The Officially Licensed Live Service Spin-Off to the Hit JRPG Persona 5!
Persona 5X: The Phantom X Review
Platform: PC(Reviewed), iOS, Android
Developer: Black Wings Game Studio, P-Studio, and Atlus
Publisher: Sega
As one could tell by going through the review archives on Natalie.TF or just searching the game’s name in my handy search box, I have never played Persona 5. It’s one of the many games that I wish I made the time to play, but my recent efforts (until the past few months) to prioritize my writing over playing games led me to never so much as touch the thing. As such, the idea that I would want to play or invest a meaningful amount of time into the gacha game spin-off, Persona 5X: The Phantom X is… strange.
If it were a packaged game that one could own, play at their pace, and not something that will undergo EOS in the next few years, then I would be able to let it pass me by. It would just be another game to add to my wishlist or collection. Additionally, if the game were a regular video game, it might also be good, rather than what it predictably wound up being. A frustrating hodgepodge of engagement traps, debilitating complexity, and and deliberately uneven design principles.
I predicted as much going into the game, but if only to satiate my own, I gave it an earnest try, throwing in 30 hours over the span of four days. You might say that is just scratching the surface of a game like this, and you would be correct. But I have delved into enough gacha live services to see the signs, and after 30 hours, I was looking for an opportunity to stop.
Originally, I was planning on keeping this write-up short enough to deliver as a preamble of my weekly Rundowns. However, after the write-up exceeded 4,000 words, I decided it would be best to rush this out ASAP, brand it as a review, and just move on with my life. So, without further dilly-dallying, allow me to indulge in a looser review of Persona 5X: The Phantom X!
…My ‘editor’ informed me that the game’s official name is actually Persona 5: The Phantom X. …But I’m still calling the game Persona 5X: The Phantom X.
Persona 5X: Twin Realities
Conceptually, Persona 5X has all the markings of a low turnaround sequel farmed out to the most convenient development studio available at the time. A game intended to capitalize on the success of the original release while the creative team works on the next real sequel. The game centers around another group of Phantom Thieves in the heart of Tokyo— specifically Shibuya, the cultural capital of Japan who are similar, but different from the characters the player is presumably familiar with.
The story’s premise is largely familiar, but with a couple names and faced shuffled around. The protagonist— Nagisa Kamisiro— is a high schooler who happens across a mysterious app that allows him to access a mysterious shadow world with the unfortunate name of the Metaverse. There, his Persona powers are awakened, and he is recruited to become a Phantom Thief by a cute animal that turns into a humanoid mascot character and a car.
With Phantom Thieves in this universe being a loosely established coalition who expose the criminals who fall through the cracks of neoliberal capitalist society and allow despair to perpetuate across the people of the world. Rather than just deal with these people, the Phantom Thieves invade their mind palaces in the shadow world and steal their treasure. Which I think is meant to be more of a metaphor for their stubborn conviction.
The cast is predictably made up of a bunch of quirky high schoolers… except we need dozens of characters for a gacha game. So the protagonists partner up with some ghosts from the past/future of other Persona users, dubbed Phantom Idols. It’s a clear contrivance, and just one of the many changes the game makes to accommodate the live service structure. Accommodations that also split the narrative framework of Persona in two distinct pieces, or intersecting timelines if you prefer.
The first the standard daily school life and teenage live system. The protagonist heads to school, maybe answers a class question, and then the game gives you several time slots to spend as you please. Study or do something to improve the protagonist’s temperament. Hang out with friends via social links— sorry, Synergies. Work a part-time job where you can just work at your leisure for two hours, get paid like $25 and leave. That sort of thing. All of which consumes Action Points, of which the player gets five a day— conveniently just enough to play one in-game day for every IRL day.
The second timeline is the quest timeline. The player can complete side quests, the main quest, or live events without paying any regards to the daily life or deliberate schedule system. Time is malleable, it can move forward and back in accordance to the scene, and there is zero penalty for doing things in a roundabout or suboptimal manner.
I fully understand why the system was designed that way, but it disrupts a key element of the series. The player is no longer living out a simulated life where events clash and free time is limited by other factors. They’re jumping back between two realities!
As for the story of the second timeline… from what I played it’s just a weaker rendition of the first story arc of Persona 5. A womanizing former baseball player has taken on the habit of aggressively shoving people in the subway, earning the nickname “Subway Slammer,” and nearly kills a female character’s friend. So the protagonist and his first human ally venture into their domain to take them down. Afterward, he confesses to being a scumbag, and the police apprehend him. …Except this process takes far, far longer than it did in Persona 5, and with far less fanfare and panache. Why does it take so long? Well, a lot of reasons, but all of them stem from the fact P5X was designed as a gacha game first and foremost.
Persona 5 Cross: Gacha-fied Gameplay
For a good portion of its runtime, one could be mistaken into thinking that this is a tried and true Persona game. The One More system, all-out attacks, iconography, elemental affinity, buff system, shitty Arkham Asylum detective vision, and the sneaking around through a big extravagant palace while searching for goodies. All are here, but the game makes a wide variety of changes that, cumulatively, radically shifts how the game feels.
- The One More system is here, but the follow-up baton pass attacks are now automated character-specific attacks.
- There is an ultimate meter that can be used to initiate a character-specific attack without using a turn.
- Characters only have access to three immutable Persona skills, which severely limits their utility and adaptability in battle. Because they want to sell that utility across new characters, so enjoy having units that can only deal three flavors of elemental damage.
- The standard magic SP system was transformed into something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in an RPG before. Every characters has 100 SP, and their SP fully replenishes after each battle, but not their HP. Thus creating a system where the player is encouraged to indulge in magic far more often, and clear encounters while taking as little damage as possible. It works, but the MP conservation elements of a typical dungeon RPG are almost entirely lost.
- The stats of Persona 5 were truncated into only three. Attack, defense, and speed. A pretty typical gacha approach, yet one that feels spiritually disingenuous for such a consistent series.
All of this is before getting into the broader mechanical changes made to complicate the process of accumulating power. Which, as to be expected from a gacha live service, involves the use of artificial level caps, and a frothing obsession with assigning levels to everything. Characters have their own levels, but EXP offered from battles is insultingly paltry to non-existent, so you need to use EXP items to level them up. Furthermore, there is a level cap every 10 levels, and to break past it, you need to feed the characters an arbitrary quantity of an arbitrary unbinding item.
All characters have their own bespoke line of four weapons— including standard, 3-star, 4-star, and 5-star variants. Predictably, these essential extensions of characters also need to be upgraded via their own EXP items and their own limit unlocking materials every 10 levels. However, graciously, the levels transfer regardless of which of the four weapons you have equipped. Meaning if you upgraded a 4-star dagger for one character to level 50, then got their 5-star dagger, the game will make that level 1 5-star dagger into a level 50 weapon when equipped.
This not being enough, characters’ Persona skills also now have levels that the game yells at the player to upgrade. Fortunately, rather than feed skills EXP resources to make the skills stronger, you just need to invest a set amount of another resource for a marginal boost in power. And I do mean marginal. It’s hard to get excited about upgrading a skill to do doing 42.8% damage instead of just 40.6% damage.
The protagonist’s Personas, meanwhile, are handled in a rather unconventional manner, and I have mixed feelings about it.
A key element of what makes Persona‘s battles so engaging is the Persona system. The fact that the protagonist can switch between a variety of different Personae and fill in the gaps of the party members with a static yet upgradable Persona. You accumulate Personae by traveling, buying them from the compendium, and use them as fodder for fusing newer, better, and more capable Personae to fulfill more roles.
Skills from one Persona are carried into the other via fusion, and there is a wide variety of player freedom in how Personae are built and what skills they have. It’s a good system, and if you get obsessive with it, you can whip up a level 99 Lucifer that absorbs physical attacks, reflects darkness, resists two common elements, and is only weak to, like, electric or something. At least I think that’s what I was rocking in the endgame of Persona 4 Golden (2012).
P5X looked at this and decided that this versatility would be too messy, too complex, and instead treats Personae as… basically equipment. When you first acquire a Persona they are not at a specified level. They are at level 1 and need to be raised up using Persona EXP candy. Once you acquire a Persona, you are stuck with it. It is part of your living compendium, and you cannot fuse it into something bigger, badder, or cuter. So, does that mean you cannot acquire a Persona more than once? No! Instead, duplicate Personas become Persona tokens, which serve two purposes. Either they can be fused together to make new Personae or new Persona tokens. Or they could be used to give a random skill to a Persona.
It works, but it is hard for me to not view this system rework as anything but another means of prolonging progression with arbitrary limits to power. Something this game just loves to do. And something that is exemplified by how Personae have two hierarchies. Their innate rank and star rating. To get these more powerful Personae, you need to go on a trading side quest of fusing tokens, where progress is limited by the player level.. It’s slower, more restrictive, and generally far less fun than the ad hoc gotta fuse ’em all mentality of the real Persona games. But I guess this is what I should have expected from a gacha-fication.
There are also something called Revelation Cards, a randomized relic like system à la Genshin Impact’s artifacts. But you only unlock that upon reaching player level 35, and I only reached level 32 by the time my patience burned out. So… next topic!
Persona 5X: Same World, But Worse!
Shifting to something else, I need to offer the developers some level of praise for their recreation of Persona 5‘s aesthetics, world, and character models. Despite being a PS3 game, the 2016 title looked immaculate upon release and through its stylized aesthetic, it has aged gracefully. P5X attempts to reprise this aesthetic, but being a game made for phones in Unity, it winds up making a couple compromises and creative transformations. It looks like Persona 5, but any side-by-side comparison will reveal different lighting and shaders. The layout and geography are there, but everything looks cleaner, brighter, more smoothed over, and generally more typical anime. Darker, if not grimier locales are replaced in a way that had to be deliberate, and I don’t quite get why.
They are clearly recycling some assets, others look to have been recreated for the new lighting and engine systems, and canonically, the game is meant to take place in the same locations, at effectively the same time, as Persona 5. There is not really a good cause for an aesthetic shift as such, and I think fans would find these similarities to be more uncanny than anything else. The structure is right, but the colors are wrong.
Throughout my time with the game, I only wound up exploring the first palace, and I think it is a great point for comparison, just all-around. This section is supposed to be a lavish baseball mansion nightclub, littered with statues, displays, and garish elements. It is bright and colorful, but the game is also very flat with its lighting. It’s a little thing I did not notice at first, but comparing it to palace footage from the first game, there were some vastly different thoughts on world design and coloring going on here. P5X’s environments look like they were designed for low-end hardware that couldn’t run a PS3 game. It looks fine in isolation, bad by comparison, while the level design is just bad.
The palace is this enormous environment, far too large and imposing to serve as the first dungeon in a game that is not a deliberate dungeon crawler. It is big, confusing, filled with side paths that just go on and on, leading across multiple floors, and littered with a deluge of stuff to uncover. Treasure chests that offer paltry rewards with a generally de minimis value. Single summon vouchers from the permanent character pool. Weak enemies that exist just to serve as obstacles, not even offering any meaningful EXP or cash. Roughly 20 minibosses who range from procedural to mildly novel to glorified stat checks. And what I like to call outsourced puzzle design.
Outsourced puzzle design is when a game implements a cheap and easy to implement puzzles to prolong a play experience all for a measly reward. Walk along the path puzzles, button pressing sequences, key card ‘puzzles,’ block-pushing puzzles, use a button to rotate the thing puzzles, and one-way door puzzles. Puzzles like this are perfectly fine when used in small careful doses, but they are the main puzzles of your game, you are doing something dearly wrong.
…These are pretty much the only puzzles in P5X, all shoved into a 6 floor dungeon that just never ends, sending the player down samey looking environments as they clear paths to circle back to other areas. The hardest part of the puzzles is understanding what the game wants you to do and seeing everything the game wants you to see. On at least five separate occasions, I missed a puzzle critical item because the game nestled it behind some rubbish, or in an area where its presence was overshadowed by a chest or a different puzzle.
If AI is ever advanced enough to make in-game puzzles, those puzzles would look exactly like these. They are not fun, they are not challenging, they are not meaningful. They are merely content. But I still went through all of them, still cleared the whole dungeon so that I could definitively call it crap. It took me a solid extra three hours, but I did it.
The state of the dungeon design is frustrating, because I can see the intent and design put into the game’s main city. The modeling, texturing, and attempts to create an appealing virtual world that the player can spend months traversing. However, even that is needlessly restrictive. With invisible walls lining the streets of Tokyo, locations that exist only as single-screen destinations, and a stark lack of interactivity.
It’s not a place that wants to be explored. You can look, talk to a few select NPCs, and shop, but the game is fixated on shoveling the player from one task to another, pushing them to fast travel and then walk to their destination. The virtual Tokyo certainly looks nice, but it does not want you to be there in the same way that even something like Zenless Zone Zero (2024) does.
Persona 5(10): Designed For Phones and Frustration
Before getting the game’s UX design, I need to talk about this game’s controls, from the perspective of using a standard controller, or gamepad if you prefer.
There is something to say about homogenized control schemes causing games to feel the same, play similarly, or stick with established conventions for the sake of conventions. A and B are confirm and cancel in most cases. X is typically an attack or core action. Triggers are for shooting and aiming. The top face button is often a menu button in JRPGs. Start/select— plus/minus— three lines/two boxes— three lines/three other lines— are the menu buttons.
Personally, I think uniform control standards are great as they make it easier for people to hop from game to game, and there are certain control scheme that just work better, feel good, and make cognitive gamer sense. Persona 5X does not do that. Its control scheme because it is so inconsistent, going against intuitive sense and expectations, that I probably should have never even tried using a controller.
In order to access a separate base building hub environment while in Tokyo, you click the left stick. In order to exit an area outside of Tokyo, you sometimes click the left stick. The start button is used as a way to warp to your currently tracked mission, a way to view more details in specific menu, and a confirm button in other menus. Some menus, like the dungeon map menu, just do not work with a controller. Well, unless you enable the controller cursor.
Whenever you switch from a controller to a keyboard the game needs to notify you with a big text box in the corner of the screen, ‘cos it thinks you’re stupid. The buttons assigned to function often do not follow a uniform or intuitive design sensibility or standards used by similar games. What was once a simple tap with a touch screen becomes a multi-button press process. And the game’s UI is so flashy, so busy, it is easy to get lost in what you are actually changing or manipulating.
I need to stress the excess of crap the game throws at the player, particularly as a title at launch. The labyrinthine achievement system for performing certain tasks that barks at the player and gives them a couple crumbs when every few minutes. The dailies, weekly, and seasonal tasks in the battle pass screen that constantly taunts you with how much you could get if you weren’t such a cheap-ass. The goals screen that lists additional tasks and offers the player a haphazard scattering of rewards along with a free 5-star if they clear everything.
Then there’s the party upgrade system where you upgrade characters, weapons, and Personae in addition to ascending/unbinding/unlocking their limits. The inventory of horribly arranged items. The social links. The quest log. The server-wide chat channels that I don’t think you can disable. The character texting system. The Velvet Room upgrades. The Velvet Room permanent and seasonal challenges. The community guild playground where you can do something upon reaching level 40. The memories theater where you can watch the anime cutscenes from Persona 5 to get summon vouchers, for some reason!
The social card where you promote your assistant for players when they do their dailies and get coins that can be used in one of six or seven exchange shops. And the Phantom Thieves hideout where you accumulate a scattering of passive buffs for raising your PEVEL and accumulate P-coins to buy concept art that increases random attributes. Oh, and you can also transform into other characters there to hang out, but the environment is too damn big and sprawling to be even remotely hangout-able.
All of which is before getting into the compartmentalized event menus, the way the shadow world is broken down, and a bunch of other crap I’m not going back to check. There are over two dozen fiddly sub-mechanics, menus, and attention grabbers, because overwhelming the player is the point. It is a clunky unintuitive system that lacks the common decency to just cram all of its same-looking icons together in one great menu section. Instead, it fragments them and affixed those with updates with a bouncing McDonald’s yellow icon. Whenever they have some de minimis reward, or whenever they can upgrade something somehow.
But what really gets to me is how the game chooses to represent the menus of this horizontal phone game on a vertical in-game phone, where you need to swipe between two screens. Why not just make the entire screen a menu? Just because Genshin did something one way with its side menu doesn’t mean you need to do it that way. Especially when your menus make Genshin look clean and orderly. When, in reality, Genshin was the purveyor of a generation of gobshite abusive retention-seeking UX garbage.
Or, in simpler terms, I give Persona 5X a D- in terms of UX design. It took a game that was slick and deliberate with its UX and infused it with everything wrong with modern UX trends. With a controller, the game’s UX would be indecipherable without button prompts. With them, it’s an unintuitive mess. P5X paints the screen with so much crap it makes the game downright hostile, if not ugly.
Persona 5χ: Another Post-Genshin Gacha
Next, I should talk about the gacha system, but there’s not much unique about it. It follows in the footsteps of Genshin’s sub-1%, limited roster, and mingling of Personae with characters. 4-star characters are commons and appear 6.2% of the time. Over 93% of all summons result in getting a random rank II Persona— eventually are replaced with currency to buy Persona tokens. A 10 pull guarantees pulling one useable character. 5-stars appear at a rate of 0.8% of the time. And you need to reach 80 summons without getting a 5-star to earn a pity summon. Also, weapons are summoned as their own thing, but you can sometimes find them as loot in other instances.
Personally, I got stupidly lucky with my 80-ish pulls, snagging three five-star characters and getting another as an early event bonus. I even got two 5-stars and a 4-star in a single roll! But I know a callous uncaring gacha system when I see one, and the sheer audacity it has in distributing its summoning currency, doling it out in instances of 5 when you need 150 for a single summon, just feels disrespectful. Most of what you get are garbage Personae— effectively equipment that only the protagonist can use— and with so many limited characters lined up for the next year or so, it’s hard to view this system with anything other than raw cynicism.
Sure, they are being suspiciously generous with the number of free vouchers released at launch, and sometimes make them available as some mission rewards or as dungeon loot. But I have every inclination that such generosity will dry up very, very fast.
Persona 5 Zechs: Doomed 2.B.A. Phantom
Everything nice I could say about P5X is something that it took from Persona 5. Its character designs, its world, its core aesthetic, its flashy and rewarding JRPG combat, and its immaculate soundtrack. It is a pale outsourced imitation, clearly created by some people who loved the game and wanted to make their own Persona 5. And they did. This game is a Persona 5. But one that is either repeating the greatest hits of the real McCoy or mucking things up.
I spent 30 hours with the title, trying to get far enough to see every key mechanic be introduced, get past the first palace, and gain a more comprehensive look at the game as quickly as possible. I was rushing to get as much done as quickly within 4 days, and most of what I have to show for it is a bunch of frustration. As a gacha game, the title is designed for retention over fun, with many arbitrary roadblocks gated off by player level, dailies, stamina-consuming challenges, and a scattershot of content meant to overwhelm and distract the player.
Crap, I forgot to mention that, didn’t I? There are like six different tranches of progression and combat for players to pursue, if only to give them something to chew on. None of which give you a hard recommended level. Most of which have harsh level gated walls you’re meant to fail at. And all of which are just more Persona 5 gameplay, but without the same level of depth and flexibility.
By being so similar to Persona 5, Persona 5X is actually an excellent example to point at to highlight everything wrong and worse about live services compared to bespoke premium packaged games. Or real games if I want to sound extra dismissive. …But that also makes it a template for other developers to follow, to take beloved game and transform it into a similar looking ‘sequel’ or ‘spin-off.’ We have been seeing mobile-based live service entries like this for years, and they will definitely keep coming.
A part of me wants to dismiss these games as crap, as games that do not respect the player, aim to overwhelm and manipulate them, and have some generally atrocious balancing. However, there is something here. I cannot look at the writing, voice acting, character design, modeling, world design, and programming on display here and say that the game should not exist. For cripe’s sake, this is a Persona game where one character is a middle-aged housewife who becomes a gyaru phantom thief.
I just wish that this game could be… a real game. That it was able to make the most of its ideas, able to focus on telling a story and not wasting my fucking time picking off checklists. Alas, the live service design is so deep, so ingrained into the experience that I don’t think it would work. They took Persona 5, gacha-fied it, and you can’t un-gacha-fy it without leaving a lung or liver on the operating room floor!
…Now, I have enough gacha experience to know that this was going to be the case. I knew what I was getting into with Persona 5X, and it roughly fulfilled my every expectation. So, why did I embark on this journey anyway? Because the game is going to die, become a phantom, and I wanted to confirm that my assumptions were correct. And I have. Persona 5X is merely another damn gacha live service wearing the skin of something earnest and special.
Edit 2025-07-08: I originally called the Once More system in this game the Press Turn system, thinking it shared the name from the SMT games. This error has been corrected.
https://youtu.be/9nGWEb5QxGA?si=TP5uK6y–qUQ-3rs
Natalie, you are but casual SCUM! Why don’t you play a real Shin Megumi Tensay game, like Nocturne or Strange Journey? 😤
They’re on my list! Besides, REAL MegaTen fans play the OG stuff like Devil Summoner or the ORIGINAL SMT.
I actually cut a line about turning a dog into Cerberus in editing this review. :P
I am pretty sure Persona uses the One-More system not the press turn that is found in SMT games (and Metaphor)
Ah, that was a bit of terminology confusion on my part. I consulted the Megami Tensei Wiki while writing this review, and they considered the One More system to be a variant of the Press Turn system.