EU copy played on a PlayStation 3 Super Slim.

Persona 4 Arena is an enjoyable fighting game experience. I'll admit the extent of my knowledge of the genre begins and ends with Tekken since I'm usually hesitant to learn new button layouts and systems, but P4A won me over in the end. It's use of characters' personas within fights was satisfying with a multitude of techniques like specials and breaks at your disposal, and combat feels incredibly simple at first with the possibility of a deep range of combos.

However I had the great misfortune to start my P4A experience with the Story Mode - a mode I assumed would be similar to any other fighting game's "story" mode at that time with maybe a line of dialogue between fights and an animated ending. Instead what I was greeted with was a way too long visual novel that spent the majority of its time showing off how much time and effort the scriptwriters had put into it, with an occasional 30 seconds of fighting game content every 10-15 minutes.

Now I enjoyed my time with Persona 4, and it's probably one of a handful of turn-based RPGs that I've actually finished, but the lengthy story scenes in that game ultimately served the design and gameplay. It was also rather intermittent, and was usually the reward after completing a dungeon or reaching a new relationship level. P4A instead bogs the gameplay down with its story, practically drowning it, so that when you do finally get to a match you've completely forgotten what your character's moveset is. It's a problem that the other Persona spin off games have too I've noticed, and it all seems to stem from this game thinking it needed to please RPG fans with a complex and circuitous story when all that was really needed was a flashback to sometime during P4's main plot with a retconned small-time villain or a training tournament conducted by Teddy for shits and giggles.

But that was the Story Mode, and when I finally found that the Arcade Mode was basically what I was after I was too mentally exhausted from hours of VN nonsense in a fighting game to really care. I might have also put more time into it or even had some fun if the servers were active but they're as dead as a can of spam in late 2021.

Overall Persona 4 Arena is a great fighting game with a ridiculous and needlessly lengthy story mode. What could have been a relatively fun and goofy plot feels needlessly lengthy with absolutely zero reward for putting yourself through it all. Stick to the much superior Arcade Mode when playing this game.

This game is also pretty important to me, and yes it ties back to Chihiro let me explain. The story's all well and good, Labrys goes from someone merely mentioned in a P3 Drama CD to having her full story, her pains, and being able to grow from it. The story format itself is really repetitive and it began the great flanderization of P3 and P4's cast (for example, Akihiko only mentions Protein twice in all of P3 but here he is the Protein Junkie for some reason and wrestles bears.), but the payoffs are really good, even explaining certain things you wouldn't expect a game like this to explain or even thought had an explination.

The gameplay is great and I love the Persona system, it's just really unbalanced. Yukiko vs Shabrys is absolutely suffering incarnate since she only has like 3 moves that can break the Bull, two of them being Supers.

But what really made this game special was how it unlocks player tags. Of course, me being me, I wanted to have Chihiro in my tag. However, this game unlocks them randomly, meaning I'd have to play a lot to get her name. I wound up joining a community and playing 1800+ matches, and in those matches I met some dear friends of mine who I still talk with to this day. Even later, I became friends with someone who holds Labrys very dearly, and for most of my online social group from 2012 to this day I have this game and its random name unlocking system to thank.

So yes, making my tag "I Love Chihiro" was very worth it.

Fun fighting game that is a sequel to the amazing Rpg Persona 4/Persona 4 Golden, featuring the amazing fighting arcade style of Arc System works. Having fun unique character story modes (others being completely useless) and great crossover fighting game with persona 3 characters making an appearance. Fun fighting game with a unique story... don't recommend buying a copy of this game. I recommend buying persona 4 area ultimax as it is an expanded version of persona 4 arena with a new story and more characters and you can just buy the persona 4 arena story to experience both story modes there. Fun game yes, but buy persona 4 arena ultimax instead and get the persona 4 arena story dlc.