Persona 4: Arena — The Ultimate in RPG-to-Fighting Game Adaptations

You have never played a fighting game adaptation like Persona 4 Arena before.

That’s, of course, not to say there haven’t been any similar to it, but they’ve all differed in presentation. The only other example that comes close Dissidia: Final Fantasy, though that’s a different kind of fighting game — if you want to call it a fighting game at all. That game adheres closer to the Smash Bros. model, a game that’s more about giving any kind of player instant fun without taking a rather significant amount of time to learn the intricacies of its mechanics. And it’s not that Dissidia doesn’t have that, but it’s much simpler than your average fighter, and favors stats over pure skill.

Arena takes the more traditional way out, making this the first time a popular RPG franchise has been adapted into a 2D fighter. Some Atlus employees liked the work Arc System Works does with their fighting games, including adaptations of licensed properties like Fist of the North Star Arcade and Sengoku Basara X. While their sprites are never the most detailed as far as frames of animation, they’re staggeringly accurate to the source material. And their games also turn out fun to play, even if some of them are broken (like the two aforementioned titles). The Blazblue team decided to take time off from that franchise to work on P4A.

(“P4A” standing for Persona 4 Arena here. Not Persona 4: The Animation, which uses the same abbreviation.)

Yeah, they all have names like that.

But don’t let that fool you: P4A is nowhere near as hard to learn as any of Arc’s previous fighters. While making the game, the development team was aware that many players of the game don’t commonly play fighting games, and decided to craft a system that’s easy to learn but tough to master. Relying on auto combo techniques initially is a good way to help how each individual character works, along with playing the tutorial and challenge modes to learn the game’s concept of basic and advanced maneuverability.

The tutorial is great, and is something all fighting games should have — that this isn’t an expected feature in all fighters these days is baffling. Challenge Mode begins by teaching the player a bunch of key basic combos, but eventually falls into the same pitfall Capcom’s games tumble into. Many of the later combos are impractical for use in a real match, either requiring too much effort for little damage or unnecessarily burn your super meter when it could be used for other means. This is forgivable for characters that aren’t too difficult to grasp like Yu (or Souji, or Charlie, whichever) or Chie, but not so much for tougher ones like Aigis. Tournament players in Japan have been playing this game for a while, so it would have been nice if they recreated some of their combos so us commoners could learn them.

It may be considerably easier to get into compared to Blazblue and Guilty Gear, but P4A still isn’t an easy game to pick up. It will take a few hours of practice before you’re even slightly formidable. It also has the same issue previous Arc games have: the fundamentals you learn with one character can’t be applied to another, but it’s not as severe of a hurdle because of its comparative ease.

Really, it’s pretty helpful stuff.

Once you’ve trained enough, you can head online to spar against actual humans. Anyone who’s played the Blazblue games and Arcana Heart 3 knows how good the online play typically is in Arc’s games, and P4A is no different. You know a game’s netcode is good when you can fight overseas players with minimal lag, but it’s obviously best if you face opponents in your own territory. The only aspect I had an issue with was setting custom search parameters for ranked matches. Whenever I made searches stricter, it often couldn’t find a match, despite plenty of players being online. The option of searching for opponents by their names and connection strength is a far better alternative.

P4A has a traditional Arcade Mode that provides a heavily abridged version of each character’s story, giving only incredibly basic details, similar to Blazblue’s storyline. It’s not the mode you want to play for any character development, but anyone who hasn’t played Persona 4 or watched The Animation (since they contain the same story) should know that there aren’t any spoilers in this mode. Those are all in the Story Mode, which is the reason why many picked up a copy.

And here you thought it was over.

The story has a visual novel presentation, where you pick individual characters to experience the tale from their perspective, similar to, you guessed it, Blazblue. The portraits are similar to the other Persona games, aside from the characters moving their mouths while speaking — which can be admittedly jarring if you’re used to the idle iterations from the main games. Though each character’s tale has some similarities, it’s important and fun to see what each one thinks of different situations. Persona’s characters are popular because of how unique and intriguing each individual character is, which makes every story thread distinct.

But that doesn’t mean some of them are a little too similar. Upon starting the mode, you’ll probably start with Yu, Yosuke, Chie and Yukiko, whose stories have a common problem: their stories start in the same area, meaning parts of their tales unfold very similarly. This can lead to some boredom. It’s better once you get into characters like Kanji and Naoto, and gets much better once you get into the Persona 3 characters’ stories. The story mode takes around 25-30 hours to finish, so expect to spend plenty of time with it.

Unlike Arc’s previous games, Daisuke Ishiwatari doesn’t handle the music in P4A, nor was he intricately involved with the project. Instead, Megaten mainstay composer Shoji Meguro provided the music. It’s fitting that he did, too, because it mostly consists of remixed themes from the games, redone so they’ll be fitting for a fighting game. Meguro doesn’t have any experience composing for a fighting game, but he did a very good job here.

The beast has been chilled.

This is the first Persona game to have both Japanese and English voice acting. The all-star cast returns for the former, but the latter received voices changes for Chie and Teddie. I didn’t play Persona 4 before tackling this game (I watched the anime adaptation), so I have no familiarity with how Tracey Rooney and Dave Wittenberg tackled the roles, respectively. Unsurprisingly, I have no problem with Erin Fitzgerald or Sam Riegel. You’ll have to wait for Angela to comment on and compare the changes.

So yes, Persona 4 Arena is a pretty swell fighting game, and you should get it. That is, unless you’re busy with the other 70 fighting games from this year. Since the Blazblue team is working on Chrono Phantasma, this will probably be the only installment. And none of the other licensed fighting game adaptations Arc has developed have ever received enhanced versions.

But don’t be surprised if it sees a sequel of some sort.