Atlus

Persona 4: Dancing All Night

My limits have been pushed to the brink regarding Atlus and their numerous methods of prolonging Persona‘s exposure in the interim between it and the long-awaited Persona 5. Given the enormous and undoubtedly unexpected success of the Persona 3 onward, it makes sense that the relatively small company would want to capitalize on the name, stretching it out into anything with even the most minor of associations. It’s had fighting games, stage plays, radio dramas, Etrian Odyssey-esque spinoff, two TV series, and a concert tour. Now its spread its wings to rhythm games, where the gang must all come together and dance evil away.

In fairness, a Persona 4 music game isn’t totally out of left field. The series is known for its strong musical element and one of the main characters of Persona 4 is a pop star, so there is some basis for a game like this. Now the way they went about it is what’s really wrong.

Dancing All NIght is pretty simple in concept. Six notes appear in a ring on screen, each representing the outside buttons of the D-Pad and the face buttons: Down, Left, Up and X, Circle, and Triangle. Notes scroll from the inside of the screen toward specific buttons which must be pressed at the appropriate time. Solid rings will also appear from the middle and require a flick of the analog stick, which is quite annoying most of the time. Fortunately, this has been patched so that you can use shoulder buttons instead.

And that’s the extent of the actual gameplay. There are hold notes, but otherwise there are no other variations during the game that alter it in anyway. In Free Dance mode certain modifiers can be bought that alter the note charts, such as reversing the order the notes scroll or the speed at which they do so. This also alters the rewards based off whether the modifier makes the song easier or harder. DAN still suffers the same problem that most rhythm games have, which is that the visual accompaniment to gameplay elements goes mostly unnoticed, as it serves only to distract you from the game at hand. Try actually watching any of dancers actually dance is guaranteed to make you miss some notes.

This means the game lives or dies by its soundtrack. Fortunately for DAN, Persona has amazing music. The upbeat pop songs that comprise the game’s score almost unanimously catchy and fit perfectly for a game of this style. Lyrically the songs are ridiculous, poorly worded, and a little on the nose, as is to be expected from a Japanese composer working in a second language, but the music itself is fantastic with only a few duds littering the soundtrack.

What is problematic is the number of songs used. In total, there are only about fifteen unique songs with the rest of the soundtrack being remixes. There is nothing wrong with remixes, but it really makes the game feel more repetitive than it should. The total number of songs in game, remixes included, is 30. In a day and age where Rock Band 4 has a disappointing setlist with 64 songs, 30 is just laughably small and does nothing to help the game’s repetition problem. I’m not even asking for character representation or story integration, just have songs from other Persona games.

Speaking of the story, the laughable string of events that acts as a plot is just bad. Persona titles, at least 3 and 4, are comparably well-written to a lot of other JRPG’s in that the games follow teenagers attending high school and are suitably reserved in their design and characteristics to help them pass of as normal kids. Additionally, the game’s plot takes place over a long period of time, where the hilarious after-school special dialogue that fills the dungeons is broken up by weeks of normal interaction between the characters, saving the “friendship” dialogue for only when its appropriate instead of all the time.

These kids cannot shut up about bonds and friendship and god damn important it is to have friends. Every problem they come across the solution is having friends to get through it. Or dancing to express you emotions to the crowd. The plot involves the gang getting invited to dance on Rise’s comeback track, which is used to explain how they are all suddenly good at dancing, and they get caught up in another Japanese god trying to trap people as shadows but forcing them to be what other people want them to be instead of themselves. The gang meets up with Rise’s rival, Kanami, and her idol group, Kanami Kitchen, who each have exactly one character trait that will entirely define who they are. The new characters in each of these spinoff games are always underdeveloped but these are by far the worst.

They get captured by the Japanese god and its up to the Investigation Team to dance in order to save them, since violence doesn’t work in the dimension they enter. It’s a loose string of events that’s more tell and don’t show, with character’s inner monologues describing their feelings about just how great it is to have friends. Did you know bonds are a good thing? After playing DAN you will have heard the word “bonds” so many times it will lose all meaning and you’ll wish to never see a person again because that just increases the odds of hearing that word and losing a little more of your soul. Oh, and be sure to turn off voices during gameplay, because some genius at Atlus thought it would be a great idea to have the characters compliment each other in the middle of gameplay, commenting on how emotional the dances made them feel.

It’s obvious that the main bulk of the game is in Free Dance mode, which has a separate progression and more songs and less of the wordy cutscenes that add nothing to the game except to make me feel contempt for characters I normally like. And there the game is saved, the music is catchy and unlocking stuff scales well with how you progress through the songs as you attempt to ace them. Still, hard to recommend this to anyone other than Persona fans, though they’ll definitely get their money’s worth. For me, the best part about this game is that there is that the next one is 5.

Expectations, Intelligent Systems, and Atlus

Two years ago, Nintendo teased Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem, no doubt as part of their new idea of lending their franchises to other companies in an attempt to fill in a dry release schedule that Nintendo can do little about filling. While rather unexpected, it wasn’t an entirely unwelcome idea. I am rather ambivalent toward Fire Emblem as a series, but Shin Megami Tensei is one of my favorite series of RPGs and the two aren’t entirely tonally divorced. Sure, Shin Megami Tensei already has Devil Survivor to fill any demon-related strategy RPG needs, but Fire Emblem has never really had a traditional RPG to go along with it.

After the announcement, the game went silent. All we had to go on was two pieces of concept art and a logo, but many, myself included, were looking forward to any new info. Yesterday, Nintendo held a Direct that contained a specific trailer (Footage captured by GameXplain):

Yikes.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it in my discussion of Persona 4, but I do not like anime. There is good mixed in with the sea of bad, but as a whole I am not a fan of the genre or its trappings. There are things I like that are definitely just straight up anime, but those things are few and far between. Recently, Atlus released a trailer for Persona 5 that went like this:

Still is recognizably anime, but infused with so much more style and personality that the uninitiated would have a hard time believing this is technically a spinoff of a parent series initially thought to be represented in the first video. I understand that Persona‘s popularity has eclipsed that of SMT, but there really wasn’t much to prepare me for what the first trailer delivered on. On one hand, SMT x FE exists. On the other, it looks like absolutely nothing like a game I want.

Illusory Revelations #FE — I’m done typing that now — is the new name for the game and reflects what changed during the course of development the past two years. The SMT elements are almost not present, the FE elements are hidden throughout the trailer’s garish and overdone use of color, bland J-Pop plays over cringeworthy scenes of spectacle-laden nonsense, and it feels like a trailer for a Persona game with all the style and pizazz replaced with a Sailor Moon transformation sequence. Only the briefest glimpse of a ruined Tokyo holds any promise for this to not just be Nintendo’s own Persona to wave around after 5 comes out. And we still have no idea what the game is about.

For the time being, we will have to take the companies word on it that this will mostly be a Fire Emblem game with a Persona-esque battle system set in modern times with occasioanal appearances from demons. And apparently, this was the idea in mind from the beginning: to envision Fire Emblem in a modern setting. And here I was thinking that was what Advanced Wars was for.

Now, Intelligent Systems and Atlus make some great games, but the direction this game has apparently taken leaves me cold. I was expecting a more traditional crossover of Fire Emblem and SMT themes and characters. From what I can tell so far, this seems to be its own, new thing. Which is fine by me I guess, but why bother attaching the names to begin with beside the obvious brand awareness? What began as a crossover now feels like a completely different thing with mere references to the two series it hails from.

Why shove Fire Emblem characters into modern life? They cannot possibly act the same way they do in the actual games, so they may as well just be new characters. Will I gain any insight into Marth as a character when viewed through a contemporary context? Like I said above, I get that Persona is more popular than the parent series now, but why force the comparison even greater when it and Fire Emblem have absolutely nothing in common except the relationship building elements reintroduced in Awakening? Persona 5 is already a thing that is happening, I don’t need another Persona game. Atlus will make sure I buy Persona 5 shit for the next five years. What I needed was a new console SMT game, an actual void that needs to be filled. As it stands, this project feels like its Atlus’ and Intelligent Systems leftovers.

SMT x FE is a clear case of announcing a game too early, something Nintendo is usually good at avoiding but something that needed to be done when the Wii U began flopping hard. It’s reveal was barely a concept and barely any of the concept has made its way to what we will be playing in less than a year. I’ll probably still get this game, at worst it will be a collector’s item in a few years and may very well be an enjoyable game in its own right. But it was a mistake to attached either franchise to its name because for now all I can think is what could have been.