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Persona's Combat System Is Brilliant

Persona's Combat System Is Brilliant

In which the author discusses the combat system of the Persona series of role-playing games, outlining how all of the pieces work together to make an engaging whole.

By: TheHans255

10/28/2024

CONTENT ADVISORY: The Persona series of video games discussed in this article is intended for mature audiences only, depicting violence, strong language, nudity and sexual content, and other mature subjects such as suicide. While I will avoid discussing any of these in this article, viewer discretion is advised when following any links in this article or otherwise exploring more about the series.

This article also contains some gameplay spoilers for the Persona series, most notably Persona 3: Reload released in February 2024. It does not contain any story spoilers.

One of my favorite video game series is Persona, a series of role-playing games developed by ATLUS in which you play as Japanese high school students exploring the Jungian collective unconscious and breaking into people's mind palaces, in order to find their place in the world or solve a larger mystery. I was first introduced to the series in 2017 when I saw gameplay videos of the recently released Persona 5 and was immediately captivated by the clever dimensions of the combat system, with far more to do than the straightforward systems of games like Nintendo's Pokemon. (Plus the music was straight fire.) I finally got to play the series for the first time with Persona 4: Golden in 2020, and since followed that up with Persona 5: Royal and most recently Persona 3: Reload, and would have to say that things have held up quite nicely. Today I'll delve into the gameplay systems of these games and how this handful of simple mechanics tie into a charming, engaging, and thoughtful experience.

As of today, the following games in the mainline Persona series are widely available on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, with some of them also being available on Nintendo Switch:

There are also plenty of spinoffs to the Persona series in different genres, such as the fighting game Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, the Musou game Persona 5: Strikers, the dancing game Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, and others. The mainline games also have original releases that are exclusive to legacy PlayStation platforms (being Persona 3, Persona 3: FES, Persona 4, and Persona 5).

(And I should also briefly mention Persona 1 and Persona 2 - while the Persona games starting from 3 do continue from these in terms of story and recurring characters, the gameplay and style are incredibly different and much more akin to a traditional JRPG, and as such, I will not be covering them. Persona fans typically use the term "modern Persona" to distinguish 3 onward from 1 and 2).

Background: Setting Up Basic, Familiar Mechanics

First, let's set the stage for how the RPG system is structured with the familiar conventions of the genre:

Persona 3 combat with 4 fighters

Early-game Persona 4 combat with 3 fighters

"1 More!" Offers A Satisfying Reward for Striking Weaknesses

Of course, when discussing Persona's combat system, we have to start by discussing its central gimmick: the "1 More!" system. In short, whenever a combatant scores a critical hit or strikes an elemental weakness on a target, they knock down and temporarily incapacitate that opponent, scoring a "1 More!" and taking another turn immediately.

That is to say, instead of only getting increased damage from striking a weakness or getting a critical hit, the damage allows you to immediately follow up with another action, including:

The 1 More! system is also symmetric - enemies can also hit you with weaknesses, knock you down, and score 1 More!s of their own, and will use any of the strategies above in order to take advantage of the extra turns.

Fortunately, the 1 More! system also has an important anti-abuse feature - while you will get increased damage from weaknesses or crits any time, you only score a 1 More! if your attack takes an enemy from the neutral state to a Downed state (or if it kills an enemy in the neutral state). This encourages you to strategically target different enemies in order to score 1 More!s.

(As a side note, the 1 More! system is a streamlined version of the more complex "Press Turn" system featured in the Shin Megami Tensei series of games, starting with Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. I may cover this system in a later article, especially since the recently released Metaphor: ReFantazio uses it directly, but the main difference between the two is that striking weaknesses gives extra turns, but striking resistances or missing attacks takes away turns.)

1 More! is the central mechanic of moment-to-moment Persona combat, and many other combat mechanics in Persona are directly connected to it. I will discuss these items as we come across them.

SP Being Hard To Find Intimately Ties The Combat System To The Calendar System

Persona is also very well known for its central non-combat mechanic: its calendar system. In all Persona games starting with Persona 3, the game follows a year calendar that begins in early April and ends somewhere between January and March, granting the player a choice in how they wish to spend their time each day. Entering the dungeon and engaging in combat is one choice of how to spend your day - most other days will be spent improving social skills, doing management tasks such as relearning forgotten skills, and engaging in Social Links/Confidants that follow short stories with other characters in the world. Every month or so, a special event or deadline will require that you have reached at least a certain level in order to take on a boss or other challenge.

When you first explore the dungeon and other parts of the world, you will find that while it's very easy to buy and find items and skills that restore HP, the only items you find that can restore your SP are few and far between in the dungeon depths. This means that, for most of the game, you will be slowly draining your SP as you cast powerful skills in the dungeon, and the only reliable way to refill your SP is to leave the dungeon and sleep - and wake up the next morning. All of this means that you are essentially limited on the amount of dungeon exploration you can do on a particular day, encouraging you to make careful, calculated use of your skills and using them to their greatest potential.

(Of course, I should mention some caveats and exceptions to this. In most Persona games, the main protagonist can learn a skill called "Spirit Drain" that allows them to steal SP from enemies, thus allowing at least them to keep fighting indefinitely. Between a third and halfway through each game, the team also acquires a "navigator", or a fifth party member that is capable of providing additional skills and analysis - which, in some games, can include restoring the party's SP. Persona 4: Golden's navigator is particular egregious in this regard, often granting SP at random.)

All-Out Attacks Encourage Quick 1-Turn Clears On Mooks and Careful Play with Larger Enemies

If a player character makes an attack that would score a 1 More!, and all enemies on the field are currently down or dizzy, you are offered the option to forgo that and perform an All-Out Attack instead. This is a mass damage attack that causes all characters on your team (who are up and are not afflicted with a status ailment) to basic attack all enemies on the field, typically killing them and immediately ending the fight. These attacks cannot be resisted or blocked, making them generally the most reliable way to do damage, and meaning that the best strategy against low-level encounters is generally to strike all of the enemy's weaknesses and finish things with an All-Out Attack before any of them get a turn.

Of course, All-Out Attacks have a downside - if you use an All-Out Attack and it fails to kill all enemies, any enemy still standing will be taken out of the Down state and can follow up with another attack. This means that if you are not confident that an All-Out Attack will take out all of the enemies (perhaps because some of your teammates are down, or the enemy is much tankier), you should instead use the 1 More! to use stronger attacks or cast other skills.

All-Out Attacks are also heavily tied to the games' recruitment mechanics, in which the protagonist can gain additional, stronger Personas. In Persona 3 and 4, where Personas are gained through a "Shuffle Time" mechanic in which they are drawn from a spread of tarot cards, ending a battle with an All-Out Attack makes Shuffle Time far more likely. In Persona 5, when you successfully trigger the opportunity for an All-Out Attack, you may instead attempt to negotiate with the enemy Shadow, either adding it directly as a Persona to your stock or extorting money or items from it.

I should also note that this is one of several combat mechanics in Persona that is not symmetric - enemy characters can score 1 More!s, but cannot perform All-Out Attacks. (There is one exception in Persona 5 - a pair of superbosses, who are themselves Persona users, can knock down your party and deliver an All-Out Attack of their own, which is always powerful enough to kill you.)

Elements Are Sparse, But Have Many Possibilities

Pokemon has 18 elemental types, and anyone who's played has probably taken the time to either memorize or write down its complicated type chart. Persona (and Shin Megami Tensei) instead has just a small handful of elements, but all characters have individual strengths and weaknesses in relation to those elements.

All Persona games feature a basic Physical element, a set of four basic magic elements (Fire, Ice, Electric, and Wind), a pair of two instakill magic elements (Light and Dark), and an Almighty type, which cannot be resisted. Each Persona game makes small modifications to this list - Persona 3 splits Physical into Slash, Strike, and Pierce, while Persona 5 splits Physical into Physical and Gun and adds the Nuke and Psy elements.

Of course, while the sets of elements themselves are smaller, more complexity is added with the weakness tables - each combatant has their own set of affinities to the elements, and in the case of the Arcana Shadows in Persona 3 and Persona 4, you can't exactly tell which element the enemy will be weak to just by looking at them. On top of this, in addition to the traditional affinities of Weak, Normal, Resist, or Block, characters can also Drain an element (meaning that they're healed by the attack instead) or Repel an element (meaning that attacks for that element are directed back at the attacker).

Fortunately, however, the game will remember this information for you - as you try new affinities on new enemies, the game will remember which elements you've tried and provide reminders on which elements work best. The game also allows you to look up what you've discovered of an enemy's weakness table any time you're in combat with it, and whenever you recruit your dedicated Navigator character, she will have an ability that can reveal an enemy's full weakness table. And, of course, you can look up your own characters' and Personas' affinities at any time.

All of this results in a system that encourages careful party composition - each character you take into a fight should generally be in charge of one or two elements, with extra elements covered either by items or by the protagonist's additional stock of Personas.

Buffs and Debuffs Are the Simplest They Can Possibly Be

Many RPGs, among their full repitorie of spells and skills, have skills that increase and decrease character stats for the duration of a fight, and Persona is no exception. Something nice about Persona's buff and debuff system is that it's probably the simplest it could possibly be while still being interesting to work with.

And that's it. There are no buff/debuff levels, buff and debuff skills do not miss, they are not side effects of other attacks. They are reliable, simple, and get their job done.

And that's a good thing, because they are nothing short of necessary for boss fights. When facing a boss that you expect to spend multiple turns fighting, the usual best strategy is to spend your first turn applying whatever buffs and debuffs you can muster, so that your future attacks can deal more damage and the boss is at a disadvantage when attacking you. (And, of course, enemies will use these same strategies, too!)

The only other skills that affect your stats mid-battle in the same way are the Charge skills, which more than double the damage of your next physical or magic attack; and some status aliments, such as Rage. Another set of skills that functions similarly are the affinity-changing skills (e.g. Tetrakarn, which causes you to reflect the next physical attack directed at you).

This discussion of elemental and buff skills also leads nicely into another element of the combat:

Most Spells Do Exactly What They Say On The Tin

A good portion of the skills in Persona (and Shin Megami Tensei) have unique names, relying on you to either just memorize their functions or view their functions in the skill menu. These include, among other things, physical attacks (such as "Torrent Shot" or "God's Hand"), ailment skills (such as "Marin Karin" or "Infuriate"), passive skills (such as "Sharp Student" and "Single-Target Boost"), and Almighty attacks (such as "Life Drain" and "Stagnant Air").

However, magic skills in both series are typically named using a clearly deliniated prefix/suffix system, where each spell has a root word and had prefixes and suffixes added to it to form the full name and effect of the spell. This makes it very easy to parse what a spell does simply by reading its name aloud.

Persona's attack spells use the following root words:

Suffixes are used to indicate an increased power level:

The prefix "Ma-" (sometimes "Mar-") indicates that the spell is multi-target (as in "Magaru" - weak wind damage to all enemies, or "Maziodyne" - strong lighting damage to all enemies).

Buff skills share the "Ma-" prefix, and have other prefixes and roots. The root indicates whether it's a buff or debuff:

and the inner prefix determines the stat being changed:

Different sets of spells have similar rules. For instance, the "Dia" and "Patra" skills, which heal HP and cure some ailments, respectively, use the "Me" prefix to indicate that they affect the whole party. "Dia" also has some suffixes to indicate potency, such as "Diarama" (high-powered healing) and "Diarahan" (full healing). Even the pure attack Almighty skills, while not using the same prefixes, use a similar system, with the spells "Medigo", "Megidola", and "Megidolan" offering increasing amounts of power.

The only magic skills that really break the prefix/suffix naming system are the skills that are unique to specific characters. For instance, the high-level Persona Alice has a skill called "Die For Me!" that has a high chance of Dark instakilling all enemies (a skill that would be called something like "Mamudodyne" if following the normal naming conventions).

Ailments Provide A Simple Flavor To Fights

Persona, like many RPGs, features status ailments, or conditions that hamper your ability to act and make you vulnerable to other attacks. These include things like Freeze (which make you unable to act), Rage (which doubles your Attack, but halves your Defense and Hit/Evasion, and forces you to use basic attacks), Poison (which damages you every turn), and Charm (which can force you to use your skills to help enemies or hurt allies). The Persona series has done a lot of experimentation with aliments over the years, with Persona 5 in particular giving them completely different names and symbols (such as renaming "Charm" to "Brainshock").

Ailments are techincally symmetrical, meaning that both you and your opponents can inflict it, and the Down condition that is central to the 1 More! system is technically a status ailment. However, in practice, most strong enemies are immune to ailments, meaning that they are usually are used by enemies to level the playing field against you. Characters inflicted with an ailment are also incapable of participating in All-Out Attacks.

Persona 5, however, makes ailments a more important part of its battle system by introducing the idea of "Technicals", a third knockdown condition besides weaknesses and critical hits that is performed by hitting an enemy with a status ailment, then hitting them with an attack of a certain element. The Nuke and Psy elements that it introduces are particularly adept at scoring Technicals.

Physical Skills Cost HP, Not SP

Admittedly, it was this element of the combat, and not the 1 More! system, that first intrigued me about Persona's combat, and it's also true of many of the Shin Megami Tensei games. The essence of it is that, while most Persona skills cost SP, the Physical skills that deal increased damage or deal damage to multiple enemies at once instead cost the user's HP. What's more, in the Persona games at least, this is typically a percentage of the user's HP rather than a constant amount, as it is for SP.

This is actually a tremendous boon for the viability of non-magical characters. Characters that specialize in tanking damage and dealing large amounts of physical damage are typically going to have a higher HP pool than their magic-wielding counterparts, but are not going to have as much SP available for using magic skills. By demanding that the fuel for their attacks comes from their high HP pool rather than their low SP pool, they can keep hitting hard and save their SP for the occassional support skill, such as a buff.

This also means that healing is a necessary part of combat instead of simply an afterthought to consider once you've been hurt. By using HP to attack, physical attackers need to be kept topped up by one or more party healers, meaning that healing becomes part of the ebb and flow of combat against powerful enemies.

The Protagonist's Power of the Wild Card Provides Extreme Customization

Most party members in the Persona games summon only one particular Persona, giving them a single eight-item skillset and weakness table. Most enemies work the same way, also having a single eight-item skillset and weakness table.

However, the protagonist of each game, as named and directly controlled by the player, is special. Shortly after awakening to their first Persona, the protagonist is told that they possess the "power of the Wild Card" - "empty, yet filled with infinite possibilities". That is to say, not only can they summon this original Persona, they can also capture Personas from dungeon crawling, customize them as they wish, and fuse together Personas for entirely new creations. They may also keep a stock of multiple Personas on hand at any time and swap which one is currently equipped, including in battle (though only once per turn).

I'll get into the fusion system in more detail in another post, since that's its own huge can of worms, but I can summarize its effects here in saying that if used effectively, the protagonist can have access to a myriad of skills and abilities, not just the eight that they start with. However, each set of eight skills is attached to its own affinity table, meaning that the protagonist will need to be careful about using skills if they might leave them exposed to an enemy's weakness. (And this is especially important since the game immediately ends if the protagonist's HP reaches 0, even if team members have revival skills or items available).

It's also worth noting that the fusion system is also what directly links the Social Links/Confidants found outside of dungeon crawling back to the combat system and increased combat performance. Each Social Link corresponds to several of the Personas available for fusion, and when fusing a new Persona, it will instantly gain levels and experience in proportion to how far you have advanced that Social Link along, allowing it to learn its more valuable skills more quickly.

The "Persona!" Cut-In Provides The Right Pacing for New Fights

Finally, I want to touch on a part of the combat system that does not affect the actual gameplay, but is a signature part of the aesthetics. I am, of course, referring to the "Persona!" cut-in that shows a close-up of the character's eyes whenever they summon their Personas.

The purpose of the cut-in is to emphasize the on-screen action, and fortunately for the experience of Persona's combat, it is not used randomly or lightly. Rather, it is always used the first time the character summons their Persona, and after that point, it is only used whenever the character uses an attack that would grant a 1 More! - scoring a critical or exploiting a weakness. Past the first appearance, it is never used when the attack misses all of its weakness-exploiting targets, or when only hitting enemies that take it normally or resist it.

Normally, you find out when an attack hits a weakness or critical after the attack animation plays out, which takes a few seconds after selecting it. However, once you pick up on this pattern, it moves the catharsis of finding a weakness or scoring a critical to the instant you press the button, which is a huge relief after what can be several turns of probing weaknesses or setting up your team.

The recently released Persona 3: Reload probably does the best job with these cut-ins, as they have been significantly revamped from how they have appeared previously. Rather than being still images that take up 1/6th to 1/4th of the screen and sit on top of the action, Persona 3: Reload's cut-ins are animated images that take up most of the screen, and stand behind the character summoning their Persona. Also, while previous games' cut-ins only show for less than a second, which is shorter than the Persona summon animation, the P3R cut-in remains on screen until the instant the Persona is summoned, shattering to reveal it. All of this makes the catharsis pattern that much easier to recognize and appreciate.

Persona 3's Aigis triggering a cut-in

And that's it for talking about Persona's combat system. Honestly, I could talk a lot more about this series - the great stories and characters they have, how the social dynamics work, the intricacies of the fusion system, the many things in these games that don't work, and much more. I could also talk a lot about combat systems in other games, such as the Press Turn system in Shin Megami Tensei or more action-oriented combat as found in games like CrossCode. Stay tuned for more!

(Persona and Shin Megami Tensei are trademarks of ATLUS.)

Copyright © 2022-2024, TheHans255. This work is licensed under the CA BY 4.0 license - permission is granted to share and adapt this content for personal and commercial use as long as credit is given to the creator.