Persona 4 Dancing All Night Preview – Story Mode Will Be over 10 Hours
I got the opportunity to sneak a bit of a peek at Persona 4 Dancing All Night behind closed doors at this year’s Gamescom — and I liked what I saw. Unfortunately, even though the game is already out in Japan, NIS America didn’t want to show us any of the story to keep it a secret. But, they did confirm that the story mode will be 11-12 hours in length, and from what we’ve seen online, could take some people a little longer.
Yes, Persona 4 Dancing All Night is in some ways pretty similar to other rhythm games, such as fellow PlayStation Vita game Hatsune Miku Project DIVA F. But in other ways it’s a different affair altogether, mostly in thanks to its headlining Story Mode feature. With this Persona 4 Dancing All Night seems to have taken its cue from Persona 4 Arena and Persona 4 Arena Ultimax.
The Persona 4 Arena games, developed by Arc System Works, seemed to in turn be inspired by Arc System Works’ seminal Guilty Gear and BlazBlue fighting game series. There’s a reason that BlazBlue has two visual novel spin-offs (one of which releases in the EU next month and is available to purchase here). Guilty Gear and BlazBlue both feature interesting stories, with their fights being broken up by sections of Visual Novel-esque storytelling. The Persona 4 Arena games just took this to the logical extreme, by injecting the formula with Persona 4‘s JRPG goodness.
Now that same attitude has been applied by ATLUS to the Story Mode of Persona 4 Dancing All Night — and it looks like it will be a blast for Persona fans! But, there’s also a Free Dance mode to play around with outside of the story for when you just want to get your jam on and not click through hours of story.
The gameplay itself looks like a lot of fun. While Miku devs Dingo were apparently involved with the project at some stage (the full details of the depth of their involvement is still a little unclear, though it seems pretty dialled back since the initial announcement), it seems like a different beast to the Project DIVA series. It’s even quite different to Dance Dance Revolution — closer to Dance: UK if anyone played that (which is probably like other games too).
Directions come in from the centre, hitting points around the edge of the screen, which tells you what to press. There’s quite a range of different inputs you need to do beyond just tapping, such as holding them down, or doing multiple inputs at once. A second character can be selected to come and dance with you once you’ve reached a certain amount of points. At the end of the song the character summons their Persona, who then jams out with an instrument (different Personas have different instruments) — somewhat reminiscent of Space Channel 5 in their funky tone.
It’s hard to describe a rhythm game. Like rhythm itself it’s something that needs to be experienced. This looks like it could be a treat for both Persona fans and rhythm fans alike. We hope to write a full review closer to the time.
In the meantime why not check out our Rice Exclusive Persona 4 Dancing All Night Midnight Stage Edition. Available here!
