Persona 5 Tactica

It wouldn’t be a Persona follow-up without changing genres, this time, a cover-based turn based strategy which is closer to the series X-Com, with Persona flair. You can move your team of 3 in real time and take and action, and when its over, the enemies will do the same. I mentioned the term ‘cover-based’ as you’ll usually want to take actions behind something so when they attack, it will reduce or eliminate damage. Attacking and being left out in the open will result in your opponents punishing that mistake hard. There are times to do this, such as going for a ‘one more’ setting up an all-out-attack, etc; that’s part of the strategy, tactics if you will. On normal and easier difficulties, it will sting a bit, but you’ll pay for it on higher ones.

Not since Persona 2 can your allies, save Erina (We’ll get to her next) now equip another persona which will augment/complement their stats and play style. If you’ve been playing anything from Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Devil Summoner series, you know the series trademark is to attack your enemies weakness, resulting in getting an extra turn, though they can do the same to you. Here, they don’t have elemental/physical weakness, instead your allies have different forms of status effects that another ally in turn will give usually give them a ‘One more’ with some exceptions. For example, Ann/Panther known for fire abilities can burn an enemy, light them on fire for extra damage on their turn, and on, say Morgana’s turn, can attack and get another turn to move around, get an extra attack or this game’s version of an all-out-attack, which is to line up your crew in a triangle, and whatever’s trapped in there, will get hit severe damage. Erina doesn’t have a Persona, but gets higher stats, and her status effect ‘forget’ works as advertised as enemies will just forget to attack on their next turn.

Lavenza is back, though this time, even she can’t quite explain, the Velvet Room is a foundry where she can do the usual of fusing personas, registering and summoning them, but later on, can use persona fusion to make stronger weapons than what you get in the shop. They’ll have their own strengths and weakness such as having a gun that has more range, but may not do the best damage, have certain percent of inflicting a status condition aside from your spells. I found in the late game that she was more prone to accidents, not getting your intended result, so you’ll want to save just before entering.

You have to worry about leveling up specific characters, as its a shared system, which just matters to what the max level of Personas you can get and fuse. Your allies will b.e using a skill tree to upgrade your passive and active abilities, using skill points which go up as you go further along. There will be side quests for sometimes just one individual character, or 2 where they can get more skill points for completing a map with a specific objective, testing how well you know the system. Your personas will level up as well, though like in previous games, I wouldn’t get too attached to particular one, fuse, fuse and fuse some more as they don’t have the myriad of abilities, instead just two. They could be anything from passive bonuses such taking less damage, or get spells/buffs that complement. So if you ever wanted Yusuke to have fire abilities, this is your chance!

The controls here don’t require twitch reflexes, so no matter what system you have, you should be fine. There are a lot of menus to navigate, and knowing which one to get to can be confusing at first, though you’ll get to know your around it after the first quarter.