Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE Review – 65/100

The title of this game rather says everything you need to know about my initial reaction, and I’m still all around puzzled at the mixed bag that this turned out to be – it IS just a standard mashup while having a bit of fun with some experimentation, but the game itself is actually a jumble of Persona’s mechanics with some hints of Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy X-2 masked behind a colorful anime-esque fatigue. Originally called “Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem” but changed shortly thereafter to “Tokyo Mirage Sessions,” I decided I’d have an open mind about this before I went into it, without looking for comparisons to the Persona or Fire Emblem aspects of the game, and did actually enjoy the gameplay. But by the end of my second playthrough, it turned out to be a mediocre title that failed to consistently interest me as a standalone title, much less as a fan of both Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei.

The story is entirely original, so it’s not required that you play any of the Shin Megami Tensei or Fire Emblem titles for you to dive into it unless you want to understand certain references. The story begins with our protagonist in some talent agency in Tokyo as he learns how to utilize an energy called Performa and attract beings known as Mirages much like in the Persona series. The rest of the plot is pretty by the books, it has cameos/references to Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei characters to keep you interested in the plot, and in between the unnecessarily text-heavy story are the animated cutscenes by Studio 4C, which are all serviceable except for the poorly integrated CGI during music/dance sequences (which I believe were done by a different studio). Although Japanese pop isn’t really my favorite genre of music, it’s well produced to say the least and the background soundtrack isn’t too generic either, they accompany the combat really well as the fights feel like a performance rather than a traditional RPG battle.

Combat overall, is very similar to Persona’s, with Fire Emblem’s weapon triangle on top the addition of Command Skills, Session Skills, and Passive Skills, which allow your characters to attack more than once in a string of combos when striking a character weakness and it makes for a moderately varied system. Enemy characters can also exploit your weaknesses and thus perform Session Attacks themselves, but you have Mirage partners that make your skills much more powerful, and the better you chain Session Attacks together, the more points you earn that will allow you to upgrade your weapons. Eventually, you can also unlock extra skills as you progress through the game and perform side quests, but ultimately as far as combat goes, it is a dumbed down version of Persona and this weakness shows up by the second hour. Namely, I can only have one Mirage partner. This means that in order to cover weaknesses, you need to switch out your characters instead. There’s no penalty for switching out your characters, but it’s an odd decision not to allow multiple Mirages as it limits character freedom. In addition, you cannot choose where your skills go, or what pieces of equipment to level up, as the game automatically does it for you – taking away any sort of personalization or variety. The latter is the worst flaw I can possibly think of, but it’s significant enough for me to have realized how simplistic the leveling system is upon my second playthrough. But still, I don’t conflate simplistic gameplay with bad gameplay, as I do enjoy a good turn based RPG like any other, and it’s solid here. 

Outside of combat is where mediocrity actually seeps in, first through the dungeons themselves as the dungeon-crawling aspect is weak, plagued with boring puzzles and bland level designs. The levels seem almost like an afterthought, and coming from Atlus it’s surprising just how relatively linear they feel. The outside environment is seriously lacking as well, as you’re limited to Shinjuku, Harjuku and are unable to explore anywhere else. Even the side quests feel like busy work, and that, coupled with the unvaried combat, is where my issue with the game lies.

It doesn’t have the characterization and charm of Persona or the depth-of-combat in Fire Emblem, and it doesn’t have the plot to make up for both these shortcomings either. I went into this game to the best of my abilities with an open mind, and while I was thoroughly surprised to find a competent gameplay that stood out on its own, it over compromised in the end and sacrificed chunks of what made the mechanics of Persona and Fire Emblem have depth. Yet the parts of the game that weren’t influenced by those titles, such as the idol components, didn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought they would, probably because the story made an attempt not to take it too seriously. Idols are incredibly cheesy, and the game smartly rolled with it and turned out a story that didn’t over-glorify that. However, the characters let the story down – they’re generic, lifeless, and are unfortunately standard fare for a game like this. Even pre-established characters from Fire Emblem, etc don’t feel genuine, and as a result it never gets any kind of interest from me towards what they are trying to accomplish because it feels like they went through a checklist of archetypes.

Now the visuals in the game are good for a WiiU title, even though the textures can look downright ugly sometimes – the colors and art style make up for its graphical shortcomings. Yet on the other hand, almost all of the characters, whether they be idols or Mirages, are way too over designed. Everyone, in addition to familiar characters, got the “make them look edgier” treatment. I’ve grown up seeing too much of Japanese high-fantasy design to the point where they all look the same by now, and this doesn’t break that feeling. Over complicating the design makes it nearly impossible to make the character look memorable. It’s a minor nitpick and a complaint not limited to this title, but there’s too many spikes, lines, swirls, armor joints, and all of it’s just bleh. I sure do miss the days of Marth and Justin.

There’s also something to be said about the differences in content due to censorship, and I can understand both sides. The argument for censoring or removing content always go either way during localization: that A) The studio itself (in this case, Atlus) considered the material indecent for the region or B) Nintendo wants all of its titles to be consistent (in terms of demographic) considering the platform it is on. Now, I call bull on both of these reasons, although I understand why they’d do it. We as fans of Japanese media know how much flak certain mainstream titles have gotten over the years like Fire Emblem Awakening and even Pokemon with its Lopunny “controversy,” so it’s really not hard to see why they’d want to avoid potential trouble. However, when you see localisations like Stella Glow, another Atlus title, come out with some of the worst loli fan service I’d seen in years next to Langrisser, the least I can ask for is consistency with the titles they decide to censor or not censor. But at least they’re usually smart about not allowing censorship to affect the gameplay.

In the end, with its niche contemporary pop culture references that instantly date the game, compromises to combat and its campy premise, I wouldn’t recommend this for everyone, but it’s undeniably a solid game with flaws like any other. If you don’t mind a half-baked Persona title with idols (which this basically is for all intents and purposes, Fire Emblem’s mechanics take a back seat here), and want something to play until Persona 5 comes out, this is available to you, but you have been warned that this is a pretty niche title and it’s a really long game, clocking out for me at 72 hours. Get it at discount price, which you can easily do by now. It’s one of those polished mash-up games that are really hard to come by these days, and there was clearly a good attempt at creativity – but between its boring dungeon crawling, half baked combat, and lastly its niche idol elements, it’s only slightly above average. It’s a dungeon crawler not as good as actual dungeon crawlers, and it’s a turn-based RPG not quite as fleshed out as Persona. But there’s enjoyment to be had.

Suggestions:

Tales of Xillia

Persona