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Ahh the days when I associated Sega with old Sonic games and and Project Diva. Those days are far gone because they are out full blast with their greed as the publisher for the Global edition of Persona 5 Phantom X. I had the displeasure of trying it out since it came to Steam and at first, I enjoyed it. I’m not gonna lie, I really missed my P5 gang and with a P5 collab event going on that allowed you to even visit Cafe Leblanc to talk to Ann, Ryuji, Morgana and Ren really hit me with that P5 nostalgia. Unfortunately that all came to an end after 2 weeks and nearly 67 hours in when I discovered that not only was the Global (and also JP apparently) servers getting shafted compared to Taiwan, China and Korea, but Global/JP was on a rushed release schedule which made the whole thing even worse.
Let’s delve into the main things that are really grinding my gears. There’s a full thread of them over at this reddit thread and google doc but I will be mentioning specifically the ones that have me on the brink of uninstalling. For those new to the blog, Kanade’s comments are in blue.
Easy Mode for Battles Removed
This is a big one that is really driving me to uninstall. Basically I am now walled in the game thanks to the final boss of the 2nd palace and the current P5 event boss. My main guy is 52, the rest of the team is between 52-60. Despite this my team is getting annihilated in 3 hits and even though I am using an A2 Morgana for healing, he just cannot keep up, and frequently will also just straight up die. Something is clearly not working right. The TW/CN/KR servers have a feature that apparently automatically nerfs the fight if you fail to beat it. The Global version for some reason removed this feature. Why? Do they think it will make people spend money on stamina items to try to level up their units? Because all it does is piss me off and frustrate me into wanting to quit.
I can think of 4 possible reasons why we are having problems with these fights, all of them bad:
1) It’s possibly bugged. The boss kept hitting us HARDER when we tried the next day and had gained some more levels. We gained even MORE levels the next day and we’re hitting enrage earlier than we did at lower levels!
2) Incompetence. They don’t realize that you need to make promo events easy so that the new players that are being brought in because of these events don’t get frustrated
3) Greed. Hurr durr you gotta spend money hurr durr. Also bad because again, players will simply quit!
4) Balance. They think that this is actually a good way to tune the fight when it’s not.
Rewards Nerfed Compared to CN/TW/KR
This is the biggest one that has everyone giving the game 1 star reviews on Google Play and Steam. If you take a look at the google doc the rewards overall for various missions have been nerfed/reduced or replaced with a worse currency. Example when visiting Cafe LeBlanc for the P5 event, you end up losing 200 jewels and 150 rebel coins compared to the other servers. For Shun’s birthday China got expensive gifts to give to other characters while NA got a bunch of cooking ingredients you can buy at the grocery store. Global server also gets punished by giving less rewards at earlier Synergy levels compared to later on basically rewarding only those who stick around and grind it out rather than diving the rewards equally.
Nerfed rewards are the exact OPPOSITE of how everything needs to work! If you’re speeding up the release schedule you can’t cut rewards because players are going to now be advancing at a significantly slower rate than you were initially intending! People are going to get frustrated that they never get opportunities to even try to gamble on the gacha and will quit rather than thinking “ah whatever I’m 30 pulls from the pity anyway I’ll just open my wallet to finish it.”
Constant Annoying Shopping Popups
I wish I could install adblock into P5X because apparently on NA it’s been disabled! Every time I got a new character or a won a new gacha card, I immediately got popups, mid dungeon, telling me to buy their “new pack at a discount”. The popup constantly sits there on top of your screen for 24 hours too!! Every day you login, they force you to go into the shop to pick up the “free daily pack” but the menu is so convoluted and confusing, you could definitely accidentally click on the wrong item and accidentally end up purchasing a cash shop item if you aren’t careful. I could have sworn Fortnight got in trouble for this.
The UI in the game sucks so bad (and it’s gotta be even worse on mobile where you have even less space on your screen) and they’re filling up valuable real estate with a big DISCOUNTS button along with the store button! Also on that note there are soooooooooo many stores!!!!!!!!
Gacha Nerfs and Permanent Banner
One big thing that made people rage at the beginning was the nerfed gacha rates. Gachas in the global edition are being released at an accelerated pace to catch up to the other servers….but despite this they made the rates WORSE! The soft pity is really bad and it’s taking some people 80 pulls just to win Joker for example. I lucked out and I got him in 59 pulls but I basically used up all the starter rewards I got from playing the first week. Additionally, the latest new gacha character Marian apparently is supposed to go into the permanent pool after it’s done, but they are withholding that feature from global. As someone who comes from Love & Deepspace where they never have limited gachas go into the permanent pool, I was actually surprised this was a thing. I am so used to Infold’s greedy ways I couldn’t believe that in other games it does actually go into the perm banner afterwards! But the fact of the matter that it went perm banner in other servers but not on global just further shows that Sega is screwing the global players.
Again, if you’re making these limited time gachas even MORE limited because you want to catch up the release schedule you’re compounding the problem for players by making the rates worse! If now you need to do an additional 20 or 30 pulls compared to the other servers and you have half the time for it, players are going to get frustrated when they can’t get their husbando/waifu in time and quit!!!! This is such basic stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!
Level 30 Requirement Wall
For some reason, only the global/JP servers were forced to grind to level 30 before being able to continue the main story. KR/TW/CN didn’t have this. Why?
This has baffled so many people, especially ones that aren’t familiar with typical gacha game bullshit. The leveling system in the game is so convoluted and opaque that people legitimately didn’t understand what to do in order to raise your own level. Or they would see “but my party members are all already 30, idgi?”
Now these are the main things that are bad because Global is just getting unfair treatment, but here’s a couple other things that really bother me about the game.
There’s Too Many Currencies
There are WAY too many currencies in the game. There’s the limited gacha currency, the limited gacha tickets, permanent gacha tickets which Nikki/LADS have as well so I’m ok with that. However you now also have multitude of currencies to upgrade Personas, Your Team Mates, Your Cards, Your Weapons. It’s insane. For example to upgrade your team members, there’s like 6 different currencies you get from battles. WTF. It’s insane. Just trying to remember which currency gives what in the “daily currency spender” menu was driving me crazy. At some point it was just easier to open a character, try to upgrade currency, ask “where to upgrade” and just have the game take me there.
Compare this of course to playing a normal RPG where instead it’s “defeat a monster” or “complete a quest” and the result is “you get a level” or “here is a sword”. These gacha games get everything completely backwards where the stuff that is supposed to be fun gets turned into “click the skip battle button once or twice when you log in” and meanwhile all the boring bookkeeping that the computer is supposed to be doing in the background now is the main focus of your time in the game. They somehow managed to figure out how to make a worse version of Progress Quest!!!!!!!!!!!! I never play gacha games since ultimately every one of them radiates the horrible background vibes that nothing in them is in there because someone thought it would be fun and is instead in there because of some kind of monetization scheme or KPI or dark pattern. They ABSOLUTELY know for example that all the systems are insanely tedious and obtuse, since gacha games are the only games that ever do this shit. Nobody making “real” games is ever like “yo I noticed how incredibly fun it is when you have to wait 7 more hours in order to get enough stamina to convert into the currency that you use in order to allow you to continue with the MSQ, we gotta include that mechanic in our newest game.”
Too Much Side Content
Remember how Persona had the usual social link stats and clubs? Well this seems to be amplified further. For example you join the soccer club but rather than just going and talking to the npcs there, you have to play a stupid soccer mini game. Joining the band club you have to play a terribly configured music game. Like damn Sega you have so much experience making music games, and you make this shit??? Maybe it plays better on touch screen, but on PC/keyboard it plays like ass. On top of this this week they added this Metro thing which is the equivalent of Finding Tobias in Love & Deepspace. It’s a roguelike bullshit side content that you basically spam just to get rewards. It’s such a waste of time and feels so pointless – Arrive at station ,get chest, get back on train, arrive at station, battle something, go back on train, arrive at station, talk to NPC, exchange items, get back on train…you get the idea. My eyes were glazing over and they want you to do at least one of these per day for the current login event??? No thanks.
THE TUTORIALS! THERE ARE NONSTOP TUTORIALS FOR EVERYTHING! AND YOU CAN’T SKIP THEM! THE GAME EVEN GETS MAD AT YOU AND DEMANDS YOU DO EXACTLY WHAT IT SAYS IF YOU GO AS FAR AS TO CLICK ON THE WRONG PART OF THE SCREEN! It’s possibly the most egregious example of the game shunting you towards things that are not fun but that some metric somewhere demands it.
This Game Does Not Respect Your Time
You get 240 stamina per day. No matter how much you level the stamina cap doesn’t change. Therefore if you do not login exactly every 24 hours or at least every 12 hours, you will overcap and “lose” stamina. Spending Stamina is easy because you can use it to get upgrade materials for your team mates or your personas etc….however unlike LADS or Nikki, you have to actually do each battle EVERY DAY. Even though you can press auto and walk away, the fact that you can’t just press “quick battle” or something that allows you to completely skip the battle and just get your daily stamina rewards if you’ve previously cleared it is complete disrespect for your time. Do they think their players are playing their game exclusively? Do they have any idea how many gacha games are out there??? I can finish my dailies on Nikki and LADS in less than 30 minutes. On persona it takes me almost an hour because of all of this nonsense that you are unable to instantly skip.
Here’s my biggest complaint of all: CONSTANT NOTIFICATIONS FOR EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!! Take this example of “logging into the game”
1) Log in to the game
2) See a little notification icon on your main menu icon
3) Click on the main menu
4) See a little notification icon on the Dailies icon in the main menu
5) Click the Dailies button
6) See a little notification icon on the “Claim Battle Pass XP” button next to the “Log in today” task
7) Click the Claim Battle Pass XP button
8) See a little notification icon on the Battle Pass icon
9) Click the Battle Pass icon
10) See a little notification icon next to the “Claim Battle Pass Rewards” button
11) Receive a giant pile of currencies as the reward
12) A sea of new notification icons all pop up next to a bunch of different icons in your main menu for all the currencies you just received
13) Click on one of those
14) A sea of new notification icons all pop up next to buttons for using whatever currency you just got for this aspect of the game, converting it to someone else, etc.
BUT! There’s also a twist! The Thieves’ Den section frequently does NOT provide notifications that you’ve gotten new stuff! I’m guessing the reason here is because you accumulate currencies from it so quickly (like under a minute) that you’d essentially always have a notification lit up there. But it still makes it easy to forget about unless you’ve explicitly gotten a notification about it and think to click on all those other “claim reward” buttons (again, instead of the game SIMPLY JUST ACCUMULATING THIS SHIT FOR YOU AND NOT REQUIRING YOU TO CLICK BUTTONS EVERY SINGLE TIME!!!!!!!!!!!)
Overall I was really excited but I am finding myself more and more burned out and disappointed with this game and it’s only been 2 weeks! Honestly I might have even put up with most of this bullshit but the inability to clear battle content that’s supposed to be a limited time event unless I raise my characters to level 60 (???) and getting gated by a STORY boss really kills the motivation for me. The Persona 5 nostalgia really has a grip on me and I really like a lot of the characters, especially Tomiyama (rip Atsuko Tanaka 😭) but aside from burning my stamina and using up my daily 5 turns to level up my social links/stats I have lost all motivation in the game. I am going to give them until August to address players concerns (there’s even a survey you can fill out so please do so if you have not!!) but if I don’t see changes I am going to uninstall. It’s a shame because honestly the game seems like it had a lot of love put into it, but a poor global release and decisions made by greedy corporate bastards (who need their heart changed), have ruined everything.
Basically, the first set of hours when you get to play the game like a “normal” Persona game are mostly fun. I say “mostly” because there’s still the thick layer of gacha tedium that you have to constantly push through, but since the gating hasn’t kicked in yet you can have fun doing the typical things that you would do in a Persona game like hanging out with your friends, exploring the city, mapping out dungeons, and progressing the story. But once you exceed that runway you end up in the depressing gacha cycle where you no longer get to do things because they are fun and instead are doing piles of busywork while you wait until the game will finally allow you to play it like a game.
Bread Master Lee 
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