For the longest time, I’ve been able to resist the pull of gacha. Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware it appeals to me, Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s Blade system taught me that. However, the Genshin Impacts, Fire Emblem Heroes, and more recently, Umamusumes of the world haven’t been able to pull me in. It’ll take more than some anime boys, girls, and horses to tempt me into spending too much money on something like this – or so I thought.
In the lead up to the global launch, I’d seen Persona 5: The Phantom X content floating around the internet, and I always kept one eye on it because the more I learned about it, the more I realized this would finally be the gacha game to get me. Rather than taking one of my favourite games and reducing it to a simplified shell of itself that may as well be an auto-battler (looking at you, Octopath Traveler: CotC), you could make a strong argument that P5X is essentially just Persona 5: 2.
While the launch version of the game only has two out of at least seven promised Palaces, the quality of the original game is still there. In fact, I’d even say it’s been enhanced, with the first Palace in particular having level design quality comparable to Persona 5’s best.
The place feels so expansive as you make your way through it, with plenty of opportunities to backtrack and find optional content, which you’re heavily encouraged to do as you get an awful lot of free rewards as your completion percentage for each Palace climbs higher – something very important in a gacha game. Even if that wasn’t the case, it’d still be worth doing, as there are some fun puzzles with cool mechanics that push the boat out a lot further than P5 ever did, with concepts like resizing or rewinding objects in the world to use them for platforming.
P5 was never particularly challenging in this area, and P5X’s improvements in this field are minimal. The more complex mechanics do require a little more thought, but I’m certainly never left scratching my head, and in fact, sometimes the game is actively unhelpful, with Lufel – your Owl equivalent of Morgana – chiming in and giving advice to solve the puzzle that is outright wrong, telling you that you need to come back later or gather more of a certain resource when you simply don’t.
The writing has stepped up too, with the pacing in particular being dramatically improved. In this game, you’ll enter the Metaverse and get your first taste of combat within about 20 minutes, as opposed to P5’s 60-90, and it won’t be too much longer after the game gives you free rein to explore the first Palace. I realize this is likely because it needs to push you to all the content where you can spend money as quickly as possible, but the story has benefited as a result.
That said, while the plot and Metaverse side of the game have benefited from gacha-fication, the life-sim elements that are so integral to the series’ success have taken a big hit. The game’s stamina system limits you to just five “City Life” actions a day, which encompass all the activities that increase your social stats, earn you in-game currency, and improve your bonds with your allies. After the starting rush, things like bond levels and social stats climb pretty slowly, so it feels like you’re barely making any progress or not getting enough time to really sink into the life-sim side of the game.
It also makes the character-focused synergy stories – the part of P5 that had by far the best writing – feel pretty underwhelming. With the maximum bond level increased from 10 to 20, you don’t get a special scene for every time you level up a bond; sometimes you’ll just get one of the generic “hanging out” scenes followed by the level-up screen. It’s a real disappointment as spending time with these characters and getting to know them outside the context of fighting shadows in the Metaverse was what I loved most about P5, and while it’s not gone in P5X, it is deemphasized in favour of all the combat-based modes that will push you towards the gacha mechanics.
If you like battling in Persona, there is no shortage of stuff to do. Aside from the main story Palaces, Mementos are still there to explore along with a whole host of different modes. There’s a roguelike mode, a raid-boss mode, two different kinds of challenge battle modes, and a resource-grinding mode.
Out of these, the only one that limits you with any kind of stamina system is the resource-grinding, which creates a big dissonance. In P5, part of the charm was the fact that every session of extended battling was broken up by a session of life-sim stuff, but in P5X, the heavily limited life-sim becomes barely a blip on the radar compared to the unrestricted access you have to combat.
However, as annoying as that is, all of these different combat modes are fun and distinct, which pairs well with the depth available when it comes to character building. While only the protagonist, Wonder, can customize their Personas, all of the other characters have different weapons and equippables that force you to think carefully about what role you want each character to take, which is compounded further when you add the extra bonuses you get for filling your party with characters of the same type.
It means that I do find myself using significantly different parties for each mode, and even think about switching up between individual battles. While there will always be some characters that you just don’t click with or find a use for, I’ve ended up regularly using a lot more of the roster than I thought I was going to, once I’d gotten lucky enough to unlock them all, of course.
Which brings me to the gacha mechanics. In truth, P5X is pretty standard as far as this genre goes, perhaps even leaning a little more on the generous side in terms of how much free currency it throws at you. While it dries up a bit once you run out of main story content, being a free-to-play player is entirely viable in P5X, though you will have to accept that there is no way for you to get everything.
It does have a big pacing problem, though. The team behind the game is planning to get the global version to catch up with the Chinese version, which is a year ahead in terms of content. This means content updates, including the many limited-time characters, are going to be coming in a lot faster than the game was originally balanced around. This is why the fanbase is currently up in arms about a complete lack of compensation, because even if you start the game now – less than a month after launch – you’ll already feel like you’re behind.
The thing is though, if you’re just here for a new P5 story and to explore some new Palaces, you can almost entirely ignore it. Pulling a bunch of 5-star characters will certainly make your life easier, but they’re not required for success. You won’t get hard-walled by a boss just because you don’t have the specific premium character to counter them, and as I said earlier, there is enough depth in the character/party building that you can work out a way around any obstacle – it’ll just cost you time instead of money.
Persona 5: The Phantom X does a great job of giving you main story content of a quality that is as good, if not better than Persona 5, and uses that good will to tempt you over to the more gacha-ified aspects of the experience. To do this, it makes a few compromises to the Persona formula that I don’t like, mostly in how it deemphasizes the life-sim elements, but I still think it is a very enjoyable experience that will keep you well-fed if you’re gagging for more Persona content and are impatiently waiting for Atlus to get on with making Persona 6 already.
PC. Persona 5: The Phantom X. Persona 5: The Phantom X. 8. JRPG