So, you want some more Persona in your life, do you?
In the background: Koromaru barking and chasing Teddie. In the foreground: nobody cares.
(Note: Persona Q assumes that you've played both Personas 3 and 4—ideally, Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 Golden. For the purpose of this review I am going to do the same, in a limited way, although I'll try to avoid spoilers. Also, whenever I reference 'the previous games' I'm talking about Personas 3 and 4. There are actually similarities to Personas 1, 2 (and 2 again) when it comes to exploration and such, but Etrian Odyssey is the obvious reference there, so I'm sticking with that.)
A new stage (but not really)
Persona Q is unabashed fanservice, a side-story that takes place in the middle of the previous two Persona games. Not in between the games, which themselves occur about three years apart—but halfway through each, when mysterious circumstances bring the characters together during the Yasogami High culture festival. An enormous clock tower has appeared in the courtyard, and somehow its tolls have summoned the two groups into an otherworldly school connected to labyrinths filled with mysterious symbolism and, worse, murderous shadows.
Both groups are familiar with shadows. The Persona 3 gang started a club called SEES to fight them in the time hidden in the first second of midnight, called the Dark Hour, which threatens to overwhelm the world. The Persona 4 crew formed the Investigation Team to solve a series of local murders by stepping into the TV, in which they found a realm where facing your own shadow awakens your persona, but failing to accept it results in death. Both groups have to put aside their personal missions and join forces in order to discover the secret of they labyrinths, and hopefully find a way home.
You will also meet Zen and Rei, a pair of Yasogami students traveling the Labyrinth. Both have lost their memories, and both claim to have been in the strangely altered school for some time before anybody else showed up. They know that they have to reach the end of the maze, but they do not know why. If you're all headed in the same direction, then they might as well tag along, right?
You have a choice when starting the game: focus on the Persona 3 cast, or follow the Persona 4 Investigation Team. After the two teams hook up, there are very few significant differences between the two. You are locked into keeping one of the main characters in your party, and while most of the story scenes are identical, there are quite few that are specific to the team you've chosen.
You know the right answer.
Once you've made the choice, though, you're dropped more or less en media res, with little more than a handshake and a one-or-two line introduction to each character before moving on with the story. Make no mistake: Persona Q assumes you've played the previous entries to the Persona series, and beyond the token introduction does very little to ease you into things. Whichever group you chose, if you haven't played both previous games you'll miss references and inside jokes in nearly every scene. There's still a good time to be had, but this one is definitely for the fans.
The Labyrinth
So the Persona lore requirement is high. The foundation of the game-play, however, is all about Etrian Odyssey. The labyrinths you'll be exploring are basically enormous grids, and you explore in first person view. Each step you take fills one of the squares and counts toward the map completion for that floor. The map, as well as a variety of cartography tools, is displayed on the lower screen of the 3DS. You use the stylus to draw in walls, shortcuts, treasure locations, power spots (where you gather rare crafting materials) and other general information about the dungeon. A detailed map is not required, but skimp at your peril; many puzzles and quests require backtracking, and you may find yourself wandering if you don't remember where you last saw a seemingly inconspicuous clue.
Guys, I Aliced a little hard last night. Let's take it easy today, okay?
If cartography isn't your thing, there are some assists in the options. While you can't completely automate it, you can have the game fill in floor space and walls for you, which relieves most of the effort. It will still be left to you to note any other items of interest, but that's usually a one-time drag of an icon to the appropriate space. I'm not big on the mapping portion of Etrian Odyssey, but after automating the floors and walls the rest of the process became a routine that I hardly noticed. More effort went into completely exploring each floor, which results in unlocking a special treasure chest. Mapping is not required for that—you only have to step on every square of the floor to unlock the chest. If you don't have the patience for that, you can instead spend 3DS Play Coins to unlock it. The more you've explored, the fewer coins it takes, so if you don't want to find those last two squares when you've reached the staircase, it should only take a couple of coins to open the chest.
The Combat
Combat is Etrian Odyssey with a Persona twist. You assemble a team of five before entering the Labyrinth, placing them into the front and back rows (max of three in either). You deal and receive less damage from the back row, unless the character is using magic or a ranged attack—pretty standard stuff. Each character has preset stats and skills, as well as some flexibility based on the Persona they have equipped (more on that later), and most of them fall into fairly obvious positions. Once you enter the Labyrinth, it's random encounter time. Quite a few random encounters. Eventually, far too many random encounters. More on that later too.
To quote Kanji: "Don't you flutter in front of me, punk!" I love you Kanji.
Fights are team-turn based. You enter commands for each of your teammates, hit 'Go', and watch what happens. The order in which the commands are executed is based on the character's (and enemy's) agility, and you definitely want to pay attention to it. Having your slowest character cast a desperately needed heal will almost certainly end badly, but there are times when you want to have the last attack in a round. More than anything, though, you want to hit your enemy where they're weak. Most enemies have some sort of elemental weakness (fire, ice, lightning, wind, light and dark), and exploiting it results in various bonuses: extra damage, a chance to stun the enemy for that turn, and, best of all, the character who struck the blow gets the boosted state. Characters who are boosted get to go first on the following turn, regardless of agility, and can use any power for no cost. Considering how costly some abilities are, it's critical to take advantage of boosting as often as possible.
Additional challenges come in the form of F.O.E.s: Fysis Oikein Eidolon, which translates (I assume) into Big Angry Monster. These are visible enemies wandering the map; you'll know it when you see one. Run into one and you're in for a tough (probably too tough, if its the first time you've encountered that F.O.E.) fight that could send you quickly to the Game Over screen. Explore a little, level up and come back for a rematch, though, and you can earn a good bump of experience, as well as rare crafting materials that will unlock powerful weapons and armor. F.O.E.s provide the most challenging fights in the game, and give you a good reason to fine-tune your party to handle each distinct challenge.
Whatever you say, collar guy.
So F.O.E.s are neat! There's just one problem, though...
The puzzles
Most F.O.E.s wanders the dungeon in a distinct pattern, and puzzles in the Labyrinths rely heavily on maneuvering your way around them. This design seems intended to add an element of danger and urgency to the puzzles, but making an incorrect move while navigating one ultimately has one of two results:
You get into an unwinnable fight with an overpowered monster that brutally slaughters your party while you desperately attempt to flee, or;
You get into a winnable fight, kill the F.O.E., and render the puzzle irrelevant.
Neither result is ideal, as some puzzles require experimentation, and getting into an unexpected tussle with a killing machine is more frustrating than motivating. I got into a couple of situations where I had been backed into a corner, and the only way out was to kill an F.O.E. or warp out of the dungeon altogether. Midway through the game I was powerful enough to simply kill most F.O.E.s on first contact, which made most puzzles pointless unless I went out of my way to solve them. (Full disclosure, I was playing on the Normal difficulty, so this may not be feasible if you play on something higher.) Since I did not find many of the puzzles to be very interesting, outwitting F.O.E.s was more irritating than fun.
Another annoying factor about puzzles is the rate of random encounters—mainly the fact that they even occur in rooms where you're trying to solve some riddle while surrounded by F.O.E.s. Nothing is more frustrating than working through the steps to unlock a door and having your concentration broken by marauding shadows. What's even stranger is that, very rarely, they do turn off encounters in a puzzle focused room...just not all of them. I'm not sure why.
It's a puzzle crime of the first degree, and it's made worse by the fact that the encounter rate in Persona Q is high. I didn't notice it as much early on, but later in the game I couldn't take ten steps (if that) without getting into one fight after another. Your tolerance may vary, but for me it reached the point of frustration. It did not help that I could usually kill every enemy in the first round; the fights became an interruption, unwanted grinding for experience that I no longer needed. It did not ruin the experience, but it certainly did not benefit it, and it made me yearn for an option that just let me turn off encounters altogether (a la Bravely Default). Random encounters are increasingly relics of a bygone RPG era, and even a dungeon crawler has better options these days. It's fair to say that random encounters are an expectation of an Etrian style game, but some options would have been nice.
The Velvet Room, et al (Or, in Rise's voice: Persona!)
The school is also connected to an alternate version of the Velvet Room, a realm of the collective conscious where nothing occurs that is without significance. The bell has tolled here as well, and summoned the room's various residents, along with their skills and services.
It's a good thing, too. This is where you go to create and refine new Personas for your team, and from Personas come a variety of skills and enhancements to make your group that much more powerful. In Persona Q, each character has a built in main persona and can equip a single secondary Persona, gaining access to the spells and skills associated with it, as well as buffs to HP (health) and SP (magic). You can also fuse Personas, combining up to three of them to form a new, more powerful version that can inherit the skills of the originals in addition to whatever it already has. Inheriting skills works like in Persona Golden—you simply choose which skills you want to pass on. (With restrictions. An ice-based Persona won't accept a fire skill, and some rare skills simply can't be passed on at all.) Personas level up with you, and the higher level you are, the more powerful a Persona you can create.
I see you have a stairway to nowhere. This really is a metaphor for life!
In the previous games, only the main character can 'equip' multiple Personas. The rules have changed, though, and now everybody (including the main characters) can equip a single secondary Persona. This mix of additional, changeable skills provides the flexibility to make anybody viable in combat, which means you can take your favorite members of SEES and the Investigation Team into fights without worrying (much) about a bad mix of skill sets. You can even sacrifice a Persona to extract a skill card from it, and permanently graft the skill directly to any character you like. Everything is flexible, a welcome change from the previous formats.
The flexibility comes at the cost of a bit more party/Persona maintenance, though. Keeping everybody up-to-date with a high level Persona can get complicated, especially if you need a Persona (or three) to perform a fusion, and all three of them are currently in use by other party members. One thing the Velvet Room has always been missing is some sort of automatic 'pull-from-the-compendium-to-fuse-this-thing' option, and it hits a little harder when everybody needs regular Persona upgrades. It's not the end of the world, but there were times when I said, 'Forget it, I'll just keep using what I've got until I have more junk Personas to sacrifice.'
Another minor issue is that it takes a while to unlock all of the Velvet Room options. The best of them are tied to milestones in the dungeon, and while you get them early enough to make a difference, it still seemed like longer than was necessary. I don't know if this was a design decision meant to preserve early-game balance, or if they just didn't want to complicate things in the Velvet Room too quickly. They make for pleasant additions when you get them, but you'll be painfully aware of their absence if you go for a second playthrough.
Dropping names: Margaret and Marie attend the Velvet Room, while Elizabeth handles the Nurse's office and Theodore crafts new equipment for your team. Elizabeth heals and revives you (for a price), and dishes out requests—side missions that grant experience and material rewards, as well as providing some entertaining dialog between the characters. Theodore purchases any items you find in the dungeon and uses them to make available more powerful equipment (also for a price). They'll occasionally leave their posts to spend time with the crew; and that brings us to...
The real reason you are playing this game
Maybe you're some crazy person, and you've decided to make this your first exposure to a Persona game. That's fine! Crazy people are welcome here. If not, though, then you are probably here for one thing: more of the characters, more of the story, and the fanfiction-esque crossover between Personas 3 and 4. So how does it stack up? Good news! It's (mostly) great!
Mostly? Well, we'll get to that. In the meanwhile, know that this is where names get dropped with an assumption that you know who I'm talking about. I'll try not to go overboard.
In many ways this is a streamlined Persona experience. Social Links are gone; there is no steady progress of time; there are no decisions to be made about what kind of activities you're going to pick to improve your social stats. Instead you get a story told through scenes that fall loosely into three categories: strolls, Labyrinth skits, and the standard cutscene.
I will eat anything Yukiko puts in front of me.
Strolls more or less replace S-Links. This is where the characters hang out, goof off, and generally get to know each other. They occur in the game's hub, popping up throughout the game in response to recent events, conversations in the Labyrinth, Elizabeth's requests and, as far as I can tell, just for the heck of it. You might run into Rise and Fuuka having a conversation about the shared experience of being left behind to navigate while everybody else has to fight for their lives, get in on some strength training with Akihiko and Chie, or get a sudden dose of Junpei's Believe it or Don't. You're given dialog options during a stroll, and while there are no long term consequences to your answers, reactions vary enough to make it entertaining. Strolls are not necessary to progress the story, but this is where you'll see your favorite characters just being themselves. The interactions are as entertaining and charming as you would expect, and it was always a pleasure to return from the Labyrinth and see the Stroll icon lit up.
Labyrinth skits supplement the Strolls, and also serve as a reward for thoroughly exploring every corner of every floor—what would otherwise be just another dead-end will often become a small conversation (often commenting on how the team somehow manages to run into so many dead-ends), which can subsequently lead to a new Stroll once you leave the dungeon or a request from Elizabeth. They pop up frequently enough to break up the grind of exploration, giving you a minute to relax without leaving the dungeon. They are a welcome distraction, entertaining in their own right, and help to take the edge off during a long exploring session.
The rest of the scenes are dedicated to the story. There are two doors in the Velvet room that lead back to the real world, and the locks are somehow tied to the Labyrinth. The team must fight to the bottom of the maze in order to discover the way out, as well as figure out how and why they—and Zen and Rei—were brought here in the first place. This isn't end-of-the-world stuff, but as time goes on the story clicks right in with the usual themes of a Persona game—facing yourself, understanding your faults and fears, and ultimately conquering what holds you back and accepting the part of you that you've never considered. It doesn't hit as hard as the previous games, but it's not trying to; this is a side-story after all.
This could take a while.
So how do the Strolls, skits and story hold up? They're (mostly) great! The characters are vocal and expressive even in chibi form, and the scenes are frequent and lengthy, full of as much interaction as I had hoped. Watching the group interact with Margaret and Elizabeth throughout the game is as entertaining as you think. Watching Junpei and Yosuke respectively abused by their teams for goofing off is funny. Yukiko laughs inappropriately, there are at least a couple of cooking scenes, and Teddie has a mascot rival in Koromaru. Even the hub menu backgrounds are charming, especially for events that don't have any dialog. You'll see Akihiko and Kanji armwrestle, Koromaru chase Teddie down the hallway, or just watch the gang chat in a circle while Koromaru runs around everybody's legs. Good times!
So why the mostly? Well...
One of the things that made the Persona games stand out was the fact that the characters, while quirky in their own ways, were also grounded. The follow-up Persona games (including the two Arenas) fall back on the usual anime tropes, which I found a bit disappointing. Character quirks are increasingly exaggerated: Chie always liked meat, but she wasn't a drooling carnivorous monster. Teddie was naively flirtatious, not an overbearing (...sigh) caricature of a clueless, unrelenting ladies man. Akihiko was an exercise buff, not a macho-man musclehead with a suicidal need to test himself against insanely powerful monsters. Junpei was not a total goof and Yukari was not some sort of cynicism monster. The more grounded characters fare better; Naoto is Naoto wherever you put her, and Aigis is still in robot mode at this point of the story, but that just makes the exaggerations stand out. Each character is what you would expect...sort of...but more of it.
In the game's defense, this is a chibi-fied fanfic side-story. It's understandable that they would want to have a little fun with the characters in a situation that did not involve saving the world. Still, coming to the game to get some more of the characters that I enjoyed so much in the past, the shift just felt off. I can't think of three situations with Teddie that did not involve him hitting on one of the girls, or talking about hitting on them, or trying to steal their attention away from Koromaru, or starting a conversation innocuously only to lead into a pick-up line, or...whew. Teddie had other things to say in the core game! Oh well.
A gentlemen's agreement, better than any contract with Igor.
The verdict
All in all, though, Persona Q is a great addition to the Persona universe. There is more than enough of the familiar to draw you in, and just enough of the new to make it interesting. Character quirks and random encounters aside, this is a worthy game for any Persona fan. So grab your evoker, lay out some graph paper, and get ready to fight some shadows!