When it was announced that Persona 5: The Phantom X would be accelerating its story content rollout for the West to catch up to China, which has had the game for over a year, players were wary. As a gacha game with timed events and currency, The Phantom X is a game in which narrative developments and their associated rewards come and go, and that means if you can’t get around to playing it for some time, you might miss out on something big. Western players wondered if they might be getting a lesser experience than the original Chinese audience until they were caught up, and while it remains to be seen just how much this new accelerated story will affect things, fans are already noticing they’re getting smaller rewards on this faster timeline than The Phantom X’s original run.
As reported by GamesRadar+, The Phantom X players have been comparing the rewards for the worldwide release with those of the original Chinese one, and while in some cases the western audience is receiving more rewards comparatively (North American players get more character materials in the battle pass, for example), broadly, it appears that the spoils players earn by playing have been nerfed from what they were for Chinese players a year ago. You can read the full breakdown in a shared document that goes through each change.
If you’re not playing The Phantom X and don’t know what all these currencies and points mean, all you really need to know is that these changes will require more grinding and time investment over the course of the game, or for players to make up for that by spending real money. With The Phantom X now being on an accelerated story roadmap, it all amounts to western players having to work with fewer resources and less time.
A lot of free-to-play live-service games bank on players feeling a sense of urgency to play and sometimes pay money to not fall behind, but fans argue that these factors make The Phantom X feel unfair, and that western players are “getting treated like trash.” As such, swaths of players have review-bombed the game on Google Play, where its user rating sits at a low 1.9/5 stars, with its one-star reviews eclipsing all other scores combined.
“Honestly, this is a really fun game so far,” one Google Play review reads. “But the current greed and lack of compensation while speeding up updates and banners to catch up with the other versions will run the global version of this game into the ground, very, very quickly. I personally wouldn’t invest too much if things don’t change, cause in a few more updates it might just be time to jump ship.”
We’ve reached out to Atlus for comment on the situation and will update the story if we hear back.