Persona 4

Combat

• Make sure you have take direct control over all your teammates. The AI is okay if the fights are easy and you're feeling lazy, but it's nowhere near as smart as you are (hopefully).

• The first dungeon is the hardest in the game because your characters don't have many skills, you don't have very effective personas, and the battle system is new to you. Keep at it, once you get it done you'll be fine for the rest of the game.

• The game is balanced around you fusing and training new Personas every few levels. Try to keep a decent spread of elements, buffs/debuffs, and at least one with healing abilities.

• Schedule about 3 days to complete each dungeon. Sometimes you can do it in one, but sometimes, you just need that full HP/SP refill. If you still can't beat the dungeon in the time limit, the game will give you the option of going back in time a week.

• Once December 3rd rolls around, start making back-up saves. There's multiple endings. One involves a dialogue tree that you should probably just look up after two or three attempts. (You'll know it when you find it.)

Social Links

• Don't try to max all the social links until New Game Plus. Just pick the ones you think are interesting. Justice and Hierophant require maxed Expression and Understanding to complete, and must be completed by the end of October, if that affects your priorities.

• Focus on school-related Links when given the opportunity, there’s a lengthy vacation in the middle of the game.

• Always take a Persona of the matching arcana with you when you do a Social Link with someone. The persona does not need to be equipped, just in your party.

• On rainy days, go to Aiya Chinese Diner and take on the Beef Bowl Challenge. This gives an increase to multiple stats at once.

• Try to finish up any social links you care about by the end of November, if you can.

Golden-specific

• There are no Steam achievements related to difficulty level. And it's serious about only playing Very Hard if you hate yourself.
  • You can also tweak settings at any time to make a custom difficulty. (For example, Hard enemies but with retries enabled.)

• If you want to see the new content and dungeon, you need to max Aeon by mid-late December. It's not hard, just don't neglect it.

• If you can get every card in Shuffle Time at once, you'll get a Sweep Bonus. This guarantees Shuffle Time and helps you get more cards, which means more Sweep Bonuses, which means more Shuffle Times, which etc. etc. etc. Grinding will become much smoother if you can keep a Shuffle Time streak going.