August 17th, 2019
I think I hate Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, and I’m not sure how to balance that considering how the game is sold. Persona Q2 beats you to death with its fan service, from an intro sung by the musical talent in Persona 3, 4, and 5 to “friendship attacks” that pair your favorite characters together in little cutscenes, and as a fan of the franchise this was working for me on a number of levels. However after beating it and setting it aside for a while there was this niggling thought in the back of my head that Q2 was just…bad. So rather than making a traditional review I’m just going to talk about why I hate it, because why not? There will be some spoilers in this review.
The first thing you might notice about Persona Q2 is just a feeling that there’s lack of effort behind the scenes. I’m not necessarily going to blame them for this, after all I can’t imagine the original Persona Q sold very well considering it was a love letter to Persona fans sold on a platform with no other Persona titles (the 3DS) and using a relatively different combat system than fans of Persona or SMT in general may be used to. But Q2 has so many strings cut it’s actually rather insulting, starting with a complete lack of an English dub (the whole game is Japanese with English subtitles) and absolutely terrible music. Sure, the returning songs and remixes of classic Persona music are fine, but compared to Persona Q’s absolutely incredible original scores for fighting FOEs and bosses the music in Q2 might as well not exist.
Speaking of bosses there isn’t much originality there either. Most of the bosses are boring and the others are annoying, with uninteresting designs due to the game’s overarching plot using characters from previous Persona titles as a reference point. The game also ends on a disappointing note, creating little sense of urgency as you push to the finale after a twist anyone that’s even looked at a Persona game could have seen coming a mile away. Q2’s ending is a jaunty stroll down a street to fight a boss that doesn’t care about you, while Q1 ended with a dramatic climb up a tower as a god of time and/or death threatened to take your friend away. These two things are not the same.
Something of a black mark against both Persona Qs is how all of the characters have one dimensional personality traits. On the one hand I don’t blame the games for this, since they have a cast of over twenty characters that they need to stand out from one another, but on the other hand it just gets frustrating to see your favorite characters lack any depth. I had been hoping that Persona Q2’s focus on having the Persona 5 cast as the main characters (rather than in Persona Q where the story was split between the “perspective” of the teams from Persona 3 and 4) would help, but Yusuke won’t stop talking about food and Morgana won’t stop insisting he’s not a cat. Makoto and Haru hardly feel like they’re even there (which is fitting considering they’re kidnapped at the start of the game), and this is all before the rest of the characters show up and clog the gears with their own one-off quirks. There are some good moments to be had as the cross-game characters interact with each other, but players of the original Persona Q will be frustrated that a lot of it is just retreading ground from the first game since everyone “lost their memories” after that adventure.
Personally I wouldn’t mind losing my memory either after experiencing the plot of Persona Q2. The franchise has never been Shakespeare but some of the games ride the “friendship will get us through everything” train a little too hard and this is certainly one of them. Every other minute of the story has at least one reference to friends and getting along and learning how to talk to people, with double the frequency whenever Hikari (one of two new characters/plot devices) is on screen. I like to think that I’m patient when it comes to anime tropes but there’s only so many times I can come back from a level and hear the same “Boy it sure was cool watching you fight that boss! I learned something about talking to people and my own self worth today, and I look forward to see you do it again!” bit.
So far I’ve only been complaining about story and presentation, but Persona Q2’s gameplay is also worth a complaint. The dungeon design in particular feels half-assed, with only FOE designs and gimmicks setting one apart from the other. In Persona Q each dungeon had their own side themes that carried throughout the level, such as a “love cafe” that quizzed you about characters you liked and a horror level with jump scares. Q2’s dungeons have none of these different themes, with instead each level (after the first) focusing entirely on a character being smothered by social pressure and everyone in your party trying to convince them that individuality and friendship are all magical. Sorry, sorry, I’m complaining about the story again.
The actual combat has its own issues as well, due in part to the failures of a system where you decide how your whole party acts before combat actually plays out. Persona Q had this battle system as well and it wasn’t great there either, but when the rest of the package is this unappealing it makes it harder to forgive any small problems. Fans returning to the series will be disappointed to hear that physical elemental attacks are still overpowered, and while you can target unconscious allies with healing abilities (so that you can heal them after someone else revives them) you can’t do any other pre-planned maneuvers such as using abilities blocked by binds with the knowledge that another ally will be removing those binds on an earlier part of the turn. Q2 also has an unfortunate relationship with scripted boss fights, where at least two separate encounters are either “supposed to run away” fights or ridiculous scripted moments where none of your abilities actually work (and with no indication that they shouldn’t work beforehand) just to teach another lesson about the power of believing in yourself. They’ve had these moments in Persona games before, but typically they come as a cutscene rather than forcing you to play it out in a real boss fight.
I could go on about more minuscule problems with the sub-Persona system, character variety defined as either AOE or single target attacks, Joker constantly using his gun in still-art and cinematics despite it not working in this alternate dimension, etc, but I think I’ve made my point already without going that deep into the trenches. Persona Q2 is a game that tries to convince Persona fans that it’s good with its many layers of fan service, but if you take a while to think about it you’ll see that it’s just a shallow game compared to its predecessor. As much as I love the Persona franchise I hope this is the last time they do a crossover of this scale.
