the good life of not-working...it resonates.

I'm glad I finished it today before the rat race started back up.

It is late January. All character Personas are level 99 and my Compendium has several level 99 Personas in it.

I'm trying to maintain at least 1 million yen to feed into the NG+ which means that every time I fuse a new Persona (an expensive endeavor), I have to grind out more cash.

According to Steam Replay, Persona 4 is where I've spent most of my Steam-time this year and I am, finally, beginning to see burn-out approaching.

I would really like to finish this game so I can start Metaphor: ReFantazio before I learn all about the spoilers. But I also need to be careful to not just get sick of the whole thing.

I'm also a little worried about [SPOILER DUNGEON] where I understand that you lose SP after every fight. I'm so close to a strong finish here and am now terrified of getting stuck like I did in P5:Royal.

I need to make sure to keep save files going back a few days, just in case.

It's Saturday, June 25, 2011. After grinding everyone to level 50, I have saved Rise Kujikawa from the TV world.

I now have a month to kill.