If you want to get an idea of how popular Persona 5 is, look no further than the number of its mainline releases and spin-offs. There's the main game for both the PS3 and PS4 as well as Persona 5 Royal for a multitude of systems. You have the rhythm game Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight and the dungeon crawler Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth. Persona 5 Strikers is for the hack-and-slash fans, and those who want a tactical RPG have Persona 5 Tactica. With so many games for the fifth entry in the Persona series in the span of nine years, there's a good chance that you are either still enamored by this world or tired of seeing it, especially with no news yet of a Persona 6. Persona 5: The Phantom X is yet another spin-off, and while it is a traditional JRPG, its origins will determine if you would be interested in the title.

The story starts off almost exactly like the original Persona 5, with Joker attempting to escape from a casino, but you notice something amiss because the screen occasionally shows some glitches. Once you defeat your first set of enemies, someone enters the fray wearing similar Phantom Thieves gear and engages in a fight with Joker. The tussle ends with a gunshot to Joker delivered by the now-unmasked assailant, the game's protagonist. The next scene shows your hero waking up with the realization that this was all a nightmare. The series of events includes a conversation with a talking owl, and an incident with a bike in a subway car leads you to discover the other world known as the Metaverse. You finally awaken your persona and form a group known as the Phantom Thieves to get rid of the shadows. The goal is to get people to care again by wiping out the malevolent forces that cause chaos and indifference.

For the most part, this is Persona 5 told in an alternate universe where the main characters have changed, but the premise remains the same. Your protagonist may be code-named Wonder instead of Joker, but they'll still be relatively silent except for some text-based responses. Your animal companion is an owl instead of a cat, and you all go to a different school, but it is still located in Tokyo. The plot is different, as are the situations you find yourself in, and that's what makes it appealing, especially since the bits of humor sprinkled are still present.

Compared to the other spin-offs, this title doesn't try to use a different genre or style of gameplay. Instead, what you're getting is the same gameplay mechanics featured in the main game. When you're not in battle, you can run around the city and do things like pick up a job or go hang out with your friends, which can prove beneficial because improving your bond with them grants buffs in battle. You can go to school to partake in quizzes or go home and craft tools for use in the Metaverse. When in a fight, you have basic attacks, but you also have gun-based attacks and special ones that come with cooldowns after X number of turns. In short, if you played the main game, this spin-off will feel very familiar.

There have been a few changes to make everything more streamlined. In combat, this means that your characters' skills have been reduced to three. All Out attacks can be initiated by anyone. When you down an enemy, your choices are to either pass to another party member or initiate an attack with something based on your element. You lose the ability to use any other type of attack this way, but it also means that you have a better chance of ending a fight faster. When out of combat, you'll notice that the calendar system is merely cosmetic, and you're no longer pressured to finish a quest in a set amount of time. It also means that you can spend as long as you want in a place, but you are limited in how many locales you can visit via an hourglass system that needs replenishment.

Some of that streamlining is actually good, but there are other streamlining choices that take things a bit too far for some tastes. For example, the negotiation system to obtain new personas has been removed. You automatically get new personas after certain fights instead; it's fine if you want a somewhat frictionless experience, but it removes some of the challenge of the original game. The same goes for some of the puzzles, which have been mostly removed. The few that do remain see your team members giving you the solution almost immediately, so you'll just go through the motions.

This was originally a mobile free-to-play title, so there has to be monetization, and this is where things get dicey for those who aren't familiar with how these types of games work. Visiting areas outside of a fight or participating in some tasks offer a chance to spend money to do more of those things if you run out of the required currency. An argument can be made that this acts as a replacement barrier for the original game's calendar system.

The microtransaction system comes into effect when getting new characters and personas, as it all relies on a gacha system to obtain enough pieces to get who you want. Based on those who were playing the game last year for the South Korean release, the odds of getting who you want aren't too bad, but the large roster of characters can be quite expensive to obtain, especially if luck isn't on your side. The temptation to spend is amplified by the fact that you can get original characters from Persona 3, 4 and 5 in your lineup, which really puts pressure on people to buy to get their favorites sooner. It's the nature of the beast, as is the fact that pop-ups for bundles appear fairly often after a major section of the story is complete, but that doesn't make the mechanic feel any better for those who aren't as accustomed to gacha games or don't have the resolve to keep their wallets closed.

Beyond the monetization and gacha elements, one thing that may throw off people is the overall pacing for the main story. The game seems to tackle its action segments in small pieces, where you may go after a battle or two before you leave the Metaverse to return to real-life activities. With lots of dialogue and general cut scenes going on between the battles, the game feels like it goes on at a much slower pace, even though it's all very interesting. Since this is a free-to-play game, the storyline comes through via updates, so you don't get to finish the whole story until the developers provide a patch with the conclusion. To counteract the story's slow pacing, the game offers up a ton of side-quests and seasonal events to keep you busy, so there's a reason to keep getting more personas and leveling up your characters. These quests feel slightly less fleshed out than the main storyline quests, so they don't feel like wastes of time. Those who care about the main story and how quickly it goes will be disappointed by this aspect.

Graphically, The Phantom X looks nice. The environments and characters look exactly the same as they did on the home consoles, with the same kind of care taken for the animations and texture quality. This is to be expected, since most of the monsters and environments are lifted from the mainline release, and changing anything would be sacrilegious to the die-hard fans. Everything moves at a solid frame rate, and the options for both HDR and 120fps are welcome in a game that sports colors that need to pop out due to the overall art style. About the only knock is the lack of shadows, which gives the game a floaty aspect. This only comes up if you are actively looking for flaws in the visual presentation.

Like the graphics, the sound isn't completely new. There's a good deal of songs that you've heard before, so this game's soundscape is a pleasure to listen to. However, the new songs match the vibe of the original compositions well enough to the point where only those who know the original game front-to-back could point out what's new within a few notes. Meanwhile, the voice acting remains excellent, but those who liked the English cast will be disappointed to learn that only Japanese voices are present. At least a good chunk of the dialogue is voiced, so the only time you're stuck reading text with no audio accompaniment is when your main character answers a question.

If you're playing on the Steam Deck, then the game is initially problematic. You'll need to use the touch-screen to navigate the game launcher and skip the initial splash screens. The game will give you a guest login, and while you can switch to using a Steam login, if you try to use the controller at any point during that sign-in process, you'll be stuck in a loop where the only thing you can do is view the full Terms of Service unless you quit the game and try again. Once you finally get signed in, the controls work fine unless you see the notices. At that point, you'll rely on the touch-screen again for navigation since the touchpads don't work.

Once you come to grips with all of those control caveats, you'll find out that the game runs on the device's native screen resolution of 1280x800 rather well. With a graphical preset of a tad above medium settings, the game runs at a nearly locked 40fps, which looks rather good in motion. Battery life fluctuates wildly from around two hours to four-and-a-half hours on a full charge, depending on whether you're in a fight or in cut scenes. Overall, it's not bad once you get over the initial boot sequence confusion.

As mentioned before, your acceptance of Persona 5: The Phantom X will depend on how you feel about gacha games. If you dislike the concept, then there's nothing that will change your mind, especially since the pop-ups are pretty frequent for microtransactions. For those who are already used to the gacha game style, what you'll find is a fleshed-out JRPG that is still considered novel at a time when games like Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero are still a rarity. It isn't as fleshed-out in some areas as the main game, but there's enough to satisfy the die-hard fans who are still craving Persona 5 content, even after finishing the other spin-offs.

Score: 7.0/10