What are Persona Q, Q2 and the Persona dancing games?
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, released in 2014 for the Nintendo 3DS, is a crossover in the Etrian Odyssey mold: the Persona 3 and 4 casts meet inside a strange school festival labyrinth, drawn in a deformed chibi style, and the player maps dungeons by hand on the touch screen. It was the first Persona game on Nintendo hardware and a deliberate genre experiment, borrowing Etrian Odyssey's mapping and FOE enemies wholesale.
Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, from 2018 in Japan and 2019 in the West, adds the Persona 5 cast and a movie world setting, and holds a sad distinction: it was one of the last major 3DS releases, and the Western version shipped with Japanese voices and subtitles only, no English dub, a sign of how late it arrived. Physical Western copies had a short shelf life, which collectors noticed quickly.
The dancing trilogy began with Persona 4: Dancing All Night on the Vita in 2015, a rhythm game with a full story mode set after Persona 4. Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight and Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight followed together in 2018 for PlayStation 4 and Vita, trading story for a social event structure and leaning on remixes, including guest tracks and downloadable songs. The soundtracks are the point: these games exist because Persona's music had become a selling point in itself.
Other spin-offs crowd the same shelf: the Persona 4 Arena fighting games made with Arc System Works, and Persona 5 Strikers, the action sequel covered through the Persona 5 pages. The spin-offs are where Atlus experiments, and several, Arena especially, are canon continuations rather than side stories.
For collectors, the spin-offs are a format map of the series: 3DS cartridges with different Japanese and Western cover art, Vita cards, PlayStation 4 discs, and limited editions that bundle the dancing games together. Soundtrack CDs were bundled and sold separately across all of them, and the music releases are often the most chased physical items in this corner of the series.
