Auto-combos allow the player to tap one button to pull off multi-hit moves that truncate into cancels. The fighting game is the one that looks to the future, and it does so by offering a bevy of features meant to guide the beginner into a notoriously difficult-to-learn genre. Yet they’re such a minute part of the main thrust of the game: this setting, this story that could easily have been condensed into a 30-minute short with a single adage: friendship is still magic.īut Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is two games, and, like Janus, its two games are two faces. Arc System Works (of Guilty Gear and BlazBlue fame) have created a compelling fighting game that feels true to the characters involved, their personas, magic, and status effects translated flawlessly from the RPG. The fighting is secondary here, which is a shame, because when it unfolds, it does so seamlessly. But when all’s said and done, the story spans hours of reading, advancing dialogue, and watching the occasional cut scene, all punctuated by a handful of single-round fights. They’re never given the chance they move on rails through predictable developments, left reduced to even more concentrated caricatures of themselves designed only for combat, like some sort of Justice League without any of the personal stakes of the original titles.Īnd if it weren’t for the game’s absolute focus and the obvious importance of the story mode I could be convinced that the thin characterization was some sort of meta-commentary on the genre. Meanwhile, through so much dialogue, relationships don’t change, and neither do any of the characters, really. But the game attempts to treat it all as such, forcing the player to sit through scene after scene of a different character showing their surprise to these wacky developments in a world where, not one week earlier, they were forced to fight inside of a television. This is nothing new in the context of this series: not to the player, nor to the characters. Which is insane: here is that same setting filled with a dark world and evil doppelgangers, red, bloody fogs, warped roads, and a massive spire that erupts from the town’s high school. Once that initial nostalgic burst wears off, there’s not much narrative left.
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The delight is in navigating a story where our protagonist creates and strengthens bonds with these characters now present in Ultimax that these bonds then help us maximize our RPG prowess as we explore a new world and new relationships is nearly secondary, like the whipped cream on top of a cake that is made of TV static and also bleeding.īut where Persona’s narratives are usually sprawling odysseys filled with growth and weird discovery, Ultimax is like a greatest hits compilation that doesn’t recognize what makes the original games so engaging. We, as players, move through games like Persona 3 and 4 not to see those characters as static beings but dynamic vessels of growth. Just as the ill effects of a shadow realm eventually enact their change on the people attempting to live through it, so too do those people rebel against that hideous change: by continuing to cultivate friendships and life skills, characters are able to fight more proficiently. An insane, twisted world is only insane and twisted in contrast to something else, and it’s this normalcy that serves both as the driving force of the game’s mechanisms but also as a backdrop for an increasingly disturbed environment. Persona has always been about different types of duality. There are plots and subplots that evolve from real-world struggles. But meanwhile, within this unreal world filled with contemporary horror there are plots and subplots that evolve from real-world struggles: growing up, teenage friendship, part-time jobs, clubs, and finding out who your soulmate is by gazing into a TV at midnight. Television worlds contain repressed emotions. Teens summon powerful, tarot-based creatures to fight for them by aiming gun-like devices at their heads. Public deaths are sudden and yet still eerily expected. People turn into coffins amid bloody streets at midnight.
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Each character in Ultimax is a love letter to their original games, and this makes sense: each Persona game is full of life from every weird angle. The nostalgia is earned, but only because of the strength of Persona 3 and 4, the games from which these characters hail. They’re all here, and more: eccentric loners, secret sewers, robots, animated bears with zipper necks. We are meant to ooh and ahh, easily recognizing the returning cast of characters.
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While the traditional fighting game relegates its story to two cutscenes-one at the beginning of a series of matches, and one at the end of a series of matches-the impossibly named Persona 4 Arena Ultimax’s story modes are lengthy, sprawling segments of visual novel smashed up against each other.
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