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Persona 5 Tactica review: middling turn-based strategy built for Persona-likersAn easy excuse
An easy excuse
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Sega
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Sega
Your energy forPersona 5 Tacticais going to come down to how much tolerance you have for the Persona 5 brand’s Baz Luhrmann-style maximalism. If you’re emotionally invested in the gang, it’ll definitely help. But even if you’re a Persona veteran or a total newcomer, you’ll find the story a bit loose, the chats a bit tiring, and the combat a bit simplistic. Then again, if you’re a Persona fan, it’s still more than a good excuse to sink back into another adventure with your pals.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Sega
So, if you don’t happen to have Persona fever, how does it stand on its own as a turn-based strategy game? Honestly, it would be overly generous to call Persona 5 Tactica a strategy game, as most of the stages are incredibly slight, and are often set-up for one specific approach: enemy soldiers love to stand around their prone comrades, setting themselves up to be wiped out in an all-out attack, that involves nothing more than surrounding them in a triangle formation. It feels more like a puzzle game with simple solutions, designed to enable a steady trickle of endorphins as you identify the ‘correct’ placements and moves.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Sega
One snappy holdover from the main game’s combat is the “One More”, which grants you another move if you’re able to lower an enemy’s defences or defeat them outright - which usually leads to satisfying cascades of actions as you overwhelm the opposition. The same can be done to you of course, if you are somehow ever caught out in the open, which is fleetingly rare given the game’s overabundance of invincible cover.
Outside of combat, there is little to do other than chat to your comrades, tinker with their equipment and abilities, or engage with the heavily truncated persona fusion system. Unlike Persona 5, Tactica’s persona system limits characters to a single sub-Persona each, which bestows an extra spell or skill buff. Character building in general is also a very minor distraction, with simple character-specific skill trees. You can only have three active party members on the field at any given time, and while they all have certain traits, you’ll be able to make it through most battles with even the most poorly thought out team composition.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Sega
Even diehard fans of the Persona 5 may find this a tough hang, and strategy heads who are perhaps looking for a way into Persona 5 won’t find it particularly nourishing either. If you’re a turn-based strategy enthusiast, there are dozens of examples with richer tactical depths. If you likeJRPGsfor their stories, there are hundreds of better written epics out there. If you wanted something that competently merged an unexpected IP with X-COM mechanics, you could playMarvel’s Midnight Suns.
Of course, if you consider the talking cat and the computer girl close personal friends then any excuse to spend more time with them is a good excuse, and all of these shortfalls won’t matter in the slightest. We’re in a world of rapidly depleting and fleeting pleasures, so in the grand scheme of things, an aggressively mid turn-based strategy game is a fairly low price to pay.
