Music Game Review: Persona 5 -Dancing in Starlight-

And so continuing from P4D we completed P5D!

	Finally the songs don’t sound like some god  awful dubstep remix!!!!
	Now with 50% more wah-wah funk guitars!

I want to begin that I enjoyed this game much more than I did the previous game and I’ll go into why.

First of all the music game was much easier on many levels. The reason is there was a slew of helper items to let you clear songs on Hard and Extreme (All Night) mode but it didn’t hinder you to the point where it wouldn’t count as a clear  (looking at you Taiko and PJD!!) So therefore if you needed to unlock a character, or a trophy you could just put on all the helper items you need and bam you got your clear. The game itself was exactly the same as P4D but they added “double notes” which were essentially if you just had 2 notes close to each other so I’m not even sure if there really was a point to adding them. One of the helper items also basically let you ignore scratches completely as they would just scratch themselves as a “Perfect” every time so this made clearing Hard mode songs a million times easier for me because scratches are the bane of my existence.

I should also clarify that there’s only a few trophies that require playing songs on Hard or All Night difficulty and even these are very simple like “see all of Ren’s dances”. Nothing difficult is required for unlocking songs, advancing social links, etc. So these are more like either a) if you are INCREDIBLY bad or b) to help keep your combos going (which you need to do in order to advance Ryuji). So ultimately I’d say the “point” of the game is now about getting the platinum trophy.

Secondly, there’s no long winded story full of random o/c characters. It’s just skits featuring the gang of P5 and the only “original” character is them just adding one of the Velvet Room ladies from P3 as part of the whole shtick with Caroline and Justine. So overall you can enjoy small social skits with Ren and co. and not have to worry about annoying random characters you have no connection to. Because of this I was more motivated to play through the various songs to unlock them as well as unlock the social skits. The only real annoyance was Ryuji who not only cockblocked me unlocking Makoto’s skits but also having to grind him to unlock the last few trophies. His social skit requirement was basically “combos” and since I only really played on Easy/Normal getting more than 200 combo was a big feat for me lol.

The skits are much more lightweight of course than a full, real story but honestly after playing this version it made it clear that a long story isn’t actually appropriate for this kind of game. It also totally throws off the er, rhythm of the game because you’ll spend 3 minutes playing a song and then it’s like okay, time for 20 minutes of cutscenes until you play the music game again. I don’t know the exact playtime for each game but I bet that the ratio of songs to cutscenes was probably the reverse between the two games, where this time it was predominantly playing the music game rather than predominantly reading about how Kanamin is a derpwaifu.

And of course last but not least: The option to turn on Japanese voices! Hooray! But anyway the game actually started with English voices that I never really heard – but everyone sounded OKAY. I’m still biased to Japanese, but there was nothing wrong or annoying about the English voices in Persona 5….vs how in 4 they all tried way too hard to sound ANIME and were cringe 90% of the time. So for that reason alone this game is already much better. I get the dubbing back in the early 2000s was to sound as anime as possible (which is why some people became dub anime haters like me lol) and there’s no going back to fix that issue on P4…but it would have been nice if the port offered to switch to Japanese voices. So because I was forced to listen to cringe voice acting for many hours in P4, P5 was already miles better by default.

I wish I knew how to really describe this, but the problem with the P4D dub was that everyone was trying way too hard to “sound anime”, while in the P5D dub everyone sounded much more like they were just “portraying a character.”

The only true disappointment – lack of shipping. I know I know it’s a music game, I should just STFU but at least they did throw me a bone here.

There were quite a lot of great scenes with everyone interacting though, particularly Yusuke. The game also had a VR feature so you could watch dancing in VR and explore the characters rooms in VR. You were supposed to also find these cards the twins had hidden in order to unlock accessories. Honestly if you add VR to the picture it was kinda…creepy? Like oh yea baby I can’t wait to explore my imouto’s room like a creeper lol. It was even creepier because you had the “crouch” feature so you could look for cards under tables or chairs but that made the creep factor even higher lmao. Sometimes exploring was so annoying especially for a character I didn’t really care for (Sorry Haru!) so I just looked up a guide to tell me exactly where the card was. Most of the cards were fairly easy to find though.

The VR features rules, let’s face it who else has long dreamed of being able to FINALLY snoop around in their waifus room!!!!!!!!!! Go root through their garbage can FOR REAL!!!!!!!!!! Sadly enough we did not find any of their pantsu while searching for the cards.

For those wondering, since the game came out before Royal,  Kasumi is not in this game. Akechi isn’t in here either. Not gonna lie though, I didn’t miss either of them. 🤣🤣🤣

So overall a much more enjoyable experience and easy enough that I was able to unlock all the songs, view all the skits and get the platinum trophy. In P4D I didn’t even unlock all the songs because they were just awful remixes of my favorite bgms, and I had to basically start unlocking them from the start despite having played every single song in story mode and that was a PITA. If you found P4D draggy and/or difficult, I would definitely recommend giving this game a shot as I felt it was a much better experience.

I think the best way to maybe sum them up was that P4D felt like they were trying to do a Persona game that then randomly had dance battles instead Pokemon battles while P5D was meant to be a Persona-skinned music game, which honestly worked out better in the end.