![]() Yukari’s now an actress and joined a Super Sentai equivalent, donning the costume of Feather Pink for the duration of Ultimax. What works especially well is how they’re freshened up and integrated with the current cast. Calling up Junpei, Ken (and Koromaru!), and Yukari allows players to catch up with characters they haven’t seen in over seven years. The most attractive parts of Ultimax’s narrative lie with characters whom weren’t part of Persona 4 Arena. You literally never have to play the game in Ultimax’s story mode. While this may seem incomprehensible to those who buy a fighting game to get a fighting game, it’s awesome for players whose only interest is to further the narrative of their beloved characters. Ultimax de-commits its fighting game obligations one step further, offering players the ability to automate every single battle. The whole thing is still an unabashed visual novel, containing twenty hours’ worth of soliloquies and spoken dialogue punctuated with occasional fights between characters. Different characters may back each chapter, but they all coalesce into a singular plotline. Gone are the separate narratives that followed individual characters, and in their place are flowing chapters that complete a grand story. Structurally, Ultimax’s storytelling has changed a bit from Persona 4 Arena. What it loses in accessibility, however, it gains in positioning itself as a deep dive into the characters behind those respected games. This isn’t necessarily a negative – the stories that power games are largely irreverent in the fighting game community – but it’s worth noting that Ultimax makes little effort to welcome newcomers to its prized assemblage of Persona 3 and Persona 4. What Ultimax indulges and explores is strictly a fans-only adventure, meaning those unfamiliar with the wild world of modern day Persona games will be left in the dust if they attempt to absorb the narrative. Ultimax’s most difficult assignment is creating and maintaining a worthwhile narrative. The harsh eye of judgment is ready to beam down on Ultimax from almost every angle. It’s a huge burden to bear – and this is all without taking 2D fighting aficionados and fans of developer Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear and BlazBlue into account. That mission was already accomplished in 2012 with the comparatively vanilla Persona 4 Arena, which makes Ultimax’s task of providing a follow-up absent of any contrivance doubly difficult. It features characters birthed in Atlus’ Persona 3 (2007), Persona 3 Portable (2010), Persona 4 (2008), and Persona 4 Golden (2012) and it’s charged with the task of feasibly tying together the disparate narratives separating Persona 3 and Persona 4. Consider the audience Persona 4 Arena Ultimax needs to satisfy.
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