[Review] Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth - The Cinematic Swan Song for the 3DS

Written by: Bootyous Maximus August 30, 2019

Ah Persona; a sub-series I’ve been meaning to get to since the early 2010s. My interest slowly grew, especially when I was introduced to anime in 2016. At the time, the only way I was going to play any of the games was via emulation, but I didn’t feel like setting all that stuff up, so into the backlog you went for about 6 years.

It wasn’t until December 2018 when my curiosity reached an all-time high. For starters, certain music students at my school would not shut up about the soundtrack in Persona 5, especially the main battle theme, Last Surprise. There was so much hype surrounding that game and its music, that I went out and bought the game 2 months later in February which I played in the following month in March. After playing the game twice, I can certainly say that Persona 5 deserves all the hype and recognition it got. Even long after I finished the game, I’m still jamming out to the glorious OST.

As far as the development process behind Q2, there’s not much to discuss (well, there’s actually a lot, but I won’t be mentioning all that until later). I’ll leave a link to the interview with the main producer of Q2/head director of Q if anybody wants more details about the development.

Daisuke Kanada (left, producer) and Yuta Aihara (right, director)

To summarize the development, it began immediately after the development for P5 has concluded. The team decided to put the focus on the P5 cast and the P3P (Persona 3 Portable) heroine after several discussions. There was a “Horror Ban” on the game since the producer felt like he went too far in Q. Puzzle elements were reduced and key gameplay changes were made from Q to Q2. Instead of 3 story perspectives, there was 1 perspective with Joker taking the center spotlight. As far as development, this is the best I could do to summarize.

With all that out of the way, the real questions become, “Is the game good? Why should I play this game? Are there any games I should play beforehand?” I’ll do my best to answer every question that might pop up, but I’m not making any promises. Time to begin, and...oh boy. This one’s gonna be long.

Story/Characters

Forewarning: I will be spoiling the first several hours of Q2. If you don’t want to get spoiled, just scroll to the paragraph that’s right above the 3rd picture (the film reel picture) I’ll try to not use the real names of the Phantom Thieves except the initial 4.

Note: The protagonist of P5, canonically, is called either Akira Kurusu or Ren Amamiya. Most people refer to him as Joker. If you’re even thinking about playing this game, it’s adamant that you play P5 before even touching this game

We begin with a blue butterfly flying across a theater to which the screen displays a pretentious quote from the philosopher Rousseau. We then transition to Joker waking up from a dream he had which was implied to be the theater from before. After chatting with Morgana and Ryuji for a bit, Joker decides to hold a meeting at Leblanc regarding a trip to Mementos. The team unanimously decided to go to Mementos to train for the upcoming palace (with some very stylish visuals in the process). After beating up a few shadows, Joker and Mona noticed that something was off about Mementos, but they paid it no mind and proceeded with their training. A little while after that, the team begins to get sucked into a portal where they strangely end up in a city called Kamo City (P5 fans, you see where this is going). After Queen gloriously failed speaking to a cop, they get attacked by shadows. According to the P5 cast, not only do these shadows look completely different from the ones they’ve seen, but they can’t utilize their full strength. The Thieves retreated into another portal where they end up in a movie theater.

For the next few events, I’ll try to be brief with them, so bear with me for a bit…

After the Thieves regain their composure, they realize that Queen and Noir are not present. They search the cinema only to find a locked staff door, the front door is locked by 4 elaborate locks, the projection room has a black...creature...thing that plays the films. There were 2 people, named Hikari and Nagi, who were hiding amongst the seats in the theater, and they tell us that they called the black creature Doe (which is a placeholder name). With no time to waste, the group heads back into the film (named Kamoshidaman) to continue their hunt for Queen and Noir.

Once they reach 2nd avenue, they get a transmission from Oracle where she mentions that a presence was detected in the cinema behind the single locked door that was investigated earlier. The Thieves swiftly heads back to the cinema and investigate said door to reveal the Velvet Room attendants from P5, Justine and Caroline. The group is then guided to the Velvet room where they are then greeted by Elizabeth and Theodore who just casually stood to the side. Theodore mentions that he’s looking for a red-headed, plain-looking girl with headphones, implying that she’s a user of the wild card.

More talking happens and they proceed to enter the film again to continue their search for Queen and Noir. An announcement from Kamoshidaman himself appears on a big screen where he states that he will publicly execute the 2 prisoners unless they submit to his authority. Shortly after the announcement, the Thieves meet up with the girl that Theodore mentioned where she manages to hold her own for a bit with her Persona, prompting the team to be surprised when she summons it. I have no idea why they should even remotely be surprised since it was a Velvet room attendant that mentioned her. That should’ve clued in that she’s no ordinary person, but whatever.

Commonly referred to as Minako/Hamuko Arisato, FeMC, Female Protagonist

A bit of discussion reveals that she’s searching for her friends who are members of SEES (Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad). They all regroup back in the cinema where a number of services are opened, mainly the Velvet room where they can fuse and summon personas like the main titles. They head straight back into the film to rescue their friends. The group encounters Kamoshidaman and get destroyed because of the super lightweight statue right in front of them. They retreat to come up with a plan to beat the villain in question. A few exchange of ideas and a neck chop later, they pulled of their plan with excellent execution in true Phantom Thief fashion. Queen and Noir are rescued, Kamoshidaman is defeated, he realizes the error of his ways, and the masses are happy that they’re free from his tyranny. Once the gang make it back to the cinema, Doe...uhhhh…...”cries” out a key that strangely opens one of the locks on the front door. Queen noted that this could potentially be a pattern with Doe playing the second film shortly after.

From this point on, it’s a similar process. You meet the P4 cast in the 2nd film and you’ll meet the P3 cast in the 3rd film, although some complications arise when you eventually get there. Each of these films has something to do with individuality and peer pressure from other people and society and damn this game will make sure that you get the message. This game will hammer these themes into your head with a sledgehammer and by the time I got to the 4th film, I was ready for this game to end. The game, prepping for super boss aside, took me about 100 hours to beat and that’s too long for a handheld game, if I’m being honest. That’s my biggest issue with this game; the game is too long for the story it’s trying to tell. It really hit me when I got to the 4th film as I mentioned earlier. I’ll get back on that later.

What I’m not including is the large amount of dialogue that happens during the course. To be fair, the dialogue itself is extremely entertaining and easily the best part about Q2. There’s plenty of humor to be had here, especially with Elizabeth and the cast of P3. It’s really something you should experience for yourself. Occasionally, there will be times when you’re in the cinema and these characters are just relaxing. The things that happen and the dialogue during those times are really good as well. I would say that the game is worth the price for the dialogue alone, but even that’s a bit of a stretch coming from me.

As far as the characters, the game assumes you have an idea of who these characters are and what they’re all about. For maximum enjoyment, I would say play P3, P4 and P5 before even touching Q2. By playing those games, you would have a much better understanding of who these characters actually are and what they’re like. To be honest for a bit, as a person that has only played Persona 5 (at the time of this review), I was immediately interested in what these characters were like in their respective games. This game really doesn’t show or indicate that these characters went through insane hardships whether it was internal or external when you’re not doing the special screenings.

Not only is the dialogue a big highlight of the game, but the special screenings are also a big highlight and contestant for best part of the game. These screenings are available after a certain part of the game and more are unlocked as you progress. As I mentioned before, the dialogue is the best part about the game and there are a lot of screenings. This game might be long, but the dialogue, screenings and music were THE primary reasons why I managed to finish the game. Oh, and that issue I mentioned about the game being long doesn’t just apply to the story…

Gameplay

Just to be brief on how the game plays, it’s structured like an Etrian Odyssey game, so you create your own map as you travel, you explore the dungeon/labyrinth in 1st person and the battle system is the standard turn-based system with some twists to it.

Returning from Q is the boost mechanic where if you hit an enemy with its weakness, the character that attacked will be in a boost state until they get hit or don’t strike an enemy with their weakness again. While in a boost state, their turn takes priority and consumes no SP. This is probably the most crucial mechanic in the game and one you’ll abuse to hell and back. Saving SP in a game like this is a live-saver when traveling for extended periods of time. There’s an indicator in the bottom-right of the top screen that...indicates how much longer before you encounter an enemy. That indicator has saved me on so many occasions since it gave me an opportunity to escape the labyrinth or pre-emptively heal myself.

To talk about the changes made from Q to Q2, there are several changes to make the game more accessible and it’s because of those changes that I’d recommend starting with this before playing Q.

To begin, there’s no longer a chance for the enemy to get knocked down and there’s no longer a chance for the All-out Attack prompt to show up. Once you knock all of the enemies down with their weakness, you’ll be given the All-out Attack prompt (thank god). Another change is that beating enemies now grant you money. I know this doesn’t sound like a big thing, but this is an absolutely substantial change from Q to Q2. Having enemies drop money is a standard in every other RPG I’ve played and it’s just now being put it (wtf?), and you no longer have to pay to restore your HP and SP (which only added to the money issue in Q).

With a crossover comes several characters, and Q2 has several characters to choose from; a grand total of 25 characters to put in your party of 5 and 3 navigators to choose from. Unlike P5, there is no reliable way to level up all the characters evenly. There are certain points during the game where you’ll be giving an item called Growth Incense where the character that was given this item will be raised to the wild level (raised to current highest level party member). I’ll be blunt about this; choose about 5-7 characters you like the most and focus on them for the majority of the game and fuse personas that’ll suit them specifically.

You have 4 types of personas: Physical, Magic, Defense and Support. Some characters like Morgana and Yukari have ranged basic attacks and others like Crow and Queen have melee basic attacks. It’s really important to consider type, formation and sub-personas when making a team. This could also be a semi-time consuming process since there’s so much to consider when making a team (plus the music is really good by the way). Deciding what sub-persona to give to each of your party members will take even longer.

Due to how the rules of the world work, all wild card users can’t use different personas. Instead of that, everybody can wield a second persona. The sub-persona offers whatever abilities/skills it has plus the HP and SP boosts it provides on top of that. Each persona has 6 skill slots instead of the normal 8 in the console games. If the personas had 8 slots in this game, it would be game-breaking since you could make every single person extremely overpowered with extremely high damage outputs. It is certainly possible with how it’s set up now, but it’s really easy to lose battles by doing so. You have to mix good offense with excellent defense.

The reason I say it’s important to mix good offense with excellent defense is that bosses and certain enemy formations in this game will not hesitate to annihilate you in a moment’s notice. Even if you’ve overleveled by at least 6-10 levels, depending on your team and enemy formation, you can quickly get flattened by the enemy. There were several times when I almost died due to not having elemental versatility on my team and the enemy formation dealing a ridiculous amount of damage.

Inventory is also extremely limited as you only have 60 spaces to work with for the entire game and depending on how many items you take in plus the materials that enemies drop after every battle, that inventory is going to fill up extremely fast. Bring only the bare essentials with you and store the rest of your items.

Remember how I mentioned that the story felt long once it got to the 4th film? I wasn’t talking about the story by itself...the 4th film is loooooooooooooooong. As a labyrinth, it absolutely succeeds, but there are about 6 large floors that you have to navigate using elevators found in certain spots and it takes forever. Most of my play time was attributed to the 4th film and it also really hammers in the themes from the previous films one last time (as if you didn’t get the memo already). Take my advice; if at any point you feel that you’re going to take an L in the next battle, leave the dungeon, then save your game.

This game is also kinda difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing. It pays to be careful in every single battle since 1 mistake can cost you dearly. Bosses will test you on how well-structured your team is and it’s very easy to die quickly. Proceed to the bosses with the utmost caution.

With the combination of several things I mentioned about battles, teams and personas, completing a film could take a couple dozen hours. Even the first film could take as long as 12-14 hours to beat depending on how well-structured your team is. I mentioned earlier that I spent about 100 hours on 1 playthrough. Without cutscenes (both in-game and animated), it’s about 60-70 hours since you’ll be making the map yourself, the small inventory will cause you to go back often including the dangerous encounters and your limited persona space (which is 10 by the end of the first film). Point is, the game is really long and it feels long as well which bums me out since I really enjoy so many things about this game.

Visuals/Sound

I’m not even going to attempt to hide it; I absolutely love this game’s artstyle. It takes the chibi art-style of the first game and refines it even further. Considering that this game has a rather lax and light-hearted tone for a majority of the time (even with the dark themes), this falls in line with what the characters should look like to fit the overall tone. I can’t imagine this game looking like anything else since the dialogue and reactions would clash if the characters looked like their edgier counterparts (I’m looking at you P3 cast).

Now that’s just art-style. As far as the in-game models, they look…...good, but I have a feeling that they’ll age as time passes. I would say the biggest offenders of this are Panther, Mona, and Fox. Compared to the P3, P4 and the rest of the P5 cast, they look a bit worse than them, but I can’t exactly pinpoint exactly what makes them worse. It’s best to look this up and see them in motion since I’d do a miserable job of explaining it. Despite that, every single character is really expressive and their reactions can be pretty priceless...with 3 exceptions.

The main characters (MCs) of P3, P4 and P5 do not display nearly as many emotions as the rest of the cast. I understand this for Joker since the player is selecting the dialogue options, but since the MCs of P3 and P4 have actual lines of dialogue to which they actually say those lines, I would’ve appreciated a bit more emotional expression even though being somewhat stoic falls in line with the characters.

I usually don’t bring up voice acting in games since there’s not that much to talk about, but this is a completely different case. When Atlus announced that there was going to be no English voice acting during the localization process, a bunch of people were vocal and upset about this since every single persona game before this always had an English cast. It’s amazing how upset some people were when this announcement was made. I was optimistic since this would be the first time I’d be hearing the JP voice actors for the P5 cast. Once I heard Skull and Fox, all my doubts were washed away and what was left was a big smile on my face.

An accurate representation of the fans when they heard about Q2

The one exception to that is Teddie; I really can’t stand his voice. At first it was ok...then it became annoying...and eventually obnoxious. I cringe every single time I hear Teddie speak and plus one to the English voice of Teddie for making his voice less high-pitched. It’s that reason plus a less-annoying voice that I 100% prefer Teddie’s English voice over his JP one. I mentioned way earlier that the show-stealer of the game was the Velvet Room attendant, Elizabeth. Her voice acting and delivery was a big reason why she stole the show for me.

When it comes to Persona games, there is one topic (besides story) that absolutely deserves its own section. With the release of P5, this is something that the fans will never shut up about.

Music

Yes. These games actually exist

I know some people are going to be salty by some of these takes...oh boy

If you’ve been living under a rock, the Persona games (starting with P3) has had a massive reputation for having excellent music and that includes some of the spin-offs. Q2 is no exception to this at all.

The OST was composed by Atsushi Kitajoh, who has worked on the console Persona games and composed the music for Q with Shoji Meguro (head composer of the console games) assisting him. The words Kitajoh was working with was “Retro”, “Pop” and “Kitsch”. From there, I can only assume that greatness happened based off what we got.

As early as the intro, it captures you with it’s chibi art-style and opening theme, Road Less Taken. This opening managed to encapsulate what the rest of the soundtrack is like. Other tracks such as Coffee Break, Party Party and Friendly Talk are nice to listen to as the characters are interacting with one another. Going a bit further, some of the tracks you hear as you’re going along the labyrinth are great as well with Kamo City and Connected being my favorites.

No RPG would be complete without a battle theme. This game hosts several of them and they’re all based off their respective games with all the singers from the previous games coming back. From the P5 era, we were given a battle theme that I believe surpasses Last Surprise, and what we were given is an Invitation to Freedom, sung by Lyn Inaizumi. From the P3P era, we were given Pull the Trigger, sung by Mayumi Fujita & Lotus Juice. From the P4 era, we have my personal least favorite primary battle theme, Remember, We Got Your Back, sung by Shihoko Hirata. Finally, from the P3 era, we received Wait and See, sung by Yumi Kawamura & Lotus Juice. These battle themes are fantastic and are among some of the best tracks in the entire game.

We also have returning pieces from the console games such as Joy, Memories of the School and Paulownia Mall from P3, Like a Dream Come True, Swear to My Bones and A Corner of Memories from P4, and New Beginning with the famous Life will Change getting a new instrumental (too bad you only hear it twice in the entire game)

Of course, there’s the central theme of game that plays whenever you’re chilling in the cinema, titled Cinematic Tale. At first, it starts off as a solo performance with Lyn, then it becomes a duo with Shihoko and finally becomes the complete full version with the inclusion of Yumi and Mayumi as you proceed with the game and recruit more members. This is an absolutely fantastic attention to detail and one that I’m glad was implemented.

I’ve been gushing about the music for a while and I honestly believe that this OST surpasses the one presented to us in P5...which is a hot take of otherworldly proportions. Unless P5 has tracks that I’m unaware of, the OST in Q2 not only captures the mood of the current situations, but most of the tracks are a joy to listen to outside of the game.

Overall: 8.6/10

Pros-

• The story is conceptually interesting

• The dialogue and special screenings are the absolute best part of the game and justifies the $40 price it has.

• The art-style, for me, is pleasing to the eyes with the in-game models looking like they’re going to age as time passes (but still looks good).

• The JP voice acting is another reason why the dialogue is a show stealer.

• The music is the absolute best of the Persona series so far and I have no regrets saying that.

Cons-

• The story just goes on too long for its own good and it revolves around 1 central theme which can make the last ⅓ of the game feel monotonous as a result.

• The game itself, while fun to play, can be quite challenging at several instances. The last ⅓ of the game can feel really long on top of the really long story.

For the time being, this is still being sold for $40 in most places. If you have a 3DS, please go ahead and get this for yourself if you plan on playing the Persona series at any point. P5 is definitely the best place as far as an entry point in the series, so you play that first before jumping into this at the absolute minimum.

As the final 3DS game to be released, the life of the 3DS certainly ended on a really positive note.

Bootyous Maximus

Bootyous, jack-of-all-trades, blitzes through the battlefield with nothing but patience, a bag of potato chips, a can of Dr. Pepper and an extremely high metabolism.