New Persona 5 Spinoff Game Announced

We’ve had Persona 5, we’ve had Persona 5 Royale, we’ve had Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight and also Persona 5 Strikers. That’s a lot of Persona 5, but Sega and Atlus figure we can handle even more, because another spinoff has just been announced, this one called Persona: Phantom of the Night.

As Persona Central have translated, this one — with a shortened name of P5X — is a mobile game being released by Chinese company Perfect World Games. Before you go switching off at that like I almost did, though, just…look at this trailer:

And this one, which features some gameplay:

I think those clips look cool as hell. And the little owl! And everyone’s character designs! They’re perfect (long-time series designer Shigenori Soejima worked on the main character and owl sidekick, which would explain that). This footage obviously looks cool as hell because it looks just like the Persona 5 we played on consoles/PC, down to the mix of exploration/classwork and turn-based combat, but it doesn’t really seem to show what kind of microtransactions or payment systems are going to be in place, which of course could be an absolute dealbreaker. Guess we’ll have to see how that all works when the game’s first public test takes place on March 29.

You play a high school student whose parents are “travelling abroad”, leaving you home alone to juggle going to school during the day and fighting demons by night, the trailer suggesting the story is going to follow a very similar path as the main game, just with a fresh group of kids, teammates and possible social links (though Joker and crew do make an appearance based on a screenshot from the official site).

If you want to see some more of the excellent character design work, you can check out the game’s official site (though you’ll need to translate it since it’s all in Chinese).