Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita): That's it. I will apparently buy anything this franchise puts out.

When they announced Persona 5, it came with a handful of other announcements that were coming out, a number of them dealing with Persona 4's  universe. One of them, was a very stupid idea I felt didn't need to exist. My friends hassled me about how great it would be though, and I swore to them that I was not going to buy a Vita for a single rhythm game.

Flash forward a few months, I did cave and get a Vita but not for this game. However, of the purchases I made with the system, one of them was Persona 4, which I had already bought twice as is and the one game for the Vita I bought that I didn't already own I haven't started yet. I am fucking weak. Let's get on with this.

PERSONA 4: DANCING ALL NIGHT(Vita)

The story of P4:DAN takes place after the events of I assume Persona 4: Golden after the Investigation Team solved the Inaba murders (but apparently not before that game's epilogue). Yu Narukami is now in a new school but is still with the old gang because the team's resident starlet and idol, Rise Kujikawa, is on her comeback trail to come back to showbiz. Nervous about her return, she convinced her friends to join her on stage as her backup dancers (because why the fuck not?), and the team has been practicing both in studio with her and back home in Inaba.

They will be participating in the "Love Meets Bonds" festival with friend and rival idol Kanami Mishita and her group Kanami's kitchen. However, its been a bumpy road as the festivals website supposedly shows a video of a dead idol dancing at midnight, and those who view it get taken away and never wake again. Sure enough, the other members of Kanami's Kitchen go missing, and the investigation team checks the site to find out. Naturally, the site indeed does something strange and they ensnared by ribbons and pulled into another world.

This world is referred to as the Midnight Stage, and it functions similar to the TV world in some regards but is different otherwise, most namely you can't resort to violence here. The ribbons in this world drain you of your personality and force you to be something you aren't, but the team figures out you can fight back through expression of yourself and your meaning, so since they have been practicing dance, they use this as their weapon to try to save the taken members of Kanami's Kitchen.

What in the blue goddamn fuck??? OK, I get that this is a franchise that stems from a base of JRPGs so obviously story is kind of an important role to its universe, and its a story I love but that was in a 60+ hour RPG. Even the fighting game that hooked me on this series had some incredibly wordy story to all of it, but it's a fighting game and even those sometimes have a bit of a story. But this is a rhythm game, and sans a few exceptions rhythm games almost never have a plot to them. So much like Persona 4 Arena if you venture into the story mode, expect a substantial amount of (well voice acted) text.

So the inherent problem with the story was this: I powered the game up, got through the initial couple of lines to get the premise and by the first playable portion my first thought to travel through my head is "Oh my god, this is fucking stupid." Now let me be clear here: I love this universe, and I love these characters, but it only took one line of "We can show them how we feel with the power of our Dancing!" to make me shudder in sheer douchechillery and almost turn the game off. It's nearly impossible to take this game seriously.

Ugh, it's so painfully uncomfortable.

But if there is one thing Atlus and the Persona 4 dev team knows how to do, it's weave a good story. As stupid as the idea that a professional idol would insist on group of amateurs without a dance background as her back up on her first show back in show business is, as soon as they transport to an alternate world (as they do in Persona) it didn't take me long to get wrapped back up in the story. Interestingly enough, once I can get past the idea that they are fighting by dancing, the narrative is actually still really good.

They introduce a lot of new characters to series, and a handful of old faces poke their head in as well. Smartly, aside from a handful of a small references, they keep the extensive back history relatively out of the plot for the most part. They make a few references to the TV World from the other games, but ultimately they stick to their own story, which means new players who picked up a rhythm game without no prior Persona experience won't be totally lost. A lot of the new characters are fun, and while the main cast deals with the other world, new protagonist Kanami fits the mystery together with Nanako and Dojima in the real world to keep things interesting both sides.

I will say that though, that this is probably the most "bondagey" Persona since I discovered the series in Persona 2. See, the story mode plays in the Japanese visual novel style of story where character stills talk to each other, much like you have seen in many in this series to come before it, but much like Persona 4 Arena they show you a still image to sort of set the scene.

Well, without getting to in depth as to why it's happening, the captured idols will find themselves bound in ribbons. Some of them are more suggestive than others, and one of the idols is like..... really young. Not that I don't appreciate an out of the blue bondage scene (because who doesn't amirite?), some of them felt really out of place.

The first time it happened, I quirked a brow. This time, it was less subtle and they only
get worse (better?) from there. Although the one of Sumomo is a little rough, she can't be "of age".

The story actually gets really dark as fuck too, this isn't outside the norm for this series but for a game that's focused on lighthearted dancing, it's a very sharp contrast. I mean the story mode starts off with a pretty brutal tragedy, and as Persona 4 likes to do they focus on the characters insecurities and self perception, which is something everyone has to deal with thus making it very relate-able. And that's probably what made the ending that much more satisfying when I finally pushed to the final songs.

And I admit it, the longer the story stretched the more completely enamored I got, pretty much completely forgetting it was a rhythm game until an actual playable section came up. While long winded, if you buy the game, you have to play the story mode. It's a fun followup to end of Persona 4 Golden and lets you catch up with the old gang (and totally affirm where my head canon is taking the story). Honestly they can do this every year and I'll probably love it.

Kanami is mentioned in the other games and the show. but this is the first time we
actually get to see her. I have to say, she wasn't what I was expecting, but still a welcome edition

Christ almighty, 900 words in and I haven't even talked about the game play yet. So looking at the trailers, I was really confused on how the game worked, but once it was in my hands it actually could be simpler. for lack of a better term it is a bit DDRish in nature. you have a series of notes that appear from the middle of the screen and move outwards, when playing you need to use the corresponding directional on that side of the system: Up Left and Down, or Triangle, Circle and Square.

Obviously, hitting notes is easy, so they also have hold notes where you tap at the start and hold it, and then release at the end. No big, like DDR's freeze notes I can handle this. They also have Pair notes where you have to hit two at a time, these are usually marked by a long pink line connecting the two notes. Most of time these aren't too bad but I sometimes get confused if another note is following the same line.

As you can tell, there are a significant number of costumes to unlock.
And yes, I unlocked all the maid costumes first. Eff you. 

The last mechanic is "scratching" where a circle comes outward. if you move an analog it continues your combo and boosts your gauge but they aren't mandatory to do, and thank god because moving the analog while trying to keep the beat was nearly an impossible task for me to do. I would constantly miss other notes trying to move to the analog. Thankfully, you can turn on a feature that allows the shoulder buttons to scratch which felt way more intuitive to me. It's not super comfortable to hold the Vita that way, but I will say that it's pretty much necessary.

While scratching doesn't count against your score if you miss them, it does provide a boost to your gauge at the top of the screen. 5 shadows sit at the top of the screen and if they aren't happy and dancing by the end of the song, you don't clear the stage. Honestly, I have never fully understood where the line is. I've they flashing and jumping around I know I'm doing well, but I've finished stages with all of them white and smiling, which I would consider good. But when the screen fades it says I didn't clear.

This is super frustrating because on easy and normal I am fine, blowing through levels with ease. When I bumped up to hard though is where the game really knuckles down with you, When you miss notes you get big knocks to your not all that clear gauge, and it's very difficult to repair the damage so if your game starts to go south you have to get on a hot streak to bring it back, or restart the level. On the "All Night" difficulty setting missing a small streak of notes can kill you in seconds.

Thankfully, the game has you covered on this front as well. As you play through the game you earn money that you can use in the shop. This can be used on costumes or accessories for your characters, but the real use is the item section where you can get items and books. These affect the game by giving you bigger boosts during parts of the song, let's the off timed "goods" not affect your combo, lets you continue the song if you fail and others. Each of these help, but as you would expect they remove a percentage of the points and money you earn at the end of the stage.

Sorry, Couldn't find any English game play videos.

This is where the books come in, because they add some effects that make it harder and boost your score and money. So I played to the point where I would get Random note orders, Macho speed, and some other effect I can't remember, and even with the helpers set I'm still getting like 275% increase to my earnings. This made clearing out store a breeze. Inside of one power outage in my house and less than a week since its release, I've pretty much all but cleared out the store because you can pull in nearly 100,000 in one go one the All Night setting.

I only have a small number of issues with the game. Some of them are minor, one is major. First off aside from the goofy premise for the story, one of the hardest adjustments when I started the game was that Laura Bailey didn't voice Rise Kujikawa in this one, so there was a bit of shock in adapting to the new voice. At this point the characters are sacred to me so when you change a voice, like every other douchebag probably did I got really upset about it..... for about 2 hours, and by that point I barely noticed the difference anymore. Pretty much the same thing happened when Matt Mercer started voicing Kanji over Troy Baker.

When Naoto "girls" it up, she's actually super cute. No wonder people love her.

The aforementioned scratching issue persistently bugs me. because there is no real fix to this solution. Holding my vita with my fingers on the shoulder buttons is an awkward hold, and it's not very comfortable. But the only other alternative is to use the analog sticks which make sense for the motion of "scratching" but I feel my performance in the game is significantly weaker by trying to shift to the analogs. I don't think I could do it from the hard mode and up.

Something that surprised me was a complete lack of Multiplayer mode. Even if there wasn't some kind of cooperative play, they could have easily put in some kind of vs mode where you could compare the scores. Hell, in the fever times of the songs two of the characters dance on screen at once, so they could have whipped up something to that effect to help in co-op or something. I don't know. It was just surprising to me that the game was totally devoid of multiplayer. Even something like Final Fantasy:Theaterrhythm's battle mode would have been appreciated here.

Don't know when it's happening in the timeline, but I'm calling it right here:
Chie and Yousuke will get married at some point in the Persona Universe.

And despite this series having a fantastic set of music to it, the music selection in the game could be better. The game itself features 29 tracks, but 9 of them are remixes of other songs and some of them have 2 different remixes. Yeah it's cool that Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka remixed a song for this game, but I've already played two different versions of this song already. The game had a very deep soundtrack so it surprised me that more of it wasn't used.

Not only that, but they used "Maze of Life" which was one of my favorite songs from Persona Q. If you were going to borrow songs from other games, why was there not more representation from that? "Light the Fire up in the Night" or "Laser Beam" would have been fantastic additions to this soundtrack and would have given us some different songs to play instead of remixes of ones I've already done. Or to go even further why not grab tracks from other Persona games? This probably won't be a long running spin off, so I would have loved to hear "Mass Destruction" or "Burn My Dread" in the track listing.

I found it odd that although Rise is the only professional idol in the group,
she seemed to take the stage the least out of the whole story mode...

But we know why they aren't in there, don't we? Of course we do. Because if you put the full version of the game out there, you can't land that sweet sweet DLC money now can you? Fuck you, Atlus. Looking on their very own website, By the end of October (remembering this came out on Sept 29th), there will be over SEVENTY FUCKING DOLLARS of DLC content ranging from songs, costumes, characters and accessories. This is completely unacceptable and shame on you for it. You used to be one of the good guys.

Let me ask you something: Say the game came full of all of the content that they were promising but they then slapped the full price of the game on the label, how well do you think this game would do? "Persona 4: Dancing All Night available now for only 120$!!" Maybe, MAYBE a handful of the die-hards would buy a copy but ultimately the sales would be crushed because nobody wants to pay 120 dollars for a game. So why do they feel it's OK to gut the content and charge me more later? It's absolutely insane, and I can't believe that after the Streetfighter X Tekken and Mass Effect debacles that this is still fucking happening, and people keep letting it. It's fucking insane to me.

It's barely been a week and there is already enough DLC for a 3rd of the price
of the full game. Fuck you. I hate this money grabbing bullshit.

When this game was first announced, I thought it was a stupid idea. Shifting a JRPG to a 1v1 fighter didn't feel like much of a stretch to me and I ended up loving it so much that it made me go back to the RPG. But a rhythm game? Why a rhythm game? Well, in retrospect I hold Shoji Meguro on the same tier of  amazing video game composers like Akira Yamaoka, Nobuo Uematsu, and Daiskue Ishiwatari. So once I realized that the soundtracks are really one of the strongest aspects of the series, making a game focused on them didn't seem all that far fetched to me.

And despite the fact that I felt it was a stupid premise for a story and found it unbelievably difficult to swallow the image of some of my all time favorite characters goofily dancing around, Persona 4: Dancing all Night delivered pretty much exactly what I expected it in a rhythm game experience for me. Is it a system seller? Probably not, but it certainly was entertaining and it feels like a game that I will be playing for a while until get a let a level of mastery on the top difficulties. If you are a fan of the Persona series or just rhythm games, this one absolutely satisfies.

I guess it is what it is, I'm sure I will do this dance again when they come out with Persona 4: Cooking Battle, Persona 4: Kart Racing, or Puzlsona 4.....  For the love of god, when will you people realize I NEED HELP? *sob*

I might be the only person in the world who is lukewarm to Nanako.