Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight is a rhythm game based on Persona 3. It is the sister game to Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight and sequel to Persona 4: Dancing All Night. The core gameplay remains the same as Dancing All Night, in that you use six buttons: three from the d-pad, and three from the face buttons. As the button prompts overlap the icons on the side of the screen, you press the corresponding button in time with the music.
As per usual with rhythm games, there are several different types of button prompts. Hold Notes require you to hold down the button, there are notes requiring you to double tap the button, and Scratch Notes. Scratch Notes require you to flick the analogue stick although you can map it to the shoulder buttons which is much easier on the higher difficulties. Each note has one of four ratings depending on your timing: Miss, Good, Great and Perfect. Getting a Great and Perfect will build up your combo, increasing your score multiplier. Furthermore, getting specific Scratch Notes will unlock Fever Time, a section of the track where you get better points, not lose your combo if you hit Good notes and additional events.
Throughout the whole time, the background has several of the characters dancing. The environments are taken from iconic destinations of the game, including the school rooftop, the Dark Hour and Paulownia Mall. There are certain tracks which plays the animated scenes from the game. A big point was made in how the game does not have a story mode. However, this serves to mean that the game does not have the visual novel type story from Dancing All Night and Arena. There is still a story here, albeit very shallow. The cast of Persona 3 are brought into the Velvet Club by Elizabeth. She explains that this is party of their dreams and that they will forget everything once they wake up. She encourages them to dance to their hearts' content. This situation allows the game to still fit within Persona 3's canon.
By completing specific challenges in the normal course of gameplay, you unlock further scenarios with each character that expands their personalities as well as shedding more light to their situation. The story has a neat tie-in with Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, with more than a few references (if you have the DLC, you can even get Akechi and Ren in one of the songs) that explains why the cast was pulled into this scenario. Compared to the main game, the tone is much lighter and fits with the fact that the player is most likely revisiting the characters and happy to interact with them again.
Each character has eight of these story scenes and with the nostalgic music playing, you half expect to get the iconic Social Rank Up text after each one. To be honest, these scenes are worthwhile enough on their own and thus you don't feel like you missed out on much by the game having no story mode. The graphics are excellent. Everyone is rendered in the style of Persona 5 and it's the first time we get HD versions of each character's 3D models.
There is a large amount of customization available. You unlock more costumes and accessories by finishing the songs and completing each character's scenarios. There are plenty of costumes and accessories in the base game alone (with more for DLC of course, but you don't feel shafted). Unlike Dancing All Night, the pace of unlocking these items is quick and you don't need to grind for them all. You can make the songs harder or easier through the use of Support of Challenge items. These items can have effects such as speeding up notes, making them fade out or letting your combo continue even if you get a Good on one of the notes.
For a rhythm game, the song selection is one of the most important aspects. Personally, Persona 3 had one of the weaker soundtracks compared to 4 and 5, however, there are still plenty of great tracks here. A lot of them are remixed but there is a decent selection with a total of 25 songs in the base game.
There's not much difference between the PS4 and Vita versions outside of the PS4 version featuring higher resolutions and framerate, as well as a VR mode. VR mode is regulated to exploring each character's rooms as well as looking at character models. You can do these things already without a VR headset, and you can't play the game in VR mode which is a shame (the best you can do is play it using the cinematic mode of the headset).
The are four difficulties: Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare. All Night is crazy hard, while Hard and below are manageable and to be honest, a bit on the easier side. Each song has one character as the main dancer and you cannot change this. However, what you can change are the additional dancers who show up during Fever Time (but this is also from a predetermined selection). The neat thing is that a different character turns up for each difficulty level.
At higher difficulties, the Scratch Note (analogue stick or shoulder button) is a lot more frequent and usually put in between other notes. This makes it quite difficult at the higher paced songs. The flipside is that missing Scratch Notes does not break your combos but means you won't get a decent score. The game isn't too long as playing through all songs takes around 3 hours, and completing everything the game has to offer takes around 8-12 hours (i.e. if you play through all of the difficulties).
If you want to relax you can just watch each song focusing on just the characters' dance routines, watch a perfect play or watch a replay of your previous attempt. Each character has their different dancing styles: Aigis has stiffer robotic movements, while Mitsuru is more elegant and features jumps.
Overall, Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight is a fantastic game. It is one of the best rhythm games out there with a clean and slick UI, a great selection of songs and the perfect play on nostalgia. Seeing familiar faces and scenery in HD is great while the "story" mode is better than expected. The rhythm gameplay hasn't evolved much from Daning All Night but that is not a negative since it was already perfect without being too bloated. Dancing in Moonlight is highly recommended for both fans of the rhythm genre and the original Persona 3 game.
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