Dance Away Darkness | Persona 4: Dancing All Night Review

It’s hard not to love the characters of Persona 4. Many gamers who missed out on the original PlayStation 2 release were lucky to get the excellent remake, Persona 4: Golden on PlayStation Vita, and these characters found a new home on Sony’s handheld. Luckily for these fans, Atlus delivers another story set in the same universe, albeit as a dancing rhythm game rather than an RPG. Persona 4: Dancing All Night is an easy to pick up rhythm game that relies on fan service, scaling difficulty and catchy beats to deliver a great overall package that works surprisingly well.

Darkness’ weakness? Dancing!

Dancing All Night takes place a roughly a month after the events of Persona 4. Rise Kujikawa has returned to her pop star life and has recruited Yu, Chie and the gang to be the backup dancers for her next big concert.

Unfortunately for Rise, Yu and the others, a dark force is stealing other performers from the concert. Yu summons the Investigation Team together in order to figure out who’s kidnapping the performers. This leads them into a shadow world where they have to dance in order to defeat the shadows.

What made Persona 4 such a compelling game was its marriage or long story segments mixed with in-depth RPG gameplay. It struck a great balance that rewarded extended gameplay with lots of dialogue and vice-versa. Unfortunately, Dancing All Night doesn’t strike this same balance, and it’s too top heavy on the visual novel story, and it’s not broken up enough to keep the overall narrative engaging.

This isn’t to say that Dancing All Night’s story is bad; it’s filled to the brim with fan favorite characters, (un)intentional humor and great voice acting. But having to sit through 15 minutes of dialogue to only play one 2-3 minute song can really drag on, and even as a fan of Persona 4, I started to grow tired of the story as my time with the game went on.

While it’s entertaining, the story drowns the gameplay.

Dancing All Night’s control scheme is straightforward with only six buttons: triangle, circle, cross, up, left and down. Like most rhythm games, all you have to do is press the corresponding button when it appears on screen to the beat and chain together notes to get the highest score. You can flick either of the analog sticks to hit scratches, which are bonus rings that can be hit when they overlap the outer circle. These don’t end your streak or penalize you in any way if they’re not hit, but they’ll increase your score and make your streak go higher much faster.

Some of these are multicolored “fever” scratches. When enough are hit, designated sections of the song go into fever mode, usually bringing in an ally to dance with you, which increases your score and makes the shadow crowd’s reaction more positive.

The track list that’s packed in Dancing All Night is superb, and its varying degrees of speed and note patterns makes each song challenging in its own way. Fast-paced songs may offer more beats per minute, but the variation of notes is minimal which challenges your speed. Conversely, slower songs may have less beats per minute, but they’re far more technical with sections sandwiched together with closely spaced notes.

After completing the story, there’s still plenty to do if you want to unlock everything in free dance mode. Dancing nets you currency which can be spent in the item shop to unlock costumes, accessories and bonus items. Costumes and accessories will only change the look of your characters (the nose costume for Teddy is a must), but some items will alter how each song functions entirely. Some items increase the speed the notes fly in, but in return you’ll get a higher payout and score bonus. There’s also items that scale down the difficulty, though you can expect less rewards.

A replay mode is included after you beat a song, and it allows you to watch your performances. This is especially handy when playing harder difficulties, as it allows you to watch where you’ve made mistakes. It’s a great learning tool, and being able to pinpoint frequent weak points motivated me to keep attempting difficult sections rather than give up.

In fact, one of my favorite aspects of Dancing All Night is it’s ability to teach me without holding my hand. Tools are provided, like the replay function, to help you realize your mistakes, and special items can be bought to ease some of the difficulty until you’re ready to take on a harder challenge. Allowing me to add the training wheels back on when I feel like it allows me to gauge my own skills rather than the game expecting a certain skill level.

Whether you’re a Persona veteran or a Vita owner looking for something new, Persona 4: Dancing All Night is simple fun that’s hard to put down.

This review is based on a review copy provided by the publisher.