The long-running Persona series marries Famous Five-style adventuring with Jungian psychology. Typically, a group of students band together to solve the adult-confounding problems of their town, battling with the manifestations of its residents’ various emotional hang-ups. This spin-off shifts away from adolescent psychoanalysis into a more conventional game of chess-like skirmishes. The teenagers must overthrow a tyrannical monarch by allying with local resistance fighters in the fantastical kingdom to which they’ve been spirited away.
This kind of tactical war game has its roots in 19th-century Kriegsspiel, where Prussian officers would play out military scenarios on boards, nudging tokens to represent their units. Here, battles are played out in a more localised context: town centres and underground warrens through which you manoeuvre your chosen trio, knocking opponents out from behind cover using a combination of melee, projectile and magical attacks.
This blend of urban warfare, psychiatry and stylish anime aesthetics give Persona 5 Tactica a distinct feel. But for players eager to dig into the puzzle-like combat, equipping their units with weapons and ailment-inflicting special moves, there is an awful lot of dialogue (and the accompanying saccharine voice acting) to click through first. This is a game designed around those already invested in the fiction.
The turn-based tactics genre is niche but highly evolved. Series such as XCOM and Fire Emblem represent some of the most sophisticated examples. Amid this stiff competition, Persona 5 Tactica introduces some pleasing innovations: knock a foe to the ground and your character gains an additional turn that, with the right positioning, can be used to inflict still greater damage via team attacks.
With rewards for completing each stage within a set number of moves, there are incentives for perfecting your approach too. But the game’s tutorials linger well into the game’s 40-hour runtime, and combined with a bland storyline, basic environments and a persistently low challenge, it’s a game that will only appeal to the series’ most committed followers.