Four years...
It took me four years...
But I have it

No matter how many times it's been said in the past, Persona 4: Dancing All Night may just be one of the strangest decisions Atlus has ever made. To take their critically acclaimed murder mystery and turn it into a rhythm game, complete with professional dancers, tons of different artists providing remixes for old songs, and, uh... Hatsune Miku. And to somehow make it good?

I won't speak on the Story Mode since, again, it's been four years, and I remember none of it, so the most I can do is talk about everything else.
The music is the best out of the Dancing series, giving spotlight to even some of the more obscure Persona songs that you don't tend to see talked about, like the opening to Persona 4 Arena (the first one), and even extending some other songs with new lyrics. I'm not gonna try and act like I understand the deeper meaning behind "yeah, flooded apple pie, left out 'til somebody cries" but I still think it's nice to hear more from one of my favorite soundtracks ever.
Gameplay is surprisingly reasonable, though there are some charts that can be a little wonky. The hitsounds are satisfying when timed right, and the controls are smooth enough to feel fun. I'll add, though, I played the entirety of the game by scratching with the analog sticks instead of L1/R1, I just can't see how those two buttons feel comfortable with everything else. I'd maybe understand it if it were L2/R2, but sadly that just isn't an option. I find my fingers to be a little too close together on the former.

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I can't stress enough just how weird it is that this worked so well. Even weirder how the other 2 dancing games that came after fucking sucked LMAO
Proud to finally have my FC on every song in the game, 9/10.

Only good persona game for me. Just the soundtrack. The only best part for me in persona. (I guess there is a story too but idc about persona's writing)

It's a rythym game where you need to perfect your timing, but nicely added dancing animations and fun remixed songs adds to the enjoyment as well

Except the de de de mouse remix of shadow world. It's so bad that I lost the ability to hear. It's so bad that I just removed an 2 stars for it... It's so bad that... you know what, hear it yourself. Here it is https://youtu.be/FSv-IYM7otQ?feature=shared

But rest of the remixes are nice. So yeah, it's a nice enough game to play couple of musics, get energized and then continue your life.

I can't talk about rest of the games in the collection tho, because I haven't tried their remixes that much(p3 and p5)

I'll be honest - if you're playing this game on a bigger screen, then you're at a disadvantage. This was probably one of the few rhythm games I played where I legitimately had to get used to how the notes appeared, since the basic UI is far too spread out to properly gauge everything at once. Get used to moving your eyes around in main gameplay. It feels awkward at first, but once you get used to it, it doesn't become too difficult a task.

A lot of people will remember this game for the Story Mode, which I can't blame them for. A lot of it is a repetitive bloated mess of the same rescue stories for a group of idols, and had admittedly only gotten interesting for once when the game at one point left the main cast to focus on Nanako and Kanami.

Actually, speaking of - it is nice to see Kanami in the flesh, who used to only be mentioned by name in the original P4. She adds a lot to the story, and I daresay she was what made the story interesting to begin with had it not been for the filler.

The songs, interactions, and even choreography in the game are all charming. The modifiers are also a welcome addition, since they easily allow for someone new to rhythm games to get into harder difficulties without pushing them out of their comfort zones, so long as they're willing to sacrifice a bit of lost change and score at the end of it all. Need I also mention the prospect of an easy Platinum Trophy this game poses? It took me a week's worth of days to get mine, and I had a blast doing it.

This next outing by the Investigation Team is a strange one. It embraces all that is weird about it and essentially uses it as fuel to blatantly add dancing and music at every corner. Normally, this would be horrendously stupid and obscenely strange a thing to do from a series as tonally serious as Persona and SMT - but this time: It gave us Nanako singing to the Junes theme, so I think we should all collectively clap at ATLUS for their almost heavenly gift.

Bro either I have extreme P4 brainrot or this is a genuinely fantastic spinoff game.... The rhythm gameplay is great, just like Persona 3 Dancing but the music selection is 10x better. Not to mention the note placement feels a lot fairer at least to me....

But the main thing I wanna hit on is the story mode. This didn't deserve to be this good. The premise is insane, but once you look past that, it's surprisingly well written. Kanami is a really neat addition to the cast, and ties into the central themes and mystery really well... I was thoroughly engaged throughout most of the plot, each character is used really well. It may just be retreading Persona 4's themes, but it does it in a different enough way to stand out. Sometimes the dialogue pacing can be a little slow, and I wish Kanami had more development with Nanako and Yuko, but for it to be this good is a testament to me.

Definitely get this if you have P4 brainrot lol, it actually has a lot of passion behind it unlike Persona 3 Dancing

I picked up this game thinking it would be similar to the other persona dancing titles, light on story, high on fun and good music.

And, this game has all that in spades. Arguably more so than the games that follow it. The gameplay is fun, the remixes are genuine improvements over the originals, which is something I feel 3 and 5 (especially 5) dancing lacked.

But, to my surprise, this game ALSO has a very in depth and genuinely compelling story mode ❓ Yeah, persona 4 DANCING has a campaign. It’s pretty meaty too, it took me about 20 hours to finish it all.

As for the stuff I didn’t care so much for, only one thing really comes to mind. The story mode is permanently locked at “normal” or “easy” difficulty, and you’re unable to adjust the note speed or modify the difficulty in any way. I’m sure newcomers to this genre wouldn’t mind, and maybe if I did the story mode first I also wouldn’t have minded as much. But the whiplash going from hard difficulty with max note speed to snail’s pace tracks on normal made it difficult to enjoy the gameplay, to be honest. Furthermore, being that I played the PS4 version I found the timing windows on the notes to be difficult to adjust to. I suspect this is because the game was originally on vita, so the increase in resolution distorted them slightly. Either way, these are minor problems in the grand scheme of things.

As far as persona spin-offs go, this trumps 3 and 5 dancing easily, but I think it has much less to offer than something like Persona 5 Strikers or the Persona Q duology. Even so, it’s a great standalone game and was much better than I expected. The gameplay is exciting and highly replayable, the campaign is engaging and even has some of the mystery elements that made the original game so great. I (surprisingly) would highly recommend this game to any fans of Persona 4. 3.5/5

This game should be known as "Persona 4 with the Persona 5 art style" because it looks uncanny as all hell sometimes.

This is a really good Rhythm game for casual players like me, I really enjoyed my time with it and that's pretty much it since it's just a Rhythm spinoff there would never be any story or anythin- oh they seriously tried to make a persona story in this game?

Before talking about the ingenuity of the gameplay I'd like to talk about the story. So yeah this game has a full-fledged story mode that tries too hard to be like a persona game and my god it really didn't need to do that as it's not interesting at all and it's just full of nothingness it really just exists to give more value to the package which is a nice to have with most rhythm games being mostly barebone but if you're gonna make a story don't make it so long and boring like when I started playing I kept thinking "When am I gonna dance" since the intro is really long it never starts!
You could say that it's my fault for picking the story mode and not the free dance mode from the get-go but even if it played some stage first it still wouldn't have made the story good or entertaining. Though I do not shame anyone who enjoys this story, it's just a fanfiction for the people who wanted more Persona 4 just like with Persona 4 Arena and it's totally fine.

Gameplay wise this game really shines as it was perfectly crafted for the player to focus on where to look, you see in this game you have 6 inputs, the three buttons from each side of your Playstation controller, and obviously the goal is to press them whenever you have to in-game, but to keep things organized the game makes it so that the circle you gotta press spawn in a clockwise circle so your eyes always knows where to look next instead of it being a mess and spawning from left to right, it's a bit tough to explain but whoever played it with somewhat of a critical eye would understand.

In my playthrough, I ended up playing all free stages on hard with a brilliant rating, it was a fair and fun challenge and I recommend everyone who enjoyed this game to try it. I did not bother getting all achievements as some of them are dumb and useless, and I saw that there was another difficulty that you most likely unlock but I couldn't care less at this point, I got what I wanted out of this game and I'm happy with it.

And I can't forget to credit the really, really good visual effects that play during the stage with some really damn good choreographies mixed with the brand new model of the Persona 4 cast using the Persona 5 art style and the main highlight of the game, the amazing soundtrack.

Specialist is possibly the best Persona song

The story is actually quite good. Better than strikers plot mainly cos act 3 didn’t fall apart in this.

Would give this 5 stars just for the pure fun but it’s a dancing game.

Surprisingly good but the story is pretty boring and way too long considering it’s basically a visual novel with some occasional rhythm gameplay in it here and there, with the story only existing to have this being canon make sense. But what makes this good is the gameplay and the songs which are very fun. Anyways, if you really loved the original persona 4 or golden and want to see the gang back together, i’d say this is worth the purchase. Otherwise, you can probably skip it. It won’t change your life or anything but it’s fun.

Listen, its not what it looks like... Actually its exactly what it looks like. Look! I played P4G for the first time and when I finished it I felt like Id said goodbye to an old friend forever, so I got this to prolongue my P4 vibe, in the same way you keep drinking in the morning to avoid the hangover.

Whatever the music bangs and the story is kinda dumb and overwritten but this is Persona so it fits pretty well. I also generally suck at rythm games but this was easy enough to manage on normal (if not with amazing grades but frankly who gives a shit)

this game was ridiculously annoying to get ahold of and idk why they had to make it so difficult but it was fun and charming as expected - if you love persona and rhythm games, it’s perfect for you!! i think this is the only persona dancing title with an actual canon main story in there so that was… interesting, it was long winded but i thought the VN style was cool at least. also if you get the dlc you can have THE hatsune miku join you, do i need to say much else?!

it did kinda suck that there’s no option for jp audio cause that’s how i played p4 originally so the switch to en voices was a little… jarring.

adachi voice i’m rockin’ it huh?