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.

(One side note on the music: it's good. I mean obviously. Not among the best in the Persona series but even so that makes it better than most games' soundtracks. We even get a guest appearance by the legend Yuzo Koshiro himself.)

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.

opens up persona 3 mc story
junpei comes on screen
"Koromaru said: ''i want it to have big bazoongas''!"
instant 3.5 stars

Persona Q is very much a mixed bag for me, I don’t really have many strong feelings on it, but it does do some stuff that I like, along with crap I dislike.

There’s some pretty easy pros and cons that can be drawn here, for example the music is mostly really good, and the artstyle is cute, but then a lot of characters get butchered pretty badly and come off as flat. This is definitely worse for some characters than others,but it’s still prevalent.

The gameplay is an aspect I knew was divisive going in, and unfortunately I wasn’t much of a fan, felt the dungeons were too big and complex for their own good, and running away from FOEs got real old real quick, which is a shame because there are some genuinely cool ideas here, but they just tend to overstay their welcome, and trying to solve puzzles while dealing with random encounters is just annoying.

The game’s story is kinda just a worse version of Persona 1 funnily enough, although it does have some good stuff in it. While I don’t care for Rei much, I can’t deny that her VA did a really great job, and while this is an idea that’s been done before, it’s still pretty effective I feel. There’s dumb stuff like how Zen making an exception for Rei is pretty unbelievable considering he would’ve already farried millions of people to the afterlife, but eh I don’t care much.

Overall, you know it’s fine, like a very flat 5 out of 10, I don’t regret going through it, but also I don’t think I’ll ever do so again.

UPDATE: I have since beat this game and yeah, outside of the art style and music, it fucking sucks.

I would like to congratulate Persona Q for being the only video game to actively give me a headache whilst I am playing it. There are so many issues with this game that resulted in me dropping it during Inaba Pride Festival Floor 3 or whatever it was called, please bear in mind I don't know anything about Etrian Odyssey so maybe my complaints extend to that franchise and aren't just unique to this game.

For a starter, why is everything so expensive and why do enemies do such damage? And why is the SP cost for literally any skill so fucking high? After you defeat 2 enemies you practically have to go home and refuel by using a Goho-M.

In general, dungeon puzzles are mind-bogglingly poorly designed, there is only ever 1 incredibly specific and hard way to do them to the point you will just look up a guide and don't even get me started on the FOE puzzles. Those things are just down to RNG and fucking suck, and later in the game it becomes impossible to fight them as some of them regen 9900 health!

And why do people who aren't in my party NOT gain XP? With a game with this many party members it's impossible to mix and match like normal games unless you grind them or just stick with one party (PS, Use Naoto and Aigis).

Props to the music and unique style though, that's really all the positives I can say for this game.

Quite possibly one of the greatest RPGs I have ever played. I remember trying out this game, confident in my MegaTen skills after beating Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4, only to receive a brutal kick to the face for having no Etrian Odyssey experience whatsoever. I decided to give it another go after beating Etrian 1 and 2, and boy am I glad I did.

The gameplay combines crucial EO elements (Teams of 5 separated into two rows, map drawing, status ailments being somewhat useful), with bits and pieces of Persona elements thrown in the mix (Using personas/Fusing personas, obviously using the casts of Persona 3 and 4, as well as re-using the enemies from said games). It still contains the classic Atlus difficulty as well as the early-on EO difficulty, but this time it only feels challenging, not frustrating.

In terms of story, this game has one of the best stories (In my opinion) in the series. I won't spoil it in case you guys want to play it for yourself, but essentially, the casts of Persona 3 and 4 become trapped in a culture festival in another world, with some of the displays being the labyrinths you traverse through. They then meet two original characters and together, they try to find their way back to their own world as well as find out reason they were trapped here to begin with.

The soundtrack is great (especially the boss themes) and with gameplay that's fun yet challenging and never feels repetitive (One of my biggest gripes with the Etrian series), its no wonder I gave this game 5 stars

But you want to know what the best part is?

THEY FIXED ETRIAN'S MATERIAL GATHERING SYSTEM

Thank the fucking lord for that. Etrian's material gathering system sucked major ass because it forced you waste precious skill points just for a little extra money and more weapons/armor. But this game doesn't have skill points so instead they have it to where you can just gather materials at a power spot 3-5 times without the need for any special skills. I swear to god when I found out, I saw the light and heard God's heavenly choir and trumpets playing.

So yeah, pretty great game overall. If you're an Etrian fan, this is an easy recommendation. But if you're a Persona/MegaTen fan, I recommend playing at least Etrian 1 first.

Party Lineup
Front: Yu, Kanji, Aigis
Back: Makoto, Naoto

Agility Bind + Myriad Arrows sweep
-Played Makoto's side + Yu NG+
-Completed all Nurse quests
-Completed all interactions/walks
-100% Map exploration for every area
-100% Persona Compendium

im a big persona fan but i REALLY tried to stick to this one. the gameplay probably sticks better to Etrian Odyssey fans, and I liked how it differed from regular persona but i still wasnt super crazy on it. The story here is pretty bad as well, doing my least favorite thing ever in a story where everyone's memories get wiped at the end, as if everything here didnt happen. There's also a lot of character assassination here, since they cant really make any deep character moments or changes since... everyones memory gets wiped LOL

ill give some points because some of the fanservicey moments are fun, and the visual design and soundtrack are banging as ALWAYS. but otherwise I would tread very carefully around this game. definitely emulate it over purchasing it.

It’s fine. It drags, and a lot of the characterization is so bad that it ruins the whole hook regarding the P3 and P4 characters interacting, but it’s fine. I like the gameplay loop. I think that drawing out the maps was fun. I remember really liking the final boss, as gimmicky as it was and as much of a chore the boss that precedes it is. Otherwise, I don’t have a whole lot to say besides that it’s as tasteless as Persona usually is and that the original characters/story are unsurprisingly underwhelming.