by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight
  
• Developer:Atlus
  
• Publisher: Atlus
  
• PS Vita, PS4
  

When I originally reviewed Persona 4 Dancing All Night, I said it was a game with a clear passion for dance. It surprised me with how involved its story was, and the level of presentation it brought to its dance sequences. By comparison, Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight feels workmanlike.The word I’d use to describe P5D isn’t “passionate”, but rather “competent”. It’s made well enough, and if you enjoy the music of Persona 5 you’ll probably enjoy Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight. But it’s missing so many of the little touches that made P4D feel like a loving entry in the world of Persona and lays bare what P5D is–a spin off entry to get more money out of fans.

The biggest change here is the lack of a dedicated story mode. In its place are a collection of social scenes that are unlocked by a variety of conditions. This might mean getting several well timed note hits, playing with different modifiers or just watching other social scenes. It’s definitely a step back from P4D’s story mode, but it makes P5D a more straightforward game and encourages playing a little differently, so depending on your style it might even be preferable.

What bummed me out was how this change stripped the context and style that P4D brought and failed to replace it. Persona 5 Dancing sets itself up as a throwaway entry from the go, making it clear there are no consequences or meaning to its events. The social scenes do allude to the fact that this is a contest between the residents of the Persona 3 and 5’s Velvet Rooms, inspired by the events that unfolded in Persona 4 Dancing All Night. There’s also some mentions of the events of Persona 5, and an attempt to pepper the dances with some gravitas by continuing the theme of “revealing your true self”.

These social scenes elect to discard the visual novel style illustrated portraits the series usually uses and instead goes with lightly emoting 3D models. Every scene with them feels awkward, as they’re still trying to imitate the visual novel style dialogue, but feel off when not properly placed within the environment, coming off as stiff and drawing attention to the models’ flaws. It clearly made these scenes less resource intensive to make, but it also makes them feel cheap, despite the quality voice performances.

If the dance sequences were good, this might be nothing more than a side note, but unfortunately the rhythm game part of it also retains this budget quality. The choreography is decent, with each character again sporting their own style, but environments are recycled from Persona 5 and feel empty. There’s a few songs that have good staging, but more often characters are dancing to an empty room, with maybe a few particles and the camera movement keeping it from feeling totally still.

Speaking of the songs, the music is a bit hit and miss. Shoji Meguro’s original compositions are definitely doing a lot of work here, bringing the energy to the songs that the dance sequences often lack. That energy means remixes are at least serviceable, with some definite standouts among them. Despite that, I never found myself moved in the same way Persona 3 and 4’s music got me to. 

On top of that, P5D only includes about 25 or so tracks, with several of them being remixes of each other. Normally I wouldn’t even bother to mention price, but given how barebones the package feels this time, and how many excellent rhythm games have released recently, it’s hard to look at the price tag on this one and feel good about it. Even ignoring that, most other rhythm games include almost double–sometimes quadruple–the amount of songs, giving them a much more varied musical palette. Persona 4 Dancing managed to get away with this by having a full sized story mode with production to match. Stripped of that Dancing in Starlight’s limited and repetitive tracklist stands out a lot more.

If Persona 4 Dancing was a musical, with story beats building until characters burst into dance, then Persona 5 Dancing is a high school talent show. One gives you the ceremony and context to get into the songs, then lets you relive your favorite moments through its soundtrack. The other might have some genuine talent behind it, but it’s never going to sound as good through the poor lighting and terrible acoustics of the high school gym. 

Even as someone who wasn’t a big fan of Persona 5, I can recognize that it’s got a genuinely good soundtrack and characters worth revisiting. Dancing in Starlight doesn’t do justice by either and comes up short as a straight rhythm game. The Phantom Thieves might be master criminals, but this time they failed to steal my heart.