Impressions | Persona Q2

After my first four hours with Persona Q2, I have this game in high esteem. With its dungeon crawling gameplay, combined with the universe of Persona, which includes the loveable characters, good writing and excellent music, Q2 is poised to be one, if not the last, excellent game released on the Nintendo 3DS.

In Persona Q2, the main cast from Persona 3, 4 and 5 are mixed in a Cinema because, well, it has not been explained yet, nor have the cast of those first two games showed up yet. The story, and most likely the whole first dungeon, features only the Phantom Thieves, the main cast of the latest entry in the series. The story takes place in what should be a normal day of training for the Thieves in Mementos, a collective palace (dungeon) in their game. During exploration, they end up being sucked into a new unknown environment, where they escape into the Cinema after being driven into a dead-end.

The Cinema acts as the safehouse, hosted by two new characters, Nagi and Hikari, and has enough space to include a Velvet Room, a shop and the actual cinema room. After conversation with these two new characters, the Phantom Thieves realize that the new environment was actually the movie being projected in the cinema and that Makoto and Haru were captured by the not so heroic protagonist of the movie Kamoshidaman. With the exit being locked away by four locks, the Thieves have no other option but to go back into the movie, rescue their friends and defeat the so-called hero.

And it’s here that the dungeon crawling gameplay starts. The player controls a character from first person perspective and can move one space at a time in four directions. While the environment is shown in the upper screen, the bottom screen displays a map of the area, which needs to be filled by the player. Walked tiles are filled in automatically, but walls, items and whatever else the player needs to mark needs to be drawn manually.

Also during exploration, the more tiles are walked, the higher the chance of triggering an enemy encounter against shadows. For this combat system, I’d say it’s a more or less simplified version of the combat found in Persona 5. At any given time, the team (and shadows for that matter) can only be composed of a maximum of five characters, that are then divided into two rows, three in the front and two in the back row. Attacks work the same, as in that elemental strengths and weaknesses are vital and attacking/being attacked by an elemental weakness downs that character. If all enemies are downed at once, then the team can use an all-out attack and deal a lot of damage to all enemies. Here, the row mechanic plays an important part as the front row characters are prone to receive more attacks and the back row teammates can only attack enemies in the front row, thus, managing who stays where is a vital part of the strategy.

Another mechanic that is very important, specially in the early game as HP and SP is quite low, is the boost. Boost is triggered when a character attacks an elemental weakness of an enemy and allows that character to stay boosted for one turn, if not attacked in the meantime. This gives the character not only priority when attacking next turn, but its skills also see their cost reduced to zero, that is, the character is free to use its strongest attacks without worrying about resources.

And that brings us nicely to using Personas. Each character has its own Persona, but, in this game, the protagonists can’t use multiple Stands- I mean, Personas. Instead, Q2 gives a nice twist to the mechanic and now every character can use two Personas: its original and a sub, “equippable” Persona. During those enemy encounters, if a gold shadow is defeated, then at the end of combat the player will receive a new Persona. Equipped Personas can be changed any time outside combat and can be used for Persona fusions in the Velvet Room, as usual in the mainline games.

Before wrapping up the dungeon crawling, I still want to say a couple of things. One is that the game seems to be hard. Characters starting at level 1 really means that they have their most basic stats, as HP and SP is extremely low and each character is locked to a handful of Persona attacks before the player needs to go back to the Cinema. With that said, the game is still fairly manageable because the normal melee attacks are good enough and there are plenty of shortcuts to be found in each floor of the dungeon. When needed, there is also an item that immediately teleports the team back to the Cinema when used outside combat and, as the cast levels up, their range of options expands nicely.

About floors of the dungeons, so far in this first dungeon there are three levels. The first two took me a bit around two and half hours to complete and at the end of each there is a tougher enemy encounter. Upon reaching the third floor, I found the Persona 3 Portable protagonist, the first non-Persona 5 playable character, which I’ve already placed in my team.

All in all, I have loved these first four hours of Persona Q2. The writing is excellent, I have no words to describe how good the soundtrack is and the characters look so goddamn adorable in chibi form. To be honest, I was unsure if I would like the dungeon crawling gameplay but, so far, I’m addicted to it. I’m enjoying filling out the map as I go and the combat is, as well, more fun than I was expecting. Since there is no over the top animations like in Persona 5, I thought that it could get boring over time, but because of the strategy needed to keep the team alive and the fluidity of animations, I enjoy when a new group of shadows come up. As a final thought, I can’t wait to play more Persona Q2!

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