PERSONA 5 SCRAMBLE

Wake up, get up, get out there again

Six months after leaving Tokyo, Joker returns to spend the summer with the Phantom Thieves. They meet at Café Leblanc to plan a holiday. However, while the group enjoys a bit of well-deserved peace, the police begin investigating some dramatic changes of heart in a number of influential people.

Of course the peace is short-lived. While Joker and Ryuji are in Shibuya to buy supplies for the group’s trip, they stumble on an event by popular entertainment personality Alice Hiragi. She lures the boys into her metaverse Palace, which is populated by crowds of Shadows.

This is where Persona 5 Scramble’s new Dynasty-Warriors-style combat (known as ‘musou’ to fans) comes in. Large numbers of enemies are out to overwhelm you, and you have to alternate between quick attacks and specials (see ‘You’ll never see it coming’, right) for crowd control. If you’ve played Persona 5, you’ll recognise some of the enemies in the faceless crowd as the shadows you’ve collected across the series and made into Persona for your own use.

The links between Scramble and the Persona franchise don’t end there. Dynasty Warriors developer Omega Force has included recognisable attacks from Persona 5 throughout. While hacking your way through the hordes may be enough to get you out of a tough spot, you also need to exploit the weaknesses of enemies using your weapons and Persona. Doing so inflicts additional damage and grants a follow-up attack. You can add new Persona to your ranks, but our demo doesn’t make it clear how – after we’ve exploited a pixie’s weakness against ranged weapons in a tutorial battle, we can simply collect her.

A NEW ADVENTURE

As a fully-fledged Persona 5 sequel

(the first of its kind since Persona

2’s Eternal Punishment in 2000), Scramble introduces you to several new main characters. Besides Alice, the demo briefly shows us Inspector Zenkichi Hasegawa, who has already been revealed as a playable character later in the game. Another important addition is Sophia, who joins the fight after Joker rescues her from a cube in the Shibuya metaverse.

All in all, our 90-minute hands-on reveals Scramble feels like a charming return to the world of Persona 5. Combat feels slightly simple and could do with more challenge and musou-style disarray, but as the demo covers the very beginning of the game, we know battles are sure to grow in complexity as soon as you’re joined by more characters and Persona. We’ll find out for sure our chaotic things get when Scramble releases later in the year over here in the UK.

“PERSONA 5 SCRAMBLE HAS DYNASTY-WARRIORSSTYLE COMBAT.”

Above The Phantom Thieves are back together at Café Leblanc to catch up and plan a camping trip over the summer holiday.

Critical and technical hits matter when you need to get rid of enemies quickly. They are important against higher-level Shadows.

Left As soon as Joker sets foot in Tokyo, events seem to repeat – he’s called to the Velvet Room, where Lavenza warns him of a new evil.

Above It’s not clear what Sophia is, or even if she is real at all, but she’s strong, knows the metaverse well, and just wants to help.