We Need to Talk About Persona 5 Tactica’s Dialogue Problem

It’s no surprise that the newest Persona spin-off is pretty dang dialogue-heavy. The high concentration of story and character dialogue is what I and so many others love about the series. But no amount of fandom could blind me to just how longwinded Persona 5 Tactica‘s dialogue can be. I’ll explain why the game’s dialogue feels heavy-handed at times, and what can be done to rectify it in future entries.

Lastly, this is no mere spin-off fatigue setting in; at least I don’t think it is. There are real problems inherent in some of the dialogue that cripples the flow of an otherwise brilliant tactics game.

The dialogue in Persona 5 Tactica reiterates concepts and plot points to the point of absurdity at times. Take the image above as an example. Morgana repeats the objective no less than six times during the first chapter.

I didn’t scour every single line of dialogue in that first chapter, so there are probably many more examples than those six. It’s fine to reiterate the team objective once in a while, but it’d be nice if more games treated the audience as if they have a better memory than that of a goldfish. Don’t fatigue the player before they’ve even gotten past the first quarter of the game, especially with a game so dialogue-heavy as this one.

Another kind of repetition that Persona 5 Tactica loves using is recapping events. The problem? The characters sometimes recap events that occurred a mere 5 minutes prior. There are two particular examples where the game flashes back to a scene that literally just happened in the previous cutscene. They’re spoilers, so I won’t show them here. These short-term flashbacks during conversations happen in other RPGs too, so you’re probably well aware of how awkward and artificial it is when it occurs.

But the type of repetition most common to a games and anime narrative has to be when characters echo back dialogue. Whether it’s because of cultural dialect or localization, this conversational echo can be fatiguing and quite cumbersome to endure, especially with long scripts. The exact moment that I began skipping voice dialogue in Persona 5 Tactica happened because of this echo dialogue. Here’s one example from early in the game:

Persona 5 Tactica also commits some instances of As-you-know dialogue. As-you-know dialogue is a cardinal sin in classical exposition, but it’s generally accepted in most visual novels and anime. You’ve seen it hundreds of times even if you don’t recognize the term. A character explains something that everyone in the room already knows and essentially says it to the audience beyond the fourth wall. This clumsy form of exposition is immersion-breaking and ruins characterization. The original Persona 5 suffers from sloppy as-you-know moments as well, so it’s disappointing the spin-off games didn’t learn from it. Take these two conversations as an example as as-you-know:

Finally, we have everyone’s favorite large party dialogue trick in games, the character carousel. This is a trick that character-focused media employs to simulate the feeling of being in a large group. In group conversations, people interrupt and talk over each other. The character carousel instead gives each character their own turn to chime in one after the other.

The problem? This clean cycling of character reactions comes off as inauthentic and artificial. Going through every party member’s reaction to a plot point also pads out the dialogue and creates empty text that doesn’t add anything substantial. Here’s a small example I clipped together below. It’s not the most egregious one in the game, but I use it for its lack of spoilers.

Having just one party member react to a shocking plot twist can be just as immersion-breaking as the character carousel, that’s why balance and deft writing is ideal. We as players need to hear feedback and reactions from the characters on screen, otherwise they come across as static objects. But at the same time, routinely cycling through every character with an insincere predictable reaction makes skipping dialogue an attractive option. My solution would be to show, don’t tell. With character portraits emoting their reaction while others speak, and the game does once in a while to its credit.

Persona 5 Tactica hams it up with the character carousel, and why wouldn’t it? The characters in Persona 5 are longstanding favorites among fans and have a long history together. Plus, Persona 5 itself had plenty of character carousel reactions cycling through each character, so why wouldn’t its spin-off games too? This leads to my conclusion.

All of these points of critique are made worse because Persona 5 Tactica doesn’t expand on any of the original cast of characters in any meaningful way. None of the OG characters have arcs or new plot threads in this game. Instead, the character focus is on the two new characters: Erina and Toshiro. These two new faces go through a great deal of self-discovery and development throughout the game, and their dialogue is cleaner because of the freshness of their stories.

Fans are not fatigued from spin-off games because the original cast of characters is boring or there’s just too much of it, but because the same dialogue is being repeated with no new developments or characterization. If you’re going to rehash the same characters over multiple spin-offs like Persona 5 has, at least make lean dialogue and effective dialogue.

Each of these dialogue mishaps combine together into an aggregate of bloat that’s hard to ignore. Even just cutting down one or two of the dialogue sins mentioned in this article would do wonders creating a better narrative flow for the game. The simultaneous release of Super Mario RPG further shines a spotlight on Persona 5 Tactica’s bloating dialogue. Super Mario RPG Remake reminds us how fun and effective minimalistic dialogue can be. The charade scene with Mario frantically explaining Bowser’s usurpation by Smithy perfectly conveys all the info and characterization it needs to with no actual talking.

This visual method of exposition does a lot with very little. More RPGs need to embrace the art of subtlety. Look, I love RPGs, especially from Japan. They’re still my favorite genre in gaming. The worldbuilding and characters in JRPGs can be intricate and wonderfully engaging to get lost in. It’s my love of the genre that makes me wish modern JRPGs could learn from the technical limitations of classics like Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger. Check out our more positive review of Persona 5 Tactica to see how much it gets right.