I went into this game completely blind only going off of what friends had to say about it. After finally taking the plunge myself and getting the game I can say without a doubt, this is one of my all time favorite JRPGs. I had no problems with literally anything here, this game was a 40 hour long journey and everything kept me engaged and interested. All the main characters in this game are so damn good and well developed that I care for all of them, it's rare when you find a JRPG where you care about EVERY main character. The last game I can think of is Xenoblade 3. This games OST is so fucking BALLER man, I'm not an idol person nor did I ever care about that kind of stuff but this game made me love all the performances and songs being sung.
Shoutout to my girl Kiria who sings Reincarnation, the song that basically got me interested in this game, and is also the best character in the game both personality and battle wise. Plus I love her :)

I got this game on Christmas and the more I kept playing the more I was invested in this world and its characters. I was so pleasantly surprised with just how much fun I was having. This game sort of taught me that I do, in a way, like fire emblem, but the main problem I have with that series is not so much the characters or the story, but the gameplay. I'm not a tactical RPG person, and i've experimented with enough fire emblem games to know this series just aint for me. Since i'm someone who values gameplay over anything else, that makes it difficult for me to be invested in these worlds and games when I just don't vibe with the gameplay. This games gameplay tho is so fucking fun especially once you understand how it works under the hood. The amount of session combos you can get is pure ecstasy. I never once had any issue with any of the bosses or difficulty because if anything the game actually gets easier the more you play and unlock more and more characters to continue the session combos, which are this games whole gimmick. Couple it in with both Fire Emblem weapon trees and Shin Megami Tensei's signature combat and you have a recipe for a good ass game. Legit I would just stay and grind for hours because of how fun this game is.

So would I recommend this game to anyone who hasn't played it? Not really, as much as I love this game I can see it not being everyones thing, you sort of have to be familiar with both SMT and Fire Emblem enough to really give it a shot, more so SMT. Still though even if 2024 just started this is one of the best games i've played this year and you know if they somehow for whatever reason announce a Tokyo Mirage Sessions sequel in a Nintendo Direct sometime in the future, you bet your ass I'll be there no matter what.
Fucking phenomenal game.

I can say with full confidence that this is my favorite game of all time and it's a great rerelease of the Wii u version. I enjoy the music, the characters, and the questionable localization that came along with this game, I skipped my finals to buy this game day 1 when it released and I've been doing a run at least every year since. The characters are adorable and I love how they sound and look. When I went to Japan I made it my mission to find a Japanese copy of this game and it's soundtrack I love them so much

When your video game leads into the final boss with a musical number where the characters sing "Fire Emblem," you've instantly got me.

Holy shit. What a game. I originally started this back in 2021 but fell off due to time and other stuff, but decided to come back to it to clear up my backlog a bit, and goddamn am I glad I did. It's a fun, lighthearted, funny game about the power of music and friendship and how that can push you forward despite how tough things might be, pull you from your darkest moments, and light the beacon forward for a brighter, better tomorrow.

It's also a game about meowing with cats, punching out the president because That's Hollywood(tm), catching an axe while wearing a dog costume, microwaving, and so much more.

Compared to other Atlus fare in a similar vein, it is a LOT more lighthearted, and I think it works best for that. The dramatic plot beats are very dramatic, but they primarily focus when you're in the Idolasphere (think this game's version of the Metaverse) and in the real world, the dramatic plot beats have to do with the struggles of moving forward in the entertainment industry, growing as a person in your chosen craft, and finding yourself. It's a great contrast that ultimately works very well both because of how they tend to be separate but also meld together. The Mirages (read: Personas) have some fun say and back and forths with their respective Mirage Masters that you don't ever get in something like Persona, that gives these long-time, well-known Fire Emblem characters some fun extra personality. Though I do feel a bit iffy on some of the choices (who was asking for VIRION of all characters???), I do like picks like Chrom as opposed to justr going with Marth, or Tharja for Kiria.

I think in this, though, is one of TMS's few failings for me: I understand they were going just with FE1 and Awakening, but I think it would've benefitted so much more from having a wider variety. A small complaint, but it is just one of the things that I would've liked to see changed. Louise from FE7 in place of Virion could've still provided that "noble looking to train a more brash young girl" idea for Ellie while being a character that, I dunno, people remember more? Like more? Again, that's just me.

I really like the dungeon designs, as they don't feel too overwhelming or too short, kind of a "juuuuuuuust right" situation. They usually have a fun gimmick with them and, aside from a few puzzles in the last dungeon that I had to look up a guide for in order to progress, I genuinely enjoyed them. For a game that's so much smaller (I think I hit close to 50 hours, and this was with grinding in order to get max stage rank and all the radiant skills for my characters), it really feels like they brought their A game in all aspects. Music, character design, environments, and especially the battle system, oh the battle system.

I think this battle system is my favorite battle system from Atlus. I think Sessions are a fun idea that take ideas from stuff like One Mores and Baton Passes in order to utilize your entire party, but without making it so simplistic of knocking down your enemy and then hitting an All Out Attack and walking away. The idea of planning out which enemy to attack in order to hit a long Session, see if it can continue into ANOTHER enemy to continue to do more damage, and sometimes get Duo Arts to chain that into ANOTHER Session is just, so satisfying, even if some of it may be random. It makes you think about party composition a lot more and how to best cover your range of skills in terms of buffs/debuffs and attacking skills so you have all your bases covered. Stuff like the ad-libs and the Special Performances have some great animations and also add great variety, and I think the Carnage system is fantastic. Affinities being determined by your weapon primarily and not by which Persona you have and their skills makes things a lot better, in my opinion, and you aren't stacking a bunch of null/evade skills onto your MC by the end of the game to make sure they're getting hit as little as possible. A limited skill set for both usable skills and passive skills makes you really think about how you want to evolve your characters over the course of the game, and the ramp up of skills and the ability to upgrade them to +1, +2, and so on makes it satisfying in terms of growth.

I will say though, upgrading healing/buff/debuff skills is so... wholly unsatisfying. With the exception of something like Makajamaon, which increases the chance it succeeds, upgrading a healing spell simply causes it to drop 1 EP in cost. So with a +3 Diarahan you're looking at around 28 EP or something as opposed to 30 something, and with the amount of skill experience required to do that feels kinda... bland. Even if it was just 3 or 4 EP per upgrade with a cap I think it would've felt a lot more satisfying, especially with how high of a cost your party-wide healing spells cost at the endgame compared to your total EP bars.

That's a small complaint though for a battle system and weapon system that kept me wholly entertained and occupied the whole time through, though!

I love all the characters, Tsubasa, Maiko, and Ellie in particular, as they felt really fun and had some fantastic throughlines for their side stories. I also came to adore Yashiro a lot more than I thought I would as the obligatory "edgy" sword boy. His growth was fantastic.

Itsuki on the other hand... while I like how he plays with some characters (Yashiro and Ellie in particular), he's so bland. How did Atlus make an MC that speaks but is so boring? I understand that's his point: he's there to be the "supporting cast" to his party members/friends who ARE members of the entertainment industry and are pretty damn spectacular, but I can't help but feel like the game would've been so much better served by starring Tsubasa. She's the main character, she's a fantastic, fun, and relatable character, and it really feels like a shame that we play as Itsuki when she's such a full, wonderful, charming character and is RIGHT THERE.

I will say though, the final chapter and the true ending in particular did a lot of heavy lifting for an otherwise very underwhelming, boring character.

Overall, I love this game, and I'm genuinely contemplating putting it on my list of top games. It's got a breezy length compared to other Atlus RPGs, but still feels substantial enough, and considering what they originally pitched SMT x FE as, I'm SO glad we got this silly, heartfelt idol game.

Atlus... TMS 2 when... I will give anything and everything for it...

Good lord this took too long for me to finish. I started playing this game back near the end of April and it’s now almost the middle of June! Well after all these years I’ve finally played and finished this game and I have a good reason to review it, that isn’t because I’ve been reviewing RPGs. This game is technically a FE game and I’ve been meaning to review most of them so I guess count this as a FE review even though it’s out of order lol.

Surprisingly didn’t know much going into this game outside of the controversial censorship that went on with the US release and then bled into every region for the new Switch version. I sadly still wasn’t into FE by the time TMS came out on Wii U so I skipped on it at the time. I wanted to have it on Switch since it came out but I just never had a good time to buy it and didn’t get it till last year. It should also be noted I’m not a Megaten person. I actually do want to play an entry soon but I haven’t even played something like Persona. So if there are games in Megaten that are better than this, I’m sorry that I’m not aware.

Guess I’ll start with the story and I’m going to be blunt here and say I thought it was kind of boring. I feel like this game is trying to be like an anime with how most of the chapters follow a formulaic approach. There’s only 6 main chapters in the game but it’s not as short as you think it would be. Honestly the characters just didn’t do it for me. I’d say I liked them more as the story went on but some are okay. I think my favorite by the end was Kiria, I really liked her whole wanting to show her cute side arc she had in her side quest. I also did appreciate that doing side quests did help the characters be a bit more interesting but that’s also character dependent. I wish Itsuki, the character you control was cooler. I wanna like him but it feels like a quarter of the time he’s given the most interesting writing. He also barely says anything in text messages and I counted two times where you get to choose what to send for your message. If there was one character I didn’t like at all was Barry. Oh my god this character is TERRIBLE! I honestly can’t think of an RPG character I’ve hated more than him. I just hate his dialogue. It pisses me off and the way he just always wants to be with Mamori creeps me out. Still outside of that gross spot, the story didn't really impress but at least it wasn’t bad.

The gameplay is where the game shines more for me as you’ll be traversing through the few locations in Tokyo and explore various Idolspheres (the dungeons) the game has to offer. There’s actually a ton of stuff this game does that you can do but I’ll talk about that more later. You fight enemies that appear in the Idolspheres and it becomes a turn based battle system. You’ll be able to use your weapons you get by doing unities and you can get skills by mastering them. You can also get items and gear from the overworld stores like the Hee-ho Mart. A cool mechanic about battles are sessions, if you find a weakness in an enemy with a skill or item, you can have other characters come in to do more damage and even get items and yen. These are satisfying to do but you can’t fully skip these sessions and it can get old after a while. You can at least speed them up but it still won’t stop you from hearing the same four voice clips come from each character.

Alright let’s talk about this now, the FE representation. Do I like it? Eh, not really. Again I didn’t really know much about it, I was just told yes it counts as a FE game and thought it would be pretty cool. Now I assumed every entry up to that point would be represented but nope it’s just Shadow Dragon and Awakening. FE characters are represented as mirages which are characters who help your team out to do the actual attacks and stuff. There are FE characters that aren’t just the ones in your team but most of them are either side quest bosses or ones they start using for the final chapter of the game which are all just Shadow Dragon characters. Tiki is also here to do stuff for your unity needs using carnages and radiants. She is also represented via her Shadow Dragon version. She can also give your mirages a class change like actual FE. I honestly just don’t get why there aren't more games shown off here and the game feels so loose with the use of FE until those last 2 chapters especially if you don’t do the sidequests. I don’t wanna assume something happened behind the scenes but it feels like they just had ideas they couldn’t use.

So yes there are a lot of things you can do. You change the outfits of your cast for battles and you earn them by progressing through the plot or doing sidequest and buying the outfit from the shop. They even added some in this port by going through a new special Idolsphere so now you can have the costume of Joker from Persona 5. Doing sidequest can unlock the ability of ad-libs for your characters that seem to activate randomly in battle. You can also unlock duo moves which have a variety of effects that can also add more to the session combo. It’s best if you just do these sidequest. There’s also places to get items like Tomes for easy level ups, they’re so good that the game tells you not to overuse them otherwise the battles will not be fun. I said before you can class change which gives mirages new benefits and each one gets two choices so use your master seals thoughtfully. There’s many requests you can do for NPCs to get items though it’s not always helpful. My god there’s just so much stuff and that probably wasn’t even all of it.

The idolspheres are some of the highlights of the adventure as they’re really well crafted and thoughtful in their design. Outside of the chapter 4 one being a bit tedious especially in revisits, they’re really fun to explore in and while nothing will make you rack your brain trying to solve stuff, it kept me invested. Battling is fun but I do feel it was a bit easy compared to the bosses. I played on normal difficulty and felt the enemies were a breeze most of the time while the bosses gave me trouble at times. I think I game over like 5 times? Also sometimes these places can spawn savage encounters, screw these fights I never understood most of the time how to even survive in these, it’s probably a skill issue. I’m a little confused too why you need Itsuki to be in battles every time. I could understand the overworld but in battles the options feel limited especially since it’s a 3 person team at all times. Also if I have people in the back waiting to tag in, why can’t they come in when someone is down? Eh actually that might make the game too easy. Still even with those issues the game is still fun and the gameplay was the highlight of the game for me.

The graphics are nice for when they were originally on the Wii U, I kind of like how it tries to hide the limitations with some nice aesthetics like how they handle NPCs you don’t talk to. The Idolspheres look nice and the battles are really cool too. I also love the designs of the characters for their forms during battle. I do wish the UI for when a battle starts or the sign showing their expression above changed per costume cause it kind of hurts the immersion for me but otherwise it’s cool. A lot of the animations for attacks and stuff like ad-libs are really cool too. There's also animated cutscenes and they look nice, they remind me a lot of the 3DS FE games. Maybe it was the same people? There’s also the music and personally I mostly got enjoyment from the battle themes and god they’re really good. I also have the Fortuna theme stuck in my head cause you hear it so much! Seriously if this game was more popular, I guarantee you there would be memes. This game also has probably the most corny take on the FE theme though I kind of like it for the context it’s used in. Idk I’m weird. Also the voice acting was fine but nothing amazing, I do like how the FE voice cast from the actual games are their respective characters or at least some I recognized so that’s nice.

I feel like I’ve been a bit negative but in truth, TMS #FE Encore is a good game but nothing mindblowing to my tiny mind. I went into it hoping I would really enjoy the experience but sadly it’s just good but not amazing. That’s not a bad thing mind you, I mean I wouldn’t have played almost 50 hours just to say it sucked, bad game. I wouldn’t be surprised if I find Atlus RPGs better than this though. It’s such a weird experience when you think about it, how this all ended up becoming. I’m glad I got to try it out and even though part of me wishes I could have enjoyed it more, at least I got to finally beat it. Should you play the game? IDK, maybe. The game feels like it’ll one day be forgotten and idk if it deserves that faith. At least IS still uses the characters for that mobile game. IDK which ones are in it, it could be like Tsubasa for all I know. I ain’t playing the damn mobile game. I kind of wish they would try this again but considering this game, I doubt it’ll happen again. Oh well, at least fun times were had.