Hello there, Keith D. Mitchell, at your service. You may remember me from my Persona 4: Dancing All Night review, and if not, well that’s ok. So early today, Atlus released demos for both Persona 3: Dancing In Moonlight & Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight. All in English, and they’re available on the PlayStation Network store. Of course, being a fan of the first game on the PlayStation Vita, I had to download the demos and see how they played.
Impressed is the word that comes to mind. I had always wanted this series on the PlayStation 4, and thankfully the games are almost here. Yes, I could have imported them as the games have been available in Japanese for some time. However, I want to support Atlus’s efforts in the West, so I waited. Getting back to the demos, the gameplay is pretty much the same in Persona 4: Dancing All Night. With the exception of a new note called “DD” (hey, I didn’t name it!). I’m not really sure how I feel about that note’s function. What it does is instead of hitting a single note in rapid succession without a pass, the DD note lets you smash it. Which removes any error of scoring a bad score. That’s a positive. However, if you miss time it, you could potentially miss a perfect press and end up with a lower value – twice! So it’s a blessing and curse, which is why I’m still not sure about it.
I’m really enjoying the presentation of both games as well. Both are very stylish and has a lot of nice animations. From the opening movie, down to the starting of each dance-off. It’s that Persona charm we all know and love, and it seems to expense was spared.
Outside of that, I’ve been enjoying the demos, despite them being very short. And when I say short, each game has access to two songs and three levels of difficulty; Easy, Normal and Hard. While I find myself starting off on normal, the challenge was there. So I moved on to hard and well, let’s just say I got my groove back. After a bit of time.
But don’t take my word for it, check out the gameplay footage below.
I would have liked to see the harder difficulties unlocked in the demo, though that takes a bit of time and dedication to unlock in the full game. So I guess hard is what I’ll have to enjoy until the game is released.
Both games will be available on December 4, 2018, for both the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. Of course, you can expect our review of the game once we get our hands on it. But if you want to know what I think after playing the demos, I think Atlus has another hit on their hands. Hopefully, these two games do better in the West, compared to the first outing.