Persona 4: Dancing All Night Reviews
Persona 4: Dancing All Night is an engrossing experience. That being said, it is one that is short-lived. While the interesting narrative serves as a pleasant surprise, there is little intrigue to be found once each track is bested. There are DLC characters and songs in the works, but as the game is already priced just short of a primary console title, paying more for a fuller experience is not enticing.
If you’re a Persona fan, you’ll enjoy seeing your favorite characters bust a move and besting your previous scores, but it doesn’t offer much beyond that
Worth it for Persona 4 fans, but misses the mark in regards to its rhythm gameplay.
While its overly long story mode amounts to a tragic waste of resources, Persona 4: Dancing All Night's strongest qualities can be found in just how well the series' pop art aesthetic meshes with the rhythm game genre. This might not be the most complex or inspired take on rhythm games to date, but DAN certainly knows how to have a good time.
Even with a few missteps, the presentation for Persona 4: Dancing All Night is as colorful as it gets and a beauty to behold. The anime art style remains crisp and if there's anything better than seeing the Persona characters in prime form, it's watching them get their groove on. Ultimately, a rhythm game like this is only as strong as its soundtrack, but fortunately for Atlus, there are some truly enjoyable tracks to be found, including a few remixes of some old favorites. All of those earworms can easily be accessed through Free Dance mode, which is good for anyone that just wants a few quick sessions aboard a plane or in line at an amusement park.
Persona 4: Dancing All Night brings back the deep, familiar characters and introduces them to the rhythm genre in a game that, while short on content and steep in price, is still a blast to play.
Enjoyable mostly for its persona heritage
There's a lot to like about Persona 4: Dancing All Night; unfortunately a lack of cohesive game design hinders the product as a whole. For an MSRP of $50, justifying a purchase is difficult. It's good, but compared to the competition, it flounders.
A decent rhythm game that fans of Persona will lap up and newcomers may be left a little bewildered.
The game makes such a point to establish itself as a tangential side story to the franchise that I have trouble recommending it to even the most avid of Persona collectors.
What we have here is a game that gets its mechanics wonderfully right, but almost everything else around it wrong.
A mediocre rhythm action game that is not made any better by tacking on a silly and insubstantial Persona story mode.
The combination of a flawed rhythm game and a disappointing narrative make Persona 4 Dancing All Night an underwhelming experience.
I was excited for the chance to play this game. However, while not an outright failure, it turned out to be mediocre and a relative disappointment.…but more Chie always helps.
Get to know your friends from Persona 4 even more intimately, and maybe dance along.
I wanted to like Persona 4: Dancing All Night a lot more than I do because this might be the last we see of these eternally memorable characters for a while. I really wanted to enjoy the time I spent with them like I did in Persona Q, where they were mere caricatures of their personalities, or the Persona 4 Arena games, which kept the cutscenes to a slightly more tolerable level, but the script and its length are just too impenetrable for anyone looking to actually enjoy the gameplay.
At times I wonder whether the folks over at Atlus ever predicted the popularity of Persona 4. While Persona 3 did have its following, as well as a few updated releases with Persona 3 FES and Persona 3 Portable, it simply can't match Persona 4's popularity, though it did ride its coat tails. Persona 4 astounded us as an amazing JRPG that we could eventually take on the go, a fighting game, a dungeon crawler and now, a dancing game. Yep, you read that right. Persona 4: Dancing All Night is a rhythm game akin to games like Hatsune Miku, though in true Persona fashion, sports a narrative tying it all together.
It could certainly be improved - the relatively small song catalog and limited customisation options to name but two areas that a ripe for improvement - but this Persona rhythm debut generally hits all the right notes.