John's nerd corner

I Need To Talk About Persona 5 Tactica

Fictional characters: to your brain, they can become basically the same as real friends. Which means you’ll keep wanting to see them again and again. Am I wrong? This aspect of human behavior is what I think is largely to blame for why ATLUS can convince people to buy so many Persona spinoff games.

I mean, take Persona 4 for example. It’s a great game, and they could’ve just released it and moved on. But no. We like the Investigation Team too much to just move on. So then we get:

Persona 3 itself got a second version on PS2, a portable version on PSP, and eventually even a dancing game like the Persona 4 one—plus it crosses over with almost all these Persona 4 spinoffs.

So, it’s no surprise that Persona 5 is receiving similar treatment. First releasing in 2016, the game was a massive hit, and so of course, other games featuring its characters soon followed.

And uh don’t forget Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Joker is playable in that game, if you buy the DLC, and his friends make appearances too.

Anyway, after Strikers (did you know it’s called Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers in Japan?) things were quiet in Persona spinoff land for a minute. The big news in 2022 was that some of the games were finally being ported to non-PlayStation systems, but there weren’t any new games to speak of.

But then, earlier this year, a new Persona 5 strategy game was announced, and it released just last month. This game is called Persona 5 Tactica, and I have finished it. And I need to tell you about it.

Persona 5 Strikers and the Decline of My Hype

Let me tell you my background with Persona 5. I got a PS4 in 2019—pretty late to the party. Because of being “late” though, I could get good games for super cheap. I had always heard great things about Persona 5, and so when I saw it on sale for $10, I bought it right away. Well, long story short, I sunk hundreds of hours into the game. When Persona 5 Royal came to the West in 2020, I said, “I don’t care if I’ve pretty much already played this! I’m buying it!” And so, I put many more hours into that game too. Can you blame me though? The new girl looked cute. Plus we were stuck inside anyway.

Seriously though, whether you’re talking about Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal (no reason to go back to the original game to be honest), it’s one of my favorite games ever, and the main reason I don’t just replay it endlessly is that other games exist and I need to play those too.

Now, by the time Royal released in America, Persona 5 Scramble had already released in Japan. But I didn’t find out about that game until months later. I was quite excited to know that another game with an all-new story featuring these characters I loved so much was on the way. And just a few months later, in February 2021, the game released worldwide as Persona 5 Strikers.

I wasn’t really into this game.

Ok, so the combat is pretty fun. You get to just button mash and cut through huge waves of enemies. I say button mash, but it’s not completely devoid of strategy—there’s elemental weaknesses to think about, for example. So yeah. I enjoy the parts where I’m fighting.

The story is probably my biggest disappointment with the game. Strikers really seems to want to live up to Persona 5 and be a true sequel. But it’s maybe trying a little too hard. I mean, if you’re trying to be as good as one of the best games I’ve ever played, it’s quite difficult to come off well in that comparison. The story has plenty in common with Persona 5, with corrupted hearts to change and all. The difference this time, though, is that I do not really care about the villains.

I just felt like in Strikers we were speedrunning an arc with each villain. We learn about them and why they’ve decided to be evil, and a particular member of our group may especially relate to their story. Now, I do remember finding the part with the writer guy to be funny. But none of the attempted emotional moments really worked for me, and perhaps that is simply because the story is rushed compared to Persona 5.

In 5, the protagonist and his friends almost always get personally involved with the villains in real life in some way, which inevitably leads to a sudden escalation where a severe consequence now looms and the mission has to be a success before it arrives.

The tension the deadline brings, of course, is only significant because you, the player, get to choose how to spend a limited number of days, and it’s quite possible to mismanage them so badly you fail the mission (though it’s quite easy to not do that).

You don’t get to choose how to spend your days in Strikers, which makes sense, seeing as it’s a spinoff. I have no issue with that. But the game still has lots of non-dungeon time, and I remember in a number of parts, you have to run around a city and talk to people to figure stuff out so you can advance the story. And I found this boring. I feel like it’s only here to make the game more Persona-like.

It would be different if the areas were fun to explore. You go to all these different cities in Japan, which could be pretty fun, right? (But I’ve already played Yakuza 5). But I don’t know. The areas you can walk around aren’t that big, and it’s not like there are secrets to uncover. Just places full of people to talk to before you can move on to the dungeon.

Oh yeah, funny thing about the dungeons is, if you run out of MP, you can leave and come back as many times as you need without any negative consequences. Which kind of makes me feel like MP didn’t really need to be a mechanic—maybe it would make sense as a refill-per-battle thing. Again, one of those things that’s taken right out of Persona 5, even though Strikers is a different type of game.

So honestly, I think Strikers would be easier to like if it focused more on its unique aspects, rather than trying to be like Persona 5. Because the combat is fun. But the extra stuff is less fun. And the story is not great. It shouldn’t have tried to be Persona 5 2, if you ask me.

So yes, I was underwhelmed by Persona 5 Strikers.

But in addition to that, lately I think I’ve become fatigued by the very idea of endless franchises. Just a couple years ago, if you told me “There’s a new entry in a series you like!” I would automatically start looking forward to it, no questions asked. But nowadays, between Disney and Warner Brothers’ attempts to milk dry whatever they can (often poorly), I’m just tired of it all. If a revival of something great from the past turns out good, that’s a fortunate exception. Right now though, I expect that most such things will not be worth my time (and that includes Nickelodeon’s new Avatar Studios endeavor, I’m afraid).

So, when Persona 5 Tactica was announced in summer 2023, I wasn’t totally sure what to think. I was interested, for sure—it was a strategy game, after all. I am not the most seasoned strategy player, but I’ve enjoyed a couple Fire Emblem games. But I didn’t feel that hunger for more Persona 5 content anymore.

When I saw the trailer, I also had to wonder how there was yet another incident involving the Phantom Thieves when they were supposed to be done at the end of the original game. But that doesn’t really matter much.

Tactica’s art style immediately sticks out. While Strikers emulated the look of Persona 5 as closely as it could for running in a totally different game engine, in Tactica the characters look cute and small and have really big eyes and hands. I’m not sure if this contributed to my feelings on the game prior to playing it or not. Does a different art style make me subconsciously think of the game as less important? Maybe.

The space from reveal to release was also unusually short. And since it was a simultaneous global release, there wasn’t even any time for people to play it in Japanese and tell everyone else waiting on the English version what to expect.

Basically, I had no idea if the game was gonna be any good. My hype was low.

However, Tactica was coming to Xbox Game Pass at launch. And it just so happened that I had subscribed to Xbox Game Pass for PC to play the new Like a Dragon game. There was absolutely no reason to not try Persona 5 Tactica! So I tried it!

What’d I think?

I liked it. Liked it a lot, in fact.

A Surprising Story

As I said before, story was my biggest disappointment with Strikers, but with Tactica, I am happy to say that, to my surprise, I found the story delightful. I became very invested in it.

Now yeah, my own expectations were a factor both times. I was expecting more from Strikers, and I expected very little from Tactica. Regardless, I loved this story, and I’ll tell you why.

In some ways, Tactica’s story is exactly what you would expect. The gang somehow gets transported to another world and has to take down several different evildoers there. But this time, the scope of the Phantom Thieves’ influence doesn’t quite grow to the point where the whole country seems to be talking about them—actually, we don’t know what’s going on in the real world at all for most of the game, because there is no switching back in forth like the previous games. The conflicts you’ll face become quite large by the end of the game, yet they are personal at the same time. This is less of a “let’s save the entire world” type of mission and more of a “let’s save these particular people” one. Which is exactly what a spinoff should be, I think.

Tactica tells us early on that the old Persona 5 rules behind the “metaverse” don’t fully apply here, for whatever reason, and there’s a lot of mystery as you seek to know just what type of place you’ve stumbled into. Not only that, but who is this Erina (Eru in the Japanese version) person? And why has a famous politician ended up here with an overly convenient case of amnesia?

Well, if he didn’t have the amnesia, there’s a lot he could just explain, and where would be the fun of that?

As the third act of the game rolls in, the story’s mysteries have mostly been unfolded, but I’m feeling more invested than ever. There’s excellent payoff to a central character’s arc here, and these people who I didn’t think I would care about at all when I first saw them, I am now rooting for them so enthusiastically to overcome the challenges they’re facing. And that’s something Persona has always been good at—except, this is a shorter game with fewer characters than a hundred-hour game would have, but it works within that smaller scale just as effectively.

It’s a good story that surprised me, both with a couple of its twists and just how fresh it felt overall for being another Persona 5 story. I mean there aren’t actually any calling cards or treasure-stealing in this one!

And by the way, I honestly think it’s a better story than that of Like a Dragon Gaiden, which I played only a couple weeks before. I mean, Gaiden made me cry more, but the first half was just weak…well, I’ll talk about that another day.

I should probably mention the art style, which I suppose relates to story indirectly. I really like it. Everyone just looks so cute and their expressions are much more comically exaggerated than usual. But they don’t look as tiny as in the Persona Q games. I really appreciate every choice made here, and I couldn’t imagine this game with the usual Persona 5 style.

Triangle Strategy

Now I gotta talk about the actual gameplay. Because while you do spend a lot of time in story segments (this is Persona after all), there is a tactics game here too.

I am not a strategy game guru. I’ve played Fire Emblem Awakening and Fire Emblem Three Houses. I play in Classic mode (the one with permadeath) but many times have gotten units killed due to some idiotic boneheaded oversight I made—at which point, I restart the game, because I want my units alive. Anyway. Persona.

Tactica is certainly not as punishing as a Fire Emblem game, at least not on Normal or Hard difficulty settings. There aren’t as many factors to consider. For example, in Fire Emblem, a flying unit can be instantly killed by an archer. There is nothing like that in this game. In fact, while elemental affinities and weaknesses are a staple of Shin Megami Tensei and Persona, they are not exactly a factor here. Elemental attacks do exist, but each one has a different effect, such as pushing the enemy out of cover or pulling the enemy towards the caster. No one is “weak” to a particular element. The only true weakness I remember is the sumo wrestler enemy’s instant death upon being pushed off a ledge. That’s a really cute design choice, isn’t it?

Cover is the most important aspect of combat in Tactica. Cover usually consists of crates and the sort of stuff you can hide behind, but higher ground also functions as cover, even if in the open. A normal unit who is attacked while out of cover is knocked down, granting the attacker an extra turn. Conversely, units in cover resist damage, so they are hard to kill. Obviously then, as the player, you’ll want to get enemies out of cover so you can take them down, while getting your units in cover.

For a strategy RPG, there aren’t many random elements to this combat. The amount of damage dealt is predictable, and you’ll never see your characters miss a shot. The only “critical” is when you hit someone not in cover. This certainly removes frustration, but I think it also removes some tension, too.

I was surprised that you only get a party of three in Tactica. While I thought this would make it hard to include everyone, there is a stat bonus for using different characters in each battle—and battles are usually quite short—so it ended up not being an issue.

Persona 5’s combat is known for being flashy, fluid, and having cool animations, and I think Tactica lives up to that, in its own way. When you take control of a character, you are not just telling them a spot to go to; you get to run around (within their movement range) as that character until you take an action. This allows a nice level of flexibility: if one character who hasn’t used up their turn yet is in the way of another character, just move them. You can always move them back after without penalty. Your decisions are only set in stone once you either attack or choose to end the turn early.

Earlier I mentioned the extra turn you get for knocking down an enemy. Obviously you want to get that as much as possible. There is an added bonus to it, too. It gives you the opportunity to perform a Triple Threat attack. This is where you get your three units in a triangle formation, and then attack everyone within the triangle. It’s a powerful attack, and it gets wildly fun to try to fit as many enemies within it as possible. You’re definitely going to want to use it as often as possible.

One additional bit of teamwork you can do in this game is the “follow up,” which, despite sharing a name with something that can happen in normal Persona, is here a move where you knock an enemy off a high ledge, and a teammate on the ground shoots em up. It grants the initial attacker an extra turn, and it’s just plain fun to do.

Now, you may be able to tell by this point that this isn’t the deepest strategy game ever. It’s not the most difficult, either. The only Game Overs I got on my first playthrough were from stages where I was given a small number of turns to win—and most of those are optional. If you’re a pro at strategy games, I imagine you’ll want a bit more challenge. I will say, though, that most levels include awards—extra goals that are more challenging to achieve than just clearing the level. As the game got going, I found I was missing a lot of these, and I’d need to replay the levels to get them. So even if the game is easy to beat, there is more challenge in clearing every award.

Personas are part of the game, too (whew, thought we’d have to change the name there). The old gang has their original personas again, and obviously, Ryuji’s persona has zio, Ann’s has agi, Yusuke’s has bufu, etc. What about fusion? In a surprising twist, Joker doesn’t switch personas mid-battle in this one, but everyone (except Erina) can also get what’s called a sub-persona. This basically gets you stat boosts and some extra skills. I don’t know if I was using this feature to the fullest extent possible—I didn’t really plan out what skills I wanted people to have. I just think it’s fun trying to get as many personas in the book as possible. I feel like you can get pretty far in the game ignoring persona fusion, honestly, but you could also probably use it to dominate if you wanted to.

You can buy guns in this game. You can also eventually have Lavenza turn personas into guns which are much more powerful than what you can buy.

You cannot buy armor or melee weapons in this game. Again, they’re keeping things simple.

I think I’ve covered most pieces of the gameplay, but let me also bring up bosses. I like the bosses because they’re basically just unique puzzles. The first one, she throws bombs at you. Obviously, you you should hit them back at her. But then there are other twists. None of the bosses are all that challenging, but they are fun because of their novelty, and that’s more important to me.

The game also has side quests that will often really force you to understand all of the game’s mechanics. For example: can you defeat all the enemies in just one turn? There is definitely a way, but it may not be obvious at first. Although you can bet it will probably involve project triangle strategy. These side quests are puzzles, even more so than the regular game. I beat all of them, and I felt it was worth the effort. The dialogue that accompanies them is always pretty humorous, as a bonus.

Some levels, once you get past the first world, involve switches that open doors or raise platforms. These levels can be a pain if you don’t think ahead. I find it’s still easy to keep all characters alive in such levels, but beating the level quickly and getting the award is definitely more of a challenge. It’s another puzzle-y element of the game that adds variety.

Persona 5 Tactica is not the most complex or challenging strategy game. But it’s fun enough for me, and it features the Persona 5 cast and that story I praised so much earlier. So it works. It works real well.

A Couple Miscellaneous Topics

Call me crazy, but I double-dipped on this game: after beating the Game Pass PC version, I downloaded it on Switch. I had already felt a desire to play the game on handheld—it just feels like a perfect fit, for some reason. My only regret is that my PS5 Persona folder doesn’t get to grow any larger just yet….

Anyway though, with the more stylized art style, I had assumed the game was built primarily with Switch in mind. After playing it, I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case. The game does run well in combat, as far as I can tell. The only problem is that there’s a noticeable delay when you exit the Party menu before a battle. The first time this happened, I thought the game just didn’t recognize my button press. I got used to it, because it will happen literally every time you switch a party member. Compared to playing the game on a PC or console with a modern SSD, the Switch version of course has longer load times, and you’re obviously not gonna get the 120 FPS mode either. But if you can get over that problem I described, it’s a good way to play the game.

Oh, and I got the DLC this time, so I’m gonna get to that sooner or later.

Oh hey, I forgot to talk about the music. It’s good. Pretty much any song featuring Lyn is a standout, no matter which Persona 5 game we’re talking about (arguably they’re the best aspect of Strikers), and this game has several of those, but the other tracks are good too. While it might not have a ton of tunes that make me go, “Oh man, what a banger,” I definitely never heard anything I disliked either. Apparently they made sure not to make the music too energetic this time (I read this on Wikipedia), since it’s a strategy game and all, which was a wise choice. The music complements the slower-paced battles and sets the mood without getting in your face and annoying you.

Also wow you can stream the soundtrack on Apple Music already and it’s five hours! Much longer than Persona 5’s. I know 5 has a lot of tracks that repeat many, many times, but it’s also a much longer game. How’d this happen? I’m kind of impressed.

Conclusion

If you like Persona 5, play this game. Even if you’re not sure if you like strategy games, this game feels like it’s tailor-made to be someone’s first strategy game. You won’t want to miss this story. No it’s not going to change the status quo of the Persona 5 universe or anything like that; I just think it’s a good story you won’t want to miss. And if you like strategy games but haven’t played Persona 5, well… I’d suggest playing Persona 5 Royal first. I mean the dialogue in this game will be gibberish in some parts without that, right?

Well the game does have readily accessible notes you can read so maybe that will suffice. Even so, I’m telling you, you gotta play Persona 5 Royal, it’s a great game. And then play this.

Anyway. It’s always nice to get a surprise. I wasn’t expecting much from Persona 5 Tactica, and that’s why I’m so happy that it turned out so good. I’m sure it won’t be the last Persona 5 spinoff, and I’m going to try not to get my hopes that the next one will be just as good as this one. But clearly, now I know it could happen.