Persona 5 Tactica

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Tired of your day job? Sick of running the rat race? You might want to consider a life of crime! It’d only take one heist to pay your way through retirement, after all. It’s so easy, it’s a wonder everyone doesn’t do it! If you need a little taste of the thief life, you might want to check out Persona 5 Tactica, the latest Persona 5 spinoff featuring the game’s Phantom Thieves served as a strategy-RPG. Sure, they’re supernaturally-gifted heroes with magical powers and you’re just you, but anything they can do, you can do too…right?

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The Phantom Thieves find themselves forced to battle the cognitive denizens of the Metaverse once again as they’re pulled into the Kingdom. This land is home to a race of peace-loving big-hatted citizens that are oppressed by the villainous Lady Marie. Joker and pals will have to team up with the local rebel forces, led by spear-wielding leader Erina, as they fight to defeat Marie and escape from the Kingdom…but if that sounds a little too easy for Persona, you’re right. There’s more going on here than meets the eye, particularly when it comes to the politician Toshiro that shows up early in the Thieves’ new adventure.

That applies to Persona 5 Tactica’s combat system as well. At first glance, this is an XCOM-lite sort of strategy-RPG, akin to games like the Mario + Rabbids series. The overarching concepts are pretty similar, certainly – you’ll position your characters behind cover to keep them safe from enemy attacks, then fire back with bullets and magic to the best of your ability. Careful planning so your team isn’t left exposed, risking massive damage and offering the enemy bonus turns, is vital to victory.

Your team of three is almost always overwhelmed by the enemies’ numbers, so you’ll need some tricks to turn the tables. You’ve got your Personas, of course, alternate selves that can be summoned to deal out special magic attacks. Enemies behind cover can be pushed out with wind magic, hypnotized into walking toward their doom and so on – or, if you’d prefer a more pragmatic option, just walk up and punch them right out into the open.

Blasting a foe that’s not explicitly in cover will knock them down, deal critical damage and offer the attacker a second turn, which is where the real fun comes in. During that second turn, your party as a whole can arrange itself into a triangle around a downed foe and unleash a powerful Triple Threat attack, potentially including enemies that weren’t involved in the initial exchange at all. You can take out entire maps with this, and properly setting up and executing Triple Threats is supremely satisfying.

There’s more going on, of course, but this is just a taste of the kind of over-the-top zaniness that makes Persona 5 Tactica such a joy to play. There’s a fair amount to do between battles as well, such as creating and equipping Sub-Personas to offer additional skills, progressing down each character’s skill tree and, of course, enjoying tons and tons of flavor text. There’s even puzzle-style “quest” maps to check out that are bound to keep you thinking. It’s quite a bit of content for a cute little spinoff game.

“Cute” sums up the presentation here pretty well. Tactica is a chibi-fied take on everything Persona 5, but it maintains the series’ style without missing a beat. This makes for a unique experience with plenty of flavor. Naturally, Persona’s also all about the music and Toshiki Konishi’s compositions largely doesn’t disappoint, though each battle theme tends to be used a bit too much from map to map.

Persona 5 fans have probably already gobbled Persona 5 Tactica up, but what about newcomers? Well, they’d be better-served playing through Persona 5 Royal first – all eighty or so hours of it – so they can get the most out of the experience. There’s good news for those who might find this intimidating, however, as both Royal and Tactica are available on Microsoft’s Game Pass service. With that said, there’s little reason not to check them both out and see what all the fuss is about.