Review: Persona 4 Arena

Persona 4 Arena is a fighting game made by Arc System Works, makers of BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, with its story and character design being done by Atlus, who has made the Persona series. Even though I'm not usually one to play fighting games, I'm really enjoying this one - the characters and story that I recognize drew me into it, but the surprisingly easy to pick up gameplay has kept me here.

The first thing I'd like to talk about for this game is the story mode. As the game is a fighting game, you wouldn't normally expect that much from it - however, it is actually quite entertaining, and quite important to the Persona series. It connects Persona 3 and Persona 4, while setting the stage for another game in the series - possibly Persona 5, or perhaps another side game like this one. Regardless, the overall story is quite enjoyable - though the first of its flaws is that it is likely to be almost completely inaccessible to someone who has played neither of the previous games, and even missing one of them would significantly cut into your enjoyment of it.

Another problem with the story mode is the exceptionally high ratio of story to gameplay. It's not a deal-breaker, but the fact that after starting the story mode with most characters (each character has a separate story mode), you have to wait upwards of twenty minutes to get to the first fight. And, oddly, those fights are only ever one-round affairs, with no option to adjust this. Clearly, the game's developers wanted to get you back to the story and out of the fighting quickly, but I definitely don't agree with this decision. One of the stories has only one fight in its roughly two and a half hour duration - though it has the most engaging and interesting of the stories, so it can be forgiven for this. Regardless, I can see why they designed the game they did - having characters fight for no reason is a common problem in fighting game stories, and this game manages to avert that pretty well - but the fact that there's not even a way to increase the number of rounds in a story mode fight seems like a poor choice to me.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the stories of almost every character tell the same events, but from a slightly different perspective. This would be a difficult thing to change, but it certainly seems like perhaps some of the stories could have been combined in order to make the experience less repetitive. It's interesting to see every angle to each event, but it becomes overkill after a while.

But this is a fighting game, after all! So what about the fighting?

I personally find the fighting in this game to very enjoyable. As I mentioned above, I'm not really a fighting game guy - I've played a few, but the only other fighting games that I own/have spent a significant amount of time with are Marvel vs Capcom 3 and the Smash Bros series - the former of which enticed me with its interesting characters and "deckbuilding" aspect of picking your team, and the latter of which also grabbed me with its characters, but also its discarding of many of the things that make fighting games inaccessible (and typically uninteresting) to me. So, as a novice fighting game player, I'm very appreciative of some of the changes they've made in this game. Many of the more complex joystick motions of other fighting games have been cut out entirely - the only motion required for a single move is rolling the joystick from down to forward or down to backward - twice in a row for super moves. Most of the two-button and three-button combinations do something when pressed at the same time that, in some other games, would require a more complex input for at least a few of them - and several these two and three button inputs can conveniently mapped to shoulder buttons. Last, and perhaps most helpfully, there is an auto-combo feature - if you just keep mashing square (on the PS3), your character will do a five-move combo, ending with a super if you have the meter for it. These combos are far less effective than true, more conventional combos would be (though certain characters have more usable auto-combos than others), but they provide an excellent way to allow beginners to not be overwhelmed by the need to learn a relatively complicated (for a beginner) chain of moves to do more than trivial amounts of damage. Lastly, there is also a lesson mode to teach you the basic controls of the game, as well as a challenge mode for each character to show you some of their combos, further increasing the accessibility of the game.

However, I am not personally equipped to speak too much on the mechanics of the game beyond the newbie friendliness of the game. While I am sure that it has its flaws, and someone more experienced with fighting games could point them out to you, it is simply lots of fun to me. For once, it's a fighting game that makes it unintimidating to look at your character's command list, and it's not too hard to do any of the moves there for a novice to the genre. I feel like I'm using the full power of my character when I play him , even though I know that I'm not, and that's a great feeling. I think that attempting to capture this feeling (by making basic moves and combos easier to do) is what other fighting games should try to do in order to draw in a bigger audience.

And on a side note, the online play is amazingly lag free. It is exceptionally rare that I really notice a difference between online and local play (though I'm sure someone who relied more on real combos would notice it more), at least if you let the intro play long enough to sync the two players. While not a huge deal in terms of game design, it is very nice, and having netcode this good definitely helps to keep me playing online.

One last flaw I'd like to discuss is the DLC - specifically, four navigators (read: match commentators who are characters from the series) which are overpriced online, but are also unlockable in-game. I do really like this model (well, not the overpriced part, but the unlockable in-game or DLC part), but these four particular unlocks are all hidden behind the hardest portion of the game - score attack. Score attack mode consists of putting you up against extremely powerful versions of all 13 characters, one after the other, with any failure sending you back to the beginning of the mode. This is bad enough, but to unlock each of the navigators, you have to beat this mode with a certain combination of three or four of the characters. In other words, it really gives the sense that these navigators, while technically unlockable in-game, are so difficult to obtain that only an extremely tiny portion of the playerbase would be able to get them - but, hehe, if you really want them, you can just buy them online for a mere three dollars each! While I'm all for rewarding players for difficult feats, beating this mode with even one character is hard enough - beating it with several characters, many of whom play quite differently from the character you like to play as, is effectively impossible for those who don't want to spend literally days on this mode.

Anyway, as should be obvious, while this game definitely has flaws, I'm really enjoying it. I think that it's a great example of what fighting games can do to be more user-friendly, as well as having an interesting and engaging plot.


Things I can learn from this game:
-Make your player feel like he is using the full power of his chosen character. This can be accomplished by not making your character have crazy awesome moves that require appropriately crazy inputs - or at least by making the easier-to-use moves feel sufficiently powerful. This applies to any sort of combo system the game might have as well - have some sort of very easy but usably effective place to start.
-Try to avoid repetition in game modes - particularly story modes, where you'd just be seeing the same thing over and over, and with minimal combat gameplay. Combine separate stories into one, create further differentiation between them, whatever.
-Allowing things to be unlocked either in-game or by spending money is a pretty good model. However, don't use this to hide unlockables behind such ridiculous requirements that the content is effectively unlockable only by spending money.
-For games where each character plays significantly differently (and players frequently have the choice of which character to play as), don't force us to play at extremely high levels as multiple characters in order to unlock things.