Persona 4 Ultimate

Persona 4 Ultimate is the new 2D fighting game to hit Japanese game centres, and, according to wikipedia, came out yesterday for the PS3 and Xbox360 in Japan.  America and the EU are getting it in August.

For anyone who may not know, Persona is a spin-off series of games in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise.  Shin Megami Tensei is kinda like pokemon, but for real men.  SMT is an extremely challenging and unforgiving series and when you do eventually beat one of them it's one of the most satisfying things ever.

However, Persona 4 Ultimate isn't a RPG at all.  Like I said in the first sentence, P4U is a 2D fighting game and contains no RPG elements whatsoever.  That said, the game is actually a blast to play on 2 levels.  The first level of fun is what I like to call the fanwank level.

Above is a picture of the character select screen, and I swear the version I played in the game centre had more characters available.  But my point is, if you're a fan of the Persona games, you're probably gonna get your rocks off to kicking the shit out of the Persona 3 and 4 cast as your favourite character. 

The other level of fun to be found here is in the gameplay itself.  The game is developed by Arc System Works, who gave us amazing fighters such as Blazblue and Guilty Gear, so you know this shits going to be good.  As a result of this however, the characters all feel like characters straight out of Blazblue and there is a little sense of this being an excuse to reskin that game and make a shitton of money off the Persona series popularity.  But you know what?  I'm not going to get angry about that! Arc System Works have done a good job of providing and solid fighting game that doubles up as fanwank, and even though it is very similar to Blazblue, it does seem to be just different enough to qualify as its own thing rather than a cheap Blazblue knockoff.

So warm up those arcade sticks because you're in for a treat with this one.  It doesn't matter if you like Persona or not, if you like fighting games then you'll like this I'm sure.