Frankly given how much I love the Persona 5 story, characters, and general vibe with the presentation and music as soon as this was announced I knew I’d be getting it day 1, even though I’m not a big fan of the art style they went with and I’ve never really played a Tactics RPG before (beyond X-COM, I guess?) and while I wasn’t as into it as I hoped I’d be I still enjoyed my time with the game. I think I was most disappointed with the storyline, which was weak compared to even fellow spin-off Persona 5 Strikers, and at the lack of challenge the game gave me. There were plus points though, so let’s take a deeper look!
Background:
Joker goes full on gangland executioner.
Persona 5 Tactica was released worldwide on November 17th 2023 for the PS4 / 5, Xbox One / Series X&S, Nintendo Switch and PC, so if you’re interested you can most likely play it!
It’s the latest Persona 5 spin-off and I’d assume the last, though given the next big Persona release is a remake of 3 it might not be as it could be a while before Persona 6…
Gameplay:
A good example of the all important cover mechanic… and someone being kicked off of a ledge. That too.
Full credit to Atlus as they did blend Persona with a Tactical RPG really well, ticking boxes in both categories. The actual gameplay is as you’d image, maps are broken up into grids where you can deploy and move three characters a certain amount of squares each turn, with your side and the enemy side taking turns moving and attacking. The Persona-ness comes in with how you can attack as much like the game you can use melee weapons, guns for long-range and summon Personas to do magic attacks and a special move, the latter of which you can only do by building up the “Voltage” meter. The magic attacks all do different effects like Psy damage making enemies move out of cover, wind sending them flying backwards, and your more standard stuff like fire, ice and electric moves stunning people or giving them ticking damage over several turns. Another Persona-ism is a “One More Turn” system, though this time it happens when you attack an enemy that isn’t behind cover, and gaining a “1 More” will allow you to do a “Triple Threat” move which is basically the “All Out Attacks” from Persona 5 but you have to create a triangle between your three party members and everything caught in the triangle will be hit by the move. Also if you knock an enemy off of a high platform and one of your team mates are underneath they get shoot the enemy as it falls for extra damage.
Really though cover is the main mechanic in the game, if you leave any of your character standing in the open rather than behind cover you’re going to have a rough time but each stage is well designed enough that its often easy to place them in cover pretty much every turn. On that note each stage is well designed, to be fair, a good variety of enemy types from ranged shooters to big brute melee enemies, to enemies that block frontal attacks meaning you have to find a way to get behind them and enemies that cause you to swap places with them, meaning attacking one that’s not in cover is a risky move; all on stages full of cover, lifts and high ground, it may have been easy but it was never boring. Well, apart from the last “Kingdom”, as it contained mostly reused bosses, but hey-ho. On that note much like the Palaces in the other P5 games there are several Kingdoms in this, each with their own boss and unique looking enemies (that admittedly all function the same) and you get main missions and side quests, though in this case the side quests are just “Missions” comprised of a single stage, normally with a more puzzle-y feel to it, with goals like “defeat all enemies in one turn”, so you have to make use of all the mechanics. These were normally the only real challenging parts of the game, and the only place I saw the “Game Over” screen… a couple of times.
It’s a comparatively small triangle, but it’ll get the job done!
But what about the Persona fusion that is a key part of the games? Well, it’s here but… it’s pretty pointless, really. So you get Personas during the course of play and you can fuse them to make more powerful ones, but this time they don’t do anything apart from give one of your fighters access to a new move or a stat buff. So yeah, now all characters can get a second Persona, that’s fun, but in the end it rarely made any difference, and they don’t even appear when you use the magic spell they’ve given you access to, you see them in the Velvet Room screens only. You can also fuse them with range weapons to create powerful new weapons that sometimes have a status effect on them, but honestly the only thing you can buy with the money you make is ranged weapons so I didn’t really use the feature. I’d rather try and get my percentage of Personas found up than get a slightly better weapon, especially when the game was giving me so little trouble.
So yes, as mentioned several times, the major negative is that I found the game far too easy. I always put games on their default difficulty setting, Easy is too boring and Hard is too frustrating nowadays, but going through this game on Normal felt Easy, especially since every single boss fight the method to defeat the boss is literally told to you right away giving you no chance to, you know, have fun figuring things out for yourself. There is a Baton Pass mechanic where if one of your party gets defeated you can swap out for another one, but guess what? It happened ONCE. A single time I made some stupid error and one of my team got KO’d and I replaced it with another, the rest of the game I didn’t see the feature at all. There’s an trophy/achievement for a certain amount of Baton Passes that will no doubt forever remain unlocked… Basically I should’ve gone with Hard but by the time I’d figured that out I was settled in and didn’t want to redo anything, I just naively assumed it would get harder as things went on, but nope! Ah well, it’s just funny that I went from this to playing through Super Mario Bros. Wonder and had the same issue there, though at least that has some rock hard levels in the bonus Special stage (but more on that in a week or two!)
Graphics and Sound:
Even the chibi art style can’t stop the “All Out Attack” poses from being extremely satisfying.
Graphics are bright and clean, with a sort-of chibi style that grew on me as the game went along, though I think it’s more “I learned not to notice it” as I enjoyed the banter between the Phantom Thieves so much. I do like some of the enemy designs though.
Sound is obviously great, both voice casts are back and are on-point throughout and the soundtrack is good but not on par with the original or Strikers, no part of the Tactica soundtrack will make it onto my gaming music playlist, but at no point did I think it was bad either. In fact it’s probably good it’s just you can’t help comparing it to the other Persona 5 music and that will make anything look bad (Strikers cheated by mostly remixing it!)
Story:
Toshiro and Erina are at least good additions to the cast, even if neither of them are as good as Zenkichi from Strikers…
While hanging out at Le Blancs post main story but pre-Joker leaving the Phantom Thieves are suddenly sucked into a Metaverse-like dimension, complete with their Thieves outfits and weaker forms of their abilities. There they’re attacked by a crazy woman called Marie who is obsessed with marriage and most of them are mind controlled but Joker and Morgana are saved by a girl called Erina, who doesn’t have Persona powers but does have some unnatural gifts. As time passes all the Phantom Thieves are reunited and freed and they decide to join Erina’s “Rebel Corps.” fighting off Marie, and during this they find Toshiro, who is a Japanese Diet politician who is suffering from amnesia. Eventually they defeat Marie and find out that she is due to be married to Toshiro in real life but the real Marie is a controlling and arrogant b- um, unpleasant woman and Toshiro begins to feel better in standing up to her shadow form here in this metaverse. Everyone heads out a door they assume will take them back but instead they end up in a world that looks like Edo period Japan ruled by an avatar of Toshiro’s father, complete with its own Rebel Corps led by a women…
*Spoilers from here until the next bolded sentence!*
As you can imagine it soon turns out that all of these “Kingdoms” have been created by Toshiro’s subconscious and are pretty much acting like one big Palace, with Toshiro confronting a “demon” of his real world in each place. He stands up to his father (who in real life he has evidence of his corruption) alongside the mental image of his mother, then in the third Kingdom he sees flashes of his actual life where a girl who looks just like Erina and his teenage self stand up to a corrupt school teacher, who also has a shadowy version of himself to fight. It’s actually quite a sad story as this girl, Eri Natsuhara, was the one pushing Toshiro to stand up and do the right thing but in the end Eri is literally pushed in front of a train by the corrupt teacher they reveal to the world as scum, crushing Toshiro’s resolve. The shadow version of the teacher is revealed to not be the person in charge of the third Kingdom however and instead it’s a shadow version of Toshiro himself, he’s his own worst enemy and all that.
Yeah! … The final battle of the first Kingdom, which was certainly not the final battle, but hey. They don’t know that!
After a boss battle with the Shadow Toshiro the real Toshiro learns to stand up for himself and we find out that Erina is actually Toshiro’s Persona, called “Ernesto”, though she can switch between her human and Persona forms at will (allowing you to still use Erina in the levels!) Shadow Toshiro tries to summon a demonic form of Eri, who blames Toshiro for what happened to her, but they both get driven off. This is a Persona game though so the final boss then appears out of nowhere and is revealed to be a God made up of collective consciousness again, in this case Salmael, who wishes to bring about peace through robbing people of their will to stand up for themselves, starting with Toshiro. The Phantom Thieves plus Toshiro go through one last Kingdom (including, as mentioned, complete 1-to-1 copies of the previous three bosses…) before eventually destroying Salmael and returning to the real world. The Thieves don’t meet Toshiro but see on TV that he confessed everything and took down Marie and his father along with his own reputation, but plans on still being a politician, just an honest one. Toshiro later phones the gang and thanks them, then we get a post credits scene of Eri, walking with a cane, meeting back up with Toshiro.
*Spoilers end here!*
It took a long time to get even remotely interesting but I will at least say some moments with Toshiro coming to terms with events in his life were touching and had some good air-punching moments when he finally started doing the right things, but really it was like a single overly long Palace from Persona 5 without much else going for it.
Downloadable Content:
Not a screenshot from the DLC, but hey… look at all of those yellow megaphone squares! Who doesn’t love that?
There was some Day 1 DLC called “Repaint Your Heart” featuring Goro Akechi and Kasumi Yoshizawa from Persona 5 Royal but given I wasn’t sure if I’d like the game much and I’ve only played through the original P5 and not Royal I passed. Looks like it has some unique elements based around painting areas in different colours though, so it’s not a small tacked on thing at least.
Thoughts Now:
Thought I may as well put in a screenshot of a Persona, I mean why not?
There were times during the Third Kingdom that I was really enjoying the story and looking forward to my next play session, but the two before it and one after it weren’t as interesting, and the gameplay while multi-layered was also too easy on the default difficulty the whole way through, so don’t “wait for the difficulty ramp up” like I did and go straight to a harder one if you want a challenge in any way. Overall Tactica falls short of Strikers and way short of Persona 5 proper, but it was still nice to hang out with the cast of those games again for a while, even if there wasn’t much challenge in it.
Hogan Reviews 