I have to disagree with your critique of the story mode. I very much so like that, with one or two exceptions, they did not try to force fights into this just because it’s a fighting game (a problem, in my opinion, with most fighting game story modes, including MK9′s), and used them only where it made sense instead. If you’re going to have a story mode in a fighting game, the story needs to be the focus of the mode – the game has every other mode to give you all the fighting you could want, after all. By far the strongest part of P4A’s story was Labrys’ chapter, and that had only one fight at the very end – which honestly was probably the most unnecessary in the entire mode to boot, so I’d have had no problem if there were no fights in that chapter of the story.

I’d disagree with holding up Mortal Kombat 9′s story as getting much right, too. While I appreciate that it had a lot more effort put into it than most fighting game stories do, the end result was nothing but the video game equivalent of a dumb action movie with a bloated cast. Its use of cinematics, which is really all that it does different from other fighting game story modes, comes nowhere close to making up for its lack of good writing. Among fighting games, the BlazBlue series and P4A both offer much better stories than that mess.

Really, my one complaint with the story mode is that the ArcSys style of giving each character their own story to play through doesn’t work so well here. Because everyone is going through the same events (Labrys and parts of Elizabeth’s story aside), there’s a lot of repetition between the stories, especially with Yu, Yosuke, Chie, and Yukiko. Naoto and the P3 characters offer some variety by coming at things from a different angle and having an alternate ending, but once they’re in the TV world, the repetition is still present up until the tail end.

Beyond that though, I’d say they nailed it.