‘Cause We’re Living in a Shadow World and I am a Shadow Girl
Persona 4: Dancing All Night is a rhythm game for fans of Persona 4. Plain and simple the qualifications for this come down to how badly you want to see the Investigation Team go on another adventure. If you come to this because you like playing Music games then you might have some significant problems.
There’s two main aspects to Dancing All Night, Story Mode and Free Dance. The Story Mode consists of a visual novel story starring the cast of Persona 4 with an emphasis on Rise and the life of Japanese Idols. between sections there will be music stages where you play the rhythm game but even if you have no musical inclinations you can set up the difficulty to be as easy as you need to ensure you can enjoy the full story.
Full disclosure. I didn’t observe the whole story. I just don’t care enough to read (Most of the story is voice acted but I’m with Vinny) this fanservice side story. They brought up some really weird concepts about the Idols which seems kind of interesting but I’m not familiar enough with Japanese culture for it to engage with me so I just buttoned through it as fast as possible to unlock the last difficulty setting.
Story aside, the game is called Dancing All Night and that’s… kinda true. Before DLC the game has 27 songs that you can play in Free Dance. I would call the setlist pretty strong but not without its weaknesses. The most notable problem is that they are working with a small set of songs from Persona 4 to begin with so you end up playing a lot of remixes of the same song. Sure all three mixes of “Pursuing my True Self” sounds different but it’s still the same song. The music as a whole is more entertaining to play along to than other recent music/rhythm games but it’s worth pointing out this problem. Each of these 27 songs has 4 difficulties for you to button through in a rhythmic fashion. It is now at this point where you run into the two biggest problems with the game, the game interface and the musical notation.
The actual gameplay consists of yellow notes appearing in the center of the screen, then extend out to one of 6 circles on the edges of the screen. Three on the right and three on the left. When the yellow note lines up with the yellow circle you hit a corresponding button. Simple concept but flawed at it’s core. The game very specifically overlays the notes over all the action that’s happening in the background so you have to focus out everything else that’s occurring in an attempt to read what buttons you should be pushing. It’s a shame because at a lower difficulty level, it works out how they want it to. By having the notes fly over the characters dancing you really do see all the effort that went into the choreography and backgrounds. I’ve seen more video footage in the two weeks with this game than the years i've put into beatmania. It’s a shame that when moving up in difficulty the background does nothing but obfuscates the most important information to the player. When you get to All Night difficulty, it gets even worse as decisions they made to make it easier to read notes now come so fast and furious that the screen looks like an absolute god damn mess.
In addition to the poor decision on how to display the notes, the charting itself leaves something to be desired. Make no mistake that this is not a music game, it’s a rhythm game. The “Notes” you are hitting are not in line with the instrumentation but with a pattern which is sorta related to the music. Most of the time it aligns well so you can use the music alone but there are some truly heinous instances of the notes not lining up with the music at all or worse, just off beat so playing along WITH the music will cause you to miss the notes. “Like a Dream Come True” is one of the worse offender with the music being a jazzy swing and the game requires you to play hard 8th notes. It’s at points like this which kills any flow the game might have. There’s no reason to be playing a music game when you need to ignore the music to play it well.
At the end of the day there’s worse music games out there than this and the pure style the game has takes it pretty far but if you aren’t a Persona 4 fan there’s little reason to pick this game up. I was going to go on about how much detail is in the game from the design of the menus to the in game store and collection menu but it just can’t make up for the gameplay problems.
