Having originally been made as a reasonably high-grade PlayStation Vita port of the mainline Persona 4, Persona 4 Golden received ample critical acclaim soon after its 2008 release. It wasn't until twelve years later, in 2020, however, that the game would come out on PC via Steam, giving it yet another lease on life which, coincidentally, crosses paths with Valve's own handheld gaming PC.Still, Persona 4 Golden didn't get its Deck-verified badge right away, with various issues cropping up to prevent it from being fully and properly verified, mainly related to the game's cutscenes and audio. These problems have now seemingly been resolved, however, as the game is now listed as "Deck verified," on Steam.Up until now, Persona 4 Golden was unsupported on Steam Deck, which effectively meant that, while the game could technically run, there were potentially game-breaking problems with it in place, which users were unlikely to be able to resolve on their own. Instead, it was up to Sega and Atlus to patch the game's cutscene codec to run on the Deck. There wasn't any real information available on whether anybody was working to patch things up, though, which makes the game's "Verified" status a very pleasant surprise for Deck owners.
Deck owners should now be able to enjoy Persona 4 Golden without any real hassle, adding the game to the growing list of the very best Deck verified RPGs available for purchase. In fact, since the game started its life as a Vita exclusive, it's a reasonable expectation that it will fare way better on the Deck than, say, The Witcher 3, simply due to the nature of its UI and gameplay mechanics, making it a perfect match for this particular platform.
At this time, there are over 2,500 playable games on the Steam Deck in total, and the list includes over 50% of Steam's top 100 games of all time. The list of completely verified games is smaller still, of course, and it's also worth pointing out that some players did experience issues with running certain Verified games on the Deck. These are, however, few and far between, and the badge generally promises an excellent playing experience in almost all cases.
On top of getting the game to run perfectly on the Steam Deck, developers may have more plans in store for P4G yet. Namely, there are rumors of Persona 4 Golden coming to PS4 and Switch, effectively doubling its platform coverage. This is, however, still unconfirmed, and should be taken with a grain of salt at this time.
Persona 4 Golden is now available on PC and PS Vita.
