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Because the triple pack of all the Persona dancing games was on sale on PSN I decided to pick it up. I always wanted to try the dancing games since I love the Persona soundtracks. I expected it to just be a dancing game but to my surprise there was actually a deeply involved story??
Basically there’s a shadow realm created by an idol who killed herself many years ago and she sucks in all of the members of Kanamin’s Kitchen idol group as well as our Persona 4 gang. The only way out? To DANCE ALL NIGHT.
And so by dancing you basically defeat shadows aka people who are in some coma who got sucked into that world by accident. Anyway in the end they resolve everything and have a big concert. It’s also kind of a way for Rise to make an idol comeback since she had to quit her activities back in Persona 4 and move back to the boonies.
If I remember correctly, a lot of the story for this is based on Rise’s storyline from leveling her in P4, all the stuff about her being in a slump and going on an extended sabbatical and even how her agency transferred all her bookings over to Kanami. Weirdly enough despite being a music game spinoff (sequel?) I would say that this game was actually less silly than regular P4.
So let’s talk about the gameplay. It’s your standard music game that you just press the buttons that correspond to what’s on screen. I actually struggled with a lot of the songs simply because there’s just too much going on and honestly it was hard to see. I could clear songs up to about 5-6 stars but anymore and I would just start fumbling. There’s Easy / Normal / Hard modes. I think there’s an extreme mode but first of all, the jump from Normal to Hard is insane. For example a Normal version of a song might be 6 stars, but the Hard one is like 15 stars. Wtf?? ಠ_ಠ Fortunately you can pick easy mode for the story and when you play the music only game you can pick whatever mode you like. The down side is certain dance partners and items unlock if you beat a song on Hard Mode so I had already given up fully clearing/Platinuming this game.
AND from what I saw in the achievements, there’s also the extreme mode on top of the hard mode, so that’s gotta be the songs that are like, 20 stars of difficulty wtf. Anyway, we only scratched the surface so far with the unlocks in the regular mode, but it seemed like each song has a set lead dancer, and then only a few possible partner dancers? So it’s very much different here from a game like Project Diva where you can use whoever you want at any time.
I have a couple annoyances with the game. First of all, while I enjoyed the Persona 4 Golden OST, I am not a fan of a LOT of the remixes of the songs in this game. I get it, it’s a dancing game, they had to remix them because some songs you can’t really “dance to”. But still some songs are so remixed to the point they’re unrecognizable to me.
Look, let’s be clear here: the only good remix is Specialist.
My second problem is my waifu Chie. If you read my P4G review you know I’m a Chie/Yu shipper so I was extremely disappointed that in the entire story mode there wasn’t a single scene where Chie and Yu got to dance together. Wtf? The game basically assigns random partners to come on stage to dance with the main person and they only ever put Chie with Yukiko. If you unlock certain songs and dance partners in regular music mode. you can finally have Chie dancing with Yu but seriously WTF. It’s like the game was intentionally just trying to push Yu and Rise the whole time. No offense to Rise (big offense to Rise) but I just don’t ship you with him 🥺.
And finally my biggest pet peeve – we’re stuck with English voices. Sorry I’m a big seiyuu buff and I loved the seiyuus in the Japanese version (especially Namikawa Daisuke and Horie Yui) but because of whatever porting reasons I guess , the digital ps4/5 port of this game only contains English voices. I believe the other 2 dancing games give you options to pick a language but here I’m stuck with voices I’m not used to at all. The voices especially during the dances them selves were so annoying I had to just turn them off completely. ( ´_ゝ`) It’s not that I hate English voice acting, but a lot of the characters here are trying to sound way too try hard anime. “YOU ARE SO COOL SEMPAI!!!” 🤦 Out of all the girls the only ones I finally got used to by the end of the story were Naoto, Nanako and Rise. Everyone else, especially Chie and Kanami grated my ears. Because of the my motivation further lowered so after finishing the main story I only played a couple more songs and then decided to move on to Persona 5 – dancing in starlight.
Here’s the REAL problem with your waifu: English voices!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! I on the other hand could not get used to English Rise but was better at tolerating English Yukiko. Also I guess it is kind of ironic how our general complaint with the way that English actors try to “be anime” that Nanako was fine despite being a grown ass lady voicing a 5 year old.
Overall I think if you enjoy music games and like the Persona 4 OST it’s definitely worth playing, voice casting aside. Since I got it so cheap in the 3 Persona Dancing game bundle on PSN I would wait for a sale before buying full price.
The story mode for the game honestly felt like “enough”. It was probably 10+ hours long and covered more or less all of the available songs (which covered not just P4/P4G but also had some from the other spinoffs like the fighting game or the chibi game). After going through that it almost felt like there wasn’t really a need to play through all of them again in the free dance mode (except of course for trophy hunting.)
Bread Master Lee 
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