Persona 5 Tactica

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Persona 5 Tactica, released in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is an XCOM-style Turn-Based Strategy-RPG and spin-off of Persona 5, once again having players follow the story of Joker and his ragtag gang of teenage friends, The Phantom Thieves, as they find themselves pulled into an alternate world they end up simply calling The Kingdom, where they must face a new threat while trying to understand how this world works, and trying to figure out how to return home.

All of this is to say that this game’s story acts as a bottle episode of sorts that doesn’t seem like it’ll have much bearing on the Persona 5 story after this, unlike Persona 5 Strikers, which felt more like a continuation of Persona 5’s story. In other words, this game’s story is one that will mostly appeal to fans of Persona 5, but doesn’t feel like a significant chapter in the story.

As if to underline how disposable Persona 5 Tactica is, the game’s presentation uses slightly chibi-style character designs reminiscent of what we saw in Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, a divisive choice given that one of Persona 5’s more popular elements is its slick style. Apart from the character designs and the somewhat simplified 3D used for the game’s battles, much of that style is still present here, with nice-looking menus and menu transitions, nice 3D animation for its characters, along with a really catchy soundtrack mixing new songs and remixes of songs from Persona 5. Some standouts here include Revolution in Your Heart, Beneath the Mask, Tension, Fall Out, Hideout – 1st, and Infiltrate, to name a few. Overall, there are some really strong elements to the presentation, but the choice to go chibi is going to undermine that for some players.

For the gameplay, Persona 5 Tactica’s closest point of reference would likely be the Mario + Rabbids franchise, as Persona 5 Tactica similarly takes a more lighthearted and slightly-cartoony take on XCOM-style Strategy-RPG gameplay, where combat takes place in turns and characters can move freely within a radius to line up shots on enemies, with cover playing a major part of the gameplay.

While the series’ titular persona demons are still present here, and you can still collect and combine them in the series’ signature Velvet Room, they take a back seat to this game’s core gameplay, which places an emphasis on proper positioning, and taking advantage of landing a critical hit to execute a devastating three-character combination attack.

This kinda’ leads to one of my major complaints about this game – as with the personas, Persona 5 Tactica gets away from many of the major gameplay elements that made Persona 5 popular to begin with. There’s no relationship-building, no time management element, and the game’s progression is rigidly linear in a way that doesn’t give players the freedom to develop their team the way they may want.

Speaking of the team, the way this game limits players to using only three characters on each map feels highly limiting as well, and while a character limit in standard Turn-Based RPG battles makes sense, once you change it to a Strategy-RPG it seems much more forced, and this game lacks the fun character movement abilities that were in the Mario + Rabbids games too.

Finally, I have to mention how slow-paced this game’s progression is. Four hours into the game, I felt like I was still in the tutorial, and still wondering when the game was going to show me how to get new personas. This slow pacing is inflated by a lot of conversation scenes with static images of characters where the discussion often seems to go in circles talking about the same stuff repeatedly, and where the game gives the player numerous conversation choices that seem to have little effect on the story. I feel like any decent editor could have taken a hatchet to over half of this game’s dialogue without losing anything of value.

Overall, I really like Persona 5 Tactica, and think this game had a lot of potential, but it keeps getting in its own way with questionable design choices, removing beloved elements from the franchise it’s a spin-off of, and stuffing in way too much babble to slow the game’s pacing to a crawl. Fans of Persona 5 and fans of games like Mario + Rabbids will still likely find there’s plenty to love here, but it definitely feels like this could have been a much better game than it ended up becoming.

tl;dr – Persona 5 Tactica is an XCOM-style Turn-Based Strategy-RPG that has some creative gameplay mechanics and some satisfying strategic combat, but that also minimizes or ditches a lot of the elements that made Persona 5 popular, and stuffs the game with far too much inconsequential dialogue that slows its pacing to a crawl. Fans of Persona 5 and Strategy-RPGs will still likely enjoy this, but it’s disappointing that this feels like it could have been a much better game.

Grade: B-

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