This strategy RPG spin-off was unfortunately overshadowed by Persona 3 Reload being released not too long after. Not everyone was a fan of the chibi aesthetic and the easy difficulty did not help either. I personally enjoyed the tactics gameplay and the stellar presentation.

The game consists of bite-sized missions with a puzzle-like quality to them. You can deploy only three units on the small-to-medium maps. The abilities of your personas and forged weapons are what brings a lot of freedom to approaching each map. There are new enemies with unique moves being introduced at a regular pace. The extra challenges and side quests push the player into getting accustomed with your tools and getting creative with them. This can be seen especially with the Triple Threat Attack, Tactica’s All-Out Attack. The puzzle-like nature of some objectives will get you thinking with T R I A N G L E S in no time.

While the persona system is quite simplified when adapted to the new tactics style, they provide more than enough to handle everything the game throws at you. In general, there are a variety of status effects which can disable or displace enemy units. Then, you can use the classic One More to place your own units exactly where you want to make the most of the Triple Threat move. You can also reassign each character’s skill points whenever you want as well as retry previous turns. However, when compared to something like Fire Emblem, the game is very much a more casual experience.

Tactica ends up feeling too easy and short, but that might be a good thing considering the story. What happens is a mostly decent adventure, but it very much repeats some ideas from the original Persona 5 and feels like an inconsequential filler episode. The interactions between the Phantom Thieves are as amusing as ever though, and some of the new characters are pretty good as well.

I have seen a bunch of people disappointed with the decision to use a chibi style for the characters. Personally, I thought the designs looked great, they had the chibi cuteness but still maintained the cool Persona 5 edge. However, when I saw the design drafts for Erina and Toshiro, which had the regular Persona character proportions, I did think that we may have been robbed a little.

The rest of the presentation was fantastic. The cutscenes featured great animation, the background CGs during the visual novel parts were beautiful, the VFX during combat were also pure eye candy. The soundtrack also featured some of my favorite songs in the entirety of Persona 5.

The Repaint Your Heart story DLC was a more condensed experience which was my favorite part of Tactica. This was an all-killer no-filler ride with cool ideas and made me wish that the main campaign was this good.

The Steam Deck performance could be split into two separate categories. The game ran just fine during the missions, but dropped frames hard whenever I was interacting with the Hideout menus. Many of them featured complex 3D structures in the background which was probably the cause of performance issues. However, the game was still very much playable and the incredible art direction made the game shine on a portable OLED screen.

Overall, while I enjoyed my time with Tactica, I can easily understand how it so quickly faded from the spotlight and is barely mentioned nowadays. I think that, on a discount, the game is good enough for people who want more Phantom Thieves and don’t mind tactics gameplay.

this is complete ass

This game might be fun for some people, but that's just not the case for me. I think that the game is overpriced, repetitive and boring. That might just be because of how good the past 2 entries were for persona 5, or I don't like this type of game. But whatever it might be, I had a really hard time enjoying this game and most of the time it felt like a chore to try and complete the story. At some point I just started to not care, swapped the game to easy just to get through it faster. Take my review with a grain of salt since I don't play this kind of game often, but I even got this game on sale for half off and still don't think it's worth the price