SEGA: A prominent publisher whose name you’ve likely seen before. In cooperation with Atlus, they’ve recently released a spinoff game for one of their most popular franchises to date: Persona. 

“Persona 5 Tactica” is one of the five spinoff games based on the base game simply named “Persona 5” and its downloadable content version, “Persona 5 Royal.” Tactica was announced on May 23, 2023 and when I heard about it, I started counting down the days it would take for the game to be released. Throughout the various trailers and even replaying Royal a few months before the game was released, I expected a lot from the developers and to put it simply, the game surpassed my expectations.

After waiting for the 16-gigabyte large download to finish, I immediately loaded up Tactica to see what the game was like. Similar to previous games, Tactica opens up with an animated sequence featuring the characters of the game paired with an addictive song. I was promptly hit with nostalgia from my previous playthrough seeing characters I had loved so much from Royal like Joker (who you play), Ann and Yusuke. With their redrawn character designs made specifically for just this game, they look much more cartoonish compared to their Royal counterparts. 

The game follows your group of friends called the Phantom Thieves of Hearts being transported into another world called the Metaverse, allowing them to unleash their persona powers. After being suddenly tossed in, you’re introduced to the game’s first major boss: Marie, a vicious dictatress dressed in a wedding gown. After a brief cutscene, your friends are surrounded by enemies called Legionnaires and are quickly brainwashed by Marie. Left to just you and your sidekick Morgana,before you are about to fall to Marie’s spell, a character named Erina rescues you. 

The storyline of the game follows a generic hero’s journey but adds its own twist to the genre. It adds onto information provided in Royal and helps develop the likability for each character introduced. Overall, the story gets more intriguing as it progresses but is boring in the beginning.

The gameplay is fairly simple as you have to hide behind cover while the Legionnaires shoot at you. As a singleplayer turn-based game, you take turns against the A.I. and try your best to defeat it utilizing your Persona’s skill set, ranged and melee weapons. You need to reach an objective in order to complete each mission whether that be an escort mission with a politician you save named Toshiro or to just defeat every enemy located on the map within a set number of turns.

The gameplay is enjoyable as it provides time to think of a strategy to use for each map. Unexpected surprises like the random appearance of a mini-boss also add some fun to the game as you have to come up with some reactions on the fly. The only flaw I could see in the gameplay is the redundancy in the “one more” action which limits your creativity.

Overall, the game deserves an excellent rating for just how easy it is to learn and understand. It makes the game all the more enjoyable when you start to get to know the characters and understand the gameplay mechanics. With a cartoonish graphics quality that makes it easy for any computer to run, I would highly recommend you try it. The game can be playtested through an Xbox Gamepass subscription for $1 or you can own it by paying $60 to Steam or for a disk copy for PS4/5 or Xbox.