Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight Review

I was very late to play Persona 4: Dancing All Night.  I remember the hype back when it came out, but I didn’t pay it much mind.  Compared to the likes of The Rhythm of Fighters and especially Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call, Dancing All Night’s song list looks really paltry.  It limits itself to one game and its spin-offs and a good fraction of the songs are remixes, limiting its actual track list even further.  I knew there was a story to it, but I didn’t think it could be anything more than a joke scenario or half-baked excuse to get everyone dancing, like Senran Kagura Dekamori.

Once I actually got around to playing it, I loved it.  The whole game radiated energy and fun.  The dancing, music and accompanying visuals made for an explosion of color and lights like it was party time all the time, right down to the menus.  Simply buying stuff had Tanaka’s notoriously catchy and in-your-face theme play while Patrick Seitz yells at you and the menu music was always on point.  You could dress up everyone in all sorts of outfits for added flair and all the songs had a variety of partners with their own little duo dances during the mid-sections.

The story was better than I expected too.  The dancing was worked into an established theme that fit with the Persona universe and it had a lot of detail put into what was happening.  It was great seeing returning characters like Nanako and Kojima contribute to the plot and the new characters were very sweet and endearing.  It was a solid and highly polished package and I wish I played it sooner.

As you can expect, that got me excited for the new dancing games based on Persona 3 and 5, but mostly 3 because I played it many years ago and in recent years have come off the arena games and Persona Q, familiarizing myself with the cast even more.  I’m currently in the process of playing every Persona game in order and I’m still on 2: Innocent Sin so I haven’t played Persona 5.  As far as I’m aware, the main character has a bunch of crystal skulls and fights Batman, Viewtiful Joe, Klonoa and Hitler.

My excitement took a hit after it was announced that the Playstation Vita version of the game would not be available for retail and would only be available for download.  We all know what I think about that.

I would get more mad, but Atlus has been in my good graces, unlike Bandai Namco.  Atlus has always been very good about releasing Vita games physically.  The Vanillaware trilogy, all the Persona games and even lesser games like Conception 2 have all been on cartridges.  Atlus is like Bandai Namco’s good counterpart that actually cares and doesn’t want to be garbage.  I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is an honest mistake on somebody’s part there.  With Vita cartridges ending production in 2019, someone may have missed a deadline or something.

They try to offset this major shortcoming with bonuses and pricing.  Vita owners buying it on the first week get Vita-exclusive costumes, but those costumes were available on the physical version in Japan so that’s not really a bonus.  It’s just implementing something to patch up their mistake.  Early purchases also give both versions of each game one of the DLC songs with their own dancer, both of which were not pre-order bonuses in Japan and are a $5 value.  Added onto that is the Vita version being $40 instead of the usual 50 for physical Vita games.  With all of that, there’s a bit more value in these games than other new Vita games.  Whether it makes up for not being able to own a copy depends on the overall value of the game and that’s what we’re here to look at.

Since I haven’t played Persona 5 and know barely anything about it, I’m sticking to Dancing in Moonlight for this review so I know more than half of what I’m writing about.

The story for this one is about what I was expecting from Dancing All Night: an excuse to get the characters dancing.  Elizabeth, calling herself “Elle-P” brings the SEES team into a dream world in which their thoughts are turned into dance moves, memories are turned into stages and all memories of them being there will be erased in the end.  Conveniently, the Velvet room exists on another plane of existence, so Elizabeth can take the SEES team from a particular point in time, meaning everyone is present for the Persona 3 cast except Koromaru and Shinjiro, because Koromaru is quadrapedal and Shinjiro is…. Derek Stephen Prince’d.  Luckily for their fans, those two were given their own DLC songs.

It’s a good thing space is warped and time is bendable in the Velvet Room because otherwise the plot wouldn’t make sense in reality.  The reason Elizabeth gathered them is because she was impressed by Margaret’s guest solving a major situation through dancing in Dancing All Night and wants to prove hers could have done it quicker and better.  Now she’s in a competition with her younger sister, the attendant in Persona 5, to prove whose team is the best by entertaining a crowd in the Sea of Souls.  Like Persona Q, this wouldn’t work if some time warping wasn’t employed because of the events of Persona 3.

That’s just about the extent the plot goes.  It sets things up for dancing fun and that’s just fine.  I can’t expect them to make a story as elaborate as Dancing All Night’s another two times without being extremely contrived and short on ideas.  Instead of a plot, the game uses social links for all the characters.  Every character has conditions from the main game to unlock skits.  Persona is very big on character interaction, so this was a wise choice.  Like those games, your character only talks when given dialogue choices, though he does talk during the main gameplay.  It’s a nice return to form after the Persona 4 spinoffs, where Yu was given his own personality without the interactive element.

Viewing social links is also how you unlock costumes, accessories and modifiers.  You don’t buy them from hammy Patrick Seitz anymore and I prefer it this way.  It cuts out the middleman.

I shouldn’t have to point it out, but the social links are great.  I might even consider them a better alternative to the story mode in Dancing All Night because these can be enjoyed at the player’s pace and expresses the characters even more by focusing on their interactions.  Each of the 7 characters has 8 social links, with the first and last of Elizabeth’s being the intro scene and ending, respectively, so it has as much story content as it needs, even if it doesn't have the art images and animated scenes Dancing All Night had.

Akihiko what are you doing.

To further delight the fans, social links starting with the 6^th for each character let you explore their room in full 3D.  That may not seem like a big deal, but for players who only ever got to see them at particular angles for cutscenes before, it’s neat getting to observe all their unique stuff.  Elizabeth elaborates that she took every measure to perfectly recreate everyone’s dorm rooms right down to the trash on the ground.  In them she also hid small blue cards for the player to find to unlock unique accessories.  It’s a fun little distraction.  As minor as it may seem, I’m also grateful that most scenes in the rooms use the dorm room theme or social link themes from Persona 3.  I miss hearing those after their absence in the recent games.

The graphics for all the social links look very nice as well.  No longer do character portraits flap lips at each other for dialogue.  Now every character is in beautiful 3D and animated as fluidly as the dancing, even if they are still only standing in one place.

They’re also once again all fully voice acted by the greats.  We’ve got Michelle Ruff, Wendy Lee, Cindy Robinson, Liam O’Brien and everyone’s favorite homophobic creeper, Vic Mignona.

Seriously Atlus, I get you want to keep your cast consistent and that’s admirable, but please stop giving this shithead work.  Although I appreciate you get to be a dick to him with almost every dialogue choice.

Tara Platt is especially fantastic, as always.  She’s great as Mitsuru, but her voicing Elizabeth steals the show with her grandiose tone and straightforward deliveries of awkward dialogue.  She’s easily the best part of every social link she’s in.

The game has audio for Japanese and English, but the mouth animations on characters were made to synch with the Japanese voices rather than the looping lip flapping of previous games.  This means the English version has a bit of Hong Kong dubbing, but it’s easy to ignore.

On the opposite spectrum of the social links, the actual dancing has no story or context going on and dialogue is relegated to cheering and comments.  It’s pretty much the free dance mode from Dancing All Night, but with a structure for progression.  Dancing in Moonlight takes a page from Guitar Hero and unlocks songs in groups of four.  Once those four are complete, one more unlocks before the next group, up until the last few.  The one at the end of each group is different from the regular dancing by being longer and more visually distinct, so even though there’s no story, there’s a sense of pacing to playing through it.

The music itself is a matter of taste, but for me Dancing in Moonlight’s track list is substantially better than Dancing All Night’s.  I only liked about 2/3rds of the songs in that game and part of that is because most of the ones I don’t care much for are the ones that got remixed.  It was sorely lacking in battle music.  Even when I did like the song, the remixes didn’t add anything to it.

That is not the case here.  Songs are less reused in Dancing in Moonlight and it has both Persona 3’s original version and the PSP version to draw from, which had its own soundtrack for the female protagonist.  I like the more heavy funk of songs like Mass Destruction and Light the Fire Up in the Night over the likes of Time to Make History and the remixes add a lot to the songs by practically changing their genre.  I can name a few of the songs I don’t consider great, but they’re all winners.  There are three different versions of Burn my Dread in this game, but they’re all so different I don’t get tired of it.

The dancing animations were improved with more joints and elaborate movements as well as bigger stages, so Dancing in Moonlight doesn’t falter in keeping up the energy and excitement Dancing All Night had, but there are a few omissions to the presentation I miss.

For one, the menus don’t make it feel like it’s party time ALL the time, just MOST of the time.  They have some pattern and glitter effects, but it’s largely a sterile white and blue color without the detailed flair of things like the disco balls for difficulty selection or different loading screens for each song.  There’s also no fancy gallery shaped like a trophy collection like Dancing All Night had and even worse, no music player.

When every music-based game in this day in age, including within the same franchise, has a music player, it’s downright baffling why they didn’t put one in this.  Even both versions of Super Smash Brothers 4 have a music player!  How do you forget that?!

In the dancing there’s also a lack of added visual effects.  Outside of the characters dancing, the only added pizzazz is the stages lighting up with blinking colors, which looks nice in motion, but what happened to the background details in Dancing All Night, where the words to the song would drop behind the character or they’d be transported into a fancy music video location?

My guess is that those effects were done to make up for the fact that Dancing All Night used a lot of stages more than once.  Every song that has a 3D stage in Dancing in Moonlight has its own.  I guess it’s less omitting them and more taking another approach by going all-out on those effects for the music videos select songs have.  Nobody uses Personas in this one either, which should be a big deal considering the title, but I almost didn’t notice.

Omissions are more than made up for in all the features that are added.  Dancing in Moonlight has a much wider range of accessories and options.  All of the basic accessories like the 70s glasses and product placement headphones are back, but now there are also colored contact lenses, hair color changes, animal ears, flashy neon dresses and you can even wear the masks the full moon shadows had as a hairpin.  The outfit count is roughly the same as Dancing All Night’s, but with some new ones like Halloween costumes and a dorky-looking swimsuit for Ken since he wasn’t in the beach scene in the original game.  Combinations of outfits and accessories can be saved as favorites so you don’t have to keep shuffling through it all to get the particular look you want.

Songs now have the option of selecting specific partners for specific fever time dances, once you unlock it.  It’s a small thing, but having the same character come in to do the same duo dance twice in one song made it feel a little less natural in Dancing All Night.  This way it makes the song keep an ever-changing look throughout.

For the gameplay, support and challenge modifiers have seen a big expansion.  There are way more options to make a song easier or harder at the cost or benefit of points to make for a customized play experience.

Perhaps the biggest expansion of all though is the DLC.  It’s better on every level, but a lot of people don’t seem to see it that way.  A lot of the DLC for Dancing in Moonlight came out on the first day of the game’s release, which led to people saying they’re day 1 DLC, but since the DLC was out in Japan for a long time before America, it’s really not.  They just didn’t make us wait for it.

All the songs that don’t include a new dancer are in a season pass bundle of 28 songs for $25 dollars, which definitely seems ridiculous at first glance, but the truth is, that’s a much better deal than what Japanese gamers got.

I totaled the cost of the songs in the season pass based on the Japanese release’s pricing corresponding with the American pricing of the songs out so far.  In Japan, the total cost of all those songs is roughly $48, and that’s including 5 of them that were free there and will presumably be free here as well.  With that in mind, $25 is a bargain and a lot of the songs so far are great.

My particular favorite is the song with Koromaru, which uses a beautiful remix of the ending song to the original Persona’s remake and depicts Koromaru interacting with everyone else in SEES, all done in a storybook style with the Persona Q chibis.  It’s adorable.

The live performances in the bundle also get me hyped and the opening songs for the other Persona games are nice for a quick little number when I don’t want to go into a long session.  All Dancing All Night had for paid DLC, outside of its new dancer songs, were the opening and endings for the anime based on it.

It’s common to complain that a music game doesn’t have the one or two tracks you want (would have liked the Strega battle music), but for the DLC I am particularly disappointed that they have three different songs from the first Persona (remake), but not the pharmacy song.

For those not in the know, in the first Persona the only place you could get your healing items was at the pharmacy in the shopping center and every time you went there it played a catchy as hell jingle song.  Every character makes a comment of how catchy it is, especially Kei, who is tortured by his inability to get it out of his head.  It was so good all the pharmacies in Persona 2 play their own version of it.

Dancing in Moonlight and its Persona 5 counterpart have a hilariously obnoxious DLC song for Tanaka’s Amazing Commodities and Dancing All Night had a fun song made from the Junes jingle, so why didn’t they include the very first catchy jingle?  Complete the trinity!  There’s even a live performance they can use!  Just look at that crowd reaction.

I would also like the blind pianist to play a hyper piano number like Ray Charles while Igor does Larry Graham-style slap bass, but that’s a scenario that will only ever exist in my head.

I can go on and on about “could have” in long-running game franchises.  As it stands, I love this game.   The audio is of the highest quality when you wear headphones (and still good without), I loved getting to spend time with SEES again in the social links, the songs are all fantastic, everything is kept visually interesting, I like the little details like unique dialogue when putting on the Shin Megami Tensei crossover outfits and halloween costumes and the enhancements to the modifiers and costumes keep playing songs interesting in gameplay.  I can’t quite say it’s better than Dancing All Night, but that’s only because I put them on the same level, with each one doing something different that roughly puts them on the same level of quality.  I recommend them both, but Dancing in Moonlight and Starlight have the disadvantage of only being available for download and for that, I can’t say for sure if it’s worth getting a new Vita card for.

It’s absolutely worth buying and if you don’t mind transferring games to the PC for backup to save memory space and/or you have a big memory card with space to spare.  If not, then considering an 8 gigabyte memory card is $20 on its own and this game uses roughly 5 gigabytes without the DLC, that’s $60 just to buy it, which while fun, is a little too high of an asking price for me.  Then again I know people who import games for double the price of American games and buy $15 DLC for one song in Idolmaster so it may not be so bad for everyone.

Regardless of how much you need to spend to get it, this is a guaranteed good time.  Obviously Persona 3 fans will get the most out of it, but someone who can appreciate good music and characterization regardless of context should find a lot to enjoy too.  I give Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight an 8 out of 10.  With these out, now the wait is on for the new version of Catherine on the Vita.  That and Sengoku Basara 4 on the PS3, but with how long that's taken it may be another 5 years or so.