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