Review: Persona 5 Tactica
by William Hernandez
Persona and tactical role-playing...yeah, it's not exactly a combination I ever expected to see. Surprisingly, though, the two things fit together a lot better than you would expect. The elements from the mainline game actually translate over fairly well and define most of the depth of the strategy. As you play through it, you can see just how perfectly they captured the spirit of the many RPG mechanics. Unfortunately, not everything is all sunshine and rainbows. Behind some very solid gameplay is a fundamentally flawed game. The flow of Persona 5 Tactica just never feels right. At its core, there's definitely something good in there. But in actual execution, there's a journey that incurs little investment. All I can wonder is...who exactly is this made for? The story just takes itself to seriously to say that it was designed solely around combat.
Enjoyability: 8/12
Coming in with no expectations, I figured that Tactica would be a short, fun, side adventure. Nothing too special probably, but the Persona brand generally comes with a certain amount of quality attached to it. And there's certainly some hints of that here, but, to be completely honest, Persona 5 Tactica isn't really all that engaging. It's borderline boring. And to be clear, it definitely is boring through parts. It's just real hard to fully enjoy the game when dialogue makes up way too large of a percentage of the experience. And no, that doesn't make it similar to Persona 5. That game gave you time to breathe and explore the world at your own pace through large chunks of time (plus, the dialogue in that game gave you a lot more reason to be interested). In Tactica, it's unavoidable after just about 10-20 minutes worth of playing through missions. There is no escaping it. So while it's definitely fun getting to cruise through new missions, play around with fusing, and try out different combinations of characters and skills, it's difficult to feel all that invested when you're regularly getting overloaded with info. But I will say, this is one of few games where I think it genuinely stands true that it gets better after a while. So if you're hooked after the first few hours, I think your experience may be a lot more positive. Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to how patient you are.
Gameplay: 11/12
As mentioned before, the gameplay is surprisingly the high point for Tactica. The design choices deserve some praise because the combat system feels great. It's not exactly intuitive (which is why they dripfeed you the mechanics for the first few hours), but you'll gradually pick up on how best to exploit the enemies' positioning. Your turns are a lot more straightforward here compared to similarly designed strategy games and only being able to use up to 3 party members is the main reason why. Your priority is always going to be acquiring One More's which you can do by attacking either exposed or status'd enemies. Not only does this allow you to move your attacking character again, but it will also allow you to setup a Triple Threat. That's basically like a Triangle Attack in the Fire Emblem games, but if you were able to move your characters around to increase the range and area of the attack. It won't always be possible to set this up, but it is by far the best crowd control available to you.
Speaking of crowd control, Persona skills have a wide variety of useful effects that can help you manage enemies in different ways. This, of course, helps differentiates the characters early on, but with sub-Personas you can build the entire party around your personal desires. So if you want Ryuji to be a pocket healer, by all means. A lot of things have been streamlined to make this game accessible even to players completely new to strategy games. Hit rate, for example, is either 0% or 100% with no in between. In my opinion, stuff like this doesn't really make the experience feel lesser than other games, but I don't think it's that crazy to say that Persona 5 Tactica obviously isn't going to be the pinnacle of what strategy games can offer. Still, though, missions feel really good to play out and the amount of customization is really nice.
Atmosphere: 10/12
If there's one thing that Persona games can always capture well, it's the atmosphere. It's hard to explain, but it's easy to feel if you've played any of the games out of Persona 3, 4 or 5. The music, the settings, the characters - everything culminates together into a very signature vibe. The mood can get really dark and depressing, but I'd say that the series is defined by maintaining an upbeat cheeriness despite the heavy subject matters that the games get to. And the music...the music is always good even if it's hard to ascribe an exact genre to it. Persona 5 Tactica benefits greatly by borrowing multiple tracks from the base game of Persona 5, adding in a good amount of remixes to suit the scenery a little better. The soundtrack, however, is more than good enough on its own right. When you don't even want to leave the battle prep screen because the music's so good, you know that they've done something right. There are no let downs in that department.
The characters and the environments, on the other hand, leave something to be desired. I suppose that's just natural with a spinoff. There isn't exactly a whole lot about the new characters that is of much intrigue to start. There is some gradual build-up, but it's a bit too slow to really sway your opinions much. The villains feel like charicatures of what Persona 5 was able to do with its main bosses. The grandiosity is captured well, but there isn't too much emotion there. After Marie, there just isn't too much time invested into the antagonists. The different settings are somewhat interesting; though, you don't really get to interact too much with them. The worldbuilding just isn't really there. You just get thrown into the mix of things and have to accept it as your new reality. The map diversity does eventually become really nice, though, and the monotony of the early missions slowly wears off.
Design: 9/12
Plenty of tactical RPGs struggle to provide the player different win conditions. It's difficult to stray away too much from the standard formula because it can easily break immersion or end up a major annoyance more than anything. Persona 5 Tactica doesn't really care about that, though, and it's for the better within the game. The missions are short enough anyway that you don't really end up caring if you have to defeat all the enemies or escort a certain character or item to a set goal. You won't really get exhausted or tired playing through the story missions as there's more than enough variety to keep things from getting boring. Even when the difficulty spikes out of nowhere, that just has you thinking more seriously about your actions which isn't a bad thing at all. Now, the sidequest missions are a different beast. A lot of quests in this game require strict actions to get an effective perfect turn. Whether the turn limit is 1 or 3, you lose if you don't beat all the enemies by then. From an ethereal perspective, it's not a bad thing to design missions like this. That said, it's a bit too unfriendly to players especially when it's not a one-off and actually a large portion of early missions. You're asking a lot from players when you want them to sit through multiple game over screens trying to do everything exactly right. You know what that makes people do? It makes them look up the answer. Yeah, not conducive to a fun session of gaming.
Direction: 7/12
Jumping off the last point, Tactica doesn't give you much incentive to keep playing the game. You basically just go until you get burnt out by everything the game throws at you. While the actual story missions are more than tolerable, very few other things are keeping your interest up. Managing your party's abilities is cool and all, but that lasts for so little after every little battle. The quests would be a fun little diversion if not for the fact that it requires you to think even more than the story most of the time. And if you really want to move the story ahead, you need to be ready to listen to 8 minutes worth of dialogue. Almost every single time. And to be clear, the problem isn't necessarily that they just talk too much. No, the real problem is that the story just takes itself way too seriously given the uninteresting premise. It takes a long time for the story to even actually come together. There's just no need to tell so much when they could have shown things off instead. We don't need to know about every single detail. I'm glad that Toshiro gets fleshed out more and more, but it's almost too much to put up with just to get to the climax.
