Persona 4: Dancing All Night

Video review HERE!

For those of you who know me well, you'll know that I love the Persona series, and I love rhythm games. It should come as no surprise that I've been playing quite a bit of Persona 4: Dancing All Night and am pretty excited to talk about it!

Persona 4: Dancing All Night is a rhythm game spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, one of the greatest games ever made, developed and published by Atlus. It started out very similar to how Atlus handled their fighting game spinoff, Persona 4: Arena where they didn't just make a fighting game, they went out and grabbed legendary fighting game developers Arc Systems, known for Guilty Gear and BlazBlue.

So in the case of P4A, we didn't get a half-assed fighting game that we played just for the characters, we got a totally kickass fighting game that happened to also have our favorite characters in it, boosted by the world-class visual design Atlus always brings to their interfaces.

Dancing All Night started with the same idea; Atlus grabbed rhythm game developer Dingo, well known for their work on Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA, however shortly into development, it was decided Atlus would develop P4D on their own. So how did it turn out?

Presentation-wise, this is totally an Atlus game. The interface and menus are bright, crisp, and neat. Every sub-section of the menus has its own personality, and convey to the player perfectly what they are doing.

Seriously, this is something that's very easy for me to go off about, so I'm going to lay it down right here officially: Atlus games have the best looking, sounding, and feeling menus and interfaces of any game company. There are other games that have cool and stylish menus, but no company is as consistently perfect as Atlus. If you're a game developer and you want some tips, play some Atlus games.

Going from selecting a song to a dancer to their costume to their partner to THEIR costume to any items you want to use are all accessed from the same great-looking and easy-to-understand menu. This is something Project DIVA had a much harder time doing properly. Show 'em how it's done, Atlus!

So then you get to playing the game. Even if you're a fan of rhythm games, there is a hard split here on whether this game is for you. This is very much a JAPANESE rhythm game, and that means a few things. Over here on the other side of the pond, we have two rhythm games: Rock Band and Guitar Hero, which to a certain extent are very much the same game.

Our rhythm games are about mimicking an instrument; hitting notes that are a part of the song. I really like that aspect of Western rhythm games; each song or genre has its own feeling to how it's played, and things like guitar solos become so much more important. On the other hand, no matter how high you turn up the difficulty, a White Stripes song will never be a challenge, so even on Expert mode, there is still a sort of difficulty curve which also tends to force you to schlep through all the shitty pop songs before you get to the alright stuff, and finally you unlock all the sweet metal songs at the end.

Eastern rhythm games, on the other hand, started their popularity in the West with Dance Dance Revolution, and there are some huge, clear differences. They don't have that instrument-specific parallel between what you're hearing and what you're playing, so the note charts are totally up to the creativity of the developers to chart fun and engaging gameplay no matter the style or tempo of the song, so every song on Hard mode is harder than every song on Normal mode.

Then there is the difference of scoring, and here's where we REALLY get in to diversity of preference among fans of rhythm games. First of all, Eastern rhythm games generally score each individual note depending on your timing, giving you a "bad, good, or Perfect" rating, all scored differently and having different impacts on your gauge and combo meter. A game like Rock Band says you either hit the note or you didn't. Eastern games will give you a breakdown at the end of how many notes you hit Perfectly, Well, or Poorly. On top of that, the combo system in Eastern games is extremely harsh. Rock Band and friends cap you at a friendly multiplier (usually 4x). This is cool because you really feel good when you're playing at a solid capped multiplier, knowing you're doing as well as possible, and if you screw up, it can sometimes take only a few seconds to get back to maximum if you recover well. Eastern games on the other hand just keep on climbing the combo multiplier. It's really cool to get a 500-note multiplier and have regular notes that used to be worth 400 points be racking up tens of thousands of points each, however missing a note and breaking your combo here is BRUTAL. You'll literally never catch back up. A full-comboed song can rake in 2,000,000 points at the end, but if you miss a measly two notes, you'll end up with 200,000. If you're going for score, rhythm games from Japan expect you to never miss a note.

So back to my original point: is Persona 4 Dancing All Night for you? It is definitely from Japan on all points I mentioned above. Creative note charts, smooth difficulty curve, time-scored notes, and harsh scoring. At first, I wasn't sure about all these things being a good thing. I thought the note charts felt a little disconnected from the songs and missed a lot of notes because I wasn't really feeling the groove, however this is completely solved when moving to Hard mode. As far as the harsh scoring goes, this game sold me. It allows this game to simplify your score rankings for songs to only two: Brilliant means you passed, and covers most passing scores. If you do almost absolutely perfectly, however, you may get a KING CRAZY ranking showing you've mastered that song. That's all you need! Did I pass or did I NAIL it?

On the subject of scoring, however, there is a gripe I have with how note scores are labeled. A note can be a Perfect, Great, Good, or Miss. There's a big gap there it seems between Good and Miss, but that's actually because hitting a Good isn't actually a good thing. It's bad. It means you did a shitty job timing the note and it breaks your combo sometimes. If it can break your combo, why is it labelled "Good"? I had the same issue with Miku's Project DIVA. It had a note rating called "SAFE" that broke your combo. What's safe about it? Does it not reduce your gauge?

Now I've spent a lot of time discussing what this game is and isn't, I haven't actually talked about how fun the game is yet. On the subject of gameplay, if you can handle the harsh scoring, I think this game is a blast to play. It looks and controls great on the Vita, and the perfect menu design keeps you playing with a clear goal in mind whether that's trying to climb the difficulties or hit that King Crazy rating. I will say I actually was a bit down on the game at first, and that's because of what I mentioned earlier where I had certain gripes with the groove and flow of the note charts when I was playing on Easy and Normal mode. I really started to enjoy the game when I got to hard mode, and now I'm playing on Very Hard mode and it's definitely the most fun of all.

The other reason I was down on the game early on, however, is due to our next topic: the story mode. This game has a story mode very much like Persona 4 Arena, except without the redundant story-telling, thank Tarmogoyf. With games like P4 Arena and Dancing All Night, they don't have the 3d environments a regular Persona game does, so the story progresses much more like a visual novel with just a couple character portraits over a drawn background. It's not very interesting to look at and relies 100% on dialogue to keep your attention, but there are a few things that drove me absolutely nuts and made me loathe the story mode overall.

Firstly, partly because of the visual novel style's inability to show character actions, and partly because I have no idea why, all the dialogue is interspersed with internal thinking text from whoever the "main" character is at the time. It goes from needless descriptions of characters and previous events to agonizing explanations of things anyone can infer from the dialogue that's already spoken.

For example, during one scene, a character we didn't know was there appears in the conversation revealing themselves, and everyone else goes "HUH?!" "WHA?!". Got it. THEN, it cuts to internal, non-voiced text that says "Suddenly, this character appears! I can't believe my eyes!" Yeah, we know she appeared 'cause she's not part of the group, yet appeared in the conversation, and we know you're in disbelief because everyone interjected. These internal thoughts are not only worthless pieces of over-explanation of things we remember or can infer, but the fact that they aren't voiced mean they're also completely breaking the flow of the conversations. They also cause you not to really be able to use the auto-advance feature for cutscenes because while it works well for voiced cutscenes, no one really knows how long to have it sit there on text to give you enough time to read; it just doesn't work. Eventually, I just started actually skipping all the internal text and only paying attention to the spoken dialogue. I never once felt like I was missing any information, and the conversations went by twice as fast. Why do they put this crap in? It's just bad writing. And speaking of bad writing, while the story has its moments, it also feels very drawn out. I'm not really sure what they could have done to make the plot more interesting without making the story half the length, but I ended up only skimming even the voiced dialogue for the latter half of the game just because there is just way too much filler and it moves along much too slowly.

Now there's one other problem that makes me only skim the voiced conversations in not just this game, but all recent versions of Persona 4, and that is the voice of Chie. Many of the characters in Persona 4 have changed voice actors since the original, and Atlus has done a fantastic job getting the right people for the jobs, except Chie.

Fitzgerald's performance of Chie never sounds like she's part of the conversation; everything is way too emphasized and is just grating to listen to. It brings Chie down from most people's favorite character in the series to someone I just never want to talk ever. It's a huge bummer that this decision was made because not only does it ruin this character, but the way she breaks the flow of conversation with every line makes the story that much less immersive and enjoyable.

Then, finally, there is the one other issue with the story, and that is just the entire point of it. The story here is that the TV world is creating more cases of apathy syndrome and doing crazy stuff again, but fighting is not allowed this time. In the TV world, their weapons and abilities can cause no harm. The only thing they have to fight with is the power of expression through dance.

Here's where this review is least objective and most opinion. I don't care about dancing. People can dance well, and that's cool, and there's probably a whole art-form in there somewhere, but this idea of it being this magical expression of feeling is super cheesy and it doesn't serve the game well to take it so seriously. During the dances, the game is a bit silly, but after every dance in Story mode, characters say things like "Yeah! I totally understood the feelings you were trying to convey!" Seriously, it's dumb.

So overall, besides my specific gripes about the internal dialogue, the slow plot, and the always-present animosity toward New Chie, the story overall just feels contrived, so it's a good thing it's a damn fun game. They wanted to make a rhythm game, and they did a fantastic job, but then they had to write a story around it and it's just nothing special.

In the end, while the story was a total drag, the rhythm gameplay is top-notch and I've been playing a ton of it. Especially now playing on the top difficulty, I'm having an outright blast. The last thing to mention is the soundtrack, which I think is overall great. Shoji Meguro always does a fantastic job composing the Shin Megami Tensei games and the Persona games particularly always gave very memorable soundtracks. Dancing All Night features a few more remixes than I would have liked, but overall is a great representation of Persona 4's soundtrack. I would absolutely love to see a persona 3 invasion style thing like they did with Arena, adding tracks and characters from 3, so we'll see if I get my wish there.