12/20/2023 0 Comments Persona 4 arena ultimax story mode![]() Meanwhile, through so much dialogue, relationships don’t change, and neither do any of the characters, really. But the game attempts to treat it all as such, forcing the player to sit through scene after scene of a different character showing their surprise to these wacky developments in a world where, not one week earlier, they were forced to fight inside of a television. This is nothing new in the context of this series: not to the player, nor to the characters. Which is insane: here is that same setting filled with a dark world and evil doppelgangers, red, bloody fogs, warped roads, and a massive spire that erupts from the town’s high school. Once that initial nostalgic burst wears off, there’s not much narrative left. The delight is in navigating a story where our protagonist creates and strengthens bonds with these characters now present in Ultimax that these bonds then help us maximize our RPG prowess as we explore a new world and new relationships is nearly secondary, like the whipped cream on top of a cake that is made of TV static and also bleeding.īut where Persona’s narratives are usually sprawling odysseys filled with growth and weird discovery, Ultimax is like a greatest hits compilation that doesn’t recognize what makes the original games so engaging. We, as players, move through games like Persona 3 and 4 not to see those characters as static beings but dynamic vessels of growth. Just as the ill effects of a shadow realm eventually enact their change on the people attempting to live through it, so too do those people rebel against that hideous change: by continuing to cultivate friendships and life skills, characters are able to fight more proficiently. ![]() An insane, twisted world is only insane and twisted in contrast to something else, and it’s this normalcy that serves both as the driving force of the game’s mechanisms but also as a backdrop for an increasingly disturbed environment. Persona has always been about different types of duality. There are plots and subplots that evolve from real-world struggles. But meanwhile, within this unreal world filled with contemporary horror there are plots and subplots that evolve from real-world struggles: growing up, teenage friendship, part-time jobs, clubs, and finding out who your soulmate is by gazing into a TV at midnight. Television worlds contain repressed emotions. Teens summon powerful, tarot-based creatures to fight for them by aiming gun-like devices at their heads. Public deaths are sudden and yet still eerily expected. ![]() People turn into coffins amid bloody streets at midnight. ![]() Each character in Ultimax is a love letter to their original games, and this makes sense: each Persona game is full of life from every weird angle. The nostalgia is earned, but only because of the strength of Persona 3 and 4, the games from which these characters hail. They’re all here, and more: eccentric loners, secret sewers, robots, animated bears with zipper necks. We are meant to ooh and ahh, easily recognizing the returning cast of characters. While the traditional fighting game relegates its story to two cutscenes-one at the beginning of a series of matches, and one at the end of a series of matches-the impossibly named Persona 4 Arena Ultimax’s story modes are lengthy, sprawling segments of visual novel smashed up against each other.
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