Persona 3 and 5 Dancing (henceforth abbreviated as P3D and P5D) are very much cut from the same cloth of 2015’s Persona 4 rhythm spinoff Dancing All Night. While Dancing All Night had an isolated story mode with its own visual novelesque plot that felt at home with the series, P3D and P5D choose to instead adapt their stories through a series of “social link” style conversations with individual characters. These social links are usually one-on-one, but sometimes other characters will come in for a sort of skit scenario. This framing works very well with the silliness of the game’s story, which features each game’s respective Velvet Room guide challenging each other to a dance off with the player character as their representative.

The games themselves are standard rhythm game fare. Players have six different sections of the screen corresponding to various directional and input buttons, and as notes travel across the screen, players have to hit the corresponding button in time with the music. While the gameplay is largely unchanged from Dancing All Night, with stuff like hold notes and scratches making a comeback, the game has also implemented double-tap notes, which feel like a natural evolution for the songs.

Since there’s no story mode in either of the games, songs are unlocked by clearing them in order through the “Dancing!” menu, similar to the “Free Dance” mode in Dancing All Night. While the hardest difficulty is locked until you complete every song, once you unlock a song you can play it on easy, normal, or hard, so you aren’t forced to slog through a difficulty that might be too simple for you. By getting away from the previous iteration’s story mode, the main draw of playing more and more is wanting to see the social link interactions between Persona’s cast of characters.

Players can progress through social links by doing specific challenges for each character. Haru, for example, required me to get a “Brilliant” rating on a certain number of songs for each chapter of her story, while Ryuji required me to reach a certain total number of combos across all songs. Overall, I actually liked this system a lot more than Dancing All Night’s progression system, since social links are easily the strongest aspect of any Persona game’s storytelling. Getting to spend more time with the cast of Persona 3 and 5 felt like a warm blanket over my soul. It helped remind me exactly what I loved about each of them (except for that bastard Ken). This format also means that the game is able to avoid talking about the usual social commentary that Persona games typically cover, which is much appreciated after Dancing All Night’s criticism of idol culture. A tonal choice that felt extremely dissonant in a quirky dancing game.

Accomplishing most of these challenges is pretty easy, with almost all of them being completable on easy and normal mode if you’re a player just looking for a story. Whenever you finish reading a new social link, you’ll also unlock things like costumes or support powers. Being able to unlock costumes and accessories is a welcome change from Dancing All Night, where players had to earn money from dancing to buy each individual character’s goods. The costumes this time around are also applied to either all of the boys of the cast or all of the girls of the cast as well, meaning you won’t have to grind forever to dress your favorite character up exactly how you want to. One of the weirder things you have to unlock, however, are support modifiers.

Support Modifiers are a translation of Dancing All Night’s item feature. By ticking some boxes before the start of your song, you can enable some helpful accessibility features like making it easier to maintain combos, or being able to hit any button to land notes. Using these features will cost you a bit of your final song score, but in some cases when you’re really struggling it can be useful to turn them on just to finish one of those tougher songs. While it’s good that this feature is much more accessible than it was in the past, you have to unlock most of the support powers by clearing social links, some of which require significant time played. It feels weird that the developers would create such a useful and thoughtful accessibility feature for struggling players, only to require them to potentially play hours before they even get a chance to use them.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, there are also challenge modifiers. The challenge modifiers will increase your score at the cost of making the song harder- and pretty significantly at that. Some of these modifiers include making the notes disappear before they reach the hit indicator, or having notes fly in at ever changing and terrifying speeds. While some of these modifiers just seem like stupid masochistic levels of hard, I can definitely see a few of them as being fun for people really invested in rhythm games. A lot of the challenge modifiers are unlocked in the same way as the support ones, which at least makes sense for something that is ostensibly supposed to be an added difficulty.

When all of these systems come together, both new Persona games are incredibly fun to play as well as just look at. The dancing has a ton of silly choreography to it, especially with characters like Akihiko whose moves feel perfectly crafted with their doofiness in mind. Everytime Futaba came into a dance as a dancing partner, I lost my shit over just how ridiculous literally everything she did was. Who lets her do that? Why do they let her do that? It’s just a bad scene.

I spent a lot of time in the game just going through and making the perfect outfit for each individual character that I felt would suit them the best. There’s all sorts of costumes from unique themed sets like Velvet Room-themed garb, to the various outfits that each character wore during their original JRPG debut. With plenty of accessories like glasses and headphones as well, you’re able to make a lot of really sleek, or ridiculous costumes depending on whether you like or loathe a character. While I decked out Makoto to look really cool and intense because I think she’s rad, I put a clown nose and horrible gaudy glasses onto characters like Ken or Junpei because they do not deserve my time, effort, or respect and can frankly go away.

Unfortunately, There are a couple outfits that are just plain awful. In P5D specifically, there’s a pre-choreographed video for the song Last Surprise which features a lot of really tasteless and sexist imagery of the cast’s four women. While I talked about this before when some specifically bad costumes were revealed, I was still unprepared for just how bad and out of place it all ended up being. Seeing characters from a game that was largely about challenging the old and vile ideologies of the condoning and liberal adult populous all of a sudden get dressed up in sexy nazi (?) outfits and start dancing in cages and on poles just feels…really bad. These are characters from a game that looks at the degrading culture around sexism and sexual abuse, and now here they are displayed as fetish objects for a machine they were created to destroy.

There is that strange undercurrent of tonal mishmash throughout both of the game’s social links and presentations as well. Seeing games that were about big and serious social issues all of a sudden get distilled down to funny dancing and non-sequiturs can feel extremely weird at times. With again, reference to the serious opening of its source material, P5D also has the boss theme for the man responsible for a lot of those heinous acts, being danced to by a pumped up Ryuji. It’s not outwardly offensive or anything, and it’s certainly better than Dancing All Night’s tone deaf critique, but there’s just something uncomfortable about it all.

Persona has come so far from being a JRPG spinoff in so many ways. Not only has the series bred its own spinoffs, it’s also gotten to the point where they even go out of their way to generate as much money as possible, and it creates a strange sensation. It’s simultaneously satisfying to see a series that you really love doing well as it becomes more and more popular, but it’s equally disheartening to see that the games have reached the level where they almost feel on the verge of exploitative. This could have been one big rhythm game crossover between Persona 3 and Persona 5, but instead of a single best of both worlds title, the end result ends up feeling a lot more like two different almost complete ones.

Still though, if you’re a big Persona fan, and especially if you’re a fan of rhythm games, you’ll probably get enough of a kick out of P5D or P3D for them to be worth your time. I’d recommend just picking whichever entry you’re more partial to however. Since both games have the same general progression and features, it can be a bit mind numbing to play through them back to back. The games are also played best on the Vita in my opinion, because the smaller screen makes it easier to keep track of notes coming in on both sides, which can be a little hard to parse at times on a larger television or monitor. While I wish they could’ve just come together in one big unified P5xP3 crossover dancing game, I still had fun seeing all my favorite ageless student buddies goofing around all over again, and sometimes that’s all you need.

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Dancing All Night follows in the path of Sega’s Hatsune Miku rhythm games, with nearly identical gameplay. The big hook to this game is, obviously, its ties to Persona, and those ties set it apart from its ancestor, for better and for worse. The Miku games were a love letter to her most famous songs and music videos, and while Persona 4: DAN definitely loves its music, it has to play around with the formula to actually get enough satisfying content in the game. There’s a solid amount of songs in the game, but almost a  quarter of them are remixes. That can be a bit of a bummer if one of your least favorite songs gets overplayed, but otherwise the remixes are top notch and it doesn’t feel like they were hastily slapped together to pad the track list. Famous songwriters such as Akira Yamaoka and the ever-rapping Lotus Juice make great contributions to the soundtrack.

I almost wish there wasn’t a story in this game. That may sound sacrilege, but I stand by it. There are some legitimately cute moments in the story mode, and I’ll never tire of watching the Investigation Team interact, but by the fourth go-around, “bonds are what make us who we are” and “I need to be my true self” gets just a little bit old. Hearing the characters root for each other mid-dance is reassuring and adorable, especially when Nanako is trying her best and everyone wants to see her shine. The little character moments make the existence of the story worthwhile, but just barely. You can thankfully play through Free Dance mode at any time, so if you truly want to get into the groove and nothing else, that’s a completely viable option.

Actually diving into the gameplay of Dancing All Night is where the game truly begins to impress. The controls are six buttons and the control sticks, with X, O, Triangle, Up, Left, and Down serving as note buttons. The sticks are flicked to correspond to both blue record scratches that add to your score and a fever ring that allows for a multiplier segment of the song where a partner joins in and dances alongside the main dancer. I was worried the UI would get cluttered with the vibrant backgrounds clashing with the notes, but everything stands out exactly how it should, and I almost never missed a note because I didn’t see it coming. It’s simple, elegant, and fun to look at, which are the three keys to a great rhythm game.

There’s a solid amount of unlockables in the game, and you’re constantly challenged to up the ante and strut your best stuff. New songs are unlocked via playing through previously unlocked Free Dance songs, and costumes can be purchased in Tanaka’s famous TV mail order store. You can purchase nearly every great costume from Persona 4 Golden in here, from Yosuke’s werewolf attire to Yu’s Santa outfit. More costumes are available via DLC, so if you want to shell out three bucks to put the Team in Persona 2 character colors, the option is there. More songs and characters are already confirmed on the way, so Miku will arrive sooner than you expect.
Overall, Persona 4: DAN is a package that P4 fans cannot skip. Every song you love is included, and there are plenty of chuckle-worthy bits throughout. For those lucky few who own a Vita or PSTV and yearn for a great game to pass around during a post-anime convention shindig, DAN is a no-brainer. Some bits of the game may drag, but overall it’s a tight, fun experience.

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Adoption is an arduous process, littered with paperwork and red tape; but for some it’s the best or only option for having children. It can be a new opportunity for parents to provide for a child, but it can also be a source of division between the two. It can be difficult for the child to keep a connection with the adopted family, because of a slight inkling that they don’t belong. It’s impossible to understand completely, but it works like transferring to a new school or playing for a new team. Two great examples of this division are present in Persona 4 with Kou Ichijou and–to a lesser extent–the player character.

Early in Kou’s Social Link, Daisuke (the alternate sports bro you hang out with) lets slip that Kou comes from an old fashioned family, and that he has responsibilities tied to his name. In Japanese culture, it is imperative of storied families such as the Ichijou to ensure the name and family affairs are passed on to a proper heir. Kou admits to being adopted by his father for this purpose–a practice not unheard of if there is no heir apparent–and humorously adds his father later had a daughter. Kou is still required to take up the family name, and is even meeting potential marriage partners under this premise and bemoans how he didn’t want any of this responsibility. Kou feels by his own admission that being adopted into this kind of life was not his choice. Basketball and junk food–his hobbies and interests–are looked down upon by his family because they aren’t expected of him given his higher status. He spends most of his time avoiding his family so he can continue to play ball behind their backs. At one point, Kou seeks out the orphanage he came from to find out more about his birth parents, a common wish of adoptees. This investigation ends up bringing him closer to his adopted family and responsibilities as he realizes that his family chose him. in the same way that the player character is brought into Dojima’s home during the murders in Inaba.

While Dojima is your surrogate parent and uncle, he passes this off as being the “mother’s younger brother” and does his best to distance himself early in the game. While there is still a very parental nature to the detective as the game progresses, the character is constantly at ends with him over getting involved in dangerous activities a normal teenager shouldn’t. The player feels vindicated to act on the murder mystery given their new found powers, in the same way a rebellious teenager justifies chaffing against a parent’s tight rules. It’s perfectly sane for Dojima to want you out of the strange happenings in town even if the Investigation Team is the only well prepared sortie delving into the trial. Every run in with Dojima or any other law enforcement feels like a misunderstood kid in the right place at the wrong time. Any attempt to explain the player character’s interference is swept under the rug until it has major consequences. Though the disconnect between Dojima and the player isn’t as direct as Kou and his family it still showcases the cracks that form between a surrogate family.

I went through this same phase in my teenage and early 20s-going behind my family’s back in order to learn about my adoption and even getting involved in a career path they didn’t first accept (one I’m still on to this day). Something in my mind excused doing things my own way because I wasn’t blood related to my family: often this would end with trouble for me, much like the delinquency present in Persona 4 and the upcoming 5. All the talk of the new Persona protagonist being a delinquent has me wondering how this attitude will continue in the series; and I’m starting to suspect why I relate well to the silent protagonists in these games given the history of moving around and latch-keyism in my life.

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Miku is joining the cast to sing her own version of the classic Heaven song from Persona 4. She will also be playable to some degree, but I’m not sure if she’ll be available in all of free mode or just on her own songs. Miku must have a very hard to parse contract.

Miku will be available sometime in August for Japanese players. Who knows if we’ll get her over here, but I bet we will. I mean, we got those hologram concerts, why can’t we get some DLC? Plus, I hope this means that Sonic’s gonna be in Persona 5. Here’s some more pictures so you know I’m not making this up.

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