How Persona 5 Tactica’s Damage Types Could Fit Into Persona 6’s Combat

Highlights

• Persona 5 Tactica introduces new skill trees and changes the way Personas function, adding depth to the strategy game.
• Persona 6 could learn from P5 Tactica’s emphasis on crowd control skills to enhance the franchise’s combat loop.
• Persona 6 could expand on P5 Tactica’s damage types, offering a wider range of elemental skills with unique crowd control effects.

Persona 5 Tactica is an unusual Persona game for a variety of reasons. The fact that it’s a strategy game (the first of its kind among Persona spin-offs) is only the tip of the iceberg. It introduces new skill trees for each of the Phantom Thieves, and instead of letting the protagonist switch Personas constantly throughout combat, extra Personas now function like equipment, each buffing the party member they’re attached to and giving them extra skills. What’s more, Persona 5 Tactica totally overhauls damage types. Rather than striking elemental weaknesses to get One Mores, players must use each damage type’s unique crowd control effect to manipulate the battlefield.

Odds are that Persona 6 will revert to the classic elemental affinities, given that they’re a cornerstone of the franchise’s combat loop, but that’s not to say that it couldn’t experiment with some parts of Persona 5 Tactica. While the systems of cover and unit movement don’t really fit in a turn-based mold, Persona 6 could elevate the franchise’s many forms of crowd control by blending them with damaging skills to a greater extent. Persona 5 Tactica‘s heavy reliance on crowd control might be what Persona 6 needs to take elemental skills up a notch.

Persona 6 Can Make Greater Use of P5 Tactica’s Damage Types

Persona’s History of Crowd Control

Persona has a long history of blending damaging skills with status effects. For instance, Persona 4 is rife with Physical skills that apply status effects like Poison, Enervation, and Exhaustion, and these moves appear among the skillsets of both many collectible Personas and hostile Shadows. Persona 5 has its own Physical skills with status effects, but they’re noticeably less common than they are in P4. Fire, Ice, and Electricity skills are often more reliable ways to both do damage and manipulate the status of the enemy in P5.

Persona 5 Tactica Doubles Down on a CC Convention

In this way, P5T converting all damage types into forms of crowd control isn’t completely outlandish, but it is slightly unusual when P5 took a bit of a step back in this department to make room for Physical skills that interacted with the new Baton Pass mechanic. Still, P5T‘s approach is compelling. Making every damaging skill apply crowd control means they feel far more impactful, especially in a strategy game where controlling the field is crucial. Between old effects like Burn and Freeze, plus new ideas like Vortex and Hypno, every damage type feels special, even when the actual damage doesn’t vary much.

Persona 6 Can Expand Elemental Affinities With P5T’s Designs

When it returns to the elemental model, Persona 6 could preserve Persona 5 Tactica‘s CC-focused skills by expanding the roster of elemental skills. For generations now, Persona games have mostly stuck to the same set of six spells for each element, with a handful of very rare variants. Persona 6‘s elemental gameplay might feel more exciting if it offered an alternative set of elemental damage spells that dealt less damage but have a high chance of applying a status effect on the target. Damage types other than Fire, Ice, and Electricity could wield a signature effect; just like in P5T, Light skills could apply Dizzy, Dark skills could apply Despair, and so on.

Adding weak elemental skills with CC attached could offer a lot to the combat loop. Players could explore a useful tactical middle ground between doing damage and trying to lock down enemies. What’s more, Persona 6‘s party members could learn all the full-damage elemental skills, pure crowd-control spells, and the damage-CC combo spells, giving players more options on how they sculpt their team compositions and playstyle. It’d be all the more useful if damage types can still play off of each other’s signature status effects, like Nuclear, Wind, and others do in Persona 5 Royal. Tactica‘s approach is likely a one-off for its specific playstyle, but Persona‘s elemental skills could really kick things up a notch with a new set of crowd control spells.