I want to be excited for Persona 5: The Phantom X. I played about two hours of the game, and it’s got a lot of the staples of the RPG social sim fans know and love. It even adds a few new bells and whistles to the series’ turn-based combat, lending new dimensions to a typically straightforward system. However, mapping everything this series has to offer onto live-service structures and gacha rolls doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in what may be one of the last Persona 5 spin-offs before we finally reach Persona 6.
It’s a shame I’m so hesitant, because the premise of The Phantom X is really compelling to me. This game takes place in a separate timeline in which a different group of high schoolers took up the Phantom Thieves mantle. Instead of playing as Joker, you play as Wonder, a completely different guy who goes to another school and has different friends, but still has Joker’s ability to summon multiple entities called Persona to fight off Shadows in a paranormal world called the Metaverse. Like most Persona heroes, his life is split between fighting monsters in one world and living a normal teenage existence in the other, but the difference this time around is that The Phantom X breaks the traditional RPG grind for a much more elaborate gacha one.
You build out your party by unlocking characters with gacha rolls. The game’s calendar system is regimented by an energy mechanic, so you can’t just have a breezy marathon running through several in-game days at a time like you could in other Persona games. Stats and abilities are now gated by RNG rather than acquired by simply getting more powerful. You know, the normal free-to-play dressings that keep you booting the game up every day or so.
I can’t speak to the probabilities for different pulls based on my two hours with the game, but folks who’ve been playing it in the East have said that it’s pretty generous compared to other gacha games and lets you unlock characters and summonable Personas with relative ease. But even if The Phantom X is less predatory than your average slot machine, I think I’m just kinda bummed that an interesting premise is being overcomplicated by all these chance-based systems. I’ve played every Persona game and can navigate all their complexities pretty easily, but opening a menu in The Phantom X and seeing how all the systems, from the social elements that have long been the draw to the simple act of customizing your party, have been made more complicated so the game can get its hooks into your daily routine and wallet takes the wind out of my sails.
I love Persona 5. Yeah, we have probably reached the subseries’ oversaturation point, but I still am waiting for whatever the final spin-off will be that will gloriously send the Phantom Thieves off into the sunset. Every game Atlus put out after the 2016 original has felt like a low-stakes “monster of the week” romp that mostly existed to give the old crew a reason to hang out for a bit. The Phantom X, meanwhile, is the first time one of the Persona 5 spin-offs has done something of substance. By sidelining the characters Atlus hasn’t done anything meaningful with since the enhanced edition, Persona 5 Royal, launched in 2019, The Phantom X has the potential to explore something truly different in this world for the first time in years. I haven’t had much time with Wonder’s version of the Phantom Thieves, but I’m interested to get to know new Persona users, even if they’re borrowing a previous crew’s aesthetic. But it’s hard to look forward to those possibilities when they’re all gated behind mechanics designed to tempt me to drop some cash.
I want to give The Phantom X its fair shake when it comes to mobile and PC on June 26, but I can’t lie, I’m skeptical. I hope I’m proven wrong.