The dance-centric spin-off of Persona 4 is a fun rhythm game, but don't go to it for the music. Go to it for the characters.
If you missed the original Persona 4 (a long, relatively niche RPG set in a small town Japanese high school), either with its original PlayStation 2 release or its improved PlayStation Vita port, then
1) You should play it, it's awesome. It's heavy on Japanese RPG game mechanics and you'll do a lot of text reading, but it's got an awesome setting and interesting characters. If I had to try to sum it up in a sentence, I'd say: "It's kind of like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, only with more murder and fewer cloaks."2) If you haven't played Persona 4, don't bother with Persona 4: Dancing All Night -- a game where instead of fighting monsters with spells and physical attacks, you battle darkness with the power of dance.Dancing All Night may not have the gameplay of its predecessor, but it's still a sequel. You might have seen it pitched as "a rhythm game set in the Persona universe!" but it's almost more of a Persona visual novel with occasional dance breaks. In my first hour of playing the game I danced to only one short song -- the rest was exposition.
And that's OK. It's great, even. It was a blast to catch up with the characters that I spent a hundred hours (seriously) getting to know over the course of Persona 4. I wanted to know how Rise was doing and what Yukiko was up to and if Teddy was still working at Junes as a mascot.
Yes, a lot of this (and the stuff around the edges, like unlockable costumes and accessories) is pure fan service. The story, while I found it interesting, doesn't reach the quality of Persona 4's murder mystery (though, granted, it also has less time to do so). There's a puzzle for the characters to solve and a twist or two along the way, but the driving force is less, "What's pulling the strings behind this plot?" and more "How will Yu react to seeing his 'little sister' on stage and in danger?"
Oh yeah, and sometimes you dance.
Dancing in Persona 4: Dancing All Night is enjoyable, though at times overwhelming. Circular star icons will shoot out from the center of the screen and head toward one of six different button prompts: Up, Left or Right on the left side of the screen (which correspond to the Vita's D-Pad) or the Triangle, Circle and X buttons on the right side of the screen. You want to press (and sometimes hold) the appropriate button exactly when the icon fills the button prompt. Do this consistently, in time with the beat, to increase your combo multiplier and rack up a higher score.
It's definitely something I enjoyed playing as a fan of quirky rhythm games (like Elite Beat Agents, Gitaroo Man and so on), but it can also get pretty hectic on the higher difficulty levels. There is always a lot of stuff happening in the background and the game's characters often give audio encouragement during a song, so it's easy to get distracted and lose the rhythm.
Speaking of the characters offering commentary during songs, while it's a fun touch that I mostly like, it's also something that can get grating. Especially when the same lines of dialogue are repeated more than once during a song that only lasts three or four minutes.
There also isn't a huge song list, all things considered. At least, there's not a huge list of unique songs, as you'll run into a multiple remixes of the same tunes. Still, it's music that you probably heard a lot while playing Persona 4 and it's cool to hear it with a new dance club vibe.
One of the only other problems I have with Dancing All Night is that much of its post-game content isn't great. I like the game enough that I'm planning on unlocking everything and getting the game's platinum trophy, and I'm close, but it's become a grind in the late stages. See, when you play songs you earn money with which you can by new costumes and items for all of the different characters. Problem is, a lot of that content (the accessories in particular) aren't very interesting. I love Rise, but I don't really care if she has the same pair of headphones in half a dozen different colors.
The Free Dance mode makes it a good game to pick up every now and then when you have just a few minutes to kill while the story mode makes for a fun plot to dive deep into during longer sessions.
