Persona 5 Tactica - Let's Talk Review
So, let’s talk about Persona 5 Tactica.
Tactica is a pretty fun game that has some solid gameplay, a spunky art style, and an interesting story, but is missing some things that could have taken this game to another level. While I did enjoy the game, I found that it overstays it’s welcome by the time the credits roll, even with a rather modest runtime.
Story and Characters - 5.5
Solid, but gets repetitive, and feels stretched out to be way longer than it should be.
The story is an interesting look into a young politician who is little more than a puppet for this fiancé and father’s ambitions. You might think it strange that a game with the name Persona 5 wouldn’t dive into one of the main characters of the original game, but if you think about it, these are mostly extremely well-established and developed characters, it almost wouldn’t make sense without a new central conflict for them. Instead, the story is rather free to focus on Erina, a mysterious rebel from the world you are transported to, and Toshiro, the aforementioned politician.
This actually works pretty well given that we know who the rest of the cast is, and a retread of their stories would be pretty unnecessary. If you are playing this game, you likely played through at least part of Persona 5, or as far as both 5 and Royal. This story certainly fits in the main theme of Persona 5, and while you might be able to see the twist coming, like I did, pretty early on, I think it’s interesting, nonetheless.
What starts to get old with the story is it seems to meander in circles a bit more than I’d like. Characters state the same thing in different ways right after one another, because it seems like they didn’t want any of the OG Persona 5 cast to feel left out. What you end up with by the middle of the game are rather static visual novel-style cut scenes that drag on about 5 minutes too long every time. To be honest, I started fast forwarding through a lot of the side dialogue since it usually boiled down to something interesting, and then everyone reacts seven times, or a joke that just didn’t land quite right, with very little of consequences other than flavor for the story.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff here, but it feels padded and stretched to fill time. That’s something so radically at odds with how Persona 5 and Royal used cut scene time, and generally how well Persona period uses story-heavy sections. Even side content in Persona 5 feels meaningful, and like it is helping to build a much stronger story overall. The social links are fascinating, generally every activity you engage in feels worthwhile and earned. Tactica is much weaker in this regard, and as a result feels overlong by several hours, even when it is a fraction of the runtime.
Art Direction - 7
No issues, really. I liked it, but nothing was a stellar stand out. It's consistent, and solid in quality. Literally nothing to hate here.
I know the art style isn’t going to be for everyone, but I like the SD-like art style. I love the art direction in Persona 5, but something about this just seems to fit the genre a bit better since you can see who is on the board, and where, much easier than if you had the more, at times, spindly figures of the main cast. I feel like it was a smart choice in that regard, and I like that they stuck with that style through the whole composition. It would have been jarring to switch to, say, the Persona 5 portraits after seeing the Tactica figures on the board.
But don’t let the more cutesy art style think that Tactica shies away from the more heavy subject matter Persona 5 dives into. There is a pretty serious story here that some people might find pretty close to home.
Sound and music is pretty much what you would come to expect from a Persona game. I can’t say I’ve found any new favorites, but there’s a pretty neat lo-fi remix of "Beneath The Mask", my personal favorite piece from Persona 5, that’s definitely worth a listen. “Tension” and and “Fallout” were pretty good also. I expect there’s more goodies in here, this is just what sticks out in my mind.
Gameplay - 6
Solid bones, but missing some finer details that would add so much more depth and cut how repetitive it gets.
Being a totally different genre of game from Persona 5, there’s, of course, very different mechanics at play here. You typically work with team of 3 characters to dominate and crush a field of baddies. Everyone has a certain set of abilities, as you might expect, and different ranges that they are able to engage from. So yes, maybe you like being able to blast dudes with Haru’s grenade launcher, but Yusuke can shoot target twice as far away. Maybe you like the high damage Makoto can bring down on a single target, but if you have a bunch of target clustered together, you might get a lot more out of Ryuji or Ann peppering an area with their shotgun, or SMG, respectively. This is super solid since just on a basic level, each character has their own niche. Each character also has a certain movement range, which can be pretty crucial depending on the objective of the mission, or effectively clearing the battlefield. Sure Haru’s firepower is awesome, but her five tile movement is very restrictive in the early game.
Where this game really shines is in character progression. Tactica actually has a progression tree, which adds more persona skills, buffs, or straight up upgrades. This can get pretty powerful very quickly. Depending on how you spend your points, you could get Auto-Masuku on Yusuke almost immediately, adding extra movement to the entire team from the get-go. This is super busted when you stack other upgrades as well, adding more range, or base movement speed to the other characters, and many, many other effects that can radically change how your units work. If you ask me, I want to see a system like this, but expanded, in Persona 6. It is just that good. The one thing that has always bothered me about Persona is how little control you have with what your characters can learn and how they progress. This fixes all of that without compromising the difficulty curve, or making the character lose their personality or niche. Want Yusuke to learn Mabufula straight away? Sure, put the points there, but you will miss out on other things that can make a huge difference too. Best of all, you can refund the points you put into something and put them into another skill or upgrade on the tree. This enables trial and error with builds, and encourages you to try shuffling things up to find stronger and more effective upgrades for what you need to do. It is probably my favorite thing in the game.
Enhancing this, you can now assign other Persona to the entire team. This doesn’t replace their personal Persona, like Makoto doesn’t lose Johanna when you assign Jack Frost to her. Instead, Makoto gets access to what ever abilities and buffs Frost has, including boosts to health, SP, Melee, and Gun Damage. This means, say you want everyone on the team to have a healing skill, you can do that with either their own progression tree, or with second Persona you assign them. Again, this is a pretty sick idea since it opens build possibilities that much more. No longer do you have to hoard power on MC-kun, let your team enjoy blasting dudes with Lucifer, or Sraosha. This is all done, though, in a streamlined form, since all persona have only two ability slots. So you aren’t going to have a mile-long skill list to pick from when you hit Persona. I really like this add since it helps shore up gaps in the team, and can make any team member that much more viable.
Being a strategy game, positioning is critical to execute your targets, or protect against damage. The maps start out simple enough, but eventually get pretty big, and have elevators and so on thrown in to add another dimension to the how you execute a board. However, this takes a new scope when you unlock Triple Threat attacks, this games take on All Out attacks. Basically, your three team members connect in a triangle wherever they are placed on the board, with each team member acting as a point in the triangle. Now, if you get an enemy in a Down state, which is done in a variety of ways, and you get that enemy in the triangle, you can trigger a Triple Threat, dealing massive damage to any target in the triangle, whether they are downed or not. This makes up the lion’s share of the damage you will do in the game, especially as you upgrade your characters to up their movement speed as you can position your units in a way that catches a large group of enemies at the same time. One time I cleared nearly half the board in a single Triple Threat just with smart positioning. This becomes the primary thing you are hunting for opportunities for in the game. Open a target to a crit, critical strike them to down them, make your triangle as big as possible, and then massacre.
However, while I like this formula, I feel like something is missing here. While they bring back the different elemental attacks, they are largely status deliver mechanisms and guard breakers. No enemies have elemental or status weaknesses or strengths, and neither do you. That’s all been replaced by being safe in cover, or not. While this is a good pressure on positioning, it feels odd not having type weaknesses in mind to exploit, or fear of getting hit by something you are weak to. The absence doesn’t make the game too easy, but I feel like it would have really pushed how crucial cover and positioning is to have fire variants of an enemy threatening to melt Yusuke, and so on. Maybe they were worried about making the game overly complicated? I could understand that, but I feel like there’s enough run time here to introduce that layer in natural course as the game gets more complicated.
I do like how some of the effect work with the Persona abilities. Vortex(Nuke) actually pulls others in the attack radius to the central target, which is super helpful when setting up Triple Threats. Sweep(Wind) does the opposite, blowing others away, etc. The thing is, though, it would have been really interesting to have to think about type resistance and weaknesses on top of the pure utility of a move.
There’s 6 major enemy unit types, not counting bosses. If that doesn’t seem like much, that’s because it isn’t. By the end of the game, you are going to me all too familiar with them. While each certainly fills a role, and can make for some great challenges and puzzles to solve based in the enemy makeup, it just feels weird seeing, usually, the same three enemy types over and over with no additional flavor to them, with the other three thrown in to stir the pot here and there. That’s why I think type weaknesses and resistances would have made a big difference. Simply having a Shielder immune to Gun damage, for example, makes a massive change up to the enemy since you can’t just out flank from a mile away with Yusuke and snipe em with his rifle.
Also, and I hate to say this since I thought the maps were pretty solid, for the most part, some stages are reused a bit more than I’d like. This is especially painful in the last ten missions of the game since they are reskins of the same map you have already seen, but with different enemies. For some it was nice to have another stab at that map with a higher level of ability, but others were just OK the first time, and not welcome the second. Plus, spoilers, you get to play the first three bosses all over again. Sure they each have a bit of a twist, but it just feels like you are wasting time a bit. I get that they wanted a stronger build up to the final boss, but having to go through the first three bosses again to get there just left a bad taste in my mouth, especially the boss you just beat, like, three hours ago in game time.
As a final note here, there's a set of optional objectives every main mission, like beat the level in 5 turns, or don't lose any teammates, that gives bonus rewards for beating a stage. What kind of sucks is they never step beyond a time limit, or don't lose anyone. It would have been fun to have something like "Perform 8 Triple Threat Attacks" or "Down X number of enemies in a single turn", you know, something that really would push your skills. Instead, you are stuck with pretty simple, easily achievable objectives. I typically was able to beat most levels in half the turn target they put up as a challenge. To be fair, I figured out a pretty broken combo between Makoto, MC-kun, and Yusuke that just shredded the game. So maybe other team combos wouldn't be quite so efficient.
Value for Money - 6
Decent runtime for the money, but I'd wait and get it on sale if I didn't have it on Game Pass.
Games on Game Pass are always going to make it a little hard to rate this properly, since the value you can get out of any game on Game Pass is just stellar, whether it is a one and done, or something you play every day.
Instead, I’ll ask myself how I would feel if I paid full price for this. I am not sure I’d be super happy, but there is a good chunk of game here. I personally put in about 80 hours into it. I tend to play through things slow since I’m usually watching TV, or talking with family at the same time. So I bet for most there’s about 40-60 hours of game here. While that’s practically anemic compared to Persona 5, but compared to what most full priced games offer for what they charge in this age, I think Tactica isn’t bad. While the quality of that time has some bumps and scratches, I’d say it is far from time wasted.
$60 isn’t bad, but if I didn’t have Game Pass, I’d personally be waiting for a sale to even the scales a bit there. With little in the way of replay value, I think a 6 is fair here.
Personal Enjoyment - 7
A good time, but is missing some things that really would have helped it step above. Plus the repetitive nature started to get really old.
I did enjoy the game, but I feel like there’s too many misses to be able to rank it higher on personal enjoyment. The fact that I felt like I had to fast forward through entire cut scenes, when I never skipped a single line of dialogue in Persona 5 Royal is pretty shocking to me. And it isn’t even that this feels phoned in or anything, it is just that there’s so much wasted time in many of the cut scenes that it became a chore to get through them, and I got through them all.
Persona 5 is a pretty unfair comparison to Tactica, since the scope is so different, but what I loved the most about Persona is the challenge of choice. You have limited time to do so many different things in so many different ways. None of that is here. So, your choice to listen to characters talk about XYZ thing, while it may give you more upgrades points, or something else, doesn’t feel like it matters. That’s not Persona, and I think that was always tossing and turning in the back of my mind.
With a few tweaks, I think this really could have been something special. Instead, it’s pretty good, with some anchors holding it back.
Overall Score - 6.3
It kind of hurts to hit it with a score that low, but when it comes down to it, I was pretty over the game by the time the credits rolled. I really don’t see myself playing it again. Whereas when I finished Persona 5, I immediately was thinking about how I would use my time differently, or how I would change things up. I don’t see much, if any, reason to New Game Plus this, or even go back and experiment. Honestly, I’m not even sure I want to bother with the DLC, and that probably would tell you a lot about my takeaway.
In the end, I don’t regret playing it, and I did enjoy the game, I just found myself wanting more from it than it had on offer. I kept thinking about what seemed to be missing as opposed to just enjoying what was there. It could just be a personal conflict that wouldn't bother others, but it was something that effected my take.
I’d say it is definitely worth your time, but maybe is one I’d wait for to go on sale. $30 feels like a pretty good number for what is here. But if you have Game Pass, you can play it on Xbox or PC right now, like I did. And I’d say it’s well worth it.
I hope that you have enjoyed this Let's Talk Review! Every now and then I play or watch something I feel like sharing my impressions on, and that's what this is all about. While there are scores and numbers here, this is more of an earnest, informal discussion of my impressions on a subject. The scores here are merely here to give an at-a-glance metric of my thoughts.
Let me know what you think! I'd love to hear your take if you played the game, or answer any questions you might have. Please share it on social media, drop a like, or a comment down below, if you enjoyed the review, and would like to see more!