Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth

Original (I don't know when), Updated: 2024-05-24

What if you fused Etrian Odyssey and Persona? That's the premise of this game and at face value that sounds amazing. But instead what I found was an incredibly mediocre game that I tried SO hard to like and bounced off of after 25 hours.

You take the dungeons and labyrinths of Etrian Odyssey, lose some of the charm of them, then replace the combat system with a loose approximation of Persona, where you can capture Personas and pair them up with your people, and then hamfist the Persona's moves into the similar 2-line setup of Etrian Odyssey. In the process they manage to lose both the fun of Etrian Odyssey's customizable characters that can synergize to break the game and the fun of Personas tied to specific characters with the singular wild-card-MC who can use any Persona. Nope. Now everyone's a wildcard because everyone can be assigned any Persona. So there's no flavor, no specific purpose to any character and no fun builds or synergy. Just pick the strongest Persona and try to steamroll.

But you can't steamroll because the difficulty is fucked. It's not Etrian Odyssey difficult where you have to pick apart how to win. I mean it's not even difficult at all really. No it's just every enemy is a sponge for damage. Even on the lowest difficulty setting fights against FOEs would take like 5-10 minutes. And they'd fucking spam status effects that just lock down your party so you can waste even more time in combat. It's not challenging it's just a huge waste of a time. Add to that random encounters that are near constant and don't give enough experience and you're in for a shit time.

But hey, even with the absolute frustrating and painful combat and dungeons it's got Persona characters and their charming dialogue, right? Right?! Nope. Fuck you. These are hollow facsimiles of the characters you know and love. Akihiko literally just talks about protein and eating food. There's a new girl with some oOoOo spooky backstory but she just spent the whole time talking about food as well. And even though this game merges P3 and P4 characters together, and you'd think that'd create some great moments, it's mostly just cringe, bad writing. Hell, I'm not looking for Hemingway. I mean I enjoyed the fan-service of the dancing games. They rule. But this can't even manage that. There are a couple funny scenes (the marriage bit with Akihiko and MC) but it quickly becomes incredibly tiring. Maybe that's because after a while I just wanted to be done with the fucking interminable dungeons and the shit combat.

Man... this game. I adore Etrian Odyssey and I adore Persona. This should have been so good and it was so mediocre. I'll check out Q2 'cause, hey, maybe they put some more effort into the writing and improved the combat. I guess we'll see.

2023-12-12
I actually dropped this game's score even lower. It fucking sucks.