Persona 5 Tactica is spin off from Persona 5 and it takes place after the events of Persona 5. It focuses on the Phantom Thieves who are transported into the metaverse and must defeat the Legionaries, a group of corrupt rulers who plan on taking over Japan and it is up to these fearless warriors to stop once again to stop the power hungry elites.
Just like every other Persona Spin off, it is canon and there are a few moments of call backs from the original game and the plot is quite familiar as well. It’s the same story themes as before with rebellion and oppression. A more current concept is introduced showing what happens when justice goes too far aka, cancel culture. The game shows how disastrous the effects of cancel culture can be and how it impacts the lives of those impacted by this new phenomenon. The game’s story is almost like the music album Mr Morales And The Big Steppers where it focuses on entering a certain person’s mind and trying to resolve whatever conflicts they are going through.
The new characters weren’t that great or memorable and knowing Persona, they aren’t going to be coming back anytime soon. Otherwise, the characters are more or less the same as before and Morgana is still as obnoxious as ever and same goes for Ryuji too. There was quite a bit of filler dragging things out longer than necessary. Not helping either was its lack of mission variety and over reliance on defeating enemies at a certain amount of turns, especially with another over reliance on spam attacks and reinforcements every few minutes.
Some of the map designs were too cryptic and were more frustrating than fun. Otherwise, the combat is straight forward enough and easy to learn. The voice acting is as good as ever, the same really cannot be said for the localization as its littered with so much gen-z terms that it’s really not going to age well. The same series flaw too of character dialogue choices not mattering is still there sadly.
The graphics and art style are based on the Persona Q series which is pretty good.
The gameplay is tactical based and it’s the first time ATLUS has worked on a tactical genre game in ages since Devil Survivor. The press turn system where exploiting enemy weaknesses for bonus moves is there again. You can take on quests but the economy is limited to just purchasing weapons and that’s it, the rest of the status you get is during battle. Fusion of Personas function the same as before and you can even convert Personas into weapons.
The game doesn’t have the kind of wide variety that the original series has. You can interact with your teammates but that’s it, this isn’t exactly the open world of the previous games.
There’s a voltage meter where it builds up after a few turns to unleash a powerful attack. The all out attacks are back too. There is a perk system where you can unlock more abilities the more you fight in combat and you can replay previous sections of the game. The music is excellent and the user interface as always looks amazing. The game does have content that was in game but was locked by DLC unfortunately. In fact, even the game localization team kind of went rogue and taking shots at DLC culture which honestly was really surprising as I never seen that. If anything, this is something the Phantom Thieves would not have been happy with dlc knowing their beliefs.
Overall this was a decent spin off.
It gets 3 out of 5 stars.
I think by now, ATLUS really should give Persona 3 to 5 a break and if there is going to be another Persona 5 game, at least have it set in the winter just for one last time since Strikers mentioned they’ll meet up again. Also resolve the plot holes and missing chances for story elaboration that Strikers and Persona 5 missed out on.
Otherwise, ATLUS is supposedly working on not one but two Persona games meaning that its most likely going to be Persona 6 and maybe Persona 1 or 2 being remade after Persona 3’s remake comes out. So ATLUS, really needs to get it together and cut down on the hyperfocus of Persona/smt and start to focus on their older titles again soon enough because there’s only so much you can do with a franchise before people get bored of it.