Persona 5: The Phantom X Is a Hollow Retread of the Series You Love

There is an inescapable feeling every time I load up Persona 5: The Phantom X, and it's not a good one.

It's this gnawing frustration, this feeling of knowing that I am having one pulled over on me. I sit for a few seconds (on my Steam Deck) or nearly a minute (on my Retroid) staring at the spinning “Take Your Time” artwork of Faux-Joker’s face, and it feels like the game is taunting me. That eventually, I will give up on the series’ mantra that the game is reminding me of, and spend some money in the deluded hope that it will force me to become engaged with what's, at best, a hollow retread of a game I have already played.

Because that’s what P5X ultimately is at its core, outside of the free-to-play trappings and gacha mechanics. This is the iconography and template of Persona 5 being used, yet again, to tell an extremely familiar story. It's the fourth game of this ilk to tell a tale of changing corrupt hearts and self-determination, as you fight back against the social malaise that leaves so much of society apathetic to the idea of building a better world. And it feels less inspired this time around, considering, unlike previous spin-offs (Strikers, Tactica, and Dancing All Night), this one has basically nothing new to bring to the table. This isn’t the series shifting to Musou character action, positional strategy gaming, or rhythm gaming; it's more gameplay that you probably got your fill of over 100 or so hours of in the main game.

Choosing to introduce a new protagonist is even more frustrating because, despite the opportunities to tell new stories that should open up, P5X seems obscenely committed to recreating character archetypes that result in the exact same party dynamics. The Ryuji-style dumbass-best-friend character is held back at first, but the protagonist, Lufel, and Motoha, may as well be Ren, Morgana and Ann. Right down to one of them being a teen prodigy in their field, unsure if they can make it big because of personal troubles.

And you know. Maybe that is fine. There are probably countless mobile users who have never touched a MegaTen game, and to them, this all could feel incredibly fresh. The problem is that when you take this game out of a vacuum, the Persona franchise, 5 in particular, is totally antithetical to any kind of story you can tell within a gacha framework.

P5X is (apparently) very free-to-play friendly, something all the YouTube videos of people playing the Chinese client have been adamant about for almost a year now. For better or worse, you can mostly engage with this game on the terms of it just being another Persona 5. You can focus on the story, which is yet again highlighting people that epitomise different social blights, and yet again sees you change their heart, so that society can, yet again, realise that change is possible and the world can get better. You can do that again if you want to... But really can’t.

The moment that really broke P5X for me came early on. As the protagonist (yet to awaken his persona and still stuck rudderless in life) walks to the train station, a dishevelled-looking woman walks past him. As he waits for the train, he sees the woman standing atop a building, a mummer ripples through the crowd, non-voiced speech bubbles tell us that people are mildly concerned, but not enough to do anything. The protagonist can’t raise his voice; he just doesn’t have it in him. He, like the rest of this world, does not care anymore. Then the woman jumps.

This scene is meant to show how docile a world without hope for change has become, people barely raising their voice, watching an attempted suicide. They are too resigned to a world where they go to work miserable, come home miserable, and go to sleep miserable. The Persona 5 series is no stranger to this story beat, although it's usually not so crude in its portrayal.  This is an important scene if we really are going to play the “P5 Hits” and do this all over again. It is a scene that makes the characters breaking free of apathy, fighting for their future, and making the world a better place, actually hit home.

Anyway, after this somewhat harrowing scene, you get home, and the UI opens up, and you have five icons across the top of your screen with yellow “!” beside them, and when you open them, you see the treadmill manifest beneath your feet. One page is a store that has a daily free item with a handful of crafting rewards, next items of “BEST VALUE”, another this season's “Pass” with a free tier and paid tier and, of course, daily login bonuses.

The next page details a week challenge that lets me run a weekly “Trial” playing as Joker (a character I have already played as for about 250 hours across games), who I can then unlock if roll enough spins to maybe recruit a four-star version of him to my squad, and so on. And that's when it all hit me. “Oh. Persona 5: The Phantom X is the malaise.” It is the never-ending loop of meaningless rewards and hollow stories repeating until we're moulded into a docile submission that the franchise hates so much.

Persona 5: The Phantom X is the daily grind that wears you down. On paper, it's rewarding, generous, even in comparison to its contemporaries, doling out free daily rewards and allowing you the pleasure of playing through its story with minimal roadblocks, but what is this all in service of? One of the great joys of Persona 5, and any game really, is finishing it. Closing the book, changing the world in the game, and being left like you can change the world in real life.

You’ll never do that in P5X. You will never break the cycle of apathy it is trying to depict. There will always be another season, another story following the same template, rewarding you by making the numbers slightly bigger, showering you in generosity, allowing you to play more. Until one day, you’ll look around, and you’ll realise that you too go to work miserable, come home miserable, and go to sleep miserable, and that maybe there is no breaking free.

Persona 5: The Phantom X is sure to include countless playable party members and countless story arcs where they awaken to their true selves and fight back against systems that have made them miserable. However, in securing this endless supply of phantom thieves, it has resigned itself to not only believing that change is impossible in the real world, but becoming a tool at enables our suppression.