I’ve shared my love for Persona 4 and Persona 5 in previous blogs, so it probably comes as little surprise that as soon as Atlus announced that Persona 3 and Persona 5 dancing games were not only coming out late in 2018, but would be offered in a limited edition bundle that included a digital version of the Persona 4 dancing game for the PS4 (for the first time), I immediately pre-ordered it. I played through P4 (Dancing All Night) and P5 (Dancing in Starlight) recently so I just wanted to jot down some thoughts because I’ve been playing a lot of games and am getting behind on writing about them.
I played Dancing All Night first, because I had more recently played Persona 4 and it was the first of the Persona dancing games. I said in my blog about P4 that it is funnier than P5, and that humor made a welcome return in Dancing All Night. There was a surprising amount of story and dialogue in this game, and though the writing was generally less developed and punchy than it was in the core game, there were still several scenes that made me burst out laughing.
The gameplay was pretty standard. It was simple enough to get into and appropriately challenging at times, even if sometimes there seemed like there was way too much going on at once to really see the prompts. I also find it impossible to watch the dancers while I’m playing, but thankfully they have a replay mode where you can watch a perfect version of a song. And it was a small thing, but I liked that you could dress your characters up in various outfits.
I realized immediately that Rise’s (P4 bae) voice actor had changed, but I was happily surprised when I saw the character was now voiced by Ashly Burch, who I think is great. I was even happier with the introduction of Kanami Mashita. When I’d heard that there was a new character, I worried about how they would fit into such a fun cast with established chemistry, but Kanami totally fits right in. She’s cute, funny, and I like that she represents a totally different kind of idol than Rise. It’s too bad she wasn’t in Persona 4: Golden or I might have had a harder time deciding who to romance.
So, overall, I loved Dancing All Night. The remixed P4 songs were great and I liked the stylish slight redesigns of the characters. Did the story drag on a little too long? Sure. But what I actually appreciated about that was that it just offered more opportunities to see the characters interact and talk, and that’s really what these games seem to be about: getting more time with your favorite characters. So this didn’t feel like a shoddy side-story, it really did feel to me like an expansion of the P4 universe that I already loved so much.
And if I loved the Persona 4 universe, I was head over heels for the world of Persona 5. The gameplay is virtually identical in Dancing All Night and Dancing in Starlight, so the thing that stood out the most to me was the graphics. P5 was a gorgeous, stylish game, but you can kind of tell it was originally developed for the PS3 when you look at the character models and environments. They’re well designed, but they’re also fairly low in detail and sharpness. It didn’t bother me at all when I played it, but as soon as Dancing in Starlight loaded up and I saw the new, crisp, beautiful versions of the P5 crew, I was (unreasonably) overjoyed.
Not only did the characters themselves get a graphical facelift, many of the environments they dance in are 3D, high def versions of locations from the original game. They also added detailed, explorable bedrooms for each of the characters. This is all very exciting not just because it’s a prettier version of art I already liked looking at, but because of the possible implications that it has for a re-release, like Atlus did with Persona 4: Golden. In fact, not long after this game was released they announced P5R and said nothing other than the fact that we would have to wait until March to learn more. I keep seeing the weirdest rumors about what this project will be (Persona 5 Racing? Really?), but I think it’s going to be Persona 5: Ruby. Yellow was the primary thematic color of Persona 4, so when they revamped it for re-release the new subtitle was the more valuable, flashy name for its primary color. With red being P5’s primary thematic color, ruby would be the parallel if they were going for a consistent naming convention, which we see that they like because of the similar subtitles for all of the dancing games.
Regardless of the subtitle, my whole point was that these new character models and environments (and the ability to interact with rooms and characters in both first-person and virtual reality) make me wonder if they are recreating all of the assets for a P5 re-release in tandem, and we can look forward to an even more breathtakingly beautiful version of the game, one where we can actually explore the streets, buildings, and environments from a variety of perspectives – and maybe in VR! That is too exciting to consider.
As with Dancing All Night, I like that you can collect a bunch of costumes for the characters, and I really liked some of the remixes of these songs. I did think the playlist was a little short, but they offer several free downloadable songs, and I went ahead and bought a live version of “Whims of Fate” (favorite track from the P5 soundtrack) and a song from P4.
While the writing in Dancing All Night seemed a little weaker than that of its original game, I thought the writing and dialogue in Dancing in Starlight was actually a little sharper and more natural than some of P5’s. I loved that the twins played such a big role, and almost every one of their scenes was hilarious. But in general, as with Dancing All Night, I was just so happy to have an opportunity to revisit the world and characters that I love so much from Persona 5. I’m waiting to play Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight until I finally get around to actually playing Persona 3, but all of this Persona activity, along with the remake of Atlus’s Catherine gives me such high hopes that we’ll see a new version of P5 for PlayStation 4 and Switch a lot sooner than I might have once expected.
A New Game Plus 