What do you get when you take one of the most beloved JRPG franchises and cram it into a gacha machine? Outrage. But in this case, you also get a game that has a massive identity crisis.
Story
If you already played Persona 5, there’s no need to go into detail, since it’s very much a carbon copy. Here’s the short version: The story begins as our protagonist, a young student, gets thrown into another world, awakens his supernatural powers, and beats the everloving crap out of monsters. The story ends when he and his friends kill god using the power of friendship. You know, the usual anime stuff. Now, the reason I say that it’s a carbon copy of P5 specifically is that P5X reuses a lot, and I mean a lot, of its assets. There are some original locations, but for the most part, they’re taken straight from Persona 5.
What isn’t taken straight from Persona 5 is the quality of writing, especially the roughly twenty hours, with its first two story arc villains are plain bad. In P5, the antagonists do arguably very evil things. The first one is a PE teacher who physically abuses and sexually harasses his students, to the point that one of them tries to end her own life.
The first villain of P5X is a former baseball player. What’s his crime? He intentionally runs into people in subway stations because he failed at baseball. That’s it. That’s his entire thing. Apparently, people running into others at train stations is a rare but real problem in Japan, but the way it is portrayed in the game turns it into a memeable joke. It does get better eventually. We’re currently halfway through the third story arc, and it’s quite obvious that some things have changed behind the scenes. From what I’ve read, other writers took over.
Gameplay
The developers tried to retain the biggest gameplay aspect of the Persona series, the gameplay mix of turn-based combat and social life. It mostly works out, but at this point, the F2P model becomes obvious. In Persona, your time is limited. You encounter a villain, you get X amount of days to beat that villain, and you either do that or it’s game over. Every time you hang out with friends, every time you work side jobs, everything you do makes time move forward. P5X still lets you do all those things; they progress the daytime, but once the day is over, it just restarts. Unlike P5, there is no calendar, so you no longer have any deadlines. There are no time limits. Time management is effectively gone. The only thing you have to worry about is “energy”.
Since P5X is still an RPG at heart, you’ll need to improve your party. That’s what you need the energy for: to farm a truckload of very specific upgrade items. Most of which are very typical for a gacha game. There are items to level up your characters, items to unlock character level limits, items to level up your weapons, items to unlock weapon level limits, and items to increase the level of their skills. On top of that, characters eventually need something called ‘revelation cards’. You might know them as artifacts from Genshin Impact; they’re equippable and randomized, so you have to grind to get the ones that fit your characters.
You farm all this stuff, and eventually you’ll run out of energy. So, what do you do? You wait for the energy to replenish. This happens in real-time, so you have to come back tomorrow to be able to grind some more. P5X, like most gacha games, wants you to play daily.
So what’s the bottom line for gameplay? P5X features, on a basic level, everything gameplay-wise that you would expect from a Persona game. You get the previously mentioned gameplay loop of turn-based combat and social life, regularly interrupted by linear story parts and cutscenes. Practically all the key features are there. The social links, the social stats, the turn-based combat, etc. But wherever you look, you notice that this is a free-to-play gacha game. On the screen, you’ll very regularly see a vast number of red exclamation marks that tell you about your dailies that you still need to do or rewards that wait for you to collect them.
The phantom idols, characters that you can pull as party members, are another big sign. They exist in this game solely because gacha games need an ever-growing pool of characters as potential party members. You also get characters from other Persona games, like 3 and 5, but the in-universe reason they exist is contrived at best. It’s all very obvious that the developers include them because they’re popular and sell currency.
Final words
To be honest, I’m still enjoying Persona 5: The Phantom X, but I also went in with tempered expectations. P5X attempts to do pretty much everything that P5 did, achieves that to some degree, but it’s still overshadowed by its monetisation. The target audience is quite obviously a Venn diagram of those who have already played every other Persona game and those who don’t mind the gacha system. If you fit into both of those categories, then P5X might be up your alley. It’s just very hard to recommend this game to anyone else.