Anime meets XCOM in this stylish spin-off
Seven years on, Persona 5 is the gift that keeps on giving. Following 2020’s Persona 5: Royal, the extended version of the already sprawling main game, came Strikers, a sequel of sorts featuring Warriorsstyle combat. If that represented a series first, Tactica is more of a stroll down memory lane for Atlus: according to series producer Kazuhisa Wada, the Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor games have inspired P-Studio to give the tactics genre another go.
Atlus’s desire to return to this particular well once more is reason enough to be sceptical. Though while it appears to be a little on the easy side – there probably won’t be any need for XCOM-style save scumming here – many of our initial concerns dissipate over the course of our hands-on with the game. It opens on the eve of the Phantom Thieves’ graduation ceremony; they are spending a pleasant afternoon together when they are suddenly transported to an alternate universe ruled by the iron-fisted Lady Marie, who has an army of minions sporting bicorne hats for heads. Still, every tyrant has to fall, and so our heroes band together with newcomer Erina and a rebel faction to take down this pink-skinned, French-Revolutionary-garbed despot.
P-Studio has once again found clever ways to translate Persona to a new genre
Tactica is a classic case of a game that’s more intuitive to play than to explain. Selecting a team of three Phantom Thieves from your roster, you make your way across grid-based arenas packed with enemies and, fortunately, cover positions. You need to maintain a balance of offence and defence – while behind cover, you’re safe from attack, but you can only use your gun to target the nearest enemy. To deal serious damage, you have to move your character within close enough range to call upon your Persona, or, if you’re willing to give up on cover entirely, use a melee attack. These slam your opponents out of cover, leaving them vulnerable and confused. In this state, you can “get ’em”, the prompt letting you know you can land critical hits and perform follow-up attacks as in the main game. Should you manage to surround an opponent with all three team members, you can use a skill called Triple Threat – essentially a variant on Persona’s familiar All-Out attacks.
The calculations you make as you weigh up the pros and cons of giving up your cover position are what makes Persona 5: Tactica so intriguing. Finding yourself out of cover may not be as devastating as it often is in this genre (as far as we can tell based on the first few missions), but the volume and variety of enemies and the unusual stage layouts keep you on your toes: here is a developer that fully understands the value of positioning in a tactics ga
