Persona 5 Tactica Review (Talirium)
This DLC is weird. The vast majority of it is awesome, better than the main game. Part of it is personal preference for sure, I would pay for a game that is just Yoshizawa, Akechi and Joker hanging out for 60 hours, I love their group significantly more than the rest of the Phantom Thieves, but even outside of them, the paint mechanic is a lot of fun. The walls are completely useless in this campaign, instead, the one mechanic to rule the world is paint. If you stand on your paint, you resist all attacks, and any enemy on your paint is unable to attack, and is weak to all attacks, even against walls. However, the enemy has their own paint, with all the same buffs and debuffs for them. This completely changes the dynamic of fights, insentivising spreading out and playing aggressively, rather than the slower, group focused, wall hugging game-play of the main campaign. I think that Luca is a fun companion character, and her connection with Guernica is endearing and is a good enough motivation to keep moving forwards. (Brief Persona 5 Royal Spoilers) It does feel a little too close to Sumire's arc in Royal, and I think they retconned exactly how much Sumire repressed, which didn't real sit well with me, but they don't sit on it for too long.
However, it is not without quite the list of problems. Number 1, the price. I already hate day 1 DLC as a practice, but charging almost $30 for this is absolutely ridiculous. The bundle with the rest of the DLC makes it cheaper, but as someone who was completely disinterested in weapon skins and OP legacy personas, neither option really makes me happy. Making this even more insulting is the length of the campaign. I played this blind on stream, on the hardest difficulty, and it took me around 4 hours. It is ridiculously short, and even on the hardest difficulty I only ever failed a stage like maybe twice. And the reward for getting to the end? A textbook mind control/ corruption plot foiled by the power of love, Ended by killing a very mediocre scripted boss, and despite the very small amount of character changes, Atlus still felt the need to make everyone forget anything happened by the end AGAIN. I hate amnesia endings for pretty much anything, but it at least makes sense for something like the Q games where they're a bit crazier, but it was absolutely unnecessary here, and just ruins any goodwill I had for the ending.
I definitely had a good time getting through the DLC, but by the end, it left me frustrated, and wishing I'd gotten something better. Repaint Your Heart shows a ton of potential, but has too many problems both in and out of the game for me to confidently say that I love it. At the time of writing this review, I have not finished the main campaign, but its sitting in this weird spot right now where I really want to enjoy it, and it has a lot of positives, but there's a bunch of smaller issues weighing it down. This would be perfect for a 3DS game for $40 or $50 along side the Persona Q games, and if Repaint Your Heart dropped for $10 like a couple months after, I'd be fine with it. But where we are right now, I don't think its worth picking this up, unless its on discount.