Thoughts on Persona 4 Dancing All Night

So, I got through the story mode of Persona 4 Dancing All Night. I haven’t opened up all the tracks, but I thought I talk about my replay of the story mode and do some comparisons between the games now, since I’ve kinda put the game on hold for a bit while I do other things. I’d like to at least unlock all the easily unlockable tracks and purchase some more things, but can’t say when that will happen.

Anyway, I like the story mode in Dancing All Night, but found, at least this time, that there were a few too many dancing sections and so the story seemed to drag on a bit. The reason I blame it on the dancing sections is because the sections seemed to have no real relevance to the plot, but seemed to be there just to provide a dancing section for the dancing game. For example, a number of practices for Kanami, and pretty much the whole subplot with Nanako becoming a dancer. Even at the end, it seemed that there were too many dance sections tacked on to pad out the dancing part rather than to make sure that we advanced the plot properly, and since there were story sections between all of those sections, I can see why some people thought the story sections long and boring. However, since Free Mode was open from the beginning they could have easily skipped the entire thing, so I don’t feel all that bad for them. The S-links of the other two games are less interesting, but also more accessible.

Still, the story works fairly well. Kanami is a very interesting character, far more so than her competition Rise. There is such a huge discontinuity between her idol-Persona and her real personality, and her real personality is very endearing. She’s not all that confident and a bit of a klutz, but she notices things that are going on around her — er, eventually — and reacts in a believable way. For example, when Nanako leaves saying “Bearwell” — which she must have gotten from Teddie — Kanami idly responds with a cheerful “Bearwell” and then pauses to question that. Her personality pretty much makes the story mode for me, while the plot is okay and gives Dojima the chance to show what he can actually do as a detective.

Gameplay-wise, I found Dancing All Night to be more difficult than the other two. Certainly, not having the support ability to maintain combos if I only got a Good rating helped, but like between Dancing in Moonlight and Dancing in Starlight I found that in Dancing All Night you had to do more things at the same time to make it work, although in general I found that the tracks aligned with the rhythm of the song more often. But most of the gameplay is the same between all the versions.

I should comment on the fact that to get new costumes and the like here you have to buy them instead of unlocking them. So far, I have to call it a wash. Buying them means that you can focus only on the characters you like, but at least on Easy I don’t get enough money to really buy a lot, even after I got through the story mode. There’s enough if you only care about a couple of characters or a couple of outfits for those characters, but if you want everything it already gets grindy after the story mode, especially since the story mode is not interesting enough to play through more than once.

The games overall were worth getting and I’ll probably poke around with them another time, but none of them have huge replay value other than redoing the dances with different costumes or just because you enjoyed the dancing itself.