Persona 4 Arena Testing Information and System Details

by iantothemax on July 26th, 2012 at 12:16 pm

shtkn over on Dustloop recently had a chance to visit the Atlus offices to test out their upcoming fighter, Persona 4 Arena. After spending a few hours with the game, he’s compiled an extensive list of system details for those of you looking to pick it up. There’s a number of interesting discoveries here, so be sure to peruse this list in preparation for the game’s North American release on August 7th.

Wakeup Options

You cannot wake up backdash, there is a small window where you simply won’t backdash at all. This is similar to BB’s cant-backdash-immediately on landing introduced in CS1 onwards. You can still use roll, B+D, wakeup super, etc just fine.
There is no manual quick getup. The only ground option is to neutral tech or wait for your character to automatically quick getup.
The quick getup animation is cancelable into ANYTHING, including blocking. So you can’t punish this at all, you either hit them while theyre knocked down, or you let them get back up.

Counter Hit Properties

CH with normals, throws, and specials adds 10% more damage to the first attack, but it’s not consistently so. It seems that some multi hitting attacks (such as yukiko’s 5C or mitsuru’s ground throw) do get 10% bonus damage on all hits, while others (such as Kanji’s command throw) do not. only the first hit of kanji’s command throw (where he tosses you to the wall and does 250ish damage) gets the 10% bonus.
CH with supers add 20% more damage. Similar inconsistencies found as above.
CH with throw adds more untech time
Fatals follow the same rules for damage bonus. Forgot to test things regarding wallstick/bounce and fatals

Jumping, Air Options

You can not block for the first 5 or so frames once you are airborne. This makes 5As good for anti-chicken block. Double jumps do not suffer this penalty.
You regain all your air options (air dashes, double jumps) after you air normal block, air instant block, air ukemi, or break air throws
You can hold the button to air ukemi asap. This means you can stop piano-ing buttons during opponents combos
Like GG, you can not Superjump > double jump. You can only air dash after a super jump. (unless you regain your air options as described above

Short Hop

Short hop appears to have Foot attribute invul on Frame 1.
You can not jump or air dash during short hop, even if you RC an attack.
You can not block during short hop at all.
Short hop has landing recovery.

Command Interpreter

Like BB, you can input things during super freeze and they execute immediately afterwards
No negative edging of specials
We could not tell if there was a hold-button-to-repeat-input thing like BB or if you could input dashes early like BB. It’s pretty hard to test given that we aren’t familiar with character’s combos or frame data.
You need to input 22 to do 22 motions. Mikey (the soCal carl player) described it to me that carls use some special 32 input to summon nirvana during combos, but that doesn’t seem to be an option ehre. In either case, I don’t understand it well enough to explain it any better haha. Ask a carl player what he’s talking about!

Miscellaneous

mashing 4A will not give you the auto combo. Your character will simply do 5A and not cancel into anything. Mashing 6A will do the auto combo. Exception: Mitsuru can mash 4A for the auto combo (likely so she can charge a drill).
the super armor on A+B attacks will not guard against super attacks
Minimum Damage on supers appears to be 30% for most, but iirc we found a few that were 20%
Damage scaling will push damage of things down to 0, just like BB
some persona attacks will auto correct to attack in the direction of the opponent, even if you jump and air turn to face away from the opponent such as Teddie’s j.C.
Teddie can hold down the item throw button to throw 2 items at once.
Teddie’s persona wind up animation for item throwing has a hitbox haha. hits multiple times
No super cancel on whiff
No TRM (Throw reject miss)
the last normal of an auto combo (5AAA for most chars) gives you 12 or 13 meter and refil a part of your burst gauge (1/8th?)

Source: shtkn