Here’s an abridged walkthrough of Persona 4 Arena Ultimax’s ‘GoldenArena Mode’

The ‘GoldenArena Mode’ from Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is brand new, time consuming, and a lot of fun. Basically choose a favorite character, in normal or shadow mode, and climb your way to the top of an infinite tower. Start at the bottom or somewhere inbetween. The higher you go up, you guessed it, the harder the AI becomes.

Every fight earns you experience points. When you level, you’ll get 3 points to distribute in what ever attribute you’d like. Here is the breakdown of stats:

• Strength: Increase attack power
• Magic: Increase amount of SP gained
• Endurance: Increase hitpoints
• Agility: Increase burst recovery / Shadow Frency time
• Luck: Increase the amount of experience gained

Each battle is only 1 round and your health doesn’t regen at the start. Your announcer can heal you and if you get an ability like ‘Media’ you can heal yourself once per match. This mode sticks out to me because it does an excellent job of giving fan-pandering to the Persona 3 and Persona 4’s RPG elements. You’ll see familiar skills from both games in a format that you’re familiar with.

You won’t have access to instant skills so shadow characters have an advantage there. Every few floors you’ll encounter a boss character. These guys are tough and have more HPs. After defeating one, you can get offered a random skill they had. Take it or don’t, that’s up to you – it’s YOUR character now.

Test yourself and see just how far you can make it. If it seems too easy and too slow, it probably is. Try starting elsewhere to match your skill level and AI. In the video playing, I literally start from the bottom and just screw around. I used a shadow character to test them out more. For stats, I was prioritizing Mag to get SP even faster so I could Shadow Frenzy early and spam the hell out of SP skills. What works best for you? Let me know!