"EOS speedrun": Persona 5's latest spin-off becomes the worst-rated Atlus game on Steam as reviews plummet over gacha that's even more "aggressive" in the global version

Despite having the best launch out of any of the Persona 5 games on Steam, Persona 5: The Phantom X seems to be falling out of favor. Just a couple of weeks since the spin-off's global launch, it's become the worst-reviewed Atlus game on Steam.

Previously, that title was held by Soul Hackers 2, which has a Mixed overall rating with 65% positive reviews. The new Persona 5 spin-off (developed by Black Wings Game Studio for its original, more limited launch) also has a Mixed rating at the time of writing, but only 57% of its reviews are positive, with a huge spike of negative reviews hitting the JRPG earlier this week.

Why? Well, this follows a recent dev stream covering the game's 1.1 update, in which it was revealed that "to minimize the gap in gameplay experience between Japan/Western regions and earlier releases in China/Asia regions, we are working to deliver updates and main story content at a faster pace. As part of this effort, we will also make an adjustment to the release of events and Phantom Idols, as well as game balance."

On one hand, this sounds pretty exciting, but there's a big problem which all boils down to the fact that this is a free-to-play game with gacha elements. If more stuff is happening and at a faster pace, that inevitably means there's even more things to spend in-game currency on.

Furthermore, if players aren't being given an inflated amount of currency to match that speedier content pace, the whole thing ends up being a lot less free-to-play friendly, with more pressure on players to spend their hard-earned cash on microtransactions.

That's exactly what players are complaining about in the new flood of negative reviews. "Western players are getting treated like trash compared to the original version," one reads. "They're releasing characters even faster for us to attempt to catch us up faster but somehow giving us LESS currency to compensate for that rather than more?"

"The gameplay is good, the story is decent, and I generally would love to give this a good review. HOWEVER, the gacha monetization is incredibly aggressive," another says. "More currency is being given out to the CN servers than English servers get for maintenance, log-in bonuses, and code redemption."

"While the developers are accelerating character releases in our version to supposedly help us catch up, they're paradoxically reducing the amount of in-game currency we receive which makes absolutely no sense," complains another, while one player jokes that we're heading towards a "global EOS [end of service] speedrun WR [world record]."

As players have pointed out, this is absolutely something that could – in theory – be rectified by the developers, so The Phantom X has the potential to recover its Steam rating yet. Whether that actually happens remains to be seen. All I'll say is that if I had 10 minutes to find an ounce of generosity, I wouldn't start my search with gacha games.

Persona offers a new contender for silliest JRPG villain with Persona 5: The Phantom X and its "Subway Slammer," who declares "the whole subway's mine for the slammin'!"