'Our fans have been very passionate': How player feedback has been at the core of the first six months of Persona 5: The Phantom X

Persona 5: The Phantom X has just kicked off its half-anniversary celebration marking a whole six months since the release of the gacha spin-off (at least in Japan and the Western world, anyway). It's not been an easy journey, to say the least. The game's launch was criticised for stark differences between reward distribution in the Chinese version versus the global release and was arguably (and very surprisingly) eclipsed by horse girl gacha Umamusume: Pretty Derby releasing just one day sooner.

In the time since global launch, the teams at both Sega and Atlus have been hard at work on The Phantom X to bring the standards up to what gacha gamers have come to expect. When I asked what the team's biggest initial challenge was, operations director Yuta Sakai told me: "It was definitely the game balance or the balance of the events. So when we created the Japanese and English versions, we made various adjustments from the original release—the Chinese and Asia versions—and it was mostly focused on the quality-of-life and making sure that the game would fit new players because we had some extra features that were not originally present when it was first released.

"But of course, we had a lot of feedback from our players—especially Western and English-speaking players—regarding these changes. So when we look back at it, there are some features that we were glad we made changes to, and there are some features where we took the feedback that we got and made changes as we went on."

Some of those player-driven changes have come in the form of an improved gacha banner that guarantees the [player will receive the] character after 110 pulls, as well as an increase in rewards for daily and weekly in-game tasks. It's been a much-appreciated sprinkling of changes over the last half-year, primarily thanks to those who continued to play even when The Phantom X arguably wasn't in its best shape.

Take your time

As well as smoothing things over with the playerbase, Atlus and Sega have been hard at work alongside developer Perfect World to bring an update to both the Chinese and global versions of The Phantom X simultaneously for the first time. Persona 5's very own Velvet Room attendants, Justine and Caroline, have been added as playable characters to both versions.

"We had to change the workflow completely because it was something that we've never done before," development producer Jun Matsunaga told me. "Atlus gave us permission to use Justine and Caroline as a global character in the series for the first time." Matsunaga added that introducing the two during the global version's half-anniversary was "the perfect timing to have this simultaneous release."

I do have to agree with Matsunaga that now seems like a pretty good time for it, and it seems as though for Atlus and Sega the last six months have ultimately come out as a positive experience despite a somewhat rough first footing.

"Thank you very much to our players for sticking with P5X these past six months," chief producer Yohsuke Uda said to me. "In the past six months, our fans have been very passionate, and they've given us a lot of feedback that we will continue to listen to and continue to take into our future development, and continue to make P5X a better game for the future as well.

"And with our half-anniversary update, this is going to be the first time a Velvet Room attendant is going to be playable. The Velvet Room is a central location for the entire Persona series, so we feel like that's something very special for fans of Persona. And we hope that if you're interested in playing as Justine and Caroline, you'll hop onto P5X and give it a try."