Tokyo Mirage Sessions will probably be your best stop-gap game on the wait for Persona 5. That isn’t to say it’s not without issues but is definitely solid enough to give it a playthrough if you have a Wii U. The only exceptions to that would be if you don’t have a Wii U or absolutely abhor the idol theme.
The story, like many other games is your standard fare. It takes very much after the Persona series in this regard. Nothing to write home about and it’s solid enough for what it is. In the story it integrates a lot of Fire Emblem (including a full vocal song on Fire Emblem) in the theme of Persona. A good amount of the named Fire Emblems you encounter will be characters from Awakening with most of the remaining characters being from Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and Blade of Light which we did not get localized on the SNES.
Your characters will be your very Japanese trope filled fare and for the most part are ok. I only really dislike the last character you recruit. Each have very distinct personalities that show themselves very strongly throughout the game. This means every character comes on pretty strong, for better or worse depending on how much you like or dislike their personalities.
Environments feel very Persona and look better than Persona 3 & 4. You still have a bit of redundant textures through each dungeon, however I feel it doesn’t ever get to the point of feeling overly bland and each dungeon is very different design wise. The only issue I have with the dungeons is that early on, you get a skill to reveal traps in dungeons but it’s not necessary until the final dungeon which I thought was somewhat dumb. You could possibly use it in the third dungeon, however the “traps” are clearly defined by the environmental objects making it not necessary to use at all assuming the skill works there at all. I wouldn’t of minded having another section of a dungeon being partially trapped filled so it didn’t make the skill feel so useless.
The quest system is also unfortunately your standard fare, which means mostly kill/loot quests. The main issue with quests in this game is that there is no quest log. So if you ever forget what you need to do for a quest, you’ll need to re-find the quest giver. In almost all cases, all you need to do is cycle through the area maps on the Wii U Gamepad to find a quest giver icon and hope that it’s the right one if you don’t remember. There are a few quests (one per dungeon post-prologue) that have very vague quests that require “Force” items that drop from 3 or 4 different enemies. You have to make a guess as to what these enemies are or continue to grind enemies until the quest givers icon turns purple, which means its complete and can be fully turned in. In general, nearly all the quests require backtracking in dungeons from past chapters. Some can be quick, while others can take very long depending on your luck.
Touching on enemy drops, I want to expand just a little bit on that front. Most of the game was not particularly grindy. However, I found chapter 3 & 4 a bit of a grind. This was because they were transitional chapters in terms of your Radiant Skills (passive skills). During these chapters, you will want to gain Stage Ranks on characters to be high enough to learn a skill that allows characters to join in on sessions while in the sub-cast (not in active party). To earn stage ranks, characters must join in on sessions which will require active party participation and should be your main goal up until you earn these skills.
On top of that there are two other skills that can help or hinder loot gain. The first one is a Radiant Skill on the main character which allows your sessions to continue beyond your current enemy should you manage to kill them in a session. This is useful to help the speed of battles, but on the other side it will slow loot gathering slightly. Personally, I recommend grabbing them as soon as you can. The other Radiant Skill just increases the loot you can potentially gain from sessions as hitting enemies once you achieve an overkill in a session every hit thereafter produces an extra random loot drop.
The battle system in the game is part Persona and part Fire Emblem. You have a Fire Emblem Persona that will make use of the Fire Emblem weapon triangle. It doesn’t always hold to the triangle though as enemies, like you, can have skills that remove weakness of physical or magical attributes but is a good place to start on new enemies. Similar to Persona, when you critically hit an enemy (All attacks that attack a weakness are crits), you will get extra attacks. In this games case it will start a session that work off of other characters’ skills and will continue to chain until all characters have gone once should they have a skill that allows them to continue from the previous attack.
Eventually you will learn ad-libs that will turn your character’s initial attack into a special attack that will usually hit all characters and start a session regardless if your attack type would have normally scored a critical hit. Beyond that you can gain duos that have a chance to trigger during a session and will activate after the session finishes. Like sessions, you can actually chain a second (and rarely a third) session after the duo takes place. Due to this, while you can get a good amount of extra loot, will also prolong battles that are already long as it is. You can skip the animations of ad-libs and duos however you have to sit through the entirety of sessions all the time. So while the game may not be terribly grindy, it feels more grindy than it is due to the lengthy nature of the battle system.
You have two enemy types outside of your normal enemies that you will encounter as well. First are Savage Encounters that will always throw you against enemies that are 6 levels above you. Since damage is first based off of your level in comparison to your opponents, they will hit for a lot of damage and can easily wipe a party as the first time you encounter a savage enemy their resistances and weaknesses will be hidden like normal enemies until you discover them in battle for the first time or defeat the enemy once. For the most part they are not really worth the effort, however they can drop a key item that can lead to earning a somewhat useful skill from a hidden quest. Mostly though, I just recommend making sure you have a few Smoke Machines and run from battle.
The other enemy type are Rare Encounters. These enemies are not random like they are in Persona 3 & 4. Instead they are mostly tied to small areas of the dungeons where they can somewhat easily be found if you know where to look. It’s great for farming if you know the spots but on the other hand if you don’t? Well, you can go through the dungeon several times in its entirely and never come across it. There are two types of rare enemies that will drop ingredients for weapons, so it’s up to you on whether or not you really feel you should bother.
Next is the Carnage (Weapon) system and Mirage (Persona) system. To gain new weapons, you need various loot pieces from enemies to craft new weapons. As you gain materials, new items will show up on the list whether you have all three ingredients or just one. Weapons will also level up to allow your Mirage form to gain skills. Then at a later point in the game this further unlocks the ability to reforge your weapons and re-learn the skills on them. You have a limited amount of slots for skills and learning the same skill will increase its damage and/or decrease the EP cost needed to use said skill. The Mirage system is exactly same as the Persona system in that series and each character is tied to the same Mirage throughout the game. The difference in this game being is that, like in Fire Emblem, you can use a master seal to change your Mirage into one of two advanced classes. Doing this will unlock new weapons to craft specific to that advanced class. You can even find/earn enough master seals to switch to the other advanced class and if you crafted all the weapons from the previous class, you will still be able to reforge them. Weapons not crafted however will be lost in the transition until you change back to that class.
One final thing on the battle system I want to touch on is that your experience gain in battle is determined by the level difference between your character and the opponents level. This makes it impossible to go beyond the games intended level without more or less resorting to DLC and abusing tomes. So bosses will almost always be above you in level and should you ever get stuck on one, besides rethinking your strategy, leveling a couple levels can drastically increase your chances of winning as like I’ve mentioned previously is that damage is tied to the level difference between you and your opponent. Personally I’m not a huge fan of levels being the primary factor in determining damage as I tend to skip battles when they feel unnecessarily long or the game feels grindy, which in this case I felt there was a bit of both but mostly the former.
Some things that I dislike about the game but haven’t really touched on is that the AI for choosing session attacks in the latter half of the game can be bad. Sometimes you’ll get into a battle and your session will end after the first attack as the next one will be nulled or repelled. With the same exact part composition though, you attack the same enemy in a future battle it can be perfectly fine and choose a correct one. Then once again in the next battle after, revert back to the same bullshit you got in the first described battle. It can be very frustrating towards the end of the game as you’re losing attacks that shouldn’t be lost as you have no control over what happens.
The other negative I had is because it’s a Wii U game. This causes the load times to be longer than other comparable games and they have them quite frequently (including menus!). I like the game, but this really grated on me over time and is probably my biggest issue due to how long the game is and how frequently you fight with battles being longer than average to a comparable game as well. Then like many other Wii U games, they have forced Wii U gamepad integration. In this case it’s forced onto you to progress the main story and side stories to read dialogue on it. Otherwise the only other thing that bugs me with regards to it is that the map for an area cannot be found anywhere else except the gamepad, thus causing you to shift attention between the television and gamepad while running through a dungeon.
I also wish the game had gone through some simple quality of life additions. One of which being is that chests, when full with an item that a chest has, returns the item back to the chest. Then you’re forced to sell or use the item (sometimes requiring a battle to use it) just so you can loot the chest. This is antiquated as hell and I absolutely hate it. The other quality of life changes I’ve more or less mention already which would be a sidequest list/tracker so you can track progress more easily. Finally, the other being a way to speed up battles as they can be way too long at times.
All-in-all I think the game is pretty solid in both feel and gameplay, but has some hiccups with regards to not having some basic mechanics that are basically standard these days and forcing Wii U gamepad integration. After beating it I’m also honestly surprised this was localized as there are a ton of vocal tracks throughout the game and Japan is very anal/protective of their music.
Tl;dr
Like
- General aesthetic. They did pretty good with designing most things.
- Large collection of vocal tracks. Surprised it even released here with as many as it had to be honest.
- Battle system in general is pretty good and works well, but does have some negative aspects to it.
Ehhh
- I'm not big on the general theme, but at least it's not that Omega Quintet shit. For what it is though, it did it pretty well.
- Rare enemies seemed to be more tied to specific locations than actually being a rare encounter. Good for grinding if you know where, but not exactly a "rare."
- Sessions can be very long. This is good for loot drops, but makes battles last longer than they should as there's no way to skip normal session attacks or speed them up.
- The game does lag in a few battles at the end of the game. Not a big deal though.
Dislike
- Chapter 3 & 4 felt more grindy than other chapters in terms of items. They are transition chapters where I felt the increased amount of items you need wasn't off set until you gain certain passive skills that are tied to your stage rank.
- The session AI can be pretty bad in the latter half of the game in choosing your parties session attacks.
- Load times and the amount of times you have to load. Flaw of being on the Wii U and made the game feel grinder than it is.
- Lacks a lot of quality of life things that would have made this game much better/smoother to play.
- How strictly damage is tied to level. If you're not within 5 levels of enemies, expect to hit hard or be hit hard. Savage enemies are always 6 levels higher than you for this very reason.
Recommendation: Don’t be afraid to purchase it, but I’m not sure I’d consider buying a Wii U just for this game. It is a pretty solid game with a few somewhat minor issues that I think most people can look past. If you abhor Japanese music with vocal tracks and idols in general, then you may wish to skip this game.
