Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection (PS4) Review

 Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection (PS4) 7.5/10

Hello everybody. I’m back with another game review. Today, I’ll be talking about the Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection. This collection has 3 games inside of it: Persona 4: Dancing All Night, Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight, and Persona 5: Dancing In Starlight. P3D and P5D were released on May 24, 2018 for the PS4 and PSVita. The games were developed by Atlus and published by Sega. For this review, I’ll be going over P3D and P5D strictly as I have already reviewed P4D. Let’s begin.

P3D and P5D have a story that coincides with each other. One day while the members of SEES are asleep, they wake up in a very odd room. Everybody is questioning what’s going on, thinking it’s another Shadow attack, until Elizabeth pops up. Everybody has been transported to the Velvet Room because she needs their help. She explains that sometime ago, her sister Margaret says that her guest was able to solve a problem through dancing (referencing P4D). Caroline and Justine jump up saying that their guest would have solved the issue a lot sooner and better (talking about Joker). Elizabeth then proclaims that her guest would’ve done it even better. With these two clashing heads, Elizabeth suggests a competition between the 2 guests. She suggests a ball in which whoever can hype up the crowd the most wins. Caroline and Justine agree and they summon the Phantom Thieves to participate in the ball while Elizabeth summons SEES to participate. After some convincing, SEES agrees to dance in the ball. Same thing with the Phantom Thieves. Both parties agree to participate for the sake of their attendant’s pride. And thus, the ball has officially begun! Due to the Velvet Room existing outside of time and space, both groups can spend as much time here as possible without any worry of oversleeping or anything like that. This whole situation is taking place inside a dream and when everybody wakes up, they’ll forget the whole thing. While here, they’ll be dancing in front of everybody’s souls aka people’s Shadows in the Metaverse. While staying here, everybody has a waiting room that looks exactly like their real life rooms.

Story is quite enjoyable. Nothing deep or personal like the other Persona games. There’s also social events that happen in the game where you can see characters interact with each other. I’ll go in depth with this later.

Graphically, the games look great. The P5 cast looks like they were ripped straight out of Persona 5 and given light touch ups to make them look even better. However, a certain model looks like trash lmao (coughMakotocough). The Persona 3 cast looks amazing. The entire SEES crew plus Elizabeth has been given brand new, higher quality models and they look great. Like I said in my P4D review, with these models, Atlus can make a complete remaster of Persona 3 using these models. Just seeing everyone in such high quality made my heart flutter. The backgrounds look amazing as well. For every song is a different area that was in the games. Seeing parts of Port Town in upgraded graphics was great to see (such as Paulownian Mall, Tartarus, Iwatodai Dorm, and even parts of the city during the Dark Hour). The stages for P5D look great too. It seems like they ripped out parts of the map and made it into a dance stage (such as Shibuya Square, Shido’s Palace, Futaba’s Palace, and even Joker’s room in Leblanc).

Sound design is great as well. All the songs, voices, and sound effects were of great quality. The music for these games are top notch too. Although, I will say this: I do wish P3D had a bigger music library. Persona 3 has a fantastic soundtrack and I wish the game utilized its OST more. P5D’s soundtrack is great too. However I found a lot of the remixes to be subpar at best, with myself only thoroughly enjoying a handful of them. My favorite songs from P3D are: “Our Moment”, “Battle Hymn of the Soul (Daisuke Asakura Remix)”, “Burn My Dread (Novoiski Remix)”, “Deep Breath Deep Breath (Yuu Miyake Remix)”, Time (Atlus Kitajoh Remix), “Want To Be Close (ATOLS Remix)” (arguably the best song on the OST), “Deep Mentality (Lotus Juice Remix)”, and  “Memories of You (Atlus Meguro Remix)”. And my favorite songs from P5D are: “Groovy,”, “The Days When Mother Was There (ATLUS Kitajoh Remix)”, “The Whims of Fate (Yukihiro Fukutomi Remix)”, “Blooming Villain (Atlus Konishi Remix)”, “Beneath the Mask (KAIEN Remix)”, “Last Surprise (Jazztronik Remix)”, and “Hoshi To Bokura To (tofubeats Remix)” (arguably the best remix of the game). There’s a surprisingly good amount of songs here that I might jam out to every now and then. I gotta say though, the overall quality of these songs aren’t as good as P4D’s.

The voice acting is really good here. All the Phantom Thieves returned for their roles and they sound as great as they did in Persona 5. The voices for P3D sound just as good. Fuuka’s new voice makes her instantly a better character. She’s so adorable; I love her. Aegis got an upgrade too, which is also a warm welcome. I also love Joker (Ren) and Makoto’s (P3 MC) voices. They sound just like how I imagined they would speak. The overall voice acting is phenomenal. Great job here.

Gameplay is exactly like P4D. You hit notes to the beat of the music. Fuck up too many times and you’ll fail the song and you’ll have to restart. You can also add modifiers to the songs to make them easier or harder for your liking. The customization for the characters is really great too. You can choose an outfit, customize your hair, put on accessories, eye contacts, and hair color. There’s a lot more customization here than in P4D, which is very appreciative.

There is no story mode in this. Instead, there’s Social Events, in which you’ll unlock as you play the game. These events are just characters talking and interacting with each other. A lot of these were very entertaining and even had me bust out laughing on several occasions. These were very great, especially for P3D which helped develop those characters a little bit more.

There’s DLC for the games as well. More songs and costumes. I didn’t buy any of it but I did download the free stuff. “Battle Hymn of the Soul”, “Memories of You”, “Groovy (Full Version)”, “Our Moment (Full Version)”, and “Will Power” to name a few. I do think it’s stupid that they took out some of the best songs in Persona 3’s OST and “sold” it as DLC. I am well aware of the awful DLC practices that this game does (such as in PAL region you have to buy an entire pack just to get the one song you wanted). There is an awful lot of microtransactions in these games, which is lowkey horrendous.

These games do have some problems though. The main thing is the difficulty. These games are harder than P4D. It’s not too much of a difficulty spike, but enough that it’s a noticeable difference. Another thing is the technicalities. Sometimes if there is too much going on on-screen, the game won’t read your button presses. This rarely happened to me, but it’s still present. Other than that, no technical issues such as frame drops or crashing. I also wish there were more songs to play in P3D. P3D’s song list is smaller than P5D’s, which is a shame. Also, I do wish they delayed this game until P5 Royal and Strikers were released, which would allow them to use new songs from those games. Hell, where are some songs from PQ2?

Overall, I had fun playing these. It was nice to revisit these characters before Persona 5 Royal drops. It was also a great joy to see SEES again, especially in a much higher quality. I can only recommend these games to those that have played Persona 5 and Persona 3 (especially P3 as this game lowkey spoils the ending for the game) and enjoy rhythm games. By the end of my journey with these games, I dropped roughly 19 hours into P5D and roughly 13 hours into P3D. 32 hours in total between the two games.

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

This is Zorgak, signing off.