Best Persona 4 Golden Characters TIER LIST
This Best Persona 4 Golden Characters Tier List will give you a rundown on which characters are the best and worst in Persona 4 Golden so you can make the ultimate team.
If you’re playing Persona 4 Golden, now available on Steam, you’ll want to know which of the Persona 4 Golden characters are the best and worst so you know who’s worthy of a spot on your final team. This Persona 4 Golden Characters Tier List will teach you just that.
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S Rank – Persona 4 Golden Characters
Protagonist
Just like in other Persona games, no character even comes close to the damage and utility potential of the main character. Endgame Personas like Yoshitsune deal multiple times the damage that any of your party members are capable of while also being immune to almost all damage.
The Protagonist gains access to unique spells that are unavailable to your party members. He can get tier 4 magic for every element by equipping top tier Personas like Loki. He can gain all the best healing and support skills. He can very easily get the skill cards necessary to begin every fight with a party-wide Heat Riser via the 3 Auto-Buff skills.
The Protagonist can solo every challenge in the game, even on the hardest difficulties, once you’ve reached level 67 or so and the first endgame Persona, Trumpeter, becomes available. Even before that, the Protagonist is indispensable and his versatility makes him better at every aspect of combat than all of his potential allies at any given point in the game.
Out of all the Persona 4 Golden characters, no one holds a candle to the main character. No one else even comes close.
Click here for the Top 10 Best Persona 4 Golden Personas
A Rank – Persona 4 Golden Characters
Yukiko
Yukiko is the only character available to you who can even come close to keeping up with the Protagonist in terms of damage. She gets very high magic and is the only party member who has access to a 4th tier “severe” level spell (Burning Petals).
In addition to that, she brings a lot of utility to the team with her healing spells, which makes her integral for a huge portion of the game. She also can potentially gain access to Marakunda, which lowers all enemies’ defense, which further increases her utility.
By using Burning Petals and Mind Charge, Yukiko is able to dish out damage that’s comparable to the Protagonist’s endgame setups, especially if you go out of your way to maximize her damage output by equipping items that boost her magic stat and increase her fire damage.
When it comes to Persona 4 Golden characters, Yukiko is easily top tier.
Click here for the Yukiko Skills & Best Build Guide
Naoto
Naoto has elemental versatility that all other Persona 4 Golden characters lack. If you have Naoto in your party, you will defeat almost every random encounter in the game in one round due to her ability to knock down or instantly kill every monster you encounter with her wide array of spells.
Naoto has access to tier 3 spells in every element, including light and dark, which always inflict instant death on enemies weak to those elements. Even those pesky magical hands typically get one-shotted by a charged up Megidolaon.
While she doesn’t have the raw damage output of Yukiko, Kanji or Chie, she usually outperforms Yosuke and Teddie in boss fights due to her access to Mind Charge. However, one thing you may want to do is take Naoto through the dungeons and then use a Goro-M or Traesto and replace her for the boss fights.
Though you get Naoto pretty late, her ability to devastate random encounters makes her one of the best Persona 4 Golden characters.
Click here for the Naoto Skills & Best Build Guide
B Rank – Persona 4 Golden Characters
Yosuke
Compared to other Persona 4 Golden characters, Yosuke tends to be the jack-of-all-trades. He had moderately high magic damage, but nowhere near Yukiko. He has a few decent healing spells but, again, not quite at the level of Yukiko. His physical attack is better than Yukiko’s, but not as high as Chie’s or Kanji’s.
In general he deals about the same amount of damage as Naoto, except with more utility instead of elemental variety. What makes Yosuke deserve a spot on your team above many other characters is really one thing and one thing only: Dekaja.
Bosses and even general enemies in Persona 4 Golden love buffing themselves up with pesky stat boosters and if you’re not using Yosuke, you’ve got to roll with Dekaja on your main character, who should really be more focused on damage output.
In fact, allowing other characters to not have to waste their turns on utility spells seems to be Yosuke’s main strength in general, aside from providing competent wind damage through the game. Yosuke can often heal, freeing up Yukiko to deal damage, for instance.
Click here for the Yosuke Skills & Best Build Guide
Chie
Chie and Kanji are very similar, but Chie tends to come out on top because she has target-all physical attacks, better passive skills and, in the endgame, access to the best buff spell in the game: Dragon Hustle.
Chie has a period of time during the middle part of the game where she just doesn’t perform very well, but once she gets access to Black Spot and Rampage, her contribution to the team really starts to pick up.
She has a handful of token ice spells that she can use to hit weaknesses, and during the middle part of the game her Revolution skill is your best bet for taking down the magical hands you find throughout each dungeon.
Once you’re able to get your hands on a Chakra Ring you might want to give it to Chie so she can cast Dragon Hustle multiple times.
Click here for the Chie Skills & Best Build Guide
Rise
Rise is your navigator character in Persona 4 Golden and she’s part of your party whether you want her or not. Luckily, she adds a lot of utility to the party and, overall, makes a bigger impact than Futaba in Persona 5 Royal.
Once you’ve maxed out Rise’s social link and taken her on 5 bike rides, she provides so much utility to the party that it’s hard to imagine what life was ever like without her.
A maxed out Rise can scan enemy weaknesses automatically, shield your entire party from devastating attacks like Megidolaon, Mahamaon and Mamudoon, increase the damage of your all-out attack by a significant amount and reveal the locations of chests and enemies on the map, not to mention randomly power up your party members on a regular basis during fights.
Rise is an invaluable asset to the party and easily one of the best Persona 4 Golden characters.
C Rank – Persona 4 Golden Characters
Kanji
For a lot of the game, Chie and Kanji are largely interchangeable with, perhaps, Kanji being a bit better. Where Chie really pulls ahead is toward the end of the game where she can end entire battles on her own with Agneyastra and her utility with Dragon Hustle pulls far ahead of what Kanji is able to provide with Matarukaja.
Matarukaja is a really useful skill that Kanji has access to before Dragon Hustle becomes available, and the utility it provides may be worth replacing Chie with him until Dragon Hustle becomes available late in the game. Kanji’s Primal Force is also significantly more powerful than Chie’s God’s Hand.
When it comes to Persona 4 Golden characters, Kanji is by no means a bad character, but ultimately what makes him fall behind is how little impact he tends to have during random encounters, which comprise the vast majority of combat in the game.
His agility is low, so he usually goes last, and aside from providing weak electric damage and single-target physical damage (when most dungeons have tons of monsters resistant or immune to physical attacks), he doesn’t add too much.
Chie, meanwhile, starting from when she learns Gale Strike, can usually OHKO whole encounters on her own. Kanji is much better on bosses with his access to Matarukaja and more powerful physical attacks, but eventually Chie pulls ahead there too.
Click here for the Kanji Skills & Best Build Guide
D Rank – Persona 4 Golden Characters
Teddie
Teddie isn’t terrible, but he is probably the worst of the Persona 4 Golden characters overall, if only by a thin margin. He provides a fair amount of utility with his access to healing, Matarukaja and Marakunda, which generally means you can use Teddie and have no reason to take Kanji or Yukiko for utility purposes.
However, damage-wise, Teddie is abysmal, and taking Kanji and Yukiko or, late game, Chie and Yukiko, is usually better overall, because those characters all deal so much more damage than Teddie. Even when it comes to applying stat buffs and stat downs, it’s better to have your utility spells spread out across multiple characters so you can cast all your stat buffs and debuffs in a single round.
Teddie has decent ice magic, but it’s behind Yosuke in terms of power and far, far behind Yukiko who Teddie is really competing with for his spot in the party.
Compared to Yukiko, Teddie’s magic is weaker, his healing is weaker, his utility is slightly better, and his physical attack is slightly better, but still weak. It’s just hard to make an argument that Teddie is better than Yukiko in any meaningful way, and it’s hard to come up with any compelling reason to use both of them in your party.
Click here for the Teddie Skills & Best Build Guide
That about covers it when it comes to the Best Persona 4 Golden Characters Tier List. Be sure to check out the Games Section and the Main Page for more game guides, and click here for more content related to Persona 4 Golden.
