Consider the audience Persona 4 Arena Ultimax needs to satisfy. It features characters birthed in Atlus’ Persona 3 (2007), Persona 3 Portable (2010), Persona 4 (2008), and Persona 4 Golden (2012) and it’s charged with the task of feasibly tying together the disparate narratives separating Persona 3 and Persona 4. That mission was already accomplished in 2012 with the comparatively vanilla Persona 4 Arena, which makes Ultimax’s task of providing a follow-up absent of any contrivance doubly difficult. It’s a huge burden to bear – and this is all without taking 2D fighting aficionados and fans of developer Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear and BlazBlue into account. The harsh eye of judgment is ready to beam down on Ultimax from almost every angle.
Ultimax’s most difficult assignment is creating and maintaining a worthwhile narrative. What Ultimax indulges and explores is strictly a fans-only adventure, meaning those unfamiliar with the wild world of modern day Persona games will be left in the dust if they attempt to absorb the narrative. This isn’t necessarily a negative – the stories that power games are largely irreverent in the fighting game community – but it’s worth noting that Ultimax makes little effort to welcome newcomers to its prized assemblage of Persona 3 and Persona 4. What it loses in accessibility, however, it gains in positioning itself as a deep dive into the characters behind those respected games.
Structurally, Ultimax’s storytelling has changed a bit from Persona 4 Arena. Gone are the separate narratives that followed individual characters, and in their place are flowing chapters that complete a grand story. Different characters may back each chapter, but they all coalesce into a singular plotline. The whole thing is still an unabashed visual novel, containing twenty hours’ worth of soliloquies and spoken dialogue punctuated with occasional fights between characters. Ultimax de-commits its fighting game obligations one step further, offering players the ability to automate every single battle. While this may seem incomprehensible to those who buy a fighting game to get a fighting game, it’s awesome for players whose only interest is to further the narrative of their beloved characters. You literally never have to play the game in Ultimax’s story mode.
The most attractive parts of Ultimax’s narrative lie with characters whom weren’t part of Persona 4 Arena. Calling up Junpei, Ken (and Koromaru!), and Yukari allows players to catch up with characters they haven’t seen in over seven years. What works especially well is how they’re freshened up and integrated with the current cast. Yukari’s now an actress and joined a Super Sentai equivalent, donning the costume of Feather Pink for the duration of Ultimax. Junpei’s become a youth baseball coach, and Ken’s still trying to figure out how to combine the normalcy of growing up with the challenges of the Investigation Team. Their costumes filter directly into their move sets, with Junpei featuring a suite of baseball-related attacks and Yukari issuing similar measures with her bow. Watching them interact with each other and the Persona 4 cast is a real treat, and I’ll never tire of Yukari constantly referring to Junpei as “our idiot.”
Ultimax’s spreads its narrative across different points of view between the Persona 3 and Persona 4 characters, but both ultimately suffer the same set of problems. While there are plenty of options to literally fast-forward through the story, it’s still wrought with needless repetition. I don’t need to see every character coming to grips with the red pillars that form impromptu arenas, and I don’t need to be constantly reminded of the obtuse motivations of its antagonist. It’s a minor annoyance, and generally each mini-arc fueling the existing characters comes off better than expected, but what ending up taking around twenty hours to process could have easily been dispatched in under ten.
If anything, Ultimax’s story mode offers minor characters a better chance the shine. Theodore, introduced in Persona 3 Portable, gets to fuss about the planet while trying to locate a coke for the duration of the narrative. Adachi, Persona 4’s shiftless antagonist, bears the most nuanced performance, popping in and out of the Persona 3 and Persona 4 storylines with less than clear intentions (reconciled in his own episode, available with his character as free DLC during Ultimax’s first week of release. Marie (also a DLC exclusive) is largely ignored, which is a bummer, but at least Ultimax acknowledges her existence.
Flaws come to the surface when examining the motivations Ultimax’s perceived antagonist. Newcomer Sho Minazuki is revealed to be the cause of the original P-1 Grand Prix tournament and the reason the gang is back in the thick of it just one week later. His ultimate motivation quite frankly a stretch, even for a series that features people shooting themselves in the head with fake guns and diving into televisions. I found it best to ignore the main narrative thread and sit back and enjoy the individual characters driving it forward. Every one of these characters has already conquered their respective demons in their proper games, but Ultimax comes up with plenty of new ways to challenge their convictions. I would have watched anything involving Chie, Naoto (who really could have cracked this whole thing herself), and Junpei any day of the week, but Ultimax keeps it interesting for everyone involved.
If it isn’t yet clear from the abundance of text, my draw into Ultimax came through continuing its narrative, but there’s plenty else to see and do with its content. In addition to introducing Junpei, Yukari, and Ken, Persona 4’s Rise is now a playable character along with Marie, Adachi, and Margaret as DLC. Complimenting them are shadow versions of every character whose move sets are altered slightly with an emphasis on pure offensive power. The nuances of Ultimax’s fighting system are lost on me; however a fairly robust Lesson Mode exists to baptize similarly ignorant players into its world. After spending a few hours with Lesson Mode and random online players I gained a general understanding of what the hell was going on, though I doubt I’ll ever be reasonably proficient in its deeper mechanics.
Most interesting, and where I spent most of my time outside of the P3 and P4 Episodes, is Golden Arena. This mode breaks every character down to a base level, and challenges them with completing fifty-fight challenges in a make-shift survival mode. Characters gain levels and experience from winning each fight, and can spend experience points boosting traditional Persona stats, like strength, magic, luck, endurance, and technique. Each character also receives an assortment of up to four abilities, each of which providing context-sensitive bonuses during combat. Golden Arena effectively functions as the bridge between two disparate genres, properly marrying Persona’s bewildering context to Arc System Work’s complex but relatable fighting systems.
Playing Ultimax online proved to be worthwhile endeavor. It comes equipped with the usual ranked and unranked segmentation you’d expect by now, but it also features the option to filter players by their region. I got smoked almost every single time, but in terms of a technical performance there were few persisting issues with player lag. The ideal experience of a fighting game remains bashing a buddy on the couch next to you (or with table-mounted arcade sticks for extreme purists), but online’s a sensible distraction when no one’s around.
Trying to come to terms with Ultimax’s unique set of challenges is enough to make my head spin, but Arc System Works has somehow pulled it off for two consecutive games. A $60 follow-up to an already feature-rich fighting game is a tough sell, but Ultimax justifies its asking price through welcomed roster additions, a meaningful and meaty story mode, and enough fighting game-focused sideshows to appease the fighting game community. Ultimax could have remained a rock-solid fighter and garner enough critical praise, isn’t it cool that it’s so much more too?
