As an avid fan of turn-based JRPGs, it will come as no surprise to anyone that I love the Persona Series, and was eagerly awaiting Persona 5 when it released on PS4 in April 2017. Its mix of stylish and smooth gameplay combined with its fun cast of characters and incredible story had me hooked and when its improved re-release came out in 2020 as Persona 5 Royal, I jumped straight back in to be completely blown away by how much better it was. I was similarly surprised by how much I enjoyed the hack-and-slash style sequel Persona 5 Strikers, thinking it was going to be a very shallow experience compared to the original games, but I was proven wrong. When I first saw the trailer for Persona 5 Tactica, I had high hopes. I like strategy-rpgs although I don’t play them too often, and I already loved the characters, so I had quite high expectations when I loaded it up. It took me 43 hours over two playthroughs to earn Persona 5 Tactica’s Platinum trophy, so let’s see if it lived up to my expectations.
There is something immediately different from Persona 5 and Strikers, its shift in art direction to a more, chibi anime style, that is more similar to other Persona side titles like Persona Q. It’s probably a matter of taste, and the longer I played the game the more I got used to it, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it, although this distaste was mostly in the visual novel esque cutscenes, or movie scenes. I felt the weird proportions just made the characters look ridiculous. In gameplay segments though, I did feel like it actually worked in the game’s favour. The smaller character models stood out and moved really well against the backdrops over cover-filled arenas that you have to fight through. I particularly liked how good the Persona’s themselves looked when you use your skills and unique abilities. The enemy designs were good, even if the number of unique enemies was pretty small, the fact that their appearance changes between areas in the story was nice. Every boss looked really cool and different, and I do wish there had been a few more of these throughout, even some Mini-Bosses would have been appreciated. I appreciate the consistency in the design between gameplay and story but I think I would have really liked a style that matched the original games more, and I was disappointed it wasn’t.
Performance-wise I had no issues throughout the game, it ran really smoothly and had no issues keeping up with me flicking quickly between different targets on the map. Getting in and out of most menus was really quick, although there were some small delays getting in and out of the Velvet Room to fuse Personas which caused some slight frustration on my second playthrough when I was having to go there quite a lot to fill out the compendium. One issue I did have particularly in the beginning parts of the game, was an issue with the dialogue being much quiter than the, admittedly amazing, background music.
My feelings about the artistic direction of the game somewhat mirrors my feelings about the game’s story and characters. It might have just been something I was more sensitive to especially as someone who was such a fan of the original game and its sequel, but to me, it felt like, for the main cast, their personalities and dialogue had been simplified and caricatured just as much as their character art had. Most of the characters seem like, flanderised versions of themselves, and most of their dialogue when not directly moving the plot along, or interacting with the two new characters, are retreads of what has come before, Morgana gets called a cat a lot and complains about it, Makoto and Haru are going to beat you up and you might like it, Ryuji doesn’t think things through and Yusuke only cares about Art or Food. Theres more to these characters than these single points and its a shame Tactica relies on these so much. Persona 5 Tactica is by no means a long game, and with its place in the timeline being somewhere between the last boss of Persona 5 but before the Protagonist returns home, there is not really a lot of room for character development for the main cast. It’s just a shame to see characters I really enjoyed for their depth and growth throughout the original game get sort of memed to death.
Thankfully the core of this narrative is about the two new characters Toshiro and Erina. Both of these characters are met early on in the story after the Phantom Thieves are pulled into a strange new version of the Metaverse and while Erina almost immediately endeared herself to me, I did not like Toshiro at all. However as the story progresses and you travel through the 4 main Kingdoms that make up the 4 Chapters of the story, I found myself growing to like Toshiro quite a lot. The way the story progresses and reveals itself through each Kingdom is a bit cliche with Toshiro’s inconvenient amnesia, but the reveals are worth it and I found myself genuinely surprised by the later reveals.
Despite my issues with the way the returning cast is handled, Persona 5 Tactica does have a lot of good cutscenes and dialogue in it. There are no social links or hang-out opportunities like the previous two games, but there are small optional visual novel-style “Talks” you can have between combat encounters and some of these can be quite good. I particularly liked the one where the group are talking about marriage where you can pick one of your companions to imagine a wedding with for an amusing scene. There are also small chats that happen before the optional quests you can do, and while most of these have nothing major to add to the story, they are good for getting more backstory of character moments from Erina and Toshiro, so they are definitely worth watching. I really loved the menu screen between missions as well, which shows different scenes of the gang hanging out in LeBlanc, eating curry or chatting. One of them has a small animation of Morgana, Haru and Toshiro playing cards, which loops them taking the Joker card out of each other’s hands like they are playing Old Maid, and I thought it was a really cute little thing to watch in between missions.
The missions themselves make for a fun albeit simple strategy RPG. You choose three characters, from the Phantom Thieves plus Erina, and get put on a map filled with cover and enemies to fight. Each character gets to move a certain number of squares and gets to do one action which can be a ranged gun attack, an up-close melee attack that knocks the enemy back while you move into their square, or a Persona Skill attack. The first thing I want to talk about is movement, which is something I think the game does really well and makes for some interesting gameplay moments. As I said, each character gets to move a certain number of squares on their turn, however, these are only actually used once you commit to an action or end your turn. This means that, if your movement is 5 squares, you can move 5 squares in any direction, change your mind, and go to a different square that is on the opposite side of where you moved initially. This doesn’t sound like much, but you can use this to your advantage, as interacting with things like floor switches to make platforms move doesn’t interrupt your movement, and its in figuring out this, and how to abuse it that my favourite part of the game takes shape.
There is another mechanic in Tactica, where if you attack an enemy that is out of cover, or suffering from certain status effects, you do a critical attack, and the same way a critical hit does in Persona 5, you get a “One-More” bonus. This lets you take another action immediately with the character who got the critical hit, including their movement. It also puts the enemy in a downed state, and two lines will connect your three characters together to form a triangle. If you position yourself so that the downed enemy is within the triangle, you can do a special attack called a Triple Threat attack. This will hit every enemy caught in the triangle for a huge attack, and this attack only uses the instigating character’s action. So if you combine these two mechanics, you can get one character into position to instigate the Triple Threat attack, and then move the other two around the map, to make the triangle catch as many enemies as you can at once, even if it leaves the other two out of cover, as you can just move them back after. It is immensely satisfying to do, and some of the missions require you to think about your movements and actions a lot when trying to get through some of the more puzzle-based levels. Some of them even ask you to figure out how to defeat all the enemies on the map in one turn, and abusing this is key to these puzzles.
The rest of the combat is pretty simple, and this felt intentional to really highlight the movement and puzzle aspects I mentioned above. Each map is full of items that act as Full Cover which protects you from attacks while you are behind it, or Half Cover which gives you resistance to any incoming damage. This cover applies to enemies and the core of the gameplay is to stay in cover while knocking your enemies from behind it. Melee attacks are great at this and usually leave you standing in the cover the enemy was just using as a bonus, but it’s your Persona’s Skills that do the heavy lifting here. Each of the Phantom Thieves has a main persona with an element attached to it. These elements are changed slightly from the main series and are now tied to specific effects. What was Wind is now Sweep, which gusts enemies up and moves them a couple of squares away and hopefully out of cover. Psychic is now Hypnotise and this does a similar thing except it brings enemies towards you. Ice and Fire do what you expect them to do, either freezing the enemies in place for an easy critical hit or burning them for extra damage over time. Each character, except Erina, can also equip one Sub-Persona which you can fuse and unlock to broaden the types of damage they do, or buff them with Auto-Skills. The game rewards you for mixing up your character choices too, as characters who weren’t used in the last battle get a boost to their damage or HP.
There are also unique attacks each character has which are tied to a Voltage meter that charges over time. This can have lots of different effects depending on the character, Joker gets to hit some enemies as if their cover didn’t exist, whereas Ann creates a small bomb that takes each turn to walk towards an enemy to blow up in its face, and its fun to see each one and how it works. However, by the time I got to my second playthrough, there were definite characters I used all the time because they just made things quicker by having guns with AoE effects or better movement skills.
Your enemies will try and take advantage of all of these skills too though. Your regular rank-and-file enemies just have guns, but will move around to get into positions where you are not in cover, and as you progress more enemies start to appear, such as the brutes who will knock you out of cover with melee attacks so their companions can shoot you for critical hits to get their own extra attacks in. There are enemies that buff each other or heal, and enemies that will face you to block your attacks completely, forcing you to pincer them to take them down. These enemies will try and kill you while forcing you to deal with gate puzzles, or lifts that create alternating platforms. Each mission also has three optional objectives that you will need to do for a trophy, which sometimes requires you to take out all enemies in a certain number of turns or be damaged less than a certain amount.
Overall it isn’t the most complex Strategy RPG by any stretch, but there was enough there to keep me having fun with the missions and although I played it on the PS5, it felt like it would be good on the switch, each mission short and sweet so you could play it in small chunks on a train or on your break. As I mentioned before, the bosses had some great designs and their fights were a great mix of puzzle and challenge.
Lastly, let us discuss what the journey to getting the Platinum Trophy, called Legendary Phantom Thief was like. Overall I would say it was pretty easy. There aren’t any missable trophies at all, and although it took me almost two full playthroughs, it only took me around 43 hours in total, and I definitely could have been quicker. You can choose to play the game on any difficulty if you wish, but the normal difficulty wasn’t really challenging at all, and I think the only missions I failed were ones with turn limits. There is a trophy for having a character die and be replaced 10 times, but I didn’t get this til near the end of the game.
There are 7 trophies that come through natural story progression, but there are a handful that I imagine are almost impossible to miss. Travel ten thousand squares, 500 turns, 200 one more attacks, 100 shooting attacks, 100 melee and 100 skills you should definitely have early on in your second playthrough. The other combat-related trophies are really easy to get, use 50 unique skills, which are the ones that cost Voltage to use, 50 Triple Threat attacks, and each of the status elements 20 times. The status ones have to be inflicted by a character’s main persona, for example, Joker has to inflict despair with Arsene, Ryuji has to inflict shock etc.
The only two of these I had any issue with were the Sleep ones, which require you to create a sleep fusion weapon to use. This unlocks halfway through the game, and I pretty much ignored it on my first playthrough, so it took most of my second playthrough to get a Sleep-infused grenade launcher for Haru. I also weirdly struggled with Makoto’s vortex, because I didn’t realise it dragged enemies together til the last kingdom and had been using it on single enemies and wondering why they didn’t move. So yeah, be more attentive than me, and you should notice a small circle on enemies that highlights if and where they will be moved.
The last combat trophy is to do 2000 damage in a single attack. I did this by using the last optional quests, and trying to get as many enemies as possible inside a single Triple Threat, as the damage does not need to be contained to one enemy.
Speaking of Fusion Weapons, you will need to create 10 of these, which can cost a lot of money, you also need to buy 10 and 50 unique weapons for two other trophies. These don’t have to be fusion weapons, just buy all the ones from the only shop in the game. Not too difficult at all. You can also dismantle weapons for money and doing this 10 times gets your Novice Dismantler.
Then there are the completionist trophies and the reason you need to do two almost full playthroughs. As in all persona games, you need to finish the Compendium which means fusing or earning every Persona you can for the “Collection of Knowledge” Trophy. This trophy actually encompasses a few others though, you will need to earn 666,666 Yen for the “Metaverse Aristocrat” trophy, which you will probably need to spend more than that buying all the weapons and fusing all the Personas anyway. There are also some hidden unlockable Fusions which you can unlock by completing all of the Optional Quests in each Kingdom, which also gets you the “Conqueror of Kingdoms” Trophy. These quests also unlock the final skills needed for the “New Heights” trophy. You will almost certainly see a Fusion accident while you work through the compendium for “Accidents Happen” and the highest level fusion of Satanael at level 96 will get you The Ultimate Mask. Some of the fusions are locked behind New Game Plus, and you will need to get to level 91 at least to be able to fuse this last Persona.
Lastly, you need to reach level 99, watch all of the Hideout Talk Conversations, and achieve all of the awards for each mission. This can take some time, but you can go back and replay any that you have missed if you need to.
The longest part of the trophies for myself was farming the money needed to fill out the compendium and reach level 99, however since you need to get to level 91 in NG+ anyway, I left both of these for my second run. You can make this a lot easier on yourself by before completing the last mission on your first run. Fuse Dionysus, who has an EXP bonus skill called Knack For Conflict, then fuse him into two other monsters to inherit this skill. On NG+ there is no level limit to what you can summon from the compendium, so make sure you have enough money and then as soon as you get access to the compendium, summon those personas with the Knack for Conflict Skill and equip them on your three characters. This will boost your exp enormously and I hit level 99 by the time I started the last act.
For money fuse Ganesha who has the skill “easy money”, and fuse them twice to inherit that skill. Then equip the three Persona to farm money instead of the EXP Personas. I replayed Mission 43 and put it on the easiest difficulty. With Ryuji, Morgana and Yusuke, I could kill all the enemies in two turns and earn around 35000 Yen in like 3 minutes. I just did this a few times when I needed money to finish the last few expensive fusions.
Overall I would say I did enjoy my time with Persona 5 Tactica. It was a fun little game, that didn’t overstay its welcome but didn’t really scratch the same itch the Persona games usually do for me, due to its not great characterisations of its core cast. I would recommend it if you do enjoy simple strategy games, but if you are looking for something more complex I would not look for it here. I am glad I got to go on one more adventure with the Phantom Thieves, but now more than ever, I would like to move on from them I think and get excited for the inevitable Persona 6.
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