3.5/5 ★ – Hootus900's review of Persona 5 Tactica.

Didn’t come into this one with high hopes which was good because it was only slightly above average. It was really fun to see the persona IP in yet another gameplay format, however I feel there were areas that lacked a little that if improved could have made this experience that much better. I thought the core tactical combat had really good bones, but wasn’t always supported by the stages. I found a lot of the missions to start feeling samey and that made getting through the story feel like a bit of a chore at times. I found the place where the gameplay shines most to actually be in the 1 off quest missions, where it really feels like they push their mechanics to the limit and really make you think about how to approach them. It’s a shame that they can’t be replayed within the same play through. The story had its ups and downs for me. I felt they did a great job fleshing out Erina and Toshiro’s backstories, but it did start dragging towards the end of the story for me. What made Persona 5 as well as strikers flow nicely was that each “chapter” of the game introduced a new character to join the party as well as a new antagonist that ties into their story, with everything tying together in the end. With this game almost exclusively focusing on Toshiro, that sort of lost the freshness that made those other 2 games flow better in my opinion. Not to say it was all bad, I just prefer the other games. The difficulty felt very nice at the normal level for me. I often opt into playing things on the easy difficulty because I don’t have as much time to game and don’t want to spend my time screaming, but I felt that the normal option felt very balanced and fair with a good amount of difficulty. Boss fights felt like the easiest part for me which was odd. They had some fun mechanics to learn, but once you figured out the couple of mechanics tied to their fights they start to just feel like sponges and from that point on it feels like a slog getting to the end of the fight. One thing that felt a little disappointing to me was the music. I know that they can’t make every track a banger, but considering that strikers had so many good tracks in it’s soundtrack, it almost feels like karma that there weren’t as many good tracks in this one. I played a majority of this on my PlayStation Portal, and opted to have the TV on in the background instead of listening to the battle music, as it just got repetitive after a while. All things considered I didn’t mind the time I spent playing this one. Sure it wasn’t the best persona spinoff title, but I’ll still do my second play through to get my platinum trophy. If you’re in the market for a better persona spin-off, I’d have to redirect your attention to P4 dancing, or if you’re a persona 5 fan, watch a play through of strikers since you don’t actually play the games :p.