The Wildest Fighting Game Duology // Persona Arena + Ultimax in Review
*spoilers for p3, p4, and these games* *arachnophobia warning*
Persona Arena and the sequel, Ultimax, are fantastic. At least as a pair of fighting games. With the Persona veneer I expected slightly more outta the story more, but we still had a fun time. Mostly because of the camp. And the vore. That won’t stop me from being mildly uncharitable to the story and other modes on offer, but jazzed by the mechanics.
This is releasing in preparation for the remaster, which is coming out this very week. I should clarify that the story of Arena is available in the Ultimax remaster, no DLC or anything, all that bonus content for Ultimax is there. And it’s based off a specific patch which has prety heavy gameplay ramifications, but I figured it was out of the scope of the vid – a light newcomer’s take.
If you’d like to support the show, hit me up here:
I’ve done other fighting game videos but they’re pretty old. I guess there’s Darkstalkers from last year:
Clips of specific content creators come from Moopoke, for the Naoto clip, found here:
And from AnimeIlluminati for the shadow Chie clip, found here:
0:00 INTRO
1:52 Persona Arena
12:46 ULTIMAX
#ultimax #persona #kbash
Junpei and Yusuke> the whole cast
"Popping a spider-egg"… I uh, didn't know that was a thing that people did.
Still wish P5S was somewhere in this. Either way, thanks for convincing me that I need to buy P4AU again. Hot DAMN I've missed that game! All of this just reminds me of the amazing time I had with a game where most of my skills came from watching one Evo tournament.
You had me at Canadian accent
Ummm there are fighting game fans that love persona 🤔
17:08
Really eating my heart out here
here's a fun thought: it's called a tutorial MODE because a tutorial could be as simple as a diagram saying "hit them, they die" the mode in the title guarantees that it will be more than a book and it will be an interactive experience. or they just wanted more letters on the screen.
I've been a Persona fan for a long time and Persona 4 Arena was probably the only proper fighting game where I gotten deep into the mechanics and the flow of play. So I guess I am the minority. Never got that good though, got destroyed in half the matches online but I had fun.
Oh Bash is Canadian?! That explains a lot.
It's a fighter and even a spinoff, your not expecting great just competent. It does this. It is what it is.
Fighting game simply aren't for casuals. It's a pvp genre that needs to be balanced for it, and reward higher skilled players. Treating fighting games from a casual pov is a disservice.
I wish these fighting games had a beatem' up mode.
two of them are getting rollback, both PC and ps4, switch is the only one left out for some reason
Edit: Canadian Labrys tho
Till its on the switch i wont play
As much as Labrys' story managed to hit me maybe harder than it deserved, pretty much in whole agreement with your assessment. Even being mostly the exact target audience for this game, an intersection of FGC and SMT fan, I can accept that these games didn't do much of a good job of being anything but a bit of a fan-service machine with a pretty good Mitsuru Kirijo fighting game attached to it.
Even back when this came out, and I was pretty quick to defend a majority of the Golden-only plot, I was pretty bored with the story since it was incredibly clear that it had no intentions of actually expanding on anything in a meaningful way. In that regard it feels a lot like pretty much every other P4 spin off at this point, with the Persona Qs and Dancing games feeling pretty much identical despite all being solid games in their own right. The "canonicity" of it at the time was something I had been excited for, but ultimately have reconsidered due to just how little it even amounted to in the grand scheme of things.
Your point about the RPG mode being bad at teaching the game made me think of the kinds of ways fighting games could start actually making modes designed to teach the game rather than just tacky gimmicks. It's something I've become pretty passionate about solving because the fact that fighting games seem to be unapproachable to a wider audience, and tend to have a very low retention time for anyone who isn't dedicated, is something I wholeheartedly think can be solved. It is frustrating though seeing how far we've come with only the smallest of steps to get to that point. It definitely isn't impossible though, I envision a day where we can get single player modes that find fun and unique ways to teach advanced concepts in a less dry and impractical way. Fingers are crossed that we get something like that soon.
W-w-whens, uhhh, S-S-Shin Megam-mi Tensei??
Please?
Pretty Please?
With Jack Frost on top?
So for me, P4AU was my first Persona game. A friend came over on my 17th birthday and told me about Persona 4 and this game and I was kinda hooked. So we went down to gamestop and got it for xbox 360 and just played the whole weekend.
I'm a fan of both RPG's & Fighting games, so I would've played P4 and then went for AU either way, but I get that that's not the most common pair of genres to like lol
Would love to hear about Granblue Versus next.
Literally just discovered your channel and your sense of humour is by far one of the best I’ve ever seen on a YouTube channel: I greatly thank thee for covering a game I am most excited to finally play!
P4AU is interesting because the series was the first real attempt by Arcsys to try and make their games accessible but back then they thought that accessibility was strictly input and execution based rather then being easy to understand and intuitive and not bloated system wise.
Legit had friends pick up Guilty Gear and Blazblue easier then P4AU because there is just so many mechanics not all of which are intuitive.
Jeez K-bash I'm almost 30 and am crying now… Love you dude
Arena and Ultimax got me into fighting games, and made me learn reaction time and hand eye coordination, and literally action games in general. Now I'm a diehard Guilty Gear fan who mains Ky in XX and Strive. I'm not AMAZING at either game, but I feel competent enough to enjoy playing with plenty of mindgames and execution. So this game literally taught me how to enjoy fighting games lol
Kbash is like a ray of sunshine in a shit day/year
Loved the moopoke clip !!
This is actually the game that got me into fighting games. Shadow Naoto my forever girl
20:36 Is it me or Sho has the same voice actor that plays the voice in Kaine's head in the Original Nier games? They sound familiar.
21:17 they have an obligation to put a deity as a final boss, just like Final Fantasy, bcz yes… as well as Modern Sonic for some reason….
Buddy, I think the entirety of Arc System Works has been living in perpetual fear of the sheer power of what they created with Bridget for the past 20 years
Another great video. I really liked arena but I just sucked and no one to local play so just got boring after a bit. Keep doing a super job , love ya kbash thanks and i hope things are going good and all is well.
canadian fighter when
I think a big part of the idea of rereleasing now is that people had P5 and then they got a follow up in the form of beat-em-up Persona 5 Strikers. Having fallen in love with the formula a bunch of people went to play P4G on Steam and then went for the follow up and, whoops, not a ton of them have their PS3 handy. Oh, hey, it's now on everything! Win win for Atlus.
I have to say it's really disappointing that they wouldn't have gone with a single story mode where you switch up different characters to play out what happens, like in the Neversoft games.
5:18 bro what version of chie's theme is this? it fucking BOPS
To be fair to Guilty Gear and Blazblue: Those stories are pretty decent. They're not perfect obviously, but they're pretty good.
I didn't expect him to be cute!!
I love low quality audio KBash
This video taught me that the writer responsible for Devil Survivor is also the writer responsible for Marie and I'll never forgive you for that.
I loved the fuck out of this game and I never even played Persona 4, and I never finished Persona 3. In fact, at the time, I had only played Persona 1… (and I didn't really like it). Labrys became my favorite character.
I can understand not liking the RPG type modes, because in a lot of respects, it does run counter to the main point of the game.
But think of it as being like a rouguelike. It can be very fun if you want to mess around with higher character power, for experienced players and not, and it's definitely a godsend for games that are dead or have bad netcode that you just like playing.
Oml the brief existentialism.
I'm one of those hybrid fans. Always loved JRPGs and started playing fighting games a little better around the time that BlazBlue came out. This game was made for me, and it's still my favorite fighter of all time.
I think your criticism of Golden Arena (that it doesn't make you play better) is a misunderstanding of what the mode set out to achieve; it's not there to bridge the gap between hardcore and casual, it exists to provide more PvE content with an RPG flavor for a casual audience that's entirely disinterested in the PvP portion of the game and getting better. You CAN'T bridge that gap, because they have different goals and motivations in the first place.
That's actually one of the things that a lot of modern fighters lack: content for players that aren't interested in "getting good." And the wealth of that kind of content is a big part of why Smash Bros. is the most popular fighting game series of all time.
I would indefinitely pass out if they made a sequel to ultimax and it had p3, p4, and p5 characters, and if they made the story like PQ's then we would have easily the best persona fighting game. And if they wanted to do dlc (because they have to, it's a fighting game) they could easily make p1 and p2 characters as dlc
12:28 i came back to hear canadian labrys again lmao
Dude that talking in that accent has me almost in tears🤣
Ed:spelling
I honestly hear more australian in Labrys than I do Brooklyn accent
OH maan, don't get me started on Daisuke's writing. When he gets into it, it gets NUTS. Blazblue is just . . . man, and Guilty Gear is only moderately better.
At 18:01, you said that "the end goal, to me, should be getting players online", but I love playing single player games only, and so do a lot of other people, so I 100% disagree with your premise.
Adding the RPG elements makes the game more enjoyable to play all by myself. The end.
im so mad that this game dropped on steam before P5
I can never tell of he hates the games in his videos or loves them
I have to disagree about the onboarding statement to be fair alot of fighting games have challenge modes which help you at least try out combos and learn characters if you are too soft brain to take on combo challenges than fighting games are not you juice
Patapon review?
I think this, Dragon Ball FighterZ and inbirth under light handled being beginner friendly. They have auto combos implemented but had enough mechanics and freedom to allow more advanced combos. Blazblue while great being one of the best anime fighting games, either had a way too technical for a casual player and had a mode that made it too easy for a casual player (F.E Central fiction) or was way too causal/easy like having too many auto combos for advanced players (F.E Cross Tag Battle) (The last also can apply to melty Blood: Type Lumina but that game is in a middle ground, too many auto combos that allow the player to just button mash to win but had enough mechanics in there that if the player tries to go in advance combos, they'll have enough room to do it in their own unique way)