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Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita) artwork

Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita) review


"Canon Dancing Game: Actually not a bad idea?"

If you look at the Persona 3 and 4 spin offs, you’ll find that Atlus has covered a lot of the bases. You have mobile games, canon fighting games, an Etrian Odyssey skin, pachinko, and...a canon...dancing game. When you look for one, you’d probably want to find the one that stays as true as possible to the characters, and has a good story and pretty good gameplay. Surprisingly, the canon dancing game fits that description the best. Not the fighting games. Not the EO skin. But the Canon. Dancing. Game. If you wanna hear more of this phenomenon, keep reading!

“Persona 4: Dancing All Night” takes place at the end of the current Persona 4 timeline, after the epilogue that was introduced in “Persona 4 Golden.” So, you should play Persona 4 before this, and this review will expect that you have played it. The story is that there’s this festival called the “Love Meets Bond Fest,” and Rise Kujikawa, who is making a return in the showbiz industry, invites all her friends, the cast from the original game to help perform with her at the festival. Along with them, there’s also a new idol group named “Kanami Kitchen,” led by Kanami, a person that you hear about in Rise’s Social Link in the original, and her gals. Every member other than Kanami herself start to go missing.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated note, there’s also this website called the “Midnight Sight” that says that if you look at the sight at midnight, you’re taken to another world to never be seen again. Pssh, I’m sure that has nothing to do with the plot.

So yeah, you play as the Investigation Team, who go to this world to save the Kanami Kitchen girls. In this world, no one can hurt or be hurt; however, the shadow enemies can still persuade whoever is in the world to deny their true selves, and give in to what everyone wants them to be, sorta like an opposite of the shadow selves in the first game. However, through the power of dancing, the protagonists are able to put their feelings into their dances, which show the people in their world to be their true selves. While this happens in the other world, Kanami, Nanako, and Dojima try to find out what happened to everyone, with the former two dancing and preparing for the Festival.

Yeah, it sounds very convoluted, and there’s a huge introduction to the game, so don’t expect to dance for a while, but the story addresses a huge issue of people giving into their peer pressure, and hiding who they really want to be, which can really hit home for some people. Not to mention, as opposed to other spin-offs, the Persona 4 characters act almost exactly how they did in the original game, and aren’t really one trick ponies anymore. There’s not a lot of annoying whining from Teddie, or steak talk from Chie.

As for the gameplay, it’s very basic; however, it’s also very fun… Most of the time. Easy and Normal modes should be easy for anyone to get through; however, the jump from Normal to Hard is huge! I’ve had times where I’ve missed two times in the hard modes, with getting at least Goods or Greats other times, and I’ve still lost and had to redo the song. Unless you’re playing the Story Mode, which, even if you go on Normal, which is the hardest mode they allow for story mode, you could probably get a perfect score for every song without retrying. The difficulty is all over the place.

Another thing to add, this trophy has a bunch of trophies and medals to get through. If you're a completionist, there's gonna be a few trophies that you wish were implemented better, and there's a few that are very hard to keep track of, but it will make it so that you'll spend a lot of time on the game, that's for sure.

The songs are also great, and it includes some pretty great classics from Persona 4/Golden/other spin-offs. There’s a lot of remixes though, but luckily, a lot of them are good, and the only really bad ones that I saw were the two free DLC tracks that aren’t required at all. But speaking of DLC, there’s a lot. There’s a lot of songs, costumes, and accessory packs, which I believe cost around $20-30 if you buy all of them. If you want my picks, I would just buy “Break Out Of…” and “Heaven-Hatsune Miku,” but that’s just my opinion.

In conclusion, Persona 4 Dancing All Night has a pretty good story that a lot of people can really relate to, has some great music, and really stays true to the original character. However, it’s also very all over the place difficulty wise, has way too much DLC for my taste, and probably won’t be great if you really don’t like rhythm games.



StarryPS's avatar
Community review by StarryPS (January 25, 2016)

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