PERSONA DANCING: ENDLESS NIGHT COLLECTION
Dance your heart out, steal others
Any Persona fan will tell you one thing – the JRPG series has great music. And not just your standard orchestral fantasy fare. The games are set in a (relatively) real world, and revolve around teens dealing with problems (who also can summon demons to fight battles), so their music ranges from hip hop and rap to jazz and funky beats. It’s a natural fit for a rhythm game, then – and Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection is packed full of fab tunes. It includes two brandnew games – Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight and Persona 5, Dancing In Starlight – and brings PS Vita’s Persona 4: Dancing All Night to PS4. Each is filled with music from the relevant game alongside fresh remixes and tons of fan-pleasing extras. (Though the music and rhythm gameplay is more than solid enough on its own.)
NIGHT FEVER
For the most part you play through song after song and have a blast listening to the music. Button prompts come from the centre of the screen, then move outwards, where you have to tap to the beat once they reach the outside circle. The main prompts are 8, 4, and 2 on the D-pad, and w, e, and
q. Their positions on the controller mimic that circular radius, so following them on beat feels very intuitive.
To shake things up there are special notes: Unison Notes require you to tap one button on the left and one on the right side at once; for Hold Notes you need (obviously) to hold that button; and Double Notes, new to P3 and P5, are two regular notes in quick succession. Between the notes are Scratches – big circles that award points if you hit them, but don’t affect your combo if you miss, adding a risk/ reward to whether you think you know the song well enough to fit them in. Some of these are marked as Fever, and will build to give you an extra score boost at certain points in the song, where if you’re doing well enough a back-up dancer will join your main character on stage. By default these are
“THERE’S PLENTY OF ROOM TO TWEAK SETTINGS AND PLAY THE GAMES YOUR WAY.”
hit by using the analog sticks, but you can also assign them to o/u to be more precise.
SCHOOL DANCE
As far as re-assigning goes, Persona Dancing is ripe with customisation options to help you play how you want to play. You can adjust or resync note speed, and add special Support or Challenge rules to change up gameplay. There’s plenty of room to tweak settings and play it your way – something we appreciate in a rhythm game, which should be about pushing yourself to meet your own challenges and having fun.
There are customisation options for your characters, all hailing from the games on which they’re based. The combinations of quirky outfits and goofy accessories never gets old. In the new games, you can interact with the characters via social links that you form with them from hitting certain milestones, wrapped up in an incredibly loose story. It’s great to have the opportunity to chat with your returning favourites, especially those from Persona 3 just because it’s been a while since that particular entry.
Persona 4 Dancing features a much bigger story, but in some ways the visual novel style gets in the way of the dancing game itself, and it’s almost preferable to have the smaller ‘chunks’ style of social links in the newer games. P4 Dancing is as enjoyable to play as ever and looks great in high definition, though you do miss some of the tweaks in the newer titles that highlights how much the rhythm gameplay in P3 and P5 Dancing has been polished.