Desire and Despair in the Persona 5 Gacha

As someone who was, until now, untouched by the taint of gacha games, I encountered many surprises while I played Persona 5: The Phantom X. The first was that all the game’s thunder was stolen by another gacha about horse racing, but the horses are ladies. The second was that Persona is not supported on any of my mobile devices, forcing me to play on the Steam client exclusively during my normal gaming time. The third was that my reaction to the game itself swung wildly, and violently, all over the place. Multiple times, I have considered writing a “postmortem” essay on my time with Persona 5X, only for my entire opinion to change on a dime. Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. But how long can this realistically go on? Now, after 20 hours of playtime, seems like a good chance to explain this messy thing.

Since the last time I wrote about Persona, I completed a long-term goal by finishing some version of every game in the series available in English. I will save the particulars of that adventure for another time, if anyone cares to hear about it. While I was dimly aware of a Persona 5 mobile game, I knew it was untranslated, so I didn’t pay it any mind. Lo and behold, as soon as I finished cleaning up the series, Sega announced an international release of Persona 5X. And they pulled the same trick on me yet again with a kickass animated intro and a ridiculously good earworm song. The trailers looked good, and at the time, I thought I would be able to play on my phone at my leisure. And, since it's is free-to-play, there was nothing to lose. My plan was to try it until I either needed to spend money or simply got bored. Until then, I was in the new position of counting down the days until a mobile game release.

Like I said, I had zero notion of what a gacha game entails. It's possible that what I describe here is bog-standard stuff found in every entry in the genre. Regardless, my innocent self slammed into a culture shock that caused actual mental damage. Before getting to that, though, let’s take an overview of how Persona 5X presents itself.

Our self-insert, who I have named Paul FiveStar, has a pretty easy life compared to Persona protagonists past. He’s not a transfer student, he’s not in jail, and his parents are out of town and let him have the whole house. Despite that, he’s struggling to be motivated about doing anything for himself. He’s also having strange dreams: sometimes about a boy in a fancy outfit and mask, sometimes about a bald man with a big nose. Speaking of on the nose, the aquarium-themed Velvet Room in this installment prominently features a giant “whale.” Igor says Paul has an important destiny. Then Paul meets a talking owl creature who tells him that the world’s “desires” have been stolen by particularly twisted people who can't be punished by normal society. Yadda yadda, Personas, Phantom Thieves, I don’t need to explain all this to you. But the fact that the game does anyway raises questions.

Persona 5X is now serving two audiences. There are gacha fans who have never played Persona, which constitute the title’s native China. Conversely, there are people who are Persona fans first, which I have to assume is their target for this international release. The game desperately relies on the original Phantom Thieves from Persona 5 to build intrigue and entice people to spend. At the same time, it has to act like you have no idea what a Phantom Thief is. The characters are different, the plot is technically different, but it’s all so similar to the original Persona 5 that it feels redundant. It’s self-evident just by looking at the character designs. Yeah, they’re legally distinct from the originals, but you can tell immediately who was traced over. That’s not to say I dislike any of the cast I have met so far. But for many scenes, it feels like they used search and replace to change names from the Persona 5 script. It’s just… strange.

The first bad guy is a former star athlete who now gets his jollies by abusing women, and causes grievous injury to the best friend of a female classmate. Which is, if you don’t know, exactly what happens at the start of Persona 5. The difference is that here, the so-called “menace” is much less threatening. His master plan is to body check random women on the subway platform, an act which has earned him the nom de plume “Subway Slammer.” Since the game released internationally, many people have explained that this does indeed happen in real-life Japan. I feel bad for any victims, but that doesn’t change that the way it’s presented here is utterly ridiculous and comical. Due to plot reasons, everyone just stands around as this jackass slams into people. That leads to the legendary and very real line, “This entire subway is mine for the slammin’!” Compare to the original Persona 5, where the starter villain was arguably the most effectively hateable of the lot. Persona 5X is doing the “copy my homework but change a few things” meme, and it’s not a rip-roaring first impression.

But if recycling old ideas was a dealbreaker, I never would have played more than one game in this franchise. What is it like on the ground in Persona 5X? The ads promise a full RPG experience in the palm of your hand. Indeed, the developers have adapted the the essential systems of Persona 5. As you progress through the tutorial gauntlet, you're reintroduced to the classic battle system, with Palaces and Mementos to house it. But the thing about those tutorials is that they just don't stop. They continuously introduce new apps on your ingame phone, which lead to new submenus, which lead to a multitude of currencies to spend on those activities. I don't think I can adequately convey the number of these without simply listing them off. So, here we go:

• The gacha zone for new Phantom Thieves with two types of tickets to use
• The gacha zone for weapons which uses a separate currency
• Business plans laying out assorted goals as you play
• Daily and seasonal challenges that feed into a battle pass
• Several other daily login bonuses, one of which requires tabbing through the real money shop
• Mementos challenges that dole out various rewards, limited by a recharging stamina system
• Velvet Room trials against fixed and rotating groups of enemies
• A quasi-social room you decorate for slight bonuses
• Tarot cards equipped on party members with set bonuses
• The home garden, kitchen, and workbench
• Something with guilds? I don't understand it
• Side quests in the city which can lead to minigames
• Gacha within gacha with capsule toy machines
• Events which take you to Persona 5 Palaces to meet familiar thieves

And more are surely on the way. The thing you do more than anything else in this game is claim rewards. Every single subpage has goodies to dole out, sometimes just for letting it sit for a while and rarely from a conscious effort on your part. There are at least 50 types of currency in this thing. I'll give them kudos for including a feature that explains and tells you how to obtain them... otherwise, this game would be unplayable. This phase of the experience is mentally taxing. The tutorials show you how to access new features, but they don't demonstrate why one would use them. How much should I care about obtaining high rank weapons? I have no idea! The persona fusion system makes absolutely no sense to me and I'm not sure it does to the developers, either. And which gacha is the "good gacha?"

The ideal way to introduce a player to complex systems is slowly, like heating up a bath. This was a polar plunge. I was totally overwhelmed by the weight of it all, of the ten thousand yellow exclamation points that just won't go away! I don't know the last time a game gave me such a visceral reaction. I was actually dizzy and prepared to step away.

But then, something dangerous happened. Once the revulsion subsided, it was replaced by intrigue. I started to figure out how to navigate the unintuitive menus. I pulled a five-star character from the gacha. I advanced far enough in the story to develop some investment. As I got better acclimated to what Persona 5X is trying to do, I only became more fascinated. And then something really dangerous happened: I looked at the wiki. Through the unintelligible jargon, I was able to piece together information that colored how I viewed the game. And at the end of the day, I am truly enthralled at how bad Persona 5X is at enticing you to spend money.

To start, the imported battle system is not without significant changes. Your personas have fewer moves, and you carry fewer of them. That means fewer options, which means battles are decided more by the numbers game than by strategy. It's why you can autobattle most of the time and be fine. Keeping up with the demand for power, though, is not straightforward. You know how satisfying it is to earn levels in most RPGs? throw that out the window. You power up party members by pumping currencies into them, and the protagonist is on a separate experience track entirely that focuses on daily missions limited by stamina. Remedial battles effectively give you nothing.

But how much do you really want to invest in your Thieves? Because the original release is a year ahead, and we know that none of the current characters stay relevant for very long. The nature of a gacha game is to continuously introduce new PNGs that outclass the old. Strictly speaking, it's counterproductive to dump a ton of resources into these guys. There's also another issue that comes from dozens of playable characters: I don't know these people. The majority of them are "Phantom Idols," which are not the real person but an imaginary version of them. Some correspond to NPCs in the city, so you can get some familiarity. But am I really supposed to get excited about pulling some goofy-looking guy I've never seen before who has zero story relevance? The big prizes are the original Phantom Thieves from Persona 5, where a lot of money is presumably made. I did get Ann in my party, which is cool. Thing is, I've already played like five games with the "real" Phantom Thieves. I'm not going to lose sleep if I can't get them all here.

I haven't messed with free-to-play games in over 10 years, but back then, the value proposition was simple. You either waited on a bunch of ridiculous timers or paid to speed them up. Exploitative, but logical. Here, progress is both ephemeral and impermanent. You could go to the cash shop and buy bundles of various currency at ridiculous prices, and you could spend that on a low chance to maybe pull a character you want, then dump even more into getting them up to speed. But they will still be outclassed in a matter of weeks. Dude, I've got to pay my rent. I don't doubt that some people see value here, but those people may need an intervention.

Persona 5X also includes daily life activities without understanding the value they add to the mainline Persona games. You can hop between the city and the Metaverse with a few buttons. There is no calendar or time limit, which I have sometimes found myself wishing for in the past. But Persona's controversial downtime is why it's one of my favorite series. It's what gives the cast and setting the time to connect with you. It gives the plot room to breathe (a little too much, sometimes). And it's essential to immersing yourself in a setting that inevitably becomes nostalgic. It is impossible to become immersed in Persona 5X. If it's not the notifications surrounding the entire screen, it's the performance struggling to stay afloat as the game talks to the server. Sidequests awkwardly condense a traditional social link arc into one sitting. The longer-term social links themselves have yet to present much intrigue. And after defeating the Subway Slammer, you don't even get control back before meeting the next jerk. By its nature, Persona 5X needs to keep you engaged at all times. It cannot ever let off the gas. It looks and sounds like the original, but the whiplash ensures that the two experiences will never be the same. The rhythm minigame is pretty fun, though. I like those dancing spinoffs more than I should.

Persona 5X is a live service game, but everything that is alive must one day die. The long lead time with the Chinese version means that content will be available for the foreseeable future. But when I finished the first Palace and the owl somehow knew there would be seven more, I had my doubts. The game did well out the gate, but will it stay in the money as a frontrunner, or will it lug in, wash out, and scratch? Will players who aren't freeloaders like me be enough to sustain it? And what will it look like in five years? A handful of gacha games have been officially preserved offline after end of service. However, those are rare, and I can't imagine they're very profitable. In a world where the main Persona games have great portable versions already available, the business case is even less convincing. I really couldn't say. So far, though, I have stuck to my plan. I have not spent any money on Persona 5X, and it is just way too weird for me to ever get bored.