Persona 4: Dancing All Night Review

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the Persona 4 gang danced? No? Well haha… We got a game where that happens. RISE, PLAY MY TUNES! This is Persona 4: Dancing All Night.

2015-10-31-191703When this game was first announced, I was thinking, “Wow. Atlus is really making Persona 4 its cash-cow.” If you think about it, we got Persona 4, Persona 4 Golden, Persona 4 Arena, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, and now Persona 4: Dancing All Night. Did we really need all those spin-off titles? No, we didn’t. But the port? Maybe.

The story of Persona 4: DAN takes place one month after the epilogue of Persona 4 Golden. I can’t tell you much about Golden but Erin’s review can. Anyway, Rise is staging her comeback to the idol world soon and she wants the help of her friends as backup dancers. The gang is scheduled to appear in the Love Meets Bond festival along with Kanamin Kitchen, an idol group in Rise’s company. Crap hits the fan when a rumor starts floating around that if you are on the LMB’s website at midnight, a video of a dead idol will play and you will be sucked in. It is up to the P4 gang to get to the bottom of this as the members of Kanamin Kitchen are missing.

2015-10-31-191746Gameplay is basically that of a rhythm game. With P4:DAN, you have seven things to worry about. SEVEN! Thanks Atlus. I knew you were hardcore but holy crap… You need to worry about the up, left, and down buttons along with the triangle, circle, and x button. It would be okay if I only had to worry about those six but we get a blue ring and Fever ring to worry about. Those can be “scratched” but either flicking the left or right stick or touching the front touch screen.

Comboing in P4:DAN will be a slight challenge. With every star icon there is a very light color ring around it. It will be either yellow or red. When there is a light red ring, you will need to hit it with a Perfect or Great to maintain your combo. If you are a bit late in hitting the star icon with the light red ring, you will get a Good and lose your combo. Goods are bad. Just bad.

Persona 4 - Dancing All Night(1)Fever rings are “scratched” just like the blue rings. You will need to get three Fever rings to establish a Fever Bond. A Fever Bond will allow you to rack up those points and you will have a dancing partner, either by your picking or just random. There are two Fever Bonds per song.

P4D24P4:DAN offers four difficulties in Free Dance: Easy, Normal, Hard, and All Night. You are given Easy, Normal, and Hard right off the bat. All Night is unlocked when you buy all the items in the shop but you can only do so when you have beaten Story Mode and play Margaret’s song in Free Dance. The only downside to this mode is that each song has their own designated dancer. You cannot pick your dancer but you can pick the dance partner… I wanted to be Yukiko for everything! Oh well, I can deal.

In Story Mode and Free Dance you will earn money. Oh sweet! Money!! Oh whatever will I do with all that cash I earn while dancing? Shopping. Lots and lots of shopping. You can shop for items, costumes, and accessories. You will need a crap ton of money to get everything and you will need everything to get seven trophies just based on shopping.

2015-10-31-191905The items you buy are usable in the options menu in Free Dance. Items can help you out in either lower or boosting up the difficulty in songs. I had to resort to using items to obtain one of the trophies and another trophy for just using an item.

Usually I would wrap up my thoughts here but the review is a tad bit short… So let’s talk about getting that platinum trophy.

2015-10-05-221128Getting the platinum trophy in this game is a cakewalk. Most of the trophies will be just from story mode triggers and Free Dance and the rest will be from shopping and going into the Database. The most troublesome trophies will be the Fever Bond trophies. With the Fever Bond trophies, you need to worry about what song you will need to play, having the correct dancer to show up, and having the song on the right difficulty. The most infuriating Fever Bond trophy is “Senpai, You’re So Cool!” This trophy needs you to play three songs with either Yu or Rise being the main dancer and the other being the dance partner. But here’s the deal, two of the songs need to be on Hard difficulty. Even with items equipped, I had a great deal of trouble. I just chalked it up to Atlus being Atlus and kept on resetting until I had seen the Fever Bonds and cleared the song. Oh yeah… You will need to clear the song, not see the Fever Bonds and fail.

2015-10-31-191945Overall, Persona 4: Dancing All Night is fun rhythm game with a great deal of difficulty. Getting trophies will not take you long but grinding for money will take some time. So if you want a fun, hard rhythm game to play then Persona 4: Dancing All Night is the game for you.

Persona 4: Dancing All Night

4/5

Persona 4: Dancing All Night trophy difficulty

1.5/5

Emma… Didn’t you finish this a month ago? And shouldn’t you finish Persona 4? Haha…SHUT UP!

You can find Erin’s review here.

Persona 4: Dancing All Night is available now on Amazon and PSN.

One Reply to “Persona 4: Dancing All Night Review”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.