Persona 5 is the game-turned-franchise that just keeps giving. After the success of Persona 5 Strikers, which came after Persona 5 Royal, which came after Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, we have a brand new genre-smash for fans of jazzy Japanese teens: Persona 5 Tactica!
At this point it is getting difficult keeping up with how many Persona 5 games there are, let alone which order they come in, but fortunately the timeline on this one is pretty simple. Tactica takes place after the final boss in the base Persona 5 – Royal is not canon, sadly, Dancing is a fever dream and Strikers comes after Tactica. So, essentially, Tactica is the Persona 5 pre-sequel.
For Persona 5 fans you’ll quickly find yourself sinking back into that warm-bath-feeling that is hanging out with your friends after some time apart. Oracle still makes you grin, Inari is still Inari, and it’s just nice to be back.
That said, your friends aren’t having a good time. The game starts with the Phantom Thieves being sucked into a new part of the Metaverse — a Kingdom that operate under its own distinct set of rules. Joker can no longer summon multiple personas, your comrades are captured and the turn-based combat has become tactical. What ensues is another struggle to rescue the oppressed using nothing but elbow grease, imaginary guns and a great deal of charm.
So far, Tactica is surprisingly good. While the evolution from turn-based RPG to a tactical RPG isn’t too much of a leap, the XCOM-like genre is littered with poor-quality imitations that this could easily have ended up being. Atlas is no stranger to genre-smashing and it knows what it’s doing. As with the Musuo action of P5 Strikers, this game takes a gameplay style, lavishly applies the Persona veneer, and then injects it with as much personality as a game can physically hold.
This change of tone — and genre — is evidenced from the start, with the chibi art completely changing the look and feel of the game. While this is incredibly cute, and lends itself to the idea that the rules of the other games don’t quite apply, this is still very much a Persona game.
This brings us onto the nub of the matter: Personas.
Joker can no longer use multiple Personas, and is locked into only using Arsène — that Persona he started the original game with and that we all immediately got rid of! This means that the rock-paper-scissors gameplay we’ve come to know and love has been scrapped. This may be a bit odd for a Persona game, but stick with it, because Kingdoms follow different rules to the rest of the Metaverse.
Now, after completing battles, you automatically receive spare Personas. You can fuse these in the same way as before — though now in a cool new Velvet Room called the Velvet Armory – but what’s the point if Joker can’t swap between them? Well, the new twist is that everyone can equip a single Sub-Persona. Think of this a simple version of the worst part of Final Fantasy 8, the Junction system: equipping a Sub-Persona will increase a character’s HP, SP and attack options.
This brings us to the final and most obvious change: tactical combat. This works as you would expect from any game in the genre. You move across a square-based grid, you fire off your actions or hunker down, and then you pass the turn to the enemy, which does the same. So far, so XCOM.
But, this is a Persona game, and Atlas does not want you to forget that. While the RPS element of combat is gone, the elemental attacks remain — Agi will still leave a burn and Eiha will cause Despair. But with the addition of the Partisan element, which causes Forget (enemies literally forget what they were doing) and the overhaul of Garu to now blow enemies out of cover, your options are surprisingly dense.
The story is split into a series of enclosed combat stages, which each come with a list of three objectives, including finishing within a set number of turns. With a star reward for each, Persona 5 Tactica takes on an almost puzzle-game feel which is incredibly satisfying to get a perfect score on.
This all comes together a few hours into the game, when you come across your second side quest. You’re tasked with getting one character from one end of the map to the other in a single turn by executing a very long combo. Completing that was incredibly satisfying.
We’re only a few hours into Persona 5 Tactica, but we’re very happy with how things are shaping up. There’s a lot more to explore, like the character upgrade trees, how Kingdoms tie into the overarching Metaverse and who the new characters are, but we’re running out of words and we want to get back to the game. Check back before the game releases on 17th November for the full review.
