Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight is the latest emphatic return to beloved characters and themes from Persona 3. While its energy is relentless and its rhythm mechanics are capable, it's hard to deny Dancing in Moonlight is a product picked, borrowed, and assembled from existing Persona games. It's a performance that moves but a show that doesn't go anywhere.
Persona’s characters and themes have proven effective outside of their native territory. After labyrinthine adventures in Etrian Odyssey’s style of dungeon crawling and brawls with Arc System Works brand of 2D fighting, 2015’s Vita exclusive Persona 4: Dancing All Night poured Persona in the mold of a rhythm game. A dancing themed follow-up with the casts of Persona 3 and Persona 5 seemed inevitable.
Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight is that game. It creates a perfect facsimile of Dancing All Night’s rhythm game mechanics with support from Persona 3 songs and Persona 3 characters. It replaces Dancing All Night’s dedicated story mode with sixty-four brief vignettes loaded with fan service, reproducing Persona’s fondness for visual novel storytelling but withdrawing from any attempt to create forward progress with its characters. Dancing in Moonlight is a vaguely familiar entity that really, aggressively wants to be friends with you, the Persona 3 fan. You’re suspicious, and yet you’re having a good time. What does this mean?
Dancing in Moonlight’s stab at the rhythm genre cuts identically to Dancing All Night. Three points on each side of the screen accept a flow of notes pouring out of the middle of the screen. Three directional buttons and three faces buttons corresponds to each point, rendering Dancing in Moonlight a six button rhythm game. Record scratches, prompted by bright blue bands, provide bonuses points with a flick of the analog stick. It’s a lot of information to keep track of.
Note timing is rated as a miss, good, great, or perfect. Complexity arrives with pink notes that need to be pressed simultaneously on parallel sides of the screen and green notes that need to be held down. Never missing and creating a massive combo is considered ideal play, and punctuated with fever sequences where other members of the crew jump in and dance. Easy, normal, hard, and all night (extra hard) difficulties are viewed as different interpretations of each of Dancing in Moonlight’s twenty-five songs, and each have their own point ratings.
Dancing in Moonlight carries an impressive number of accessibility options through its Support modifiers. Auto-scratching notes, allowing one button to work for any note, and other extra boosts soften Dancing in Moonlight’s frantic difficulty and, as a side effect, may open the game up to players with disabilities. There’s even a mode that disables a performance instantly ending if a fail state has been reached. All of these Support options, as one might expect, dock points from the end score. All Support options also need to be unlocked, but most open naturally by playing through (or failing at) early parts of Dancing in Moonlight.
On the other side are Challenges that can make Dancing in Moonlight harder. Making notes fade out, randomizing note paths, and fluctuating note speed can challenge personal performance alone and wreck even the most accomplished player when combined. As expected, they also add different percentages and tally bonus points to the final score. Like the Support options, Challenges need to be unlocked in order to be used.
Dancing in Moonlight’s song selection either adapts or remixes tracks from Persona 3, Persona 3 Portable, Persona 3 FES, and Persona Q. Other than Burn My Dread, Brand New Days, and Soul Phrase, all have been electrified with dance-focused remixes. t.komine’s remix of Aria of the Soul, in particular, transformed an operatic melancholy hum to something that resembled the Diva sequence in The Fifth Element. Shoji Meguro’s work, generally, was left in capable hands.
Outrageous production and choreography compose the background of Dancing in Moonlight’s tracks. Memories of You decked Persona 3’s female cast in neon Tron gear to a choreographed group dance. The Battle for Everyone’s Souls, assumed by Persona 3’s male cast, transitioned from a standard boy band troupe to sequences where everything went dark and half the cast swung around light sabers. An interesting highlight was Persona Q’s Laser Beam, which was composed entirely of live concert footage from an event in 2017. It’s completely impossible to focus on any of this while playing, but Dancing in Moonlight does include a nifty replay feature after you’ve finished a song.
Performing well and opening Dancing in Moonlight’s social sequences unlocks a smattering of wardrobe and accessory options. Hats, contact lens colors, hair styles, complete outfits, and a bunch of gag pieces are available for all eight characters. It’s weird as hell to have a duet with Mitsuru in dominatrix armor alongside Ken, who’s like thirteen, but OK! Most costume pieces are consistent with seasonal wardrobe items from Persona 3. Others, like maid costumes, Christmas outfits, and sex gear of questionable taste, I couldn’t remember existing.
Whereas Dancing All Night featured a legitimate additional story—hackneyed as it was to assemble the gang for another weird one-off—Dancing in Moonlight opts to stay inside existing narrative and say nothing. Inside of shared dream, the whole cast (minus Koromaru) is summoned to the Velvet Studio by their “producer” Elizabeth. The SEES squad is told they’re going to put on a dance competition against an unnamed rival group in another place at another time (and while never outright stating who, there are plenty of hints and references as to whom that group may be). None of the crew will remember what happened when they wake up, providing a retcon-free out in the greater Persona narrative.
Meeting certain criteria unlocks Dancing in Moonlight’s social sequences. Cumulative combo scores will unlock Akihiko’s path while cumulative perfect notes will open up Aigis’ path. Ken’s, which requires the player receive the second-highest rating, “brilliant,” may be a roadblock for some players who can’t avoid missing notes in rhythm sequences. Dancing in Moonlight doesn’t require every social sequence to be unlocked in order to receive the “main” ending through Elizabeth’s social line, but it will prod the player through completing the same songs on different levels of difficulty. Social unlock requirements are intended to drive engagement through Dancing in Moonlight.
Each character has eight social sequences. Almost everyone is constructed to reinforce the traits and quirks we learned in Persona 3. Akihiko is intensely focused on training and working out. Mitsuru is somehow more robotic than Aigis, the actual robot. Yukari is ashamed of sexuality and Junpei remains a knucklehead with porn under his bed. It felt great to see my friends from Persona 3 again, I’ve enjoyed hanging out with them intermittently over the last eleven years, but everyone and everything in Dancing in Moonlight is just spinning its wheels. Unlike the grand narrative work in Persona 4 Arena and its sequel Ultimax, Atlus seems either uninterested in or unwilling to create forward progress.
Localization remains a strong point. Quips delivered by the cast during dance sequences range from encouraging to outright razzing, with Junpei on the receiving end of some particularly lethal blows. The voice cast, as best as I could tell, sounds almost exactly like they did in 2007 without many hints of aging. The player character is constantly referred to in the generic term “leader” while being identified in Dancing in Moonlight’s roster as the canonical Makoto Yuki. This is weird and the inconsistency is glaring.
It’s hard to take Dancing in Moonlight seriously without questioning its place as a $60 product. The tangible game is lifted directly from a three-year-old Vita game. Social interactions, the beating heart of Persona, are whimsical but dispensable. VR mode—which is on the front of the retail package!—is limited to either watching character models dance or wandering around their static rooms. The Japanese release of Dancing in Moonlight currently offers thirty (30) new songs as downloadable content, eclipsing the 25 in the box.
It hurts that Dancing in Moonlight’s PlayStation 4 appearance also cross-save, but not cross-buy, with a $40 Vita edition of the exact same game. Most cynically, Dancing in Moonlight’s unlock requirements, trophies, most accessories, and general structure are identical to Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, an entirely different $60 product releasing on the same day. This isn’t a Pokémon dual-release situation and there is no interactivity between the two games. All of this comes off as uncomfortable at best and vaguely predatory at worst.
What is the price of fan service? Since its revival in 2007, Persona has earned goodwill through its novel unification of character development and dungeon crawling. It allowed a social simulation and a considerably hardcore turn-based role-playing game to reflect divergent strengths in a manner unlike anything out there, and Persona has successfully done it three times. Has Persona 3 earned and amassed this kind of indulgence?
It’s a question I’m still struggling with. I liked playing Dancing in Moonlight. I unlocked everything in the game and earned a platinum trophy. I liked seeing these characters and hearing their voices again; it felt like hanging out with old friends. Like most human beings, I appreciate it when a low-key thing I enjoy specifically panders to me. It feels great to be seen. When I finished playing Dancing in Moonlight, however, I suspect it only exists to take my money. Of course this is true of literally every product on the market, but Dancing in Moonlight almost grins inside of its cynicism.
Dancing in Moonlight is a heedless trip back to the Persona buffet for seconds thirds fourths. You wanted more Persona 3? You got it. Chew the fat. Pretend the calories aren’t empty. Pray you won’t get sick. Somehow, despite the intemperance, I still feel fine.
