Persona 4: Dancing All Night

Let's get some facts out of the way first before I delve into my review:

Fact #1:

I fucking love rhythm games. Ever since I played Guitar Hero 2, I realized my passion for pushing buttons on time with visual cues. Guitar Hero, Rock Band, even more obscure games like Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents. Give me some music and buttons to push, and I will commence with the clickety.

Fact #2:

Persona 4 is one of the best RPGs of the decade, period. You cannot argue that fact. If any of you are even remotely an RPG fan, you'll understand the truth of this statement. The game has a great story arc, with well fleshed out characters, a kick ass soundtrack and addictive gameplay.

Now about that kick ass soundtrack.

The lovely people at ATLUS have been doing some pretty strange shit with their franchise:
- A fighting game that apparently kicks all sorts of ass.
-A dungeon crawler with chibi versions of all their characters from Persona 3 and 4
-And if you have the luck to be living in japan, a ton of mobile games ranging from side story RPGs to card games,

So as strange as the revelation was that they were making a story based musical rhythm game with characters from Persona 4, I was personally excited as hell. So does the game deliver?

Well, depends on whether or not you acquiesce to those two facts I mentioned. The game relies heavily on the fact that you are a fan of the franchise and while the game can be played as a stand alone title, it is no where near as entertaining because the game banks on the connections you've formed with these characters. Seeing a guy dress up as a giant bear might look awfully bizarre to the laymen, but fans will be chanting "Awwww yeah, Teddie's back bitches!".

Also, if you're not a fan of the rhythm games, particularly the portable, 'push a button when you see a visual cue' genre, this game might not be for you either. The gameplay is deceptively simple at first. You'll see notes emanating from the middle of the screen (obstructing some pretty awesome dance animations) and spread to the 6 peripheries of the screen (top left to bottom left, top right to bottom right). You push a button when the note lands on the corresponding spot. You can sometimes push the button for longer, sometimes you'll even get to push two buttons together (gasp!). You push buttons correctly enough in a streak, and you unlock Fever mode, which does nothing but bring in another character to commence with more giddy dance animation. I'm sure it does something to the score but who cares about score in a rhythm-story game based off a hugely successful RPG franchise.



The game is easy enough at first, and they go easy on you on the lesser difficulties. The difficulty will ramp up however, especially on harder difficulties, and for all those crazy obsessive people out there, you can  unlock items that make the game harder (disappearing notes, faster notes, etc.). There's alot of replayability here, especially if you're looking to get an S rank on every single song. There are 29 of them plus 4 DLC songs so far, which is not a huge setlist, but it's fantastic. The songs are wonderfully remixed and they all sound fresh and great, with a few particular earworms that will just stay in and nest in your ears, never to leave again.

The story is top notch Japanese RPG bullshit that is also fascinating. The game picks up a few weeks after the end of Persona 4, with Rise freaking out over her big comeback into the world of Pop Idolhood so what better way to calm her nerves and deliver a great show than to have her best friends of the summer be her back up dancers (because Japan). There are new characters introduced in the form of a rival Pop group that's ascended the charts and they're disappearing one by one because of some weird rumor that states that if you watch the TV at midnight you'll see a famous deceased idol that brings you over to the other world; the other world being a weird world filled with Shadows (the primary villains of the universe) except instead of hitting you they just want to dance to your music and hang out.

It sounds crazy, but that's the beauty of Japanese storytelling. It's absurd, but you're somehow compelled to keep playing in lieu of the absurd story.

My qualms with the game are few, but they are there. For starters, the story can be grating at first. It takes a while to pick up, and there's ALOT of text. It almost veers into a visual novel at times so if you're not a fan of reading, that might bother you a bit. Also, the game could do a better job indicating whether or not you've pushed the button slightly ahead of time or later. I still have no idea why I get a Great or a Perfect on each hit and it's never clarified. It doesn't matter too much though because you start to get a rhythm for the game. Another issue is the fact that you can't really focus on the background (which is animated and lively) while you're frantically trying to press buttons with the rhythm (an easily solvable issue though because there's a replay option after every song where you can sit and watch the cutscene)

All in all, this game is an easy recommendation for fans of the franchise or fans of music games in general. The story mode is pretty long and'll take about 10 hours to complete not counting the immense amount of time you'll spend trying to S rank all the songs and buy all the accessories for your characters (because completionism for the win!)