Persona 4 Arena Review

Welcome to the P-1 Grand Prix! Are you ready to fight your friends? No? Well, too bad! You have to! Even though I stated in my initial thoughts that I was going to finish every character’s story mode, after playing a few of them, they are all the same (save for Labyrs and maybe Elizabeth). The story of story mode is simple for the P4 characters. The main character comes back to Inaba for the second half of Golden Week to spend it with his friends. And out of habit, he stays up to watch the Midnight Channel. It comes on to show a commercial for the P-1 Grand Prix with Teddie as the host. This shocks the P4 crew (minus Kanji, Naoto, Rise and Teddie cause they are missing). So the next day they go into the TV and deal with this tournament. Oh, and three members of the P3 cast are in the game as well and have their own story. Mitsuru, Aigis and Akihiko are sent to find and retrieve the missing “older sister” of Aigis, Labyrs. So they go into the TV to find her. As stated in my initial thoughts, the cutscenes overpower the fighting. Not much fighting is done in story mode. Two hours or so of cutscenes and at least maybe ten minutes worth of fighting. That much story isn’t needed in a fighting game. I know the game is a somewhat sequel of a RPG but still… Now arcade mode is where the fun is. Arcade mode plays like a fighting game. Limited cutscenes and much fighting. I had no problems finishing arcade mode with all the characters minus Aigis, Elizabeth and Yukiko. Those three characters I found the most difficult to control. Someone told me the same and suggested to turn down the difficulty so that I would be able to finish arcade. Hopefully you guys won’t have to do that. Score attack is hard for me. I haven’t been able to attack the enemy. They… um… wreck me… I’m probably never going to get that trophy. Oh well. Challenge mode is basically do attacks for characters against a dummy in a certain order. I found it boring and annoying. There is training mode but I haven’t touched that yet. Overall I enjoyed Persona 4 Arena but they end the story in story mode with a cliffhanger. Hopefully in the next installment (yeah… Arena Ultimax), they will resolve that cliffhanger.