Persona 4: Dancing All Night

I swore I wasn't going to buy this game, but damn it Atlus, you got me again.

For background, I love Persona games. I also love Persona music. I wasn't really that excited for Dancing All Night. I didn't so much dismiss it due to it being the third Persona 4 spin-off (fourth if you count Ultimax), as the previous spin-offs have been great efforts. I would go so far to argue that Arena/Ultimax is among the top 5 fighting games of the previous generation of consoles. Persona Q was a solid effort, though dragged on far past the point it needed to end. Back in the day, I played more than my fair share of Bemani games. However, I've taken a long break from the Japanese style of rhythm game following the end of the Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents craze. Much of this was due to the advent of Guitar Hero.

I appreciated Guitar Hero/Rock Band's departure from your basic keep beat with the rhythm game to more of a playing music simulation game. In addition, those games were considerably more approachable than say trying to play Max 300 on Extreme. I was able to pass most every song in Rock Band on expert, but could rarely keep up with note spam in most Japanese rhythm games, especially when missing just a few notes meant failing the stage (ask me how many attempts it took to beat Ready Steady Go on insane in Ouendan).

That's enough background. Even still, I'm not sure how well I can review this for players who have kept up with Japanese rhythm games, most notably the Hatsune Miku series, as that's a pretty decent break from this genre. That being said, I think I represent the audience this game is going to mostly appeal to.

The game aspect of DAN is as straight forward a rhythm game as you get. The game uses up, down, and left on the d-pad, and triangle, circle, and cross on the face buttons, along with the two analog sticks. Notes flow from the center to the left and right of the screen in horizontal and diagonal directions. Much like every rhythm game, the game rates each note as "perfect," "great," "good," or "miss." Perfects and goods keep your combo going, good doesn't penalize your health meter, but drops your combo, and misses eat into your health. Too many misses and you'll fail the song. The only two hiccups thrown into the mix are long pink/purpleish stretched combo notes that you hit by pressing two buttons simultaneously and blue and rainbow circles you hit to build score, but are not required in order to keep your combo going. The rainbow circles build fever meter. At certain points in the song, if your fever meter is full, you'll go into fever mode during which a dance partner may join you on screen. During these sections, the action is more hectic, but to compensate you for it, any "good" notes you score will keep your combo going. As a final note, you can also use the touchscreen to tap notes instead and swipe the screen in place of the analog stick.

And that's all you need to know about the basic gameplay. At the end of the song, you're rated in order, "Not Clear," "Stage Clear," "Brilliant," and "King Crazy." So it is actually possible to finish a level without clearing it. Otherwise, this is pretty standard fare for the genre. There are four difficulties in the game: "Easy," "Normal," "Hard," and "All Night." I find that rhythm games sink or swim on the middle difficulties, as easy tends to get dull fast, and whatever the top difficulty is called is, as the old joke goes, for robots, aliens, and twelve-year-old Japanese girls. I will give DAN credit in that its easy mode is a bit more interesting than most games in the genre typically are, however you'll quickly move on to normal difficulty. Normal feels pretty good for the most part, though it remains a tad on the easy side. I passed every song on normal in my first try save two. In addition, some songs have you pressing notes off beat, which is rather jarring. Hard mode feels really good, and it's there I started to struggle on some songs. The dreaded "note spam" rhythm games suffer from soon showed that the interface/display needed a little more time in the oven. Most hard difficulty songs I played have over six hundred notes, and it quickly gets hard to keep track of them all when there are a bunch of combo notes on the screen. Combo notes frustrated me the greatest overall, as the Vita itself is a bit of a rough device at times to be hitting notes in quick succession, several of them simultaneously. All Night mode is for sadists, and I can offer you little in the way of guidance as to how it plays if you're an expert rhythm game player. You fail songs so quickly on this mode that I've seen screenshots of people getting a "Not Clear" rating after only two misses in songs with over eight hundred notes! Most players will settle somewhere between normal and hard.

There is a lot of content in this game to unlock. The game has about thirty tracks all together, with two free downloadable tracks as well, though I'll get to DLC in a bit. It is a good compilation, though there are a number of remixes in it. The remixes are for the most part good, with several famous guest composers behind them (most notably Akira Yamaoka, with a killer remix of "Time to Make History"). There are several notable songs missing from the packed-in game, though most are already slated for DLC release. There are about a dozen different dancers to choose from, each with additional costumes, though the majority of them are for the core cast. If they had a costume in P4 Golden, they have it in this game, and then some. You earn money completing songs, to buy costumes, accessories, and items. You also have to play through both the story mode and each song in exhibition mode to unlock all songs and backup dancers.

There is a good chunk of DLC out already, with more to come. Most additional songs are 99 cents, though tend to lack in-game dancers. Instead, "Never More" and "Sky's the Limit" play over animated video. "Break Out Of...," the theme from P4 Ultimax, comes with a new dancer (Marie), but costs $4.99. It's hard to complain about 99 cents for additional songs, but having to buy additional dancers if you want some of the new songs feels a bit exploitative. This is especially true with "Break Out Of..." probably the most criminal omission from the core track list. Some credit can be given to Atlus however in that they have a number of free songs and costume packs slated for release over the rest of the year.

After three of these Persona 4 spin-off games, it feels like they finally have the visual novel storytelling framework down to where they need it. Arena was a mess, forcing you to replay the same story over and over. DAN adopts the Ultimax framework, having you play a concurrent story from several perspectives. But while Ultimax was juggling story-lines for over a dozen characters, DAN instead concentrates largely on a few characters as well as several introductions to the cast. The length of story mode feels about right, and I finished it in about three sittings. It's good, cheesy, melodramatic fun, and about what you would expect from a story involving fighting shadows with the power of dance. Just don't go into it expecting it to be comparable with Persona 4.

How much you like this game probably comes down to if you are a hardcore rhythm game fan or if you are a Persona fan looking for a fun rhythm game. For the former, I would say this is a 3-star effort: an interesting game with some mechanics that don't quite come together as well as you might like with an ultimate difficulty mode designed for sadists. If you're a Persona fan and like Persona music, this is a pretty compelling package, chocked full of fan service and fun remixes of one of the best game soundtracks around. Persona doesn't quite translate to the rhythm game genre as well as Arena/Ultimax did the fighting genre, but still manages to avoid being a cheap cash-in.

For reference, I played this game on the VITA and have not tried it out on the PS TV.