Persona Q and Persona Q2 are games that’re difficult to review simply because there’s so much going on. Created as a type of fusion of Atlus’ Etrian Odyssey dungeon crawlers and the rising in popularity Persona series, Persona Q is neither Etrian Odyssey nor Persona. It features a lot of the same features as both but cannot commit either way. As such, it’s one of those series that’s difficult to recommend for either fanbase, unless you like both.
Let’s start with the basis of the game. Persona, as a series, is essentially the light version of a series called Shin Megami Tensei. In short, a side series of games that are arguably easier and more approachable than the often brutally hard Shin Megami Tensei (Hereby shortened to SMT). Persona, in itself, wasn’t really popular for the longest time, at least in the United States, where I am based. I don’t even think we got the original Persona, or even most SMT games, for a very long time. We did, however, get Persona 2, but the series didn’t really hit mainstream popularity until Persona 3, though some would argue even then it wasn’t until Persona 4 that it really took off.
Simply put, modern Persona is equal parts school simulator, social interaction, and dungeon crawling. You goto school, hang out with friends, raise your social stats, and fight monsters. And, depending on which game you’re playing, the social and school aspects can seem like either a different game entirely (Persona 3), somewhat useful (Persona 4), or extremely important (Persona 5). In Persona 3, the social aspect did very little, but in Persona 4 and 5, raising the social links of your party members enhanced their abilities, unlocked new passives for them, and even brand new spells for use in combat. Persona 5 just took this aspect and made it so every social link in the game raised your abilities in combat, like the chess player who teaches you about better positioning, the politician whose lessons on negotiation come in handy for recruiting new allies, or the avid gamer whose mastery at an arcade gun game teaches you how to better use your firearms in battle.
Then we come to the other series, Etrian Odyssey. Etrian Odyssey games often ditch story in favor of a system that allows you to build whatever party you want and delve through massive dungeons with difficult monsters, including the dreaded FOEs. FOEs are wandering bosses that you need to avoid because they’re much stronger than you when you usually see them for the first time and will reduce your party into a fine goo if you do not exercise caution. Party members often have these large skill trees you can put points into to create a party that’s truly yours. Do you want your Protector to have shield skills? You can! But you can also give them healing skills instead, or mace skills, and more. Some games give you more options that others and, sadly, this is a series that only got approachable later on. For the first three games, these games were often quite brutal in difficulty, but the earliest games also often allowed the most freedom in skill trees with following games narrowing things a bit to make classes more distinct from each other. For example, in the original game, the Protector could learn most of the single target healing spells in addition to defensive skills, making them an effective healer, which made the Medic somewhat obsolete. Sure, they got party wide healing and reviving over the Protector, but the Protector had much more health, defense, and survivability. You could even solo the game with a single Protector, they were so overpowered! But I digress…
Often, the point of an Etrian Odyssey game is less to finish a story and more to get to the end in one piece. In these games, what goes into your party is far more important. Do you go heavy with fighters or mages? Do you use a defensive character or not? Does your party need a mage or do you use fighters with elemental attacks to exploit weaknesses? Like Final Fantasy Legends 2, the games offer a fair amount of customization and freedom, with numbered titles often featuring whole new class sets to mess with, with the most recent Etrian Odyssey Nexus throwing a ton of fan favorite classes into a mixing bowl and just letting you play with just about anything you want.
Which brings us to Persona Q. Persona Q tries to bring both Persona and Etrian Odyssey together, but had to drop a lot of things to make it work. Gone are the skill trees of Etrian Odyssey and the customization, giving you a party of known Persona characters to use. Also gone are the school and social aspects of Persona. This is a pure dungeon crawler through and through, but it does take some liberties. For example, every character can equip a second Persona to expand their skill set beyond what they normally have available and the original Persona Q also allowed you to choose your starting team, between Persona 3 and Persona 4’s casts. You have access to the entire cast of your chosen team from the beginning, though your maximum party size is five, so you can’t bring everyone. Where Persona Q gets interesting is you will eventually recruit the second team as well, allowing you to create a dream team pulling from both. This allows you to do things like use Akihiko from Persona 3 and Kanji from Persona 4 on the same team.
However, Persona Q got a few things really wrong for what should have been a slam dunk of a crossover. Firstly, the Persona series runs on the Press Turn System. What this means, at least in Persona, is that using certain attacks or getting critical hits grants you extra turns. Every enemy has a weakness so exploiting weaknesses should have a tactical advantage, like denying enemies their turn or straight up killing them in a single blow. Critical strikes often just grant you the extra turn and knock enemies down. Now, depending on the game, being knocked down is a big deal, as Persona 3 meant you lost your next turn and in all Persona games, your evasion dips to zero while down.
Persona Q, however, doesn’t have this system. Instead, hitting an enemy’s weakness or getting a critical strike puts the user into the Boosted status, which raises the strength of their next ability and drops all skill costs to 0 while in Boosted status. Boosted status only lasts for one turn, unless you exploit a weakness or get another critical strike, but it can also be lost upon taking damage. This is notable because a lot of enemies feature party wide attacks that can take away your Boosted status for your whole party in a single move. But that should be a big deal, right? Just prioritize that enemy to prevent it! … Right?
Wrong. Because, for whatever reason, Persona Q has a big issue. Enemies are just way too resilient, even on the easiest difficulty, and can take a really long time to kill. Moreover, being downed costs you a turn, but hitting an enemy with a weakness or crit doesn’t guarantee a down in Persona Q. However, if an enemy hits your weakness or gets a crit on you, you always get downed and lose your next turn with that character.
Moreover, it’s really difficult to use weaknesses because the rate at which you get skills is very delayed compared to the games Persona Q pulls from. Often, you’ll get a new skill on your main Persona only to find you need to gain another twelve levels for the next one. This forces you to rely far more heavily on your Sub Persona for new skills, who gain them much faster, but it’s highly encouraged to fuse your Sub Personas together to give them wider skill sets. This is because every Persona, Main and Sub, typically gets only one, maybe two elements, of skills. But the game has a whopping six elements and three physical types to exploit, ten total if you include the non-elemental damage type, which nothing is weak to or resists.
This is a problem because Main Personas can only hold eight skills and Sub Personas can hold six. That sounds like a lot, but a good half of the Main Persona’s slots are locked for Skill Cards, so you only really have four slots. So you usually wind up with only two or three damage types on the main Persona, leaving all the rest to be put on your Sub Personas until you can get Skill Cards for the rest.
Some may wonder if the limited skills is really a problem. Yes, because characters often get completely repurposed. For example, Chie Satonaka from Persona 4 was, for quite some time, your Ice element character in Persona 4, though she relied far more on her physical skills. Her stat growth also reflected this, as she does far more damage with physical skills than magic, but she still could drop some Ice spells to exploit weaknesses. In Persona Q, she gets a mere six skills, all of which deal Bash damage, none of which deal Ice damage. So if you want to give her her actual move set from Persona 4, you need to use Skill Cards to give her Bufu (Ice) skills. Which makes her weakness and resistances make no sense, as she’s still weak to Fire, but strong against Ice, but gets no Ice skills. While everyone else in the entire game still gets their base element.
But fusing isn’t easy. You will need to utilize the Persona Compendium, which is a big index for all Sub Personas you’ve summoned or recruited, to summon older Personas for fusion fodder to make new ones. And how high the Personas you can make is still controlled by the level of your main character. So if you’re level 30 and a Persona you want starts at level 32, you can’t have it before you hit level 32.
The problem with all of this is that Etrian Odyssey, the base style of Persona Q, never really handed out money. And Persona summoning from the Compendium is far in a way the most expensive thing to do. The only real way to make money in Persona Q is to get materials from monsters and sell them for cash. But your bag has finite space, only allowing for a mere 60 items before you’re trekking back to the school to sell your materials and go back in. You also need to spend money on new gear, consumables, healing, Skill Cards, and more, all of which takes up precious bag space if it isn’t equipped. So the more you bring into the dungeon with you, the less money you can earn.
Just to give you an idea how expensive summoning is, getting the weakest Persona in the game from the Compendium costs 3000 yen. That can take upwards of six dungeon runs to get enough materials to have enough money to summon the weakest Sub Persona in the game. Oh, and if you level that Persona up and register it in the Compendium, that price goes up, but it keeps it’s level and skills. If you don’t register it, it’ll be summoned at it’s base level, so you’d need to re-level it for fusion purposes, to pass on the skills you want.
But my final complaint? SP costs for skills have been increased. Most skills starting out can cost anything from 4 to 12 SP to cast. And when you start with a mere 16 SP on average, that means one or two spells and you’re dry, forcing you to rely far more on physical attacks, which deal very low damage. Sub Personas increase your maximum HP and SP while equipped and refill their “pool” at the end of battle, letting you cast more stuff, but until you get those Sub Personas, you’re essentially stranded, making the first couple of battles kinda hard, even on the lowest difficulty.
So, with all those complaints, you might expect me to not recommend the Persona Q games. And you’d be right, if Persona Q2 didn’t exist.
Persona Q2 takes everything Persona Q was and streamlines it. Gone are the extremely high health pools on enemies, enemies get downed in one hit by their weakness or a lucky crit, and characters get more skills more often. The game also features a lot of damage types, ten in all if you include non-elemental, but characters seem to get more elements in general. Main Personas also only hold six skills in this game, but none of them are locked behind Skill Cards, so you have full customization of your Main Persona.
Sub Personas have also been buffed a bit, to get more skills more quickly and give more bonuses to your HP and SP. Most importantly, the cost of summoning Personas has been reduced and you actually get money from battle, not just selling materials, making material selling just get you bonus cash. It also feels like enemies drop less materials as I feel like I return to the Cinema, your safe zone, far less often to empty out my bag, which also allows me to adventure and battle for longer. Even better, healing in the Cinema is free and automatic, removing at least one money sink from the game, and gear does feel more powerful to make up for their cost. In general, you just get a lot more money in Q2 and I feel like I’m in top shape far more easily.
Now for a change I didn’t see coming and it was an exciting one. Characters have physical elemental skills now. Remember how I complained Chie doesn’t get her Ice skills? Well, she sort of does now. She now gets the new Icestrike Link, which allows her to followup her allies’ attack with a low powered Ice attack. Which can actually be pretty devestating if she goes first, as she essentially hits four times with Ice. All characters also get about two or three elements on their Main Personas, meaning less you need to worry about for their Sub Personas. Skill Cards still exist, sort of, for if you want to further expand the Main Persona’s move set.
Battles also feel faster and the character pool has been expanded to include the Heroine of Persona 3 Portable and the entire Persona 5 cast. But rather than picking a team like Persona Q did, you always start with the Persona 5 team. This is actually a really good idea since the game always knows who you have available, so battles are tailor made with your party in mind. For example, in the first dungeon, you lose Haru and Makoto, who use Nuclear and Psychokinesis elements, so for the entire first dungeon, you will not see enemies weak to those damage types, leaving you with less to worry about. As you go through the game, you will recruit the other teams from Persona 3 and 4, as well as the Heroine from Persona 3 Portable.
SP costs have not been tweaked, sadly, but with enemies having less health in general, I also didn’t feel like I needed to use skills as often as in Persona Q, so the raised costs are more appropriate in this game. You still refill the boosted HP and SP amounts after battle anyways, so as long as you don’t use too much HP or SP per battle, you can usually use skills to your heart’s content.
The best thing about this game is everyone feels good. I cannot find a single bad character, though I did have some concerns about Yukiko (Persona 4) when I first recruited her as she only started with a bunch of healing spells and a party-wide Fire spell, making her start out very SP inefficient as all her spells were stupidly expensive. But I also found this to make the game much more strategic. Do I learn new, party-wide spells that use a lot of SP without increasing their damage? Or do I keep to the lower cost spells to be more efficient with my SP usage? Do I learn the higher forms of spells as they become available or just get a Sub-Persona with them later? And speaking of Sub-Personas, do I pass on the expensive skills or do I pass on cheaper versions? Either way, I get the damage type variation I wanted, so it’s just a matter of power or SP efficiency. Which do you choose?
What this all comes down to is characters get a lot more elements to mess with, leading to a lot faster battles. As an example, in my current file, my main character, Joker, has access to Curse, Physical, Light, Lightning, Wind, and Ice skills by the second dungeon of the game, so he has a lot of coverage by himself. Between my entire party of five, I also have access to Psychokinesis, Fire, and Nuclear, so my party can cover each and every weakness. Moreover, since I’m also using Naoto (Persona 4), I’ll also eventually have access to the Almighty element, which is just this series’ non-elemental damage type that nothing can resist, but nothing’s weak to it either. It’s just a form of reliable damage. Which is much better than how Persona Q handled things where every enemy was weak to one of the instakill spells to justify it’s super-strong enemies. Which, ironically, Naoto learned all the instakill spells naturally, which made her extremely overpowered. Almighty damage with Light and Darkness instant kill spells naturally? With no real weaknesses to be exploited? She was your final party member in Persona 4 for a reason…
With all this being said, Persona Q is a series that’s difficult to recommend. If you love both Persona and Etrian Odyssey and can set your expectations for a crossover, well… Perhaps. For the general public, however…
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth – Not Recommended (General Public), Low Recommendation (For Fans)
Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth – Recommended (General Public), Highly Recommended (For Fans)
Persona Q is the stumbling point due to how rigidly it follows the Etrian Odyssey formula without budging for the flexibility it needed due to Persona. Persona Q2, however, is an absolute gem that I need to recommend.
The Professional Protagonist 