Whichever mode takes your fancy, the rhythm parts of the game consist of matching button presses with the prompts on screen, with more prompts appearing in slightly more challening combinations as you alter the difficulty. For the most part this works perfectly, although there were a couple of rare delays in between the button press and it’s activation on screen. They never caused me to fail a level, but it is worth nothing that this issue can occur when playing on some of the more intensive difficulties. Outside of these two modes, you can buy a selection of clothes and equipable accessories which can cause special effects such as altering the speed of the songs you play or preventing you from losing chains if you miss a beat. Finally, the Records mode lets you see the high scores you have obtained. While you can alter the difficulty of each song, It is a shame that there aren’t more variations on offer, like the ability to edit your dance routines into a music video like you can in Project Diva f, whose main character will make a cheeky guest appearance as downloadable content, or share your scores online with friends like in Rock Band. This is not to say that both of the available game modes are lacking in quality, but the appeal of going back for higher scores on favourite songs will only last so long.
Graphically, Persona 4 Dancing All Night uses a mixture of animé portraits that will be familiar to anyone who has played the Persona 4 Arena duology, and cel-shaded three dimension models for the dancing characters and backgrounds. These blend into the Persona universe perfectly, and each character shows a range of different emotions whilst they are showing their true selves, which is both a key element in the original game, and a rare occurrence in rhythm action games which should be celebrated. If you would prefer to play Dancing All Night on a larger screen, the game is completely compatible with the PlayStation TV. This made keeping track of the icons slightly more difficult, so in terms of gameplay, the Vita is the stronger contender. On the other hand, the sometimes tinny quality of the Vita speakers meant that when it came to replaying the game’s music, the less portable option is definitely the better choice unless you are playing with headphones.
