Persona 4 Arena

[Hipolito]

I've never liked fighting games. They can be fun to watch, with Mortal Kombat's fatalities, Virtua Fighter's cool polygonal graphics, and Eternal Champions's diverse cast of losers. But I've resented their popularity ever since Street Fighter II entered the arcades and brought in crowds I didn't like, driving me to the pinball area.

But now here's this odd game, Persona 4 Arena, a fighting game spinoff of an RPG/dating sim series that I adore. I tried it with high hopes that it would be the fighting game to break my prejudice against the genre. My hopes were dashed quickly. This game might be plenty of fun for those who are already fighting game fans, but for those who aren't or who just want more fun with Persona characters, there's not much here.

P4A throws a selection of characters from Persona 3 and Persona 4 plus an all-new character together into a crisis that forces them to fight one another. The art style and dialogue remain true to P3 and P4, using mostly the same voice actors. The P3 characters are now college-aged and even look a bit older, which I liked seeing. The music of P3 and P4 has been carried over to fine effect. I wasn't impressed by the bobbing fish-mouths whenever characters talked, though.

The singleplayer story mode is a visual novel with a fighting minigame. You choose the character you want to play and then endure twenty minutes of exposition, a minute of fighting, twenty more minutes of exposition, etc. Despite a great opening cutscene, the story is pretty awful for a long time. Then you finally unlock the new character's story, which is really good and gives some much-needed context to the goings-on. Fighting game fans who have no prior Persona experience will quit the singeplayer campaign out of boredom and confusion long before reaching that point. The rest of us will have a mixed experience. Although each character brings a unique perspective to the story, there is not much variation in plot. It's a drag to experience the same "shocking" twists again and again. (Chie's story, though, is hilarious and I had a blast fighting as her.) The story ends up being sorta OK, maybe even interesting, but doesn't deserve to be considered canon.

Also, the text during story mode is often impossible to read! It's white text on backgrounds that have a lot of light color. A button press takes you to a much more readable text review screen, but this should not have been necessary.

The fighting game is flashy, noisy and well animated, as any decent fighting game would be I suppose. Each character's fighting style matches the distinct personality and even the special abilities that character exhibited in P3/P4. The character can summon his or her Persona, but this is just a brief offensive or defensive move. The Persona whooshes in, does its thing, and disappears. You can use it in combos, but it's not like you're tag-teaming with it. (To my disappointment, the P3 characters no longer need to use their Evokers to summon their Personas. Those Evoker animations were freaking badass in P3 and I never grew tired of them.) There are six difficulty levels and I mostly stuck to the middle two. Button mashing did some good, but I also had to rely on blocking and special abilities in order to win.

Unfortunately, the various tutorials modes were neither fun nor helpful enough to teach me how to play the game with skill. A lot of the cooler moves are too difficult to pull off (maybe one of those fighting game sticks would be helpful). I could practice and become better, but I just don't enjoy the game enough to do that.

Though the story has some good moments and even some effective cry-cry scenes, it doesn't hold its own against the stories of P3/P4 so the game is hard to recommend to Persona fans. It may be better as simply a fighting game, but I'm not sure of even that; the buzz on NeoGAF is that the online multiplayer is fun but there aren't many people playing it anymore. Even though the game didn't quite work out for me, I think it's pretty cool as a concept. Now how about a game in which the characters in Street Fighter go to high school and date each other?


EditOOrial

This is a little tangential and soapboxy. With the unhappy headlines in real life news lately, I've been thinking about values. We're taught a lot about the importance of hard work, education, career, and so forth. But the Persona series is about the only adult-aimed entertainment I can think of that really studies and encourages the building and development of interpersonal relationships. Sure, the Persona games lay it on pretty thick (and P4A may be the most guilty example yet), and the importance of friendship sounds so trite, obvious, and after-school-specialish. But it's an important lesson that, apparently, a lot of people haven't had a chance to learn. Maybe success-oriented values are driving us a bit mad, and having a personal support structure can help us overcome the obstacles and tame the inner demons that result. I find it touching that the Persona games preach this, unabashedly, again and again.