18. Persona 4 Arena Ultimax
Born of a collaboration between Atlus, an rpg developer known for the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series, and Arc System Works, veteran fighting game developer known for creating games with “anime” flair, Ultimax in a lot of ways is better than a spinoff has any right to be. It smartly draws a lot from the Persona series in terms of looks, sound, and style and there plenty of references in character’s movesets that fans will get pleasure from. I can’t stress enough how much those graphics pop, especially in motion.
That said what really makes this great
isn’t the fact it’s a Persona game, but where it inspired the developers to take the mechanics. First off, it takes status effects from the rpgs and translates them to a fighting game. Some of them are pretty self-explanatory (poison) while others are less obvious (rage, panic, silence). Seeing how they play out can be pretty amusing, and adds an extra bit of flavor more than most fighting games. Second, knowing that the property would draw in an audience beyond the traditional fighter crowd, they made sure the controls were streamlined and easy to approach. This meant not only does control feel wonderfully light and responsive, but they mapped a bunch of universal commands to simple two button combinations. This means that you know you have access to a bunch of tools regardless of which character playing
and makes it easier to remember said tools. And not only do special moves have low input barriers and is generally easy to find some simple combs, there is even an auto-combo system where players can repeatedly press one button to get a scripted combo. It’s not optimal but it gives you can idea of what combos looks like for casuals, and can be a helpful crutch for more serious minded but low-skilled players (like myself), because you can branch off the scripted combo at any point to try your own flourishes.
Thirdly and perhaps the biggest thing that sets P4AU apart from other fighters is how the Personas themselves work. For the uninitiated, Personas are manifestations of one’s inner psyche and can be called upon to defend yourself by Persona users. How Arc translates this into a fighting game is that about half of a characters move list involves invoking their Persona. The Persona generally hit harder than the character’s normal moves and have much more reach. Combos alternating between the characters normal moves and the Persona’s attacks look awesome, and express their individual personalities better than the turn-based battle system of the games they originally come from! The catch is that these aren’t just projectiles: because they are an extension of the character, they can be hit. You won’t take health damage, but if they get hit too many times they can be broken, meaning you won’t be able to use any moves that involve the Persona for a set period of time until you’ve recharged you stock of hits. That is a HUGE handicap, and while there are a couple of characters that do most of their damage via normal moves, for most characters that is a bad place to be, especially for those whose game really depends on their Personas to get good damage. So you don’t want to be throwing out your Persona without much thought, but at the same time you
have to if you want to really go on the attack. That tension, and the fact that your opponents Persona is also blinking in and out of the picture, supercharges movement and spacing considerations, to point of feeling omnipresent. You are constantly making small interesting decisions with this in the forefront of your mind and it is endlessly fascinating and rewarding. I love it.
Ultimax, if you haven’t caught on already, is a follow-up to the original P4 Arena. That game is excellent, but Ultimax blows it away by nearly doubling the roster size and making balancing tweaks you would expect in a sequel. At 22 characters it isn’t the biggest roster by any means, but there are few fighters that have as much variety as Ultimax, and of those none make me want to learn every character the way Ultimax does. EVERYONE is just a lot of fun to use. If I had unlimited time I would love to pick up and learn every character. That, more than anything else, is a testament to how good the game is. And that’s not even getting into the fact that a lot of the characters have Shadow versions, which don’t have access to Bursts (a pretty big handicap in Arc games) and do a little less damage per attack BUT can carry over meter from round to round and can enter a frenzy state in which you have unlimited access to specials and can chain together moves you aren’t normally able to, meaning you can make some stupid broken nonsense. They more for skilled players but they’re fun remixes to change thing up.
I only have a few quibbles with the game. The story isn’t great and feels thrown together, which is disappointing after the first game took care to have a surprisingly good one (perhaps the best story in a fighting game?). The second is that Ultimax alone isn’t as good as the Japanese subtitle (Ultra Suplex Hold!) which fits the goofy cover art better. And there’s just the fact that I was too old when this came out to put in the time the game deserved. If I was younger when this came out this would easily be top 10 material. Yeah, that’s it. To me it’s a perfect confluence of being both very deep but also very approachable, has tons of style, and is also very thematic befitting the source material. It’s awesome. :hatSuffice to say I hope we get a Persona 5 Arena someday.
Any other entries worth playing?The original Persona 4 Arena is an excellent game, but the only thing it does better than Ultimax is the story mode, and if you really want that you can actually import it into Ultimax via dlc.
Topic: Top 25 Video Games Lists v2.0: Cable's NES Nostalgia 15 & 2 (starts pg32) (Read 83750 times)