Original Release: Android, iOS, Windows, 2025. Platform Used: Steam Deck.
Note: This review is based on 60 hours of playtime, including the first two palaces, various side-quests, and the "Crossroads of Fate" event.
THE PLOT:
After observing a fellow student's attempted suicide, a high school teen attending the Shujin Academy in Tokyo finds himself whisked away to The Velvet Room, where attendants Igor and Merope inform him that he is facing "ruin" unless he can find a way to fight back against it. He dismisses this as just a dream... until he presses a strange icon that appears on his cell phone.
He is abruptly transported to a world where he must battle Shadows alongside Lufel, an owl who is somehow able to communicate with him. Lufel dubs them "Phantom Thieves," and insists they use code names to disguise their identities, with the boy now dubbed "Wonder."
Wonder's new double life begins at just the right time. Disgraced former baseball player Kiuchi has begun violently bumping into women on the subway, evading consequences by claiming this was accidental. His behavior is becoming steadily more aggressive, and he has started targeting Wonder's fellow student, Motoha. When her best friend gets injured shielding her from this "Subway Slammer" (yes, really), Motoha's own Persona awakens, enabling her to fight alongside Wonder and Lufel to get justice for her friend by changing Kiuchi's warped desires.
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| Meet the Phantom Thieves. Um, the discount versions. |
CHARACTERS:
Wonder may well be the dullest Persona protagonist. He has little personality, either in artwork or dialogue options. Persona 5's Joker had been set up as a delinquent, making him an outsider before he even arrived at Shujin; Persona 4's Yu Narakami had a preppy aesthetic that fit well with that game's social circle, and the uncle he lived with was investigating the crimes that gave that game its structure. Wonder is just... present. He has no personal stake in defeating either of the first two bosses, and he seems generally blank and featureless.
The supporting cast is better, with Motoha both enthusiastic and quick to anger and later supporting character Shun burdened by feelings of guilt, but neither of them transcends basic anime tropes. Talking owl Lufel, meanwhile, just feels like a discount version of Persona 5's Morgana.
Not helping are crossover events with the Persona 5 cast. In every instance in which Wonder's group shares the screen with Joker, Ryuji, and company, I just end up being reminded how much more dynamic the earlier game's characters were.
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| The boss fight against the first Palace ruler, a former baseball player. Combat, like most of the gameplay, is excellent. |
GAMEPLAY:
One area in which The Phantom X excels is the gameplay. As a free-to-play gacha title that many will play on their smartphones, its exploration and combat mechanics are simplified from those of Persona 5. However, it retains the feel of the earlier game. When you infiltrate palaces, you will have to find ways to get through locked doors, with various types of puzzles to solve. Ambushing Shadows is clunkier than in Persona 5 thanks to the cruder interface, but it's also more forgiving - to the point where you just about have to try in order to end up being ambushed.
The gameplay and combat remain addictive when you're in the Palaces or the Metaverse, and the game designers have done a terrific job of translating Persona 5 to a simpler, handheld-friendly format. The gacha elements can be intrusive, particularly when they "pop up"on the screen... but that more or less goes with the territory, and in most other respects, this is an extremely well-made title.
I just wish I could be half as positive about the writing...
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| Your first enemy: Takeyuki Kiuchi, The Subway Slammer. The whole subway's his for the slammin'. |
WRITTEN ON THE SUBWAY WALLS:
"The whole subway's mine for the slammin'!"
-The game's first boss, "The Subway Slammer," becomes an accidental Internet meme in the space of a single line.
Persona 5: The Phantom X has a lot going for it. It looks great, it plays well, and it boasts a fantastic score. Thus far, I haven't spent one penny, and I've found it generally free-to-play friendly - not as much as a Hoyoverse title, perhaps, but more than most gacha games I've dipped into.
But as I was playing it, even as I mostly enjoyed myself, a single thought kept popping into my brain - a tired Internet meme that nonetheless perfectly describes my reaction:
"We have Persona 5 at home."
Phantom X delivers a taste of what Persona is and how it plays (post-PS1 era, at least). It has the school/life division, though without the calendar that aspect is greatly diminished, and it attempts to tackle themes of alienation and social issues that have marked the modern Persona series. I'd say it's a decent enough free sampler of the series... except that the writing is so much worse than any of the actual mainline titles.
The opening "Subway Slammer" arc tries to build a story around a legitimate problem in Japan, of disturbed individuals deliberately and forcefully slamming into others (mostly young women, of course) with their shoulders and claiming accident. This is a passable seed to build a story around. Too bad, then, that Kiuchi, the villain of the first Palace, is cartoonishly over-the-top. At one point, he charges one of his victims and body slams her over a protective wall. Tokyo subways have a lot of security cameras, and he barreled toward his victim like he was an NFL linebacker. Claiming "accident" would simply not fly.
Oh, but the game has a "get-out-of-jail-free" card: "Apathy Syndrome." This isn't new to this entry, having been used in previous Persona titles as a growing sign that the world is moving toward ruin. Here, though, it becomes a magic wand that can justify any plothole.
There's more than enough evidence to throw Kiuchi in jail and be done with him? "Apathy Syndrome" means that neither police nor public care. The second villain is a popular restaurant reviewer who destroys good restaurants by giving bad-faith negative reviews (yes, really). And this works flawlessly in ruining even successful and well-loved establishments because "Apathy Syndrome" means that people will take his word over the delicious meal they ate last week.
It's difficult for the game's story to capture any real world resonance when its villains require a Magic Syndrome in order to be effective threats in the first place.
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| The Palaces are big, to make sure you don't get through them too quickly. But they're too big to remain interesting. |
LEVEL-GATING AND TIME-WASTING:
The gameplay is this title's saving grace... almost.
As I said earlier, the addictive Persona 5 gameplay has been effectively streamlined to work in a mobile format. The Palaces are beautiful to look at, the soundtrack is fantastic, and the combat flows smoothly. Puzzles are mostly well integrated (though if I never see another colored baseball that I need to fit into a lock, it will be too soon), and the palace designs cleverly reflect the individual villains - frankly, the level designers do a better job of characterizing the baddies than the actual script does!
But it's an online, ongoing gacha game, which means that the developers don't want you getting through content too quickly. Hoyoverse mostly tried to avoid this issue in their gacha games by creating lots and lots of content, with side quests and daily missions that further developed their settings and were often quite interesting in themselves (and, yes, some that were effectively fetch quests). Black Wings/Atlus follow a more time-honored strategy:
They waste your time.
There are multiple points in the game at which you will find yourself level-gated, pushing you off to grind side activities until you are graciously allowed to continue the story. This is a mild annoyance, as you can gain levels reasonably quickly, but it turns those side activities - quick combats that gain you Personas or upgrade materials - into chores.
The palaces are also big. Too big. If the first of these dungeons - which is larger than all but the final Persona 5 ones - had been the standard size, then I would be reasonably OK with this. But the second Palace is almost double that size, to the point where its repetitive hallways and trap puzzles become boring.
Lastly, at the end of the second Palace - which, until an update earlier this week, marked the end of the initial story content - the game unveils its final delaying tactic: a sudden difficulty spike. The second boss is recommended for a party of Level 58 or higher. You can comfortably reach him, defeating most of the mini-bosses along the way, with a party of about Level 40. I would generally call this poor design - except in this case, the design is doing exactly what's intended. It's just that the intent is to delay players by sending them back to grind for several sessions.
Of other games I've played, I'd most compare these time-wasting tendencies to the "four Tombs" quest in Anthem - unnecessary barriers that exist only to keep you from running out of story, even if it transforms gameplay that had been enjoyable into a tedious irritation. It's a massive misjudgment, one that I suspect has caused at least some players to drop the game entirely.
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| Igor and Merope, in The Velvet Room, offer you a contract. |
OVERALL:
Persona 5: The Phantom X is entirely salvageable. The designers have done a terrific job of adapting Persona 5's gameplay into a mobile format, and it's genuinely fun to play. The problem isn't the game's architecture but its writing - and it's my understanding that Atlus has already stepped in to change writers for the latest update, so there is an excellent chance that this will improve.
I'm disappointed in Phantom X, but I haven't given up on it. It's my hope that, in due course, I will find myself issuing an update to note improvements. As of the end of the second arc, however, I would rate this as a passable Persona sampler, but one that falls well short of any of the "real" Persona games.
Overall Rating: 4/10.
Previous Game: Persona 5 Tactica
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