Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight Review

Persona is known for having great music, and Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight doesn’t disappoint. It features beat bopping remixes of P3 and Persona Q music, with plenty of content to unlock and social links to expand on. There are a few issues, such as a hard to use UI, but if you are a fan of the original game, There is a good chance you’ll love this.

Story

Dancing in Moonlight takes place within a shared dream among your team during the events of Persona 3. Elizabeth, the protagonist’s guide throughout the game, wants you to compete against her younger sister’s team of Persona users (P5) in a dance competition. As the protagonist owes a lot to Elizabeth, they decide to take part. There isn’t much story to be gleamed from this dance party, as it is all a dream that they will forget, but the character conversations you unlock by doing certain tasks gives you more interesting context to each character’s history and preferences. All of these are told through simple cutscenes that are fully voiced.

Gameplay

But the main meat and potatoes of Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight is the music of course with 25 songs to play. Similarly to the Hatsune Miku games, you press buttons in relation to the beat. The D-pad resembles the left and the buttons resemble the right. With the analog stick, you can make a DJ-scratch like noise, which can give you extra points and more for your combo, but is not necessary. During specific sections of the song, another character comes on screen and dances with the person designated to the track you are playing; this is called Fever Mode.

This game can be unnecessarily tough to play, especially on the harder difficulties. It’s hard to keep track of the notes on screen due to the UI. Both sides of the note highway are hard to read at the same time as they’re so far apart. If you are responding on one side of the screen, you have to use your periphery vision to see the other side in quick succession if they are played simultaneously. It’s difficult to grasp, and over time, you can figure out how to play Normal to an efficient level, but harder modes can become too fast to process what is happening at times. In Persona 4 Dancing All Night, the scratch signs are less obtrusive on screen, and they should have stayed that way, so on top of the hard to follow UI, the scratch marks are distractingly big and brightly coloured. Having some sort of customization with the UI in-game would have been helpful.

Dancing in Moonlight doesn’t give you a lot of room to fail, as well. If you stumble just a few times during a 3 to 4, to maybe a 5 minute song, you either clear the song (which is the bare minimum) or fail it. It’s brutal, especially in the harder difficulties. And you need to clear songs with a Brilliant rating to unlock the social links for Ken. The difference between a Brilliant and the perfect score, King Crazy, is very low.

Music Selection

Most of the song selections are bangers with fresh, cool, and exciting remixes of Shoji Meguro’s music by artists such as: ATOLS, Lotus Juice, ☆Taku Takahashi (m-flo / block.fm), and Jazztronik. These artists help gives the soundtracks fans are familiar with a new balm of life. Some of the original music, such as Mass Destruction, is still in this game however. The layouts for the note highways work well with the songs and when you have a streak going it feels great as it lays out two button presses, hold button presses, and quick succession taps to the beat in a thrilling fashion.

However, P-Team opted to repeat the representation of songs multiple times, and it’s disappointing that some tracks won’t have any regard at all in this celebration of Persona 3. Three of the 25 tracks in the game only show a video in the background, as well; they feel lazy, uninteresting and one isn’t even in the correct aspect ratio.

Choreography

What highlights the music, is the choreography on screen. Each of the characters groove to the music in a flashy, dramatic and hype-inducing way, but the choreography also reflects the characters’ personalities on screen. It gets even better as Fever Mode activates and the partners dance with them. You really get the camaraderie the group has shared over their difficult journey, and the way they work together can be fixating or very kawaii.

Despite the tricky UI set up, you are able to acknowledge the dancing on screen, but to its detriment, the gameplay doesn’t actually affect the dancing. You don’t see them stumble during the dance if you screw up. And the music doesn’t falter. Instead, your team members are mentioning how you’re doing through voiced lines, which can be fun to hear at first, but repetitive as they deliver the same catchphrases time and time and time again. You can turn these voices off, but you won’t get that gratifying feedback you need while playing the game.

Unlockables

There are so many unlockables in Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight. You complete tasks, such as finishing a certain amount of songs in Brilliant or clearing a song with different outfits or accessories, to unlock social links with the cast of characters. To finish the game, which takes around 10-12 hours, you have to finish Elizabeth’s social links by unlocking the other characters’. Different outfits and accessories are rewarded throughout the game and vary greatly. They’ve stuffed a lot into this game, and it was addictive to get everything I could.

Conclusion

Persona 3: Dancing in Starlight suffers from a difficult UI, a steep difficulty curve, and a playlist of remixes of the same tracks multiple times, but the music is thrilling to play with exciting choreography, and there are plenty of unlockables to keep you playing.

This review is based on a review copy provided by ATLUS