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Mild story spoilers. I won't get into specifics, but I will vaguely talk about the structure of the plot. Ignore the playtime, I had the game on pause in the background a lot. My first playthrough on hard took about 58 hours to finish while 100%ing all the content available. Minimal grinding.

The story is overall better paced. The only poorly paced part is a sequence at the start of the third act that felt extremely rushed, as multiple twists are introduced and resolved in the same hour. It was extremely noticable, but the rest of the story was paced well. Every arc is building towards an ultimate, concrete goal and makes logical sense.

I like the setting quite a bit. This is a game that's focused on the politics, and the politics in this fantasy world are fairly interesting, with a bunch of different viewpoints that all have a good reason to exist. It's also not afraid to point out that the idealistic endeavors of the party almost definitely won't play out the way they want it to, which is one more degree of nuance than most games have these days.

The writing for the party members you get are decent. Instead of having a Haru situation where the last party member gets almost no screen time, the writers instead took cues from how P4 handled Naoto by having the last party member appear throughout the story. I found them to have the most interesting arc overall. However, every other member runs into the problem P5 had where they don't really do that much after their recruitment arc and don't have that much interparty banter. There are multiple moments where I found them sitting right next to each other in the same room, not looking at each other and not really talking. This is a huge missed opportunity, especially since you can listen to random NPCs talking to each other.

The social links got compressed down to 8 levels, and that also makes them better paced. There aren't really any social link levels like in P5 where pretty much nothing happens. I did notice a trend where too many of the social links rely on "randomly running into somebody from their past" as a hook, which felt repetitive. Each social link also serves a double purpose, where they don't only advance the general themes of the game, but also help build the world. There are pretty important details you'll be missing if you skip out on these social links.

Now to the gameplay. This is where most of the cons I have about this game comes from. On paper, I really like it. There are a lot of systems at play that incentivize strategic team building. Synthesis abilities depend on your party comp, enemies in dungeons are all weak to different things, and a good comp and a bad comp truly have a massive difference in effectiveness. The classes are like Fire Emblem, where they max out at level 20 and you need to get certain levels in other classes to promote, which is a progression system I find more fun than traditional Persona/SMT where you swap out your demons every few levels. Some of these classes also have gimmicks that I find way more fun than anything in their previous games.

On top of that, two of the classes have an interesting meta progression where you have to craft items to augment their effectiveness. However, the final promotion of one of these classes completely ignores this mechanic (which is odd) and the other class flat out doesn't need the gimmick at all to be effective.

However, the strategic element of the game is let down by too many things. The balancing, for one. There are classes that are not only blatantly better than the others, but are so much better that there's little incentive to ever touch the other classes. Why would you use a class that takes 50 mp to clear a mob when you could just run another class that can oneshot the same mob with no resource cost?

Another thing is that, for whatever reason, the first three party members you get are all physical damage focused, which is just flat out weird, since the MC's best class choices are also physical focused.

Another thing is how important party comps are. Much like in P5S, if you go into a boss with the wrong party setup, you quickly realize it is either impossible or will take far, far too long. Just like in that game, the only options you have are to let the boss kill you or restart the game, as there's no quick restart button that also lets you change your composition around. It's even more important in this game, as the late game bosses get very powerful very fast, and if you don't have the tools to deal with them, it's functionally impossible.

Dungeon crawling is pretty lame. You pretty much just run towards the fog of war and you're done exploring. They're all extremely linear, don't have many puzzles, and lack the flair that at least made P5's dungeons fun to look at. The upside here, however, is that there are at least quite a number of optional dungeons, which still gives the game more variety than Mementos or Tartarus.

If this game ever gets a sequel, I hope they iron down these flaws as I really do think the game would be extremely fun if it worked as intended. As it stands, there's too many issues for me to really love it.

The graphics are flat out not good. The art style saves it a bit (I particular like scratch effect the shadows in the game have), but there's no getting around the fact that the textures all look terrible. Worse than that, the dungeons are so bog standard fantasy that there's nothing to distract you from the fact that the rock textures in the cave or the bricks in the church all look really terrible. Persona 5's textures were bad, but again, had the flair to let you ignore them.

Furthermore, the enemy design. You probably heard of all the chatter of how they were designed after Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Well, I'm sorry to say that those enemies are extremely rare. Those ones in the steam store page that look ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome? They're pretty much isolated to the first fifteen or so hours of teh game. They largely disappear from then on. The ones that show up serve as generic dungeon enemies, and are way less interesting to look at. Everything else is pretty much just standard fantasy with very little to distinguish them from every other version of their species.

The soundtrack is overall very good, but if it wasn't for the Esperanto chanting, it would really come across as standard orchestral fantasy. I don't really see this game having permanent brain worms like Persona does.

Overall, had a good time. But the downsides aren't really small.

After playing the game on and off since release, I've finally started and ended a playthrough recently. The game's story and setting are excellent, save for a few power scaling issues, and serves as an alright introduction to the general vibe of the 40k universe for newcomers. Hearing religious technicians referring to electricity as the holy motive force or basic repairs as rites of repair is still a riot. Owlcat is still great at delivering a power fantasy. You have supreme authority almost everywhere you go and can have your right hand man announce your presence to basically everybody in the most bombastic way. I'm giving the game a recommendation solely because of this.

However, if you care about gameplay, building your characters, or whatever, then this is a thumbs down. I say this while playing after all the most broken interactions and builds in the game have been removed. The balance is still f*cked. Beyond f*cked. I'm actually convinced the balance can never fully be fixed.

I started on daring (which used to be core), and upgraded to unfair around act 3. I was still one-rounding almost every encounter with Argenta, a character everybody has access to. The only exception were the ones where I couldn't get her in range of everybody or the final boss, who stops taking damage at certain percentages. That's right, after being nerfed nonstop either directly or indirectly every single patch, she is still one-rounding encounters on unfair.

This is a problem, because it got to the point where I found endgame gear that was amazing and upgraded all aspects of a character and felt nothing. "Oh. I guess I can oneshot encounters even faster".

However, because of the way the system is set up and how they tried to balance around the broken interactions, actually trying to experiment with different, non-broken builds will mean that the enemies will be the ones alpha-striking and one-rounding you. The difficulty slider doesn't help because it only adjusts where the tipping point of "man, this is impossible" and "i'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ oneshotting everything" is on the scale. That fabled happy middle ground of "decent and engaging challenge" is almost impossible to find.

It's the exact problem that Owlcat had with the Pathfinder games, except now it's fully turn based and you have to watch the characters execute long animations after every action.

EDF isn't known for its story (even though I think they're underrated), but this one has an absurd, insanely outrageous story that enhances the overall feel of the series' over the top and stupid nature. Is the storytelling or the plot good? Objectively, no, but it has that pure EDF energy. I chuckle every time I try to logically build out all the ridiculous plot points to their logical end because they're so entertainingly stupid and it builds up to some genuinely hype moments.

Past that, it's more EDF but with some tweaks. Mobility's been slightly nerfed for WD and Fencer, at least until the mid game. Rangers and WD get to have a backpack slot that lets Rangers use nades without taking up a weapon slot while WDs can put a melee weapon that lets them pull some anime ♥♥♥♥. Air Raiders don't get to airstrike on way too many of the missions, but they get some very powerful drones as compensation that lets them completely drop limpet guns as an emergency weapon.

You'll hear a complaint that "a lot of missions are copy pasted", but I think that's overblown. There are very rarely any missions that are a flat 1:1 copy of their EDF5 counterpart. I counted maybe three at most out of the 144 missions of the game that genuinely had nothing added to it. Enemy spawns are completely different and dialogue and conversations start diverging drastically.

as someone who's run the gauntlet of action games from the souls games to god hand, re mind has the best designed bosses of modern gaming, and it doesn't even feel close. the boss themes and their attack patterns tell a better story than the actual game itself.

shame the actual base game is lacking in a lot of areas. and the story of the series is told so poorly that it's not even fun to laugh at anymore.

Genuinely the dumbest modern video game story. Banger gameplay though. Anyways, time to 100% everything again.

balance got a bit ♥♥♥♥♥♥ by power creep as per usual, the mood lighting's not as good as the original, the link episodes are way more missable than they should be, and the remixed OG songs are a mixed bag. every other aspect is great.

now give us femc cowards

Real quick. I liked the game, but unless you're a personahead, this game isn't worth 60 bucks. It's a 40 dollar game.

This is a pretty in-depth review after a full merciless playthrough. A quick summary of my thoughts is that the game doesn't put its best foot forward, with the first 10 hours or so spent on maps that are too flat and not enough enemy archetypes. However, once maps start becoming more restrictive and tactical towards the end of chapter 2, where you need to work hard to get into the positions that were just given to you before against brand new enemies that have abilities to control the field, it gets a lot better.

The same goes for the story. It takes far too long to get going, and even when it does, your mileage varies heavily based on how much you resonate with the themes it presents. It relies heavily on the ideas it presents being intrinsically sad to get you emotional because it didn't have enough time to set them up properly. That said, I did resonate and I did enjoy the gameplay when it got better, so it's a thumbs up from me. If you want to know more, read ahead.


The only gameplay worth talking about is the combat system. The day-to-day gameplay is replaced by conversations, and the persona fusion isn't deep enough in this game to talk about.

The combat is another example of Persona 5's gameplay mechanics transferring well to a whole different genre, although in this case, it's a little more apparent that it's not quite the right fit. You'd think it's and XCOM like, but it's more similar to Mario x Rabbids. You have a team of 3 on handcrafted maps that have gimmicks and you need to efficiently kill everybody to fulfill objectives that give extra rewards. Your characters can move so long as they haven't attacked, meaning that they can get into a risky position for an all out attack and move to a safe spot after it's done. Speaking of the AOA...

The Persona twist comes in the all out attack. Before I get into that, I need to explain how this game translated the knockdown mechanic from the original game.

This game is unlike other grid based tactics game in that it only matters what angle people are attacked from if they're in full cover, which gives them full immunity to one angle of attack.However, being in cover gives people a "resist" status, and as long as people have that, they have resistance to damage. That means that you can be standing flank somebody and not deal full damage. Units that are at a higher elevation will also have resistance against normal attacks against anyone lower than them, though magic will still crit them if they're in the open.

If somebody is attacked while they don't have the resist status, then they get crit and knocked down, and the attacker gets one more action. There are numerous ways to remove the status, like melee attack knockbacks, spell knockbacks, or various status effects. The coolest one is the follow-up attack, where you melee an enemy off a cliff to your ally, who crits them and gives the initiator a 1-more. If you're the one that knocked an enemy down, the character that has a 1-more can trigger an all out attack. A triangle is drawn between all three of your characters, and if the knocked down enemy is inside it, you can all out attack everybody within that triangle.

The all out attack is the most powerful attack in the game and every single mechanic is balanced around it. Every character can heal when you AOA, so you're incentivized to play aggressively and just heal up with it. On any difficulty except merciless, it will oneshot the normal enemies and severely wound the elite ones (which is why I played through the game on merciless - it was too easy otherwise). It's a cool system that emphasizes efficient movement and there's a constant choice to be made between "Do I want my character in cover, or do I want them standing out in the open for this juicy AOA?". Not all your characters can have a 1-more, so you need to make sure that whatever character you use to set up the others for an AOA is in a good position so as to maximize coverage.

Unfortunately, it also means that anybody with low movement or lacking any kind of set-up persona skills is screwed. Normal attacks and even engame magic simply can't match up to you just AOAing half the map. Not all status ailments are made equal, and the characters that specialize in the ones that don't set up are never a good pick.

Haru (bless her soul), has the worst movement in the game, so it's hard to mechanically justify using her outside of achievement hunting. The new character, Erina, specializes in the forget status and has the only built in overwatch move, both of which do nothing to set up a 1-more. Even Joker is kinda meh, because his status is "Despair", which lets him run faster and further the next round, something that isn't all that useful next to simply killing the enemy here and now. The sub-persona can cover for them somewhat, but as sub-personas only have two skills in this game, only one of which is inheritable, you can only do so much, especially when the sub-personas are the only source of passive skills like exp+ or multihit damage+.

On top of that, the AOA being so movement reliant means that whether an engagement is fun to play through or not is solely through the mission's map. Early on, maps are way, way too simple. They're flat and boring, and there's very few tactical choices to be made outside of "knock them out of cover and AOA". However, the later chapters have way more vertical maps with gimmicks that actually force you to change how you play. Enemies will be up against the edge of the map on a cliff, and you have to work to get to them. There will be elevators with switches that you have to fiddle with to open up a path.

Of course, all of that goes out the window when it gets to the boss fights, all of which are extremely underwhelming. There's no strategy outside of buff up with Mataru, get in cover, and deal with whatever gimmick they spawn. It's boring.

Side note: the quests in this game are more like puzzles that you have to find the right answer to. They're fun and require more thinking than most fights in the game.


Without spoiling too much, it's pretty much just like the Persona Q sub series in that the whole game is just one giant character arc for a character that, while I liked him very much, will probably never appear again in the future. Every other character has pretty much nothing going on for them, they're just there to be a chaotic scooby gang.

The character's arc gets a bit too long to get going, and the start of the arc is a little bit too insufferable. However, I really enjoyed the bits where the Phantom Thieves try to help him work his way through his issues. Each Thief uses their respective struggles from the main game to relate to him and share with him how they got through it, which I thought was a great use of the characters. The heavier moments that come really do come, and I enjoyed them when they did. I just wish they were dotted throughout the game more effectively instead of being shoved into the back half.

Outside of the story and characters, the worldbuilding is extremely messy, but easily handwaved away by the fact that it's all in the metaverse and metaphorical anyways. And, big spoiler alert, you do kill god in the end. You know, just like every single Persona game.

I really thought I wouldn't like the art style, but I was pleasantly surprised. The simpler art style lends itself great to varied extremely dynamic full body poses in the game's conversations that I thought really brought each character out. It blows Royal out of the water in that regard. The vocal tracks of the game are an insane bop, but I really can't remember any of the other tracks even if you put a gun to my head.

Pros:

• Lotus Juice music.
  
• Great gimmick that actually changes the flow of combat, making it more like Splatoon than anything.
  
• Well paced story that doesn't overstay its welcome and actually manages to be a wee bit sad.
  
• Yoshizawa and Akechi fulfill some unique archetypes that aren't available in the main story.

Cons:

• Can't use DLC characters until NG+, which is stupid because their skill progression is very much balanced for an NG run already.
  
• Can't access challenge stages until NG+, which is doubly stupid because they give you set loadouts to use anyways.
  
• Only took me just under 4 hours to finish on merciless.
  
  If you aren't planning on NG+, you are pretty much only getting the 4 hour story (which is stupid), 3 hours if you're a better player than me. Up to you if it's worth 20 dollars or not, but I will say I enjoyed my time with the DLC far more than I did with the first arc in the main story.

I overall enjoy the game more than the first game. The most annoying enemies from the first game are pretty much gone, save for small one-time miniboss encounters. The game is almost fully based on navigating the arena and finding ways to close the distance instead of chasing after RNG teleports or outrunning suicide bombers. This is accentuated by some really fun late game mobility options that really shake up the gameplay enough to avoid the repetitive feeling I got towards the end of the first game. The boss fights are also better, but still easy and simple. I beat most of the boss fights by running in and slashing, parrying whenever the boss made any kind of move, and dashing back in when they knocked me back. It was only ever the segments between the boss phases that gave me issue.

There are only a couple of negatives for me to mention. The most major one is the enemy having map hack. There were multiple moments where I rounded a corner to flank an enemy and they immediately opened fire as soon as I came into view, killing me before I could react. I don't know if something changed with the AI between games or if the first game's arena designs simply didn't have that many walls, but this happened enough times in this game to get me heated. I had to start rounding the corner while immediately holding block to survive.

Another one is the facial animations being genuinely really bad. There is now a hub level where you can walk around and talk to players. The writing is shallow but alright, and I enjoyed these moments. It lets you interact more with characters that don't make much of an appearance in the story, and highlights Jack's personality more through interactions with more normal people.

However, it's really distracting when you talk to the NPCs and their lips are the only thing moving, with their cheeks and eyes being completely static. It's animation from two generations ago and very disappointing.

The last negative to mention are the exploration levels with the bike. The linear levels with the bike are fine, if not a little bit unforgiving considering how imprecise the bike feels, but the open exploration levels just don't feel made for the bike at all. There are little bits of geometry dotted all around the map that my bike kept getting snagged on. It happened enough to affect the flow of the map and my enjoyment of them. These maps also had pretty much nothing going on, as once you're forced to properly get off, it just turns into another normal Ghostrunner level, which makes me question how necessary how necessary the massive open areas were.

All in all, a pretty good upgrade to the first game in my book.

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