Persona 4: Dancing All Night (2015)

On the heels of a masterpiece like Persona 4, any game has some big shoes to fill. Dancing All Night is of course not entirely trying to--it's a spinoff hoping for little more than to have fun with the characters and music of the game--but as for reaching its goals, it succeeds. Mostly.

As a rhythm game, it's quite excellent. The music selection is pretty good (if a bit lacking in variety due to multiple remixes of the same songs), and the basic mechanics are excellent. For someone who has already fallen in love with Persona 4 (which make no mistake, this game banks on), playing the game to the rhythm of such beloved music is a highly enjoyable experience.

The story, however, is something of a mixed bag. Generally I wouldn't focus too much on that for a rhythm game, but this being a Persona spinoff it actually puts more effort into this mode than most games of the genre would, and the result is sometimes great, sometimes not. It continues the series' tradition of using psychological subtext as text, this time by using dancing as a means of expressing your true feelings and, thus, bonding with the people around you. It's a neat idea, even it leads to all sorts of cheese, but the resulting dialogue ends up woefully overusing the word "bonds" to the point of narmy melodrama, and the new characters simply aren't as compelling as the cast from the original game. But it's an enjoyable tale nonetheless.

Ultimately, Persona 4: Dancing All Night is fanservice--stop, not in that way--for fans of the original game, and said fans will certainly enjoy it a great deal. Others will have little to gain from it aside from a reasonably entertaining rhythm game with a cheesy story.