Persona Arena and Ultimax - Fighting Games for the Unhinged

[Music] whoa white guy is the cave so persona 4 arena and ultimax a 2d fighting duology released from 2012 to 2014 writing the base game's popularity and roping in persona 3 die hards with a handful of character inclusions was a game that burned bright enough to make evo and now in 2022 is being remastered for modern platforms and at least one of those is getting rollback in a later patch i'm already pissed what's immediately interesting is the premise taking a pair of long-winded jrpgs persona 4 in particular just glowing with warmth and turning them into a fighting game they are friends yet powerful foes because you know someone on the dev team is cackling like a psycho over all the innocent rpg fans who don't have great reactions aren't all that competitive and don't want to beat up their digital friends like how aside from the story mode do you sell this to people to the fans i guess make the story canon and throw folks a bone now arc system works develop these games the guilty gear and blazeblue people the number one studio for like the fgc calls them anime fighters no not 3d anime brawler chef though asws got their finger in that pie too they're characterized by overt stylistic choices aerial mobility ripped wide open they're often called air dashers extreme technicality and it's not that traditional fighters lack all that stuff aside from general air mobility but it's the term that's stuck and i acknowledge that the remaster may have features not present in the originals but we're focusing on what we got so here it is arc system works a beloved jrpg series competitive fighting games and designing for fans how will these threads combine will the games be any good will the remaster be played by more than 20 people who claim they won bro who's getting [ __ ] so i'm gonna cop out here and avoid making incisive comments on the mechanic side of these games until the sequel because this game is more than a competitive fighter and because i'm just not all that good i'm sorry i'm sorry i've only really bled for soul calibur and sf4 smash i guess like those were the games i went online to take names and street fighter is so not this and why would it be it's anime fighters bro persona arena wants to rope fans in how does it do that just slaps you upside the head with the nostalgia i mean if you play persona 4 and you probably have if you bought this shoot i just stared oh man i don't want to sad bait this early in the video but seriously just opening the story mode and seeing the inner gang hanging persona four [ __ ] with me emotionally i'm almost 30. i see these ageless kids stuck like this forever see the hope and the energy and think man i'm surrounded by friends i went to school with and i'm lucky for that but what the hell ever happened to us when did hope die the fiction kids get the happy ending because it's always around the corner and the corner never turns i can't well gets a story but basically you comes home the midnight channel's active again the 2000 iq 2000 iq let's talk about how naoto is the only one qualified to handle a gun a bunch of your friends are missing and there's another mystery afoot it's not all that surprising and not all that substantive so what is the substance well it's a 2012 era fighting game that means it's shipped with a passable story mode for a fighting game plus the usual modes from verses training combo trials and not much else it's always been an issue for fighters like outside of brand appeal whatever's on offer visually they don't often push to keep players around think stuff like soul calibur 2 and 3's weapon master modes robust single player modes with in-game rewards and it's hard to design for 2d fighters no doubt soul calibur rewards players with weapon skins and costumes and that's a lot harder to pull with immaculately detailed sprites but it's always disappointing to get nothing and score attack is not a mode you die on this hill lesson mode aka tutorial mode not a mode that's a tutorial padding your menu out how dare you it's not a crummy game altogether the visuals are killer love the highly saturated contrasty detailed rendered backgrounds visibility or clarity is sometimes an issue in 2d fighters with complex background work but here the sprited characters pop out enough and frankly there's more obfuscating nonsense going on in the gameplay right we ain't got time to worry about the background plus you get demon beethoven and friends like gameplay gameplay kinda uh jesus yo 2012 wi-fi battles sound fun is look at these lasers how many smash controllers how many bruised foreheads the game's pretty fun coming from ark's system works it's best to think of it as a simplified blazblue or guilty gear but vastly more cracked just an openly silly game like any fighter you move around walk attack throw out special moves super moves and it's all very easy to grasp in a short amount of time and that's great because story mode isn't set to be super challenging persona fan with very little fighting game knowledge could conceivably by the game mash x because these games have auto combo enabled by default and scrape through to the end the mechanical complexity demanded by the game's chief draw for fans is almost nil and that's a smart move but and i'll get more in depth later the mechanics are a bit like popping a spider egg so a million little spiders come blazing out like take a single look most fighters have four to six normal move buttons like light punch heavy kick that stuff but in persona arena you get light attack heavy attack persona attack one and persona attack two that's weird and it wouldn't be if those persona attacks function like normal moves you know normal hitboxes but they aren't personas are like interactable jojo stands you can damage them if they're out you can knock someone's persona out and deprive them of half their normal moves until a timer runs out and the jojo game ain't even like that it's pretty radical and gives a lot of power to full screen pressure like elizabeth's beam forces certain matchups to be played a lot more cautiously than the mobility combo potential and raw damage allow for it's a fundamentally aggressive game but one where you can be truly irreparably denied by the opponent if you're not careful this means nothing for the story mode by the way you can quite literally mash the auto combo or just use non-persona attacks and hardly be inconvenienced the cpu is not meaningful opposition but that means the average player is developing bad habits through play and despite a decent tutorial not really learning anything about the game that said between evasive actions typical arxis burst mechanics advanced mobility options like hopping and turning mid-air every character having a unique action accessed with a button combination fairly tight combos all around a ton of unique match-ups to learn there's a big old chasm for a new player to fall into facing a knowledgeable opponent online you cannot tutorialize for this game's complexity to cap it off the game has instant kill moves out of blaze blues astral heats they're mostly framed like big flashy persona attacks but naruto just shoots everyone dead is this happening oh my god the story is ultimately why you'd go back to the first arena game it's not even getting a remaster though the story is available as dlc for ultimex so well anyway story mode is divided into chunks one story path for each roster member only most of the roots overlap most repeat content just because it's there and the game can't assume that you've picked this or that character's story first most of the routes are padded with excessive exposition and uncompelling inner monologues most of the stories add little to nothing to the plot the characters or outright contradict each other and the few stories that are decent are near the end of story mode completion it's not great well it's worth mentioning that the story was not written by original persona 4 staff but the writer credited for golden so marie and her ilk stupid goody goody womanizing lame and a handful of other projects but no matter what it's not the original writing team fighting games don't often have robust stories fighting games stories don't get a lot of respect and for good reason dev time quite literally goes predominantly to the characters and mechanics not the stories so they get a bit more charity for that but that doesn't make them worthwhile for everyone they're usually composed of a series of arbitrarily conjured conflicts so physical fights can occur in sequence like character x goes out and just has the shockiest day ever running into death battle after death battle for the dumbest reasons for example johnny goes out and meets bridget he says to bridget call me the stud master bridget says okay let me tie you up i'm a guy also johnny says alright i will kill you now i wonder if the guilty gear creator lives in fear of what he created it's not exactly literature and i just described the formula of persona arena the midnight channel is active again and it shows the protags fighting in an arena they go to investigate and find the warped version of their high school a strange girl calling herself the student council president which she is not a dripped-up teddy running the tourney enacting villainous resa announcing for the tournament and eventually persona 3 characters show up as well acting on insider information to hunt down a stolen living weapon another i guess more or less can you guess who it is guys guys you'll never fool me guys i love the p3 inclusions igus is herself and that's great elizabeth yes elizabeth yes mitsuru and akihiko are like super versions of themselves though akihiko i didn't really see that clean-cut damaged young man turning into a protein-obsessed wanderer who beats up thugs in mexico whatever and yeah he was written a bit like that in p3 but the level of flanderization on display here it's uncomfortable i mean it's pretty obvious that the writer is injecting humor wherever possible but if my youtube career's got anything to say about it people hate jokes from unexpected places some of these lines are real weird the story draws unfamiliar persona elements like evil teddy deludes everyone into thinking everyone else is crazy makes it seem like they're their shadow selves from persona 4 and i'll hand it to him definitely sets up a series of death battles only the problem is the game uses death battles to the death battles as a means of creating drama early on it's just that nobody dies or is even seriously wounded during the story so that cheap little dramatic trick just fizzles also as a persona fighting game you expect the visual novelesque story to have choices and it does but if you compare it to arx's original blazblue it pales in comparison that game has multiple choices for every character that create multiple endings plus you get stuff like this in persona arena you're lucky if you get two in a root and it's usually fewer at least it's kind of funny there's something viscerally funny about yukiko in a tournament setting wandering from room to room systemically murdering her friends with her cooking after she beats them in battle they took an old boring overused joke and pushed it to its logical extreme that's how you save a boring trope yo it's anti-gay yosuke once again but look this time kanji is deluded he thinks yosuke is saying things he's not really saying plausible deniability is established sometimes characters get up to some very funny hijinks like chie sharing her meat with a defeated akihiko they just really love meat together nothing wrong with liking a big ol shmi so the story's real value is elizabeth standing in for a certain someone from p3 and having the most interesting expansion of series lore in game and labris the new character she's central to the story more or less behind the actual events of the plot in a physical sense and she's endearing to read about her story is plausible enough for persona's universe even if it grabs at low hanging fruit for a gut punch or in other words it's about a robot gaining sentence the way igus did but through friendship with another model like her that she's forced to kill in this horrific incredible ultra-violence moment but hey it's robots ultra violence with robots only gets a t well they did give her a brooklyn accent [Music] which everyone on twitter was quick to tell me was the good choice and fair enough in her story she's supposed to have a regional accent in this case the kansai accent of japanese but you know what as a canadian maybe they should have gone with a canadian accent it's brutish it's boisterous oh [ __ ] yeah but get her done bro oh see that there that's a [ __ ] game changer there hey bud you're right i should accept like who i am and stuff bro persona arena plays with interesting concepts and suffers in a few key places mostly as a product fighting to make up its value but we can hand wave all of that because ultimax is the real version oh sh made only for the staunchest fans and fighting game enthusiasts persona 4 arena ultimax is crazy for a game with simplified move inputs with button combinations instead of the dragon punch motion with auto combo baked into regular play it sure is unbelievably complex in the deep end like you can wait in the kiddie pool and have fun sure but you want to take it to tourneys you gotta read up let's check out dust loop real quick this is guilty gear strive's systemic and mechanical complexity quantified this is ultimax it takes understanding to accept it as a whole knowledge to set the proper pace courage to attack the mountain of meat and dedication to keep on eating all these skills are needed to finish off persona 4 arena ultimax or rather all these skills are required to become passable at ultimax and it's not to say that guilty gear strive is a lesser game because it has a smaller number of things to keep in mind and micro systems to master or that strives a worse game because it's simpler on paper it's just that ultimax is pretty [ __ ] up counterintuitively mind it presents so innocently until you peel the veneer some of what i'm about to say applies to both games but let's pull up some examples the roster is complex every character is vastly different in terms of movement speed total mobility options how their normals function how their personas function special resources mini-games specific to individual characters every character has a unique move tied to this button combination in some cases it's a sure you can in other cases it's a command grab resay straight up has a rhythm game super attack i have no idea if i'm doing this right i hate this so much it's really rare to learn a character and find another you can immediately apply your knowledge to it means learning match-ups is that much harder and yeah that largely describes blazblue and others as well the arxis fighter is notable for being insane one feature i've neglected is status ailments proper jrpg status ailments transliterated into the fighting game space so mute will stop persona moves freeze does that and so on and you have to land a hit to cancel most of them so a particularly obnoxious player might just leave you without options if they know how to play effective defense shadow versions of characters exist that have access to a special buff that allows cancelling most moves into other things in layman's terms it turns you into a combo machine and that's just an option play the normal character or grind up meter in a match to unload just disgusting combos you'll watch competitive play and see the break mechanic an arxis staple used to pin down the enemy character with screen-wide projectiles so the guy pinning you down can run up and turn you inside out put you in the hellish mix and you just gotta deal shadow nauto is a popular meme because like roll the clip i can't believe that he's so dead mario and touch of death combos killer resets whatever that's not new but ultimax navigates how obscenely nonsensical most of its stuff is by giving everyone really egregious [ __ ] so the top players have a rich layered dangerous interesting experience and the bulk of players are left in the dust lamps to the slaughter for people with enough time on their hands to deep dive into a video game and fair enough it's a fighter we all know the score it's probably worth mentioning that anime fighters haven't enjoyed the same popularity that street fighter and tekken have which are both complex games when you dig in but both of those franchises are visually simple technically challenging yes sf4 is one frame links tekken's korean backdash etc but there just aren't that many layers of noise to parse you can get to the joy of gameplay faster it makes you wonder what they were thinking because the core audience here aside from arxis fans is persona fans what's the optimal outcome for the game persona fans become extremely technical fighter enjoyers i know some of them are gonna dm me after this i see you but they're in the minority or was it fishing for the arcade audience specifically and persona fans incidentally because it really feels like fighting game candy like the devs just had a blast making the thing like persona's the front and the mechanics are the heart and ultimax's sales were worse than the original so yeah i guess that's the story we're going with now i can't do any of that stuff i had one moment where i thought i was cool okay okay wait i did i'm doing cool things oh my god and that's it but i can have fun because the single player modes are expanded for casuals like me kind of the only major addition is a golden arena mode sold as a dungeon style mode okay so what's that about it's a survival mode with skills and stats you know what huge win for casual players who want to feel like they're earning something especially the type of player that's fundamentally disinterested in untangling the web of mechanics you too can tack mute or poison onto your attacks and allocate a hit point the mode doesn't teach the game in fact it works against learning the game by adding irrelevant externalities ergo crap onto your character i actually really dislike rpg-esque modes in modern fighters because the end goal to me should be getting players online feeling like they have a chance and taking some names i've still never hit a gaming high like it but it's not possible without the internet without combo videos and guides and community fighting games not only ultimax fighters writ large have such a problem with onboarding i think that's what creates the divide the devotees and the droppers a massive chasm crossed with herculean effort and while it isn't a new chasm it's the same old chasm we've seen for decades but ultimax's is painted hot pink and covered with spikes otherwise there's some dlc that'll be included in the remaster but yeah not much going on except gameplay and story at worst it's a more polished product than the original and a decent purchase assuming a regular player base rollback and any form of community or you could be a low-level shark and chomp on the persona fan guppies loading in for the first time you know chaotic neutral is a valid alignment and i see you so the story okay it's told through multiple characters once again but instead of assigning non-canon paths to just about everybody it's split into two paths technically three counting dlc focusing on the p3 crew and the p4 team both of which get their own ending ultimax is a continuation of p4a so the p3 and 4 gangs met the kids were told to stop their investigations because the adults can handle it and you says okay wink i will cease all operations wink and everyone's like okay i guess you're a six foot tall moderately attractive male rules don't apply to you labrus has reconciled with her shadow self and become a fuller sentient person with communal bonds and things are looking up until the midnight channel becomes immediately active again showing p3 characters crucified okay like i'm already hot under the collar here a red fog rolls into innova general teddy says the world's gonna end in an hour and shadows pop up in the city forcing battles with their real selves that aren't trying to kill the progenitors but steal shards of their personas for a heretofore unknown reason notably the fog imagery in the one hour so the dark hour of persona 3 are both evoked tying the two distinct but simultaneously existing universe rule sets of p3 and p4 together in a super doomsday scenario we get cut scenes of major p3 characters unfairly left out of the original game i think the best scene in the entirety of ultimax is jinpei's dream of being a successful superstar ball player dedicating his home run to chidori ro only for him to wake up in his moment of triumph yeah sometimes life just shocked on you and you get to beat junpei unlike most of the absurdly wealthy talented attractive characters persona props up at some point in our lives we're all june pay always push the human angle i'm begging you then the best character appears show minazuki or sho and minazuki a character with ties to the kirijo group reveals himself as the antagonist of the game while acting generally cringe the look on your faces is just epic oh yeah and adachi himself is back and everyone just tolerates him sure why not now you can argue that lots of things happen in the story but taken in broad strokes it's arena all over again the friends are forced into a series of arbitrary conflicts but this time with shadows instead of each other winning means nothing because the shards being collected by shadows are the real goal and as presented by the story external to combat they can just take the shards win or lose so the villain show and a certain character i don't even want to dignify can use them to summon a god i guess a god who happens to be the penultimate mastermind of both games events why is it always an all-powerful demon operating in a small locale i don't expect much from spin-offs especially when the original writers aren't here to shape or defend their own work while it's twisted by someone else but this is schlock right the game invokes major elements of persona games to throw fans a bone oh my god dude it's the end of devil may cry 3. creates a series of fan fiction interactions and cheap lamau's because there's not much in the way of source material purity insurance it is just a spin-off after all like yeah they can say the story is canon hey yosuke can i eat you sure we're presented with past characters here allusions to past conflicts and to past resolutions but they're all mysteriously dropped nobody would ever dare make a meaningful stink about sexual harasser and serial killer toru adachi because it's a dachi baby he's from persona 4. it's a dutchy baby i don't see in show the linchpin character the same value as labris maybe because labrus is inherently sympathetic and not nearly as prickly as show show gets a tragic backstory most villains won't leave home without one but like adachi he comes off like a whiny jerk ass willing to burn the world for the mistakes of in this case one character a character being puppeteered by an author who didn't write the third game but needs to tie a show to both p3 and p4 it just feels a little cheap what's really wild is rysei surprisingly she does get meaningful development her story doesn't turn on the fulcrum of her romantic interest in you she's a young woman with a lot of expectations placed on her and she resolves to re-enter the idol world with hard work it's impressive and then she meets elizabeth who immensely powerful character right can destroy erebus with emotion anyway elizabeth awakens reese's persona and she's capable of standing toe to toe with her that's insane like knowing that risay should be able to squash everyone like insects like i know i'm not dissecting the story in full detail but i genuinely don't think it's worth it i sat through the whole thing on autoplay and was ungodly bored for most of it margaret asks theodore to acquire cola now that's random and quirky well now ryse gets quality development good literally any character walks in on hella yoked akihiko tied down bondage style this is to say that ultimax a game marketed to persona fans but definitely not designed for the average persona fan has valuable gameplay but that value is best extracted by some kind of non-representational hybrid fan and nuggets of worthwhile storytelling exist but nothing that can't be gleaned from you know watching the long play on youtube and that's a soft but firm condemnation for a story primarily driven by battle and told through text dumps despite being a video game it does very little with the medium to accentuate the beats you battle you read you move on and at the end you're rewarded with a fairly average story payoff you're not any better at the game you bought in a genre predicated on getting better the extra game modes aren't interested in helping and you're there with your main your arcana as it were and a fool's journey you have to choose to walk maybe it's smarter than it looks [Music] hey it's k bash huge thanks goes out to my four dollar patrons whose names are on the screen the show is finally getting somewhere thanks to the community's generosity and special thanks goes to my extra generous patrons who are adam welch metropolitan alex andy blah blah blah basement dweller easy soul break against the machine boom dead can i cuss on i'm supporting kbash just because i wanted to make this part of the video long ingenious club punch descent radiated cherries thanks kyle it's time to sue not good ivy ruth jacob james jason lasky jaden jayden magical madman mama ross reasonable willow reggie rodriguez trash siren smells good salty smashing sam vertigo subscribe slendy no hawaii silverberry sleepy suck dollager space lizard spooky grammatical squidging squish words starbucks storm strider blind cataclysm super sandwich [ __ ] chubbington big bubby the salt knife winter solstice if you'd like to help support the show unlock new long-form projects and help me keep improving check out my patreon we got all kinds of goals and lots more videos in store stay tuned for more k bash out

Channel: KBash

Views: 116,226

Keywords: kbash, k bash, persona, p4a, p4a ultimax, ultimax, persona arena review, persona ultimax review, ultimax remaster, atlus, ultimax switch, ultimax pc

Id: E7nJnRbDlQs

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022