THE PLOT:
Two months after leaving the small town of Inaba, Yu Narukami (Persona 4's no-longer-nameless protagonist) returns for the Golden Week holiday. He is looking forward to reuniting with his friends from the Investigation Team. It's a rainy night, however, so out of habit he checks to see if the supernatural Midnight Channel is showing.
It is - and this time, what it's broadcasting is what looks like a cheesy promotional video featuring him and his friends, as if they were contestants in a fighting tournament. When he catches up with his friends, he learns that Teddie, Kanji, and Rise are missing, and that Naoto is out of town on another investigation. They decide to go into the TV World to determine just what is happening.
They are greeted by none other than Teddie himself, wearing a strange outfit and calling himself "General Teddie." This figure informs them that they must fight each other in a recreation of their high school, with Rise acting as emcee. Why are their friends behaving so oddly? And just who are the other strangers inside the TV World - an imperious woman in a fur coat, a half-naked man in a red cape, and a blonde robot girl - and what is their link to this bizarre tournament?
The only way to find out is to move forward. And since only the winner of each match may proceed, that means the friends must fight each other - and win!
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| Yosuke encounters a young woman who can't remember her own name. |
CHARACTERS:
For a fighting game, Persona 4 Arena offers a surprisingly exhaustive "Story Mode," as the above summary shows. The story acts as a direct sequel not only to Persona 4, but to Persona 3 as well, with prominent roles for P3's Mitsuru, Akihiko, and Aegis (along with a couple other cameos). The premise was devised by the producer and character designer of the Persona series, so it's little surprise that the characters mostly feel as complete here as in the core games.
I mentioned in my review of Persona 4 that I didn't think the characters were quite as distinct as the ones in P3, and the results here bear that out, with Mitsuru and Aegis coming across as particularly dominant figures. Of the P4 group, sidekick character Yosuke ends up with the meatiest arc, his narrative ultimately being more fully satisfying than Yu's. Each character gets at least one moment to shine, however. Even Kanji's largely comedy-relief strand sees the muscled doofus showing both strength and insight when apparently confronted by his effete Shadow.
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| Naoto's investigation brings her into contact with Persona 3's Mitsuru Kirijo. |
GAMEPLAY:
The game tries to cater to both fighting game fans and fans of the Persona series' storytelling by offering multiple modes. The Story Mode is substantial. You start with four characters to choose from, and play the first roughly 2/3 of their stories, up to a cliffhanger. As you play these characters' stories, more characters unlock - until you end up with twelve total parallel narratives. Ultimately, if you play every character's version of events, you will end up with around 30 hours of content.
Content - but not gameplay. Each of the stories is presented as a visual novel. All dialogue is voiced, but save for occasional cutscenes, the action is largely described through text against still images. Occasionally, you may get to make a choice between two courses of action (and in a few stories, the wrong choice can lead to a humorous "bad ending"), but there's not much interactivity beyond that except for the actual matches. In Story Mode, each match is only a single round, and the AI opponents are extremely easy to defeat, leaving less than ten minutes of actual gameplay for each 2 -3 hour long character tale. Fine if you just want to see what happens next to the various characters... But probably not very exciting for fighting game enthusiasts.
The other modes are gameplay-intensive. An "Arcade Mode" pits your selected character against either eight or nine opponents. While not actively difficult, the AI here is tougher than in Story Mode and will call for players to do more than simply repeatedly mash "X." For those who want a genuine challenge, a "Score Attack Mode" is available; I dipped my toe into this a few times, and can attest to it being genuinely pretty tough, moreso than I personally was looking for. Multiplayer is technically available... Though given the game's age, I doubt there's enough of an online player base anymore to easily put together a match, even assuming the servers for it still exist.
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| Be prepared for reading. A lot of reading. |
THOUGHTS:
Persona 4 Arena was the series' first major spinoff, made as the series was becoming more of a genuine mainstream success. I'll admit, I expected a quick cash grab and nothing more, and was genuinely surprised by the detailed narrative. The story is genuinely intriguing - and, once the backstory becomes available to play around the midpoint, quite emotionally effective as well.
The single biggest problem with the Story Mode is that it's intriguing once. Well, actually three times - once from the viewpoint of the Investigation Team; once from the Persona 3 cast's viewpoint; and once from Naoto's, which straddles the two strands. Had the alternating viewpoints been restricted to simply one strand for each unique POV (plus the backstory and a nifty surprise side-story that opens up at the very end), then it would have worked just about perfectly. But if you want to see all the story material, then you will be completing this narrative with each of the characters. Since the story itself remains largely the same, that means a lot of repetition. I rarely hit the "SKIP" button in video game cutscenes. By the time I finished the final strand, I was skipping regularly.
Another issue is the lack of interactivity in the Story Mode. I suspect this title was given a limited schedule and budget, certainly compared to the mainline games. There are several parts of each story that would have made for strong gaming moments. Aegis deals with a hostage situation. Naoto must race through an airport to fling a tracer onto a departing vehicle. All the characters have to navigate a high school turned into a labyrinth by invisible walls. Each of these bits (and more) would have been great to play. Instead, they are described by text over still images, making them considerably less exciting.
A final issue, one that strongly points to a rushed schedule, is the text itself... which is positively riddled with typos and grammatical errors. I don't tend to harp on the occasional misspelling in game text. Persona 4 Arena, however, has a jaw-dropping number of these. Misspellings abound, as do sentences with missing words or phrases. At one point, during a conversation between Aegis and Chie, a line being spoken by Chie is attributed to Aegis. Even a cursory proofreading would have fixed many of these, making it incredible that they remain in a professional, licensed product.
Lest I come across too harshly, it should be said that the actual gameplay, particularly in Arcade and Score Modes, offers a lot of depth and detail. The characters aren't just skins on a basic fight template; each character has a unique fight style, with some being most effective at close range and some most effective as distance fighters. The sheer number of combos available will test the memory of ardent fighting game enthusiasts, and multiple options to block and evade attacks are available.
The story itself is a worthy one, and it is enjoyable to see the casts of the two games brought together in this way. I suspect with a bit more time and money, this could have been something truly special; even with all the issues, it's well worth a rental or a cheap purchase. At the same time, I hope that some of the issues that keep Persona 4 Arena from being all it could have been were resolved for the sequel.
Overall Rating: 5/10.
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