I was inspired to write this blog after my experiences with the "Score Attack" mode in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax. In Score Attack, you face various groups of 10 enemies that, on the highest difficulty, are the biggest challenge of the game outside of online play.

After my thirtieth defeat, of which I have been keeping count, to the first battle of the first row of Score Attack enemies for Yu Narukami's character, I have thrown in the towel. Of those 30 losses, I have won about 5 rounds. The first and only character I had faced was Junpei Iori, who had all of three effective moves. One involved him locking me into a combo that leads into a super move and takes away about a 3rd of my health. Another move is an attack where he dives across the screen and is seemingly able to cut through any of my blocks. The worst offender is his buff move, that renders him more powerful and gives him regenerating health. It also lasts for the remainder of the match.

For someone capable at fighting games, I imagine this fight isn't very taxing. His moves are probably easily countered, and Narukami is bound to have a few combos that would do significant damage to Junpei's health bar. Unfortunately I am not good at fighting games. This can be evidenced by the afternoon I wasted trying to complete all parts of Yu Narukami's challenge mode, in preparation for score attack, where I got stuck on the 20th challenge and in the hours that I spent trying to finish it I have yet to be successful.

My lack of experience with fighting games probably has something to do with it. My first fighting game was BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, and over the course of playing it I quickly picked up the bad habit of button mashing. Despite my attempts to use a little more finesse, I still can't break out of the nervous spamming of certain buttons when in the moment. Which means most complex moves are out of the window and I am instead forced to rely on throws and easy to perform super moves. Some games offer an "easy" mode for those who are not adept at fighting games. The BlazBlue series has a very nice "stylish" mode which allows me the illusion of being good at the game. In Persona 4 Arena Ultimax's case, it offers the "auto-combo". Unfortunately the auto-combo has proven to be pretty ineffective in Score Attack.

If you're wondering why I put myself through this hell, it's because the completion of all Score Attack paths with most characters (on the hardest difficulty, no less) unlocks that character as a navigator. For those that don't know, Navigators are characters you can select to narrate the battles you fight. Navigators were pretty throw-away in Persona 4 Arena, providing some voiced lines during battles, but they have attempted to give them more meaning by turning them into social links in the new Golden Arena mode. This mode allows you to fight an endless stream of enemies to level up both your character and your social links. Anyone familiar with the Persona game will know why that's neat. It was the mode that I was most looking forward to in the lead up to this game. You could argue that it's still not that important, but at the very least I was hoping to sink a lot of time into said mode and level up each character/social link as part of spending more time with the game outside of the story. All that said, you can get them another way. Oh yes, you can pay $24 to unlock all the navigators.

To me, paying that sort of money for a feature that is part of one of the bigger things they have been promoting in this game is kind of shitty. And to add salt to the wound, if you had paid for the navigators in the original Persona 4 Arena (which could also be obtained through score attack), you would automatically unlock them in this game for free. I was suckered into buying them in the first game but of course, because I imported the sequel and not the original game, that doesn't work. My own fault, I suppose.

And so, I'm faced with a few options. Do I bang my head against score attack, on the off chance that I learn how to play this game or get lucky? Or do I bite the bullet and pay for the dlc? Or do I simply stop caring about a relatively minimal feature in a relatively feature-packed game? In any case, I'm taking a break from Score Attack. My controller nor my blood pressure can take much more.