Persona 5 Tactica Review: One More Time With Feeling

I didn’t really know what to expect from Persona 5 Tactica when starting it up for the first time. I’m a big fan of Persona 5 so I was curious what the scope of another spin-off sequel would be. I mean, what was left for the Phantom Thieves to say after the absolute slam-dunk ending of Persona 5 Royal that wasn’t also said in the pseudo-sequel Persona 5 Strikers? In the early hours of Tactica: not much, but after I let the story find its feet and the credits rolled at the end of my 24-hour playthrough, I walked away pretty satisfied.

While I don’t think that Persona 5 Tactica leads with its best foot forward from a story standpoint, it won me over with its surprisingly solid tactics combat, a story with a powerful emotional core, and its flashy animations of the Phantom Thieves in all of their now chibi-fied glory.

The group of people to address first when talking about Persona 5 Tactica are the current Persona 5 fans. This is a game that doesn’t share much DNA with the base game in terms of its actual mechanics. There are no social links, places to explore, mini-games to get invested in, or any other social sim elements of the sort. Tactica is a tactics game through and through and doesn’t shy away from that at all, for better and for worse.

If you were drawn to the Persona series due to its focus on its social elements, there won’t be much for you to grip onto here. That said, if you, like me, are a fan of the main cast of characters from Persona 5 and are fine with simply reading the story that Tactica tells as a visual novel without much of a chance to actually interact with or spend one-on-one time with the characters, then you’ll enjoy the narrative that’s being told.

That all said, I found the first few hours to be a little slow and sort of sloppy from a storytelling perspective as the game teaches you how to use its combat system. Taking place after the events of the base version of Persona 5, but before the events of Persona 5 Strikers, the Phantom Thieves are all hanging out at cafe Leblanc when they’re suddenly transported to the Metaverse even though that’s supposed to be impossible after they shut it down at the end of P5. The crew finds themselves in a Kingdom ruled by a hot-headed bride named Marie, which they make sure to point out is totally different from all the Palaces with evil rulers that the Phantom Thieves fought previously despite being almost entirely the same.

After a bit of fighting Marie’s goons, Joker and company team up with a rebel leader named Erina to free the kingdom from Marie’s evil rule. Along the way, they pick up a politician who went missing in the real world named Toshiro. Once Toshiro joins the group, the story starts picking up as you begin to realize that you’re stuck inside Toshiro’s cognition. This, as the premise of Persona 5 Tactica’s story, works really, really well since it means that every new discovery about the world that the characters are stuck in doubles as a discovery about Toshiro and Erina, both of whom have quickly become favorites of mine in the Persona canon.

While things start out pretty slow, the twists and turns of the narrative offer a lot of the base game’s joy of hanging out with the Phantom Thieves, despite the complete lack of social mechanics in the game. Things ramp up pretty drastically toward the end, but by that point, I was already firmly invested in all the characters and their drama, and everything wraps up with a satisfying and surprisingly emotional narrative conclusion. The original voice cast is back and doing outstanding work as always, bringing a lot of life to the colorful cast of the Phantom Thieves and both Leeanna Albanese and MacLeod Andrews give standout performances as Erina and Toshiro, respectively.

A New Kind Of Combat For The Phantom Thieves

While I’m a certified expert in Persona 5 lore and can talk about how P5T fits into the messy canon all day, I’m fairly new to tactics games. Over recent years, I’ve played my fair share of them with Marvel’s Midnight Suns being a big personal highlight, but I’m far from a definitive voice to listen to when discussing how Persona 5 Tactica measures up to the standards of other recent games in the genre. That said, I really liked the tactical combat, in fact, I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Persona 5 Tactica’s combat is simple and mostly based around finding cover on the battlefield. Essentially, there are three statuses you can have at the end of a turn: fully in cover, which means any enemies attacking you from the direction you’re taking cover from can’t hit you; partially in cover, which means they can hit you but you’ll take reduced damage; and not in cover which, if hit, means you’ll take critical damage and the attacker will get an additional turn.

All these rules mostly apply to your enemies as well, which means that a lot of the combat is devoted to knocking enemies out of cover so that you can get a “One More” and attack/reposition again. Once an enemy is knocked down, you can perform the Phantom Thieves’ signature “All Out Attack” by surrounding them to finish them off. If other enemies are caught in the crossfire, they’ll take massive damage and will usually just flat-out die which means that I spent a lot of my time debating how to best position my team to take advantage of the All Out Attacks.

True mastery of Persona 5 Tactica’s combat comes when you’re chaining multiple One More’s together and finishing off large groups of enemies with an All Out Attack. I found the system to be really satisfying, especially the first time that I cleared an entire stage in just two turns by hitting a few One More’s and wiping out the entire arena with a well-placed All Out Attack that caught every single enemy on the field in the crossfire. While I wasn’t rewarded with much in game for my effort, I still found the personal satisfaction of being so efficient rewarding.

That’s the gist of things. A lot more complexity is added when using Persona attacks that add various additional effects like Morgana’s wind-based powers, which can sweep enemies out of cover from afar, and when more enemy variety is added. Different enemies require different things to be downed, so the game is constantly adding new problems for you to solve. All-in-all, the actual ideas of combat are quite simple, but Tactica does a lot to build on those more simple ideas, creating combat encounters that, toward the second half of the game especially, feel like playing a really good game of chess.

The level design is also pretty solid, which adds an additional layer of puzzliness to each encounter. Some levels have a lot of verticality to them, which changes the way that the cover system works; some have doors that can only be opened when standing on pressure switches, while other levels reduce your ability to use specific skills unless you destroy loudspeakers placed around the arena. I found myself excited each time the setting changed, since I knew that there would be interesting level mechanics to engage with that would add another layer of complexity to the combat.

I was playing very deliberately and, when I wasn’t paying attention, I’d get totally punished for it.

In terms of difficulty, I didn’t die very much in my time with the game, but when I did, I usually had something close to a full party wipe. I think that’s a good sign because it means that I was playing very deliberately and that when I wasn’t paying attention, I’d get totally punished for it. Even though I didn’t struggle too much with the game, I’d wager that was because I was so engaged with the mechanics, making sure I was playing my absolute best. That said, the AI is pretty dumb and sometimes would ignore my big mistakes in favor of simply repositioning which felt like I was getting away with sloppy play from time to time.

I also didn’t engage much with the optional challenge missions. These optional encounters are called “quests,” but the ones I played didn’t actually add any additional story content, so I didn’t spend much time doing them.

If you’re looking for additional challenges outside of the main game, I’d recommend completing quests as often as possible, since they do ramp up the difficulty pretty significantly and the individual level challenge requirements for the main missions are pretty barebones. They almost always require the same three things: clear the level, complete the level without losing a team member, and complete it in a set amount of turns. Those challenges are usually pretty easy to do since the first one listed isn’t even a challenge, it’s just the goal of each encounter.

If you’re playing well, you shouldn’t be losing too many teammates (you have three available in each encounter, but if they die, they get replaced by one of the Phantom Thieves in reserve) so the second challenge is also not adding much. The only actual challenge that means something is the one that asks you to complete each level in a set amount of turns since it really pushes you to engage with the One More and All Out Attack mechanics.

Battle Prep

Before each battle, you’ll stop by your home base, a cognitive version of Leblanc, where you can buy Persona skills for each of your teammates with skill points earned from combat, buy them new guns, and create new Personas in the signature Velvet Room. In Persona 5 Tactica, you earn new Personas at the end of each combat encounter, and can fuse them together like normal to create more powerful summons.

Unlike the other games in the Persona 5 series, the Personas in your inventory can be assigned to all of the Phantom Thieves, not just Joker, but each character can only equip one at a time, Joker included. When assigned, each character adopts the skills and stats of that Persona, which allows you to get really granular with what sort of strengths you want each character to have. For example, you can add several healing and ability buff skills to a character to put them in a designated support role, which works best for characters that already have a high base stat for MP. Unfortunately, I don’t think the Persona crafting and assignment system works very well in this style of game.

I could have spent all the time in the world perfectly crafting Personas for each of my squad mates, but after just a few battles, they’d all be severely under-leveled and worth replacing. After the first few hours of the game, I figured that I was better off relying on the skills that each character has from their skill trees, and assigning my highest-level Personas at random to my squad. It’s cool that P-Studio was able to translate the Persona-crafting mechanics into the game, which will certainly be appreciated by long-time fans, but I just don’t think it amounts to much in this particular game.

The soundtrack and visuals of Persona 5 Tactica are as good as ever with a handful of new great vocal tracks by Lyn that really stood out to me. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the chibi art style that the entire game adopts, but I came to really like it. It’s got a Scott Pilgrim feel that I can really appreciate and it makes each character easy to recognize from a distance while surveying the battlefield.

…makes every encounter feel like it was designed by a studio with years of tactics experience under its belt.

At the end of the day, Persona 5 Tactica more than earns its place as a part of the Persona canon, though where it lands in terms of being actually considered canon with its lack of Sumire from Royal, I’m not sure. The story is pretty straightforward, focusing on a single character’s life, but the narrative it tells is well-written, and the Phantom Thieves are as fun as ever to spend more time with. The tactics combat system that the game adopts is simple but flashy, and makes every encounter feel like it was designed by a studio with years of tactics experience under its belt.

If you’re looking for more Persona 5 in terms of its gameplay stylings, you won’t find it here, but if you’re not afraid to branch out to a new style of gameplay and let the story stumble for a minute before it finds its legs, then Persona 5 Tactica is worth your time. It won’t run you anywhere near as long as the base game will or even as long as Persona 5 Strikers will, but as a smaller side story, it’s a game that’s begging to be played.