Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is a fighting game but it isn't your ordinary fighting game. Developed by Blazblue's Arc System Works, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is the successor to Persona 4 Arena, which itself was a spinoff of Persona 4, an RPG spun off from the Shin Megami Tensei canon (whew). One year after the events of Persona 4, a mysterious red fog has enveloped the rural town of Inaba and it's up to the Investigation Team to find out who or what is behind this fog.

Like most fighting games, the gameplay is simple: two combatants duke it out in the arena until one is knocked out. Special moves, combos and counters are normal, but the use of Persona is abnormal. When fighting, you fight as your character and (if they have one) their Persona. A Persona is simply their other self, whether it be a god or a demon, and are similar to Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Persona can use strange abilities and magic spells that can enhance your own abilities and attack your opponent from afar. They're also crazy-looking, and the fluid animation makes the wild designs really come to life.

While the fighting game portion of P4AU is ace, the story mode is something that needed work. The story itself isn't bad, with lots of forks and twists, but the way it's presented is something that didn't wow me. It's similar to a visual novel, with a background, some music, character portraits, and text. This setup works in the RPGs, but it's underwhelming in between matches. The story is set one year after Persona 4, so if you haven't finished that already, there will be some spoilers.

In addition to the story mode, there's your local versus mode, your online versus mode, your arcade mode...but unique to P4AU is the Golden Arena mode. Golden Arena mode is a survival mode that adds a dash of RPG flavor to the standard fighting experience with dungeons, leveled-up moves, and the famous Social Links. Choose your character and a partner, then fight through tons of battles to level up your character and increase your Social Link with your partner to become stronger and learn new skills. Thankfully there are checkpoints every few floors so if you get defeated, you can start from the last checkpoint. Also, when leveling up, you'll learn skills but you can only learn four skills at a time. Be careful when choosing which skills to keep and delete.

Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is a stylish, easy to pick up fighting game with great controls, music, and sprite animation that continues the Persona 4 (and Persona 3!) storyline. Marked improvements over the vanilla Persona 4 Arena include a bigger character roster, Shadow variants of most of the roster and the Golden Arena mode. With lots of characters to choose from, it won't be difficult to find your favorite and duke it out in the arena all night long.

Hint: Players who purchased P4AU within the first week of release will get to download two DLC characters for free: Marie and Adachi. One week later after release, however, the DLC characters will no longer be free and will cost you some coin.

by Ray n.