Persona 3 and Persona 4’s character driven narratives may seem like unlikely bedfellows alongside Etrian Odyssey’s obsession with dungeon crawling, but with a careful and crafty application of their respective strengths, Persona Q is a strangely melodious composition.
Persona Q’s greatest challenge is finding a way to properly integrate two distinct narratives, eighteen (!) different playable characters, and a host of beloved supporting characters. Not only that, but it has to canonically align within existing narratives and not step on the toes of the two Persona 4 Arena games that follow the events of both games. Through its continued success, the modern day Persona games have turned into a unified franchise all their own, and with their winding complexity comes the double edged sword of driving away new players with a labyrinthine narrative or alienating diehard fans with ineffectual filler.
The narrative Persona Q lays down seems to be the only viable solution to satisfy both parties. Players can choose their main character as Persona 4’s silver haired Yu Narukami or Persona 3’s blue-mop-topped main character. Persona Q’s opening chapter is actually wildly different depending on which side of the equation you fall, though the cast from both sides eventually meets up and gels into a cohesive unit. Still, there’s one room for one player-character, and the way Persona Q handles a main character not being a main character is actually pretty diplomatic; the other one simply concedes leadership.
Make no mistake; while it contains all the makings of a proper narrative, Persona Q’s story is ultimately in service to its fans. Other than a couple new characters, which we’ll get to in a minute, it does little to push any of its existing characters forward. Rather than develop new challenges (as vague as they were in Persona 4 Arena, they were still there), characters default to accelerating their existing personalities. Chie is obsessed with eating and meat products and eating meat products. Teddy is an unrepentant and relentless pervert. Mitsuru is a hard-ass who doesn’t know how to handle her invulnerability. Akihiko is always thinking about kicking someone’s ass. If you know these characters, then you know the drill.
Thinking all of it over, Atlus had to play the hand they were dealt. Injecting Persona Q’s narrative between both games renders any sort of meaningful resolution a moot point, as all of these characters are still in the middle of their respective struggles. This can occasionally make for moments that are both somber and nuanced (like Junpei’s celebrating his doomed relationship with Chidori, Kanji’s conflicted sexual identity, or the mere inclusion of Shinjiro), but mostly it just runs in circles. There’s a lot of dialogue in Persona Q – most of it voiced and all of it well localized – but it’s rarely comfortable pushing its characters into any interesting new places.
All of that being said, there is something of an original narrative lining the walls of Persona Q. Taking place in a bizarro-world version of Yasogami High School, characters from Persona 3 and Persona 4 stumble across a new duo, the dark and brooding Zen and the constantly-eating Rei, who obey the JRPG trope of being wandering amnesiacs. Both groups combine forces to scour an escalating series of dungeons with the hope that clearing all of them will generate an eventual resolution. If Persona Q is anyone’s story, it belongs to Zen and Rei, and while I was a little let down by their closing circumstances, it was hardly a throwaway. There are certainly more egregious displays of pure fan service, and Persona Q, at the very least, has the coolness to put a bow on its tale.
One of the more striking assets of Persona 3 & 4 was the intrinsic relationship between character building and its flowing narrative. Time was a coveted resource, and the people you chose to spend it with directly corresponded to combat prowess. Persona Q abandons the dynamic nature of this relationship, but not the process of spending time with its characters. In between dungeons you’re dumped into a menu where you can visit the Velvet Room, buy items, or heal your characters. Another option, Stroll, occasionally populates with humorous sequence of characters interacting with each other. Your actual agency inside these sequences is minimal, your main character gets to make a few senseless choices from time to time, but it’s a neat venue that allows for interesting clashes between the casts of both games.
The bulk of Persona Q, however, will be spent scouring dungeons and taking on monsters. While I’ve played more MegaTen games than I can count, I’ve never endured any of Atlus’ Etrian Odyssey titles (though our Steve Schardein loves them). This matters because Persona Q’s exploration mechanics were either directly lifted from or intimately inspired by Etrian Odyssey’s deep dives into dark depths. Players familiar with those titles should feel right at home, whereas the Persona crowd (ahem) may feel uncomfortable and intimidated by such a radical change in style.
Each dungeon is composed of several floors that culminate in a boss fight. Each floor is an increasingly complex maze that governs player movement in finite steps. With each step, more of the floor plan is revealed – and your chance of encountering an enemy increases. The entire bottom screen of the 3DS is used for your map, and not a single bit feels wasted. I was initially hesitant at having to virtually graph each and every move, but I quickly fell in love with the idea. I became obsessed with completing my map, and using then provided tools to fill in every last detail. The game auto-maps player-covered areas, but power spots (areas where the player can harvest rare items), shortcuts between walls, treasure chests, and other anomalies have to be documented by the player. With that comes a sense of personal ownership, and all the satisfaction that follows. Those are my maps, and I was proud of having used them to fill in every last detail.
There’s also a significant amount of risk and reward baked into every dungeon. Dead ends, as numerous as they are, also tend to offer their own bonuses. You’ll either get a humorous scene of characters lamenting their current predicament, or a hint that it’s a location for a future sidequest. Requests, as sidequests are called, are available in sporadic intervals and conjure new challenges for the player to deal with. Requests can task the player with defeating an enemy under certain circumstances, solving civil debates between characters, or manipulating certain aspects of a dungeon, but all usually result in either experience (for everyone on the team) or a helpful piece of equipment.
Each floor of a dungeon also neatly transitions into a puzzle, all thanks to badass enemies called F.O.E.’s. Unlike normal battles, which occur with a degree of unpredictability, F.O.E.’s are marked on the player’s map. Sometimes they’ll obey the rules of common roguelikes, only moving when the player moves. Other times you’ll have to avoid directly entering their path of vision. Persona Q is constantly coming up with ways to force the player to work around these typically unbeatable F.O.E.’s, and usually challenging them to endure escalator-like floor plans, magic-draining spikes, or equally bizarre F.O.E.’s obsessed with painting roses. They even transition to an occasional horror element, with the terrifying predilection for gang stalking in the Evil Spirit Club dungeon. These guys aren’t completely unbeatable, but they’re tailored to directly and harshly challenge your expected character levels at that point in the game.
Persona Q’s battle system shares more in common with its namesake. Battles remain turn-based and, largely, fought with the same enemies that populated Persona 3 and 4. Hitting an enemy with an elemental or light/dark weakness may knock an enemy down and render them unable to complete their attack, but it also negates the costs of that user’s magic and places them in a “boost” state. Given the relatively meager amount of SP (read: magic points) and the near non-existence of mid-dungeon magic replenishment, figuring out weakness and exploiting them is paramount to any measure of sustained success. Get everyone boosted and proceed to wreck shop.
Negotiating your use of magic also injects a bit of strategy into otherwise normal turn based battles. While upgrading skills to more powerful versions of that specific skill is generally recommended in games like this, I often found it beneficial to keep a few low level skills around for the specific purpose of exploiting the enemy weakness system. The persona I had attached to Naoto, for example, had a basic Bufu skill that required 8 SP. I would use that on enemies weak to ice, then hit them with a zero cost Megido skill (normally 54 SP) on my following turn. Poisoning everyone typically broke the game anyway, but whenever that wouldn’t work I’d use a trick like that. Persona Q is packed with similar opportunities, and they feel like rewards for paying attention to and appreciating the nuance of its battle system.
Titular personas also play an important role. Each character retains their traditional persona, but all of them can be buoyed by attaching a different persona. This not only adds to the list of available skills, it fundamentally alters that characters HP and SP. What’s neat (and extremely useful) is that the attached-persona’s HP and SP regenerates after every battle. This essentially provides the player with an HP and SP cushion to spend in every battle. Even the support characters, both Rise and Fuuka, have specific support skills reflective of their aligned persona. Play your cards right and you’ll rarely have to invest in any of your own SP.
Attaching different persona’s to every character also partly solves one of Persona Q’s biggest potential problems; the enormous cast. With a maximum of five characters in battle and a pool of nearly twenty to draw from, many of them will inevitably get left in the low-level dust. With minor upgrades to better equipment and an attachment to a high level persona, almost any low-level character can instantly make the required fighting weight. Throughout my time with Persona Q I rolled with the same seven character rotation, but, when a Request would challenge me with bringing a specific character to specific dungeon floor, I wasn’t left worried, nervous, and afraid. Almost any setup is viable if you’ve taken the time to cover and consider all of your bases.
With all of that in mind, there were times with Persona Q’s pacing got the better of me. Sometimes I was tired of fighting a boss over and over, or feeling cheap-shotted because a bad attack wave exhausted all of my revival items. Persona Q offers a safety net for newer players (or, ah, game reviewers with a lot on their plate) with a huge suite of difficulty options. Safety, the absolute lowest of the bunch, basically gives the player infinite continues and renders them undefeatable, but others are more in tune with what’s expected. In the end I spent most of my time dancing between easy and normal, although Persona Q offers plenty of harder options for die hard MegaTen masochists faithful.
Persona Q’s visual load-out is an eclectic mix of inspired artwork and dubious character design choices. I don’t know why nearly every iteration of a franchise on the 3DS has to default its characters into the “chibi” style, but Persona Q is ready and willing to oblige. It meshes with the lighthearted nature of the Persona Q (and the original Shigenori Soejima portrait art remains), but it just looks weird with existing characters I know and love. Each dungeon sports a specific theme that ranges from delightful kitsch to outright insanity. It’s all very…boxy and reminiscent of some PS1 era RPG’s with better art assets, but it serves its purpose. Occasional visual flairs are thrown in, like the soft evening light that baths everything in the Evil Spirit Club dungeon, but generally Persona Q deals in style before technical prowess.
I typically don’t spend much time in reviews talking about music, but any transition from Persona 3 & 4‘s sonic excellence begs commentary. Persona Q does its part by either straight up referencing or remixing Shoji Meguro’s legendary pop nonsense, but original tunes by Atsushi Kitajoh dominate most of Persona Q’s soundscape. Kitajoh’s work sounds like it’s trying to emulate Meguro’s style, which sort of makes it feel like a copy of a copy – something’s lost along the way – but given the series’ relatively unique style it’s a harmless foul. With all of that in mind, I did start to get a little tired of everything by the time hour 40 rolled around, though I guess that comes with the territory in massive games like this.
There are so many ways Persona Q could have gone south. The mash-up of two different narratives, untouchable plot consequences, incalculable fan expectations, unabashed dungeon divergence, the weight of two excellent fighting games, and the series’ debut on the 3DS hardware coalesce into a challenge seemingly too great to meet any reasonable sort of expectations. In the end, Persona Q serves each and every one of its masters with a considerable amount of confidence. It cuts a few corners where it absolutely has to, but emerges as a unique solution to an acute problem. Against all odds, it’s the best dungeon-crawling, seven-game-spanning, turn-based battling, social-sim mash-up available.
