14 DAY TRIAL // 
Persona 5 fans rejoice! Atlus once again decided to launch yet another spinoff of the popular game that initially debuted over seven years ago in Japan. It is yet another milking of the same cow, with not real updates about the seventh episode of the series. But can the adventures of the Phantom Thieves get reheated for a warm welcome?
The developers seem to be keen on repurposing the current team of Phantom Thieves to any popular game genre of the moment. After seeing them in a welcome extended edition, a slightly odd rhythm game, a relatively unknown dungeon crawler and musou fight sidestep, now we have the chance to admire our heroes as chibis on a tactical battlefield.
It might seem that the publisher is just squeezing out any profit left from the Persona 5 that by itself sold over 7 million copies, we have to admit that the various iterations were fresh enough to keep our attention pinned to the franchise, and the quality of the final product was high enough to justify the price. And just as its preceding spin-offs, Persona 5 Tactica delivers the magic and pristine production value we grew to expect from P Studio.
Once again, real-world politics and social events have an unexpected effect on the life of our teenage vigilante gang. This time around though they seem to land in the thick of the action unwillingly and by total surprise. As a result, the format seems familiar, resembling castles and their rulers who’s hearts need to be stolen, but the rules of the game have actually changed. This becomes painfully obvious when shortly after starting the game our hero and Morgana are stripped of their companions.
Forced to retreat to a mysterious resistance hideout that turns out to be Café LeBlanc itself, our heroes form a new alliance with the rebel leader Erina. Using her network and connections, and with an expected help from the Velvet Room’s residents they start on the quest to free their friends from mind control and uncover what roles plays Toshiro in all this – him being a familiar face, but not encountered directly so far.
As suggested by its title the new episode focuses on a tactical approach presenting a turn-based gameplay. Instead of exploring the halls of palaces fighting shadows, now our heroes have to deal with larger battle spaces, full of crates and other objects that offer tactical options. From the limited movement to the ability to find cover and use the environment to hurt their opponents, the new gameplay challenges every player’s inner tactician.
You will venture into the combat heavy action with teams of three heroes, but as a novelty, your main character’s presence isn’t mandatory anymore. And not just Joker but the others will need the rest as well, since Persona 5 appears as an almost infinite chain of tactical battles, with a growing difficulty level.
A peculiar choice from the developers is the streamlining of the gameplay down to two elements, battles and preparation phases during which you can chat with your companions and manage the equipment and abilities of your characters. The big missing element is exploration, an absence that will make itself felt pretty quick, Persona 5 dictating quite a monotonous pace.
Although as you adventure further and further in the story, you will visit new places these are nothing more than fresher settings for the tactical battles. Instead of exploring these new places, you are confined to the inside of the LeBlanc stuffed with menus and dialogue bubbles, with no trace of organic interaction.
The new battle system, the ability of any character to use multiple Personas and the new development options although interesting fail to break the monotonous tempo, and Persona 5 becomes the hardest to digest episode of the series. It is a great tactical game with a great story, that this time around is delivered in a mechanical way.
Even the side quests and other secondary activities mainly involve nothing else but fighting another group of enemies. Some of them have different objectives, while others take you into Arena like scenarios, but even so everything seem to be reduced to just tactical battles. As a result, even longtime fans of the series will feel that this new spin-off requires a lot of mastication.
The random drops through which the Personas are obtained do not help the pacing, that also encumbers the use of the Velvet to fuse and upgrade these powerful entities. To stretch out things even more, the game requires frequent use of the replay function to gather money and XP needed to level-up your characters.
The Good
- Great story with interesting characters
- Catchy visual style and sound track
- Engaging combat system
The Bad
- Monotonous pace due to the lack of exploration
- Repetitive with no real variety of the side content
- Steep difficulty curve
Conclusion
Yet somewhere along the way the focus shifted too much towards the battle and had a somewhat negative impact on the pacing, the atmosphere and the player engagement in general. Persona 5 is the most repetitive and monotonous iteration released by Atlus so far.
Review key provided by CD Media.
