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Persona 4 Dancing Review: The Investigation Team returns for their musical number

by Omar (@siegarettes)

• Persona 4: Dancing All Night
  
• Developer - Atlus
  
• Publisher - Atlus 
  
• PS Vita

Of all the things I expected from Persona 4 Dancing a deep, detailed story to set it up was not one of them. What initially started as a collaboration with the developer of the Hatsune Miku games eventually moved onto a new team. Just as well, as tonally Dancing is less Love Live! style candy colored idol celebrations and more Perfect Blue. Well, maybe with a little less ultra-violent murder.

Presented in a visual novel format, the story follows the exploits of Persona 4′s original cast as they get caught up in a new mystery surrounding a summer music festival headlined by Rise Kujikawa, their idol classmate from the P4. An accompanying idol group disappears in the midst of rumors of a video featuring a dead idol and they head off to find them. 

Thematically, Dancing returns to an exploration of internal conflicts, this time with a focus on the struggle of defining yourself amidst the expectations and desires of others for you. It follows a familiar arc, layering the emotional beats of each character into a larger picture for a grand reveal that blows out the scope. It retreads a bit of ground from the previous games, but overall it was interesting enough to warrant my full interest, even if it was a bit wordier than it needed to be.

That wordiness does sap the pacing in places, with too much time spent waiting for characters to catch up to revelations you put together yourself a while ago. Contributing to that is the spread of the rhythm scenes throughout the story. It does a decent job justifying them within the logic of its fiction, carrying a passion for dance as a communicative, personal exploration that I found admirable. Each character has a motivation and personal style that drives the feeling behind each dance. In that way it largely functions similar to dances in musicals, sequences where a character’s emotions hit such an intensity they need to be expressed physically. 

At some point the story does become constrained by them, with the motivations for each scene becoming contrived by virtue of repetition. First and foremost, Dancing is a visual novel with a new case for the Investigation Team to solve and a return to thematic beats familiar to the series. This tension between dance sequence and emotional payoff stretches tight, especially around the middle sequence that moves into narrative tangents occurring alongside the main story. It does, however, pay off its emotional and narrative threads in the finale, which feels as bombastic and joyful as the material deserves.

In fact, all of Dancing is wild with character. Touches like the aforementioned distinct dance styles, to the excellent reworkings of Persona 4 music that make up the soundtrack make this feel like an entry into the core series, rather than a simple spin-off. The framing of the story also places you as an audience to the story, rather than the driver, allowing them to bring a deliberate characterization to the protagonist of Persona 4 rather than presenting him as a blank slate you mold. He actually has quite a bit of dialogue and it was exciting hearing him actually speak, even if it didn’t align with the version of the character I’d created. 

Tanaka’s shopping channel also returns as the shop where you buy costumes and items for the rhythm sections. These items are limited to the Free Mode, where the majority of your time with the rhythm sections will take place. This mode has a separate progression than story mode, so tracks you’ve playing in Story Mode won’t unlock alongside it. Strangely, these are all still framed by the events of Story Mode, with characters and locations associated with the song always present.

The rhythm stuff itself is pretty standard. Tap and hold buttons to hit beats, flick the analog sticks to get bonus “scratches” and build Fever. It works well enough, and items, difficulty settings and modifiers provide custom challenges to return to. There’s quite a bit of visual noise between the backgrounds and the format of the notes, but it never gets hectic enough where it feels like a problem. Your performance is also not something that will affect the track directly, but layer beats upon the rhythm of the track. If you’ve played something like Final Fantasy Theatrhythm you’ll be familiar. 

There are dissatisfactions I had with Dancing, namely in the story’s treatment of some subject matter. It tends to drop the ball when dealing with sexuality, at best sort of flippantly ignoring or brushing aside threads brought up within Persona 4, at worst presenting you a dance instructor that works as a gross caricature of homosexuality. There’s an overall sense of “hey yeah that happened but they’re over it” when dealing with Kanji and Naoto  that feels reluctant to actually acknowledge those parts of their characters. It never comes out with it, but it feels too close to a “it was just a phase/insecurity” at times. The instructor, however, just runs with a blatant queen image, which while not troublesome alone, gets paired with a sense of lusty flamboyance and absurd effeminate exaggeration that marks him as caricature.

There’s also some anxiety around the image of Kanamin Kitchen, the idol group the game revolves around. Particularly how they are themed around meat, each of them referred to as a particular animal and wearing fast food uniform style outfits. Their description as “edible idols” is quite on the nose, even if it feels thematically relevant to the game’s questions about how idols play to an audience’s desires. The story never satisfactorily addresses these threads, though, leaving us with some uncomfortable moments of women self describing as pigs and cows. Yeah, I grimaced at that too. 

Overall, Persona 4 Dancing accomplishes what it sets out to do. It’s a self contained set of stories that come together to provide an enjoyable return to an interesting and smartly written cast. It does play to the same strengths of recent Persona games, providing strong character studies  and a good mix of lighthearted dialogue and introspective set pieces, though it ultimately doesn’t dig too deep into anything it tackles. There’s some good mixes of Persona music, and you can easily lose time playing it, but its going to be most valuable to people who wanted to spend more time with these characters. Though if you just wanted to see Nanako dance to the Junes theme song, that’s there too.