Some guy from Japanator wrote up about his first impressions of the arcade version of the game and what the game is about

http://www.japanator.com/first-impressions-persona-4-arena-22310.phtml#ext

Seems good. I've never played games like Guilty Gear or BlazBlue to be honest but everything I've seen of this game has me really excited.

yip yip

@JeanLuc: If you're really curious and have a USB controller of some sort handy, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload is available for download on Good Old Games over here for $6. It's not the most recent version of that series specifically (although I believe it's the first and last to officially come to PC), but it's still a good game to get up to speed on how ArcSys games fundamentally play. (It's also in my opinion still a great game in its own right, but that's neither here nor there.) As I wrote in the other thread, not every skill from Guilty Gear transfers over to P4A 100 percent and that's especially true now that I've spent something like $20 playing the game in a local Japanese arcade, but in terms of how moves are executed and generally flow, as well as how more advanced mechanics come into play, it still gives you a good general idea of how they'll fundamentally work in P4A. Obviously the only way to come to grips with P4A's exclusive mechanics like, say, the Personas themselves is to just play the game, but they don't alter the playing field so dramatically that the experience feels unfamiliar if you've practiced with a different ArcSys game beforehand.

Final Boss, Story Ending and Yukiko Ending in Japanese in you're interested.

@Pepsiman said:

@JeanLuc: If you're really curious and have a USB controller of some sort handy, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload is available for download on Good Old Games over here for $6. It's not the most recent version of that series specifically (although I believe it's the first and last to officially come to PC), but it's still a good game to get up to speed on how ArcSys games fundamentally play. (It's also in my opinion still a great game in its own right, but that's neither here nor there.)

I would just like to point out that, having bought it on a whim during GOG's holiday sale, the PC version of Guilty Gear X2 #Reload is ghetto as all hell. It still has the PS2 button prompts in all of the menus and you straight up have to Ctrl-Alt-Delete in order to quit the game because there is no quit button. IIRC, it's also available on Xbox games on Demand as an Xbox Original for $15, which may or may not be a more preferable way of playing it.

@ArbitraryWater: I was speaking in purely mechanical terms how the game is, but yeah, I agree that as a port it's not all that great. I forgot about the lack of a quit option since I just run it in windowed mode (still doesn't provide that much of a solution since you still have to close the window to quit) and I feel having just straight up PlayStation button prompts, as messed up as it is, does help with configuring standard controllers and learning how to operate the game in terms less foreign than kick putton, kick button, punch, but yeah. A lot of it I think can be attributed to the fact that it was originally a budget release in Europe years ago. It doesn't excuse it, but that's the reality of it. I still think the part where you actually play the game is fine, but that may also because I specifically like Reload a lot. If you're getting into the console side of things, I'd say it's better to wait for the upcoming XBLA/PSN release of Accent Core Plus since that's not only the most recent edition of Guilty Gear, but it's also the first one in the series to get proper online support since Reload itself on the Xbox, I believe. The only real reason why I singled out Reload in particular was mostly the value proposition (later entries in the series are pretty hard to find) and the convenience factor with having it on GOG.