‘E3 2015’ What The Hell Is Wrong With ‘Persona 4: Dancing All Night’!?

Atlus struck gold when they released Persona 4 during the PS2’s final days. Building on the social aspects that made its predecessor such a hit and framing the dungeon crawling around a murder mystery, the series found mainstream success that continues to extend through enough spinoffs to make Mario jealous. With this in mind, the Persona team moved from the fighting game to first person RPG’s, so naturally, the next game would just HAVE to be a dancing game. I mean, right?

After playing Persona 4: Dancing All Night for myself, the game is just about as bizarre as you’d expect from a demon summoning RPG being transformed into a happy go lucky rhythm title. The demo let us choose from some of our favorite characters from the main game, including Yu Narukami, Yosuke Hanamura, Yukiko Amagi, Teddie and even Nanako Dojima, where each were attached to a specific song from the series’ excellent soundtrack. Mostly consisting of dance remixes, I went in with doubts that these background tunes would be able to carry a game of this nature. From what we’ve seen so far though, I felt the addictive nature of wanting to constantly replay the same songs for better scores.

However, this is easier said than done, thanks to the actual game play mechanics. Using the up, left and down buttons on the control pad and the triangle, circle and X buttons on the right side, this odd set up takes some getting used to. Once you’re used to what you need to push, it’s not too hard to tap, double tap and hold the proper notes, with progressively higher difficulty settings adding in more complex patterns. Much like other games in the genre however, the colorful backgrounds can often obscure your view, leaving me with a broken combo because I missed button prompts that I didn’t see. With the Vita screen being the size that it is, this shouldn’t be an issue, especially when song completion has less to do with making it to the end, and more with meeting a minimum score.

But when you do meet your goal, you’re greeted with one of the strangest things I’ve seen in a game this year. When your character wins, they summon their trademark Persona in an overdramatic scene where they rise from the ground and… Play a solo? There’s something odd about seeing the vicious looking Izanagi break out into a guitar solo, or the divine Konohana Sakuya pull out the saxophone to perform her best Bill Clinton impression. Couple this with your former party members shouting out words of encouragement throughout the song while the formerly vicious Shadows dance along with your sweet moves, this all led me to wonder what the hell was going on with this silly, over the top, and seemingly self-aware spinoff. But you know what? I can’t help but smile every time I think of how insane this all is.

Persona 4: Dancing All Night will launch this September for the PS Vita, with a standard and limited edition which both hold tons of goodies for the Persona faithful. Complete with a text heavy story mode, (that will justify all this strangeness,) quick play dances and DLC that expands on the included song list, the final build will seemingly have enough content to keep us boogieing the night away. Will you be tearing up the dance floor when this title finally arrives?