Persona 4: Dancing All Night (PS4) Review

 Persona 4: Dancing All Night (PS4) 8/10

Hello everyone and welcome back to Persona. Persona 4: Dancing All Night was originally released on June 25, 2015 for the Playstation Vita and then brought over to the PS4. The game was developed by Atlus and published by Sega and Bandai Namco.

This is my very first rhythm game and I’m really glad this is my first exposure to the genre. When I first picked up the game, I wasn’t expecting anything special. Just some mindless fun. When I saw that there was a story mode for a rhythm game, I knew I found something great. Let’s jump into this.

Our story follows the Investigation Team (Yu, Yosuke, Chie, Yukiko, Kanji, Teddie, Rise, and Naoto) one year after the events of Persona 4. Yu has returned to his hometown, Naoto has returned to her work as a detective, and Rise is trying to get back into the pop idol scene. Rise reaches out to the Investigation Team to help her with her comeback show, asking them to be back-up dancers for the Love Meets Bonds Festival (LMB for short). Everyone agrees and she starts training the team. One day when Rise is training Yu and Naoto at Takura Productions (her idol agency), during a short break, Rise brings up a strange rumor that’s been floating around: If you watch a video on the LMB website at midnight, then the viewer will then be taken inside the video. Naoto then adds that several people have entered comas after watching the video. Yu, being the absolute Chad that he is, watches the video at midnight with the other two. Sure enough, after watching the video, a bright light appears and yellow ribbons grab the trio, pulling them into the vortex. When they awake, they find themselves in a completely new place. What seems like a dance stage with the name “Rise Kujikawa” over the stage, the trio notices that there’s a crowd of Shadows acting like an audience, but they’re all tied together with the yellow ribbon. The group, now on high alert, prepare for a battle just like in the TV world. As Yu and Naoto try to attack with their Personas, nothing happens. A voice then speaks to them saying that no one can get hurt here. This is a place with no violence. After some talking, the voice tries to coerce the trio into joining the bonds given here. The voice then starts blasting a very dark, cryptic song, making the trio very weak and submissive, with Naoto almost giving in. In the struggle against the situation, Rise drops her music player and it starts playing her music which counteracts against the music the voice is playing. Yu, remembering what he heard earlier from meeting another idol group called Kanami Kitchen, says that dancing might break the spell over these Shadows. He mentions that dancing is a form of expression and he thinks that dancing will help get these Shadows free from the ribbons that’s binding them. Having Rise blast her music with her Persona, Yu starts dancing with all of his might and emotions. After he finishes, the Shadows disappear into bright light, leaving the world. The voice, realizing that the group doesn’t want to form a bond with it, forces them to leave. Yu, Rise, and Naoto awaken back in Takura Productions. Wanting to investigate this further, Rise emails the other members about what happened saying that they should investigate when they arrive at the studio tomorrow. The next day, everyone reunites and starts discussing the events that happened. Rise’s manager Inoue meets up with the group, but seems worried. Apparently Kanami Kitchen has gone missing. All the members minus Kanami herself can’t be found anywhere. Yu suggests talking to Kanami, hoping she knows what happened. During her photo shoot, the group watches from a distance when all of a sudden those same ribbons from last night appear and try to pull in Kanami. Yu and the others react and try to stop it. Ms Ochimizu pushes Kanami out of the way and she gets pulled in instead. The Investigation Team follows suit and goes into the vortex. The group finds themselves in the same world as last night. The world is called the Midnight Stage and it turns out that Kanami Kitchen has been taken here. The Investigation Team decides to split up to find the four members. As they are searching for them, the Investigation Team has to find out what happened, who made this world, why they are doing this, and to put a stop to it once and for all.

Again, I’m sorry for the long synopsis, but I felt it was necessary to set the stage (pun intended lol). I actually really liked this story. It’s very entertaining and the way it ties into the music for P4 is actually great. The story’s presentation reminds me a bit of Ace Attorney mixed with Persona. Fully voice acted lines (except when a main character is thinking to themselves) and there are split dialogue options, just like in the Persona games. There are 3 main characters that you’ll experience the story through: Yu, Rise, and Kanami. I really enjoyed all the chapters as well as the character development that everyone underwent, especially Rise’s team and Kanami Kitchen. I also love how Yu had a personality in this. I know in P4 you were supposed to imprint your own personality into Yu, but his character just works better when he has an actual personality and fully voice acted lines. 

The story itself is actually pretty good. Like I said earlier, I wasn’t even expecting a story mode for this. I love the idea of self expression through dance and you can see these expressions through the character’s dances. The build up to the final showdown was great too. Something that P4 didn’t do so well imo. LIke I said earlier, I love the new characters. Kanami Kitchen, Ms Ochimizu, and Inoue-san were all great characters and each had their own character arcs. Dojima and Nanako are in this too and were surprisingly very important for the story. I can keep going on and on about the plot, but I’ll leave it at this. I highly recommend getting this solely for the story alone (you have to play P4 first to understand it though).

And I realize that this whole story is bullshit compared to what P4 was trying to do. This whole thing only exists to give everyone an excuse to be together again (also doesn’t help that the story is very similar to the main game). But you know what, I’m fine with this. I recognize that the story may not be totally original, but I love this cast so much that it’s great to see them all again, even under these weird and convenient circumstances. And even with that said, what they did with this “unoriginal” story was pretty original to me, so I guess it’s okay lol. Overall solid story and solid writing all around.

I love the graphics for the game. Seeing everyone upgraded to higher quality models that are fit for Persona 5 was amazing. Everybody looks so fucking good that if Atlus decides to do a complete overhaul of Persona 4, they can easily use these models for that. I love the dances everyone does too. Yu, Yosuke, Naoto, Kanji, Rise, and Nanako were the best dancers imo. The backgrounds (both for the dance stages and still images for the story) look good too. I wish there were more stills for the story instead of reusing the same ones over and over, but whatever. No technical difficulties either. No crashes or frame drops (from what I could tell). 

Sound design is good too. Everything sounded great with no hiccups or dips in sound quality. The voice acting is great, as well. They are a couple of voices that did catch me off guard. Johnny Yong Bosch was great as Yu and Yuri Lowenthal was a good Yosuke, but I do miss his old voice from P4. Ashly Burch is a great substitute for Rise. I didn’t even realize it was a different person. Sam Riegel aka Teddie was really great too. Now, there is one voice that really bothered me: Chie’s. I hate her fucking voice so much. It is so annoying and I want the original voice actress back. Whoever casted Erin Fitzgerald needs to be banned from voice casting. Everyone else was fine, but she does not make a good Chie at all.

The music. The main attraction for the game. The music for this game is nothing short of amazing. This game helped me appreciate the music for P4 a lot. I wasn’t too ecstatic about P4s OST but the remixes here helped me love the music even more. Anyway, how are the remixes here? A lot of them feel like filler music to pan out the game, but I found some real gems here. “Dance!”, “Backside of the TV (Lotus Juice Remix)”, “Signs of Love (TK Remix)”, “Best Friends (Banvox Remix)”,  “Snowflakes (Narasaki Remix), “Your Affection (Daisuke Asakura Remix), “Calystegia”, and  “Shadow World (ATLUS Kozuka Remix).” There’s a whole bunch of other songs in the game, but I found that I enjoyed these the most (both musically and gameplay).

Gameplay is very simple, but very difficult to master. You pick a song, choose your outfit, and begin. Your goal is to match the button presses to the beat of the song. Depending on when you press the beat, you’ll get a Perfect, Great, Good, or Miss. You’ll want to get as many Perfect and Great as you possibly can. Miss too many notes, then your Hype Gauge will go down. Miss enough notes and you’ll fail the song and you’ll have to restart. As you play the songs, you’ll see blue rings coming out. Hit these and you’ll get points towards your score. If you miss these rings, no penalties. There’s special rings that’ll pop up that’s rainbow colored. Hit three of these and you’ll unlock a Fever Bond. When a Fever Bond starts, your dance partner will come in and join in on the fun. During Fever Bonds, your points will increase as well, so always try to aim for these. After you beat a song, you’ll get a results screen. Depending on how you did, you’ll get either Stage Clear, Brilliant, King Crazy, or Not Cleared. 95% of the time, I got Brilliant ranking, but when it got the the Hard Difficulty version of the songs, that’s when the game truly pushed my limits. Let me just say, “Signs of Love (TK Remix)” was the hardest song that I beat in the game. Beating this song on Hard Mode is a legit gaming achievement for me because I spent 45 minutes on this one track. Thankfully this is arguably the best song in the game, so I wasn’t too peeved playing this song over and over. There’s another song on here called “Heaven (Norihiko Hibino Remix)” that I could not beat. There’s no rhyme or reason to this song’s beats and I just couldn’t do it.

After every song you beat, you’ll get money. You can use this money in Tanaka’s Shop to buy costumes and accessories for the dancers and power-ups and handicaps for the songs. These were great additions to the game. A couple of the handicaps were complete bullshit, so I didn’t bother too much with these.

My only problems with the game are: Chie’s voice, lack of diversity for the songs (there’s a good amount of songs to play here, but I wish there were more), and just overall more content. After you beat all the songs on Easy Mode, you’ll unlock a prequel to the story showing Rise asking everyone to join her show. After you beat all the songs on Normal Mode, you’ll unlock a new dancer and a new song to play. And I assume after you beat all the songs on Hard Mode you’ll unlock All Night difficulty. There is extra content, but I wish there was more. There is also DLC for the game, but I didn’t bother with that. I only bought the music video for “Backside of the TV” only because I was curious about it. 

Overall, I had a blast with the game. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the gameplay was very addicting. I can see why people obsess over Hatsune Miku rhythm games in all honesty. The music for the game is great too. There’s a couple of songs on here that I’ll be jamming out to on a regular basis. If you’re a fan of Persona 4 or Persona 4 Golden and like rhythm games, then you’ll enjoy the hell out of this game. By the time I finished what I wanted to finish, I dropped roughly 25 hours into the game, just to give you some perspective on how long the game is. Until my next review, watch out for creepy videos.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.