YMMV / Persona 5: The Phantom X

• Awesome Art: The opening animation received high praise for retaining the style and spectacle of Persona 5 and its offshoots, but with even more fluidity and little to none of the conspicuous CGI seen in more recent titles like Persona 5 Strikers and Persona 3 Reload. All of this, coming from two relatively unknown animation studios operating from out of China (Studio Tumble and Flint Sugar) as opposed to industry giants and up-and-comers like Production I.G^*P5, MAPPA^*P5R, and WIT Studio^*P3R — which naturally convinced fans to check out their previous animated works.
• Common Knowledge: Considering some elements of censorship in the game (see Bowdlerise on the main page), namely the human skulls appearing in the design of Personas such as Bugbear and Hell Rider, a joke that got out of hand and became a rumour stated that Ryuji Sakamoto — whose Phantom Thief codename is Skull — would've been subject to this as well, with his codename changed to "Pipe". Dataminers, instead, proved that not only was Ryuji's codename unchanged from the original Persona 5, but so was the design of his skull-like mask and of his Persona, Captain Kidd.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • With the lack of Café Leblanc and Sojiro Sakura (though datamining found a graphical asset related to him), fans began to speculate that The Phantom X takes place in an Alternate Timeline with a large portion of Suspiciously Similar Substitute/Alternate Self equivalents of the original Persona 5 characters (with some serving as stand-ins for multiple characters, such as Motoha/Closer having aspects of both Ann and Ryuji). This idea gained more traction when the OP featured a previously unseen member of the P5X Phantom Thieves (Riko Tanemura) whose Metaverse outfit resembles that of a gender-swapped Yusuke/Fox, with information from the concurrent open beta test establishing her to be — in a parallel to Makoto — a third-year on Kokatsu's Discipline Committee.
  • Another theory is the game taking place in The New '20s going by a mention of the year 2022 on a calendar display and one in-game poster◊ placing the current events in 2026, despite Takemi and Iwai looking unchanged, which alternatively implies that Leblanc went out of business at some point during the speculated decade-long Time Skip. Combine this with the explanation that the original Phantom Thieves featured in the game are more akin to cognitive selves instead of their "real" selves like with the special fights against the Persona 3 and 4 protagonists in Royal, Gacha Game fans began speculating that characters from previous Persona games might be included one day.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • The developer was surprised◊ by the more positive reaction to this game from outside China.
  • Likewise, many westerners took immediate interest in Kayo Tohyama when she was unveiled, as not only is she voiced by Atsuko Tanaka, but she's also the first female adult Persona user since Persona 2 at age 44 (and looking quite good for her age both in and out of the Metaverse), especially since female Persona users in the franchise are usually senior high schoolers at most. It's not uncommon to find comments online demanding that Atlus include her in the mainline games rather than have her only be featured in a China-exclusive gacha game.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Previews of the first arc of the game's story gave the impression of it being a rehash of 5's first arc, with the first main antagonist being a sports-themed villain whose actions earn the animosity of a female main party member, right down to Kiuchi representing the sin of Lust and his Shadow's transformed state having a similar design to Asmodeus (though there are still enough notable differences for the arc to stand as its own storyline, such as Kiuchi feeling hatred towards Motoha rather than Kamoshida's uncomfortable lust towards Ann). The similarity was later revealed to be intentional due to mainland China never receiving an official Persona 5 release, with the story of P5X intended to function as such for the Chinese market.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Don't tell Akechi." ^ExplanationThe third beta test showed Joker and Wonder coming into conflict for as-of-yet explained reasons. This caused several fans to joke that Joker and Wonder would have some sort of rivalry with a dash of Ho Yay, in turn leading people to joke about how pissed Akechi would be when he finds out.
  • "This is for a mobile game." / "They didn't need to go this hard." / "They never miss." ^ExplanationThe moment the game's intro was made available to the public and further spread by English-speaking members of the fandom in late March 2024, numerous jokes and comments circulated about its high level of quality in terms of both visuals and sound, ranging from how Lyn and/or the Atlus Sound Team "never miss" to the fact that Atlus not only went all out for a Chinese gacha spin-off, but by many accounts came out with an opening on par with if not surpassing that of the original game P5X spun off from and said game's definitive version.
• Mis-blamed: The many Tainted by the Preview reactions from the mere existence of this game^note Microtransactions, Follow the Leader, New Work, Recycled Graphics, It's the Same, Now It Sucks!, and They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, among harsher criticisms, especially related to the target demographic. caused the Persona fandom to paint Atlus and/or Sega as a lost cause and completely greedy, tainting expectations for the next Persona entries. The fandom even accused this game of taking away from the Persona team's development time for the next mainline games. However, Atlus only officially licensed The Phantom X and oversaw the creative aspects (including longstanding series producer Kazuhisa Wada serving as project supervisor for X). The game itself was developed by Black Wings Game Studio, part of Perfect World, not P-Studio, meaning that development of the game will have no effect on the development of future main series games.^note Compare this to Metaphor: ReFantazio, whose development team (Studio Zero) is made up of former Persona team staff, including longtime series director Katsura Hashino. In addition, mainland China never officially got Persona 5 at all, hence the similar story flow with a Cast of Expies (albeit in gacha format). The Phantom X is primarily developed for the Chinese audience, though Word of God admitted to being surprised by all the buzz from outside of China, which fueled this further.
• Narm: Shun Kanou is noted to have a very cool design, with an equally cool Persona. Fans were unable to take him seriously, however, due to his codename: Soy.
• Older Than They Think: When Kayo Tohyama was introduced, many people were caught off-guard as while the series has introduced adult Persona-users before, they're mostly men. This isn't the first time an adult female Persona-user has made an appearance, however; Maya Amano and Ulala Serizawa from the Persona 2 duology are both in their twenties. It's worth noting that Kayo is the oldest female Persona-user to appear to date, as she is stated to be 44.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The opening bars of "Desire Surrender" sound a little too much like "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The game's announcement received no small amount of stigma from the fanbase, chief among them being that, well, P5X is a gacha mobile game in the vein of Fate/Grand Order and Granblue Fantasy.
  • Thanks to leaked information shared by Midori on X, many Persona fans ended up bitter over the fact that The Phantom X was focused so much in development to be a mobile money-maker like Genshin Impact that the highly anticipated Persona Grand Stage (codenamed Persona ASA), a PC and mobile auto-battler (akin to Dota 2's Autochess mod or Teamfight Tactics) featuring characters from all mainline Persona games from 1 to 5, was potentially cancelled in favor of Phantom X.
• Values Dissonance: A minor one, in that the Morgana stand-in for the game being an owl has been a point of confusion for some western circles, as owning a pet owl would get you odd looks at best and have exotic pet laws after you at worst. Having an owl as a pet is currently legal in Japan, though the ethics of it all is still a massive point of contention.

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