Game details Developer: Atlus

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Wii U

Release Date: June 24, 2016

ESRB Rating: T for Teen

Price: $60 / £40

Links: Nintendo eShop (Amazon UK Atlus: Nintendo: Wii UJune 24, 2016T for Teen: $60 / £40 UK ) | Amazon US

Tokyo Mirage Sessions: #FE — originally billed as Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem—is title with a hidden, obscure meaning for those who’ve followed the odd little Wii U JRPG from announcement to release. TMS, for Tokyo Mirage Sessions, is a play on the pseudo-recognizable "SMT", for Shin Megami Tensei, very gently evoking the core franchise on display here.

After playing a few dozen hours of this massive, 50 to 60 hour quest, however, I particularly like the "#FE" part of the game that hangs off the end of the title. It’s a crouton of a Fire Emblem reference in a game putting nearly all its weight on the Shin Megami Tensei end of the see-saw, but it makes all the difference.

Idolize me

Level design, combat, and setting in SMT are all distinctly influences by Atlus’ post-apocalyptic near-future role-playing games (which makes sense given that Atlus actually developed the thing). As such Tokyo Mirage Sessions is set in the SMT-favorite location of modern-day Tokyo. The game follows a group of young idols—sort of professional celebrity role models—through a dense Japanese culture tour.

Events unfold from the perspective of the aloof and often clueless Itsuki Aoi, but the plot mostly follows in the wake of his best friend and rising star Tsubasa Oribe. Together they, and a growing cast of like-minded performers, get wrapped up in a tale of self-expression, third-person dungeon crawling, and turn-based combat.

To drive the action, we have Mirages—helpful and/or hostile spirits invisible to anyone without the potential to wield them. Here’s where the sword and sorcery medieval influences from Fire Emblem finally cut their way into the equation. Every major Mirage is represented by a heavily reworked version of a character from Nintendo's turn-based strategy series. In keeping with the game’s musical bent, these Mirages come across as more like covers of that cast, to the point where they’re sometimes nearly unrecognizable from their classic counterparts.

These Mirages function not dissimilarly from the “personas” in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, or the Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, for the anime fans out there. Each is bonded to a particular host and determines what skills they wield, including what class of weapon they use, to what schools of magic they can draw from.

This is vital because this is, ostensibly, a Shin Megami Tensei game, meaning that elemental and weapon class weaknesses form a massive part of the combat. You'll be balancing those strengths and weaknesses against each other a lot of in the hours-long dungeon dives that comprise every chapter of the game. Some of these dungeons can easily eat up entire afternoons of enjoyably hacking and dodging incoming enemy symbols and tarrying with each stage's unique environmental puzzles.

Combo cascade























As in Persona, and the more recent Shin Megami Tensei 4, encounters aren't completely random. The aforementioned enemy "symbols” represent cloaked figures roaming the halls beside you. They’ll attempt to charge your party and initiate a shift to turn-based combat, but you can time a simple sword strike to cut them down ahead of time, stunning the symbol and possibly goosing a free turn or three for your team (that’s if you decide to fight at all).

If a symbol does make contact, you'll shift to a classic turn-based RPG encounter. In true Atlus fashion, the flow of combat is mired in mechanics of past SMT games with a fresh spin on the top layer of strategy through those elemental weaknesses.

In other Atlus games, striking a foe in the Achilles heel will stun them, or offer a free move to your team. Here, however, the developers have found an incredibly clever way of working Fire Emblem’s strategy mechanics into an otherwise wildly different genre.

Members of your cast can learn "Sessions": abilities that trigger automatically when certain conditions are met. When an enemy weak to lightning gets pummeled with a thunderbolt, for instance, a session with the right affinity could trigger a free strike. That strike could, in turn, trigger a different weakness, which triggers another party member's free hit. It’s all heavily reminiscent of Fire Emblem's team-up attacks — wherein two party members attack standing side-by-side doubles the pain.

This is an incredibly clever way of doing things, but I'm not sure that I actually like it.

Auto-tuned to auto-play

Sessions trigger automatically, so while you'd be a fool not to make use of them you also don't have much choice. Compare this to Press Turns (free moves granted from striking enemy weaknesses in SMT4), and the position-based team-up attacks in Fire Emblem, and the actual strategy involved feels limited, if not outright constricting.

What’s more, because Tokyo Mirage Sessions shows you the turn order of friends and foes before they happen (a la Grandia and Final Fantasy X), it’s easy to feel a little bit led by the nose. You’re always encouraged to simply target whichever enemy is next in line, and then watch as the auto-Sessions take care of the rest. More than once I lined up a cascade, and used the unskippable chain reaction to get up and use the bathroom while plucky teens handled my affairs.

More than what's on the surface

Thankfully, the teens in question do pick up some more interesting wrinkles outside of combat. Between each chapter of Tokyo Mirage Sessions is an intermission, wherein you can shop your way across Shibuya, track down a sprinkling of fetch quests, and most importantly handle side stories. These operate somewhere between Mass Effect 2 loyalty missions, and the dating sim elements found in both Persona and Fire Emblem.

These intermissions are, sadly, triggered automatically, either by reaching a certain point in the story, or leveling up your cast members. That means you don't get quite the workmanlike satisfaction of putting in the effort to pick relationships between Itsuki and his friends. The trade-off is that the missions feel hand-crafted, which doesn't always mean they feel "good." I certainly didn't enjoy tromping around Shibuya to find an off-screen cat for Tsubasa. I did, however, get a kick out of landing my TV extra teammate, Touma, a job as an off-brand Kamen Rider.

Most of these stories don't fare well in the short-term, but true to its Persona roots the cast of Tokyo Mirage Sessions has more to say than you'd think. They begin as clichés painted in the broadest of anime brushes: the Japanophile westerner, the vapid would-be star, and of course the tsundere. Over time, though, they reach beyond themselves. Though this doesn't excuse some predictable, borderline creepy ogling committed in both the character design, and by the characters themselves.

Good or bad, completing these quests is well worth it. They each unlock new "Performa"—crafting materials used for making weapons—and unlocking skills which are unique to each character.

These can be exchanged with Tiki, a goddess from both the first Fire Emblem and Awakening. Here she's a vocaloid pop star by day, and a craftsperson by night. She plays a more passive role than the other Mirages, hanging back at home base and offering upgrades.

Tiki's weapons — called "Carnage" because the game didn't have enough jargon — borrow from yet another JRPG. Besides offering damage boosts to each hero, they work like Materia from Final Fantasy 7, bestowing new powers on Mirage masters the more they use them.

The downside is one that's present in the vast majority of Shin Megami Tensei games. Characters can only hold onto so many skills, so to take on a new one you must permanently abandon another to make room. That’s as inconvenient and unpleasant here as it is in games that actually say "Shin Megami Tensei" on the box.

Perso- Ahem, I mean Performa

The Performa skills generated by these side quests are permanent, unlimited, and often incredibly useful; from a straightforward bump in max hit points, to being able to Session even when a character isn't in the active party. They can also take the form of "Ad Libs," insanely powerful attacks caused by a party member going off-script, instead of doing what you tell them. These are flashy, and fit the performance-centric themes of the game, but further illustrate Tokyo Mirage Sessions' fascination with random chance.

"Flashy" doesn't even begin to cover the game itself. The plot following in the wake of Tusbasa and the rest is one about the power of self-expression. Which mostly manifests in Smarties pastels, gorgeous cutscenes, as well as lots, and lots of J-pop.

Music has long been a massive part of Shin Megami Tensei (as calcified by the last Persona product being the rhythm game Dancing All Night). Sadly, I never took to the more saccharine tones of Tokyo Mirage Sessions the way I did Shoji Meguro's hip-hop score from Persona. More than that, I don't think even this less personally appealing genre is well-represented at every turn.

For example, one of the earliest dungeons ends with Tsubasa freeing a major character through the power of song. A song which is said to come from her heart, and requires much dialogue and backtracking to Tiki to unlock the right skill.

The long-built-up moment falls flat when Tsubasa's heartfelt song is just a load of la-la-la's.

That's not quite indicative of the song quality in the entire game. There are quite a lot of genuine, absurdly produced musical sections to match the absolutely bananas combat animations. It is, however, a flat story beat that sums up the majority of my time with the game. There’s a lot of pomp, circumstance, and build-up for something less heartfelt than it portends to be. And it feels a lot less meaningful for being completely out of my hands.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions: #FE has a stage-load of style, backed up by good-not-great performances. Like the title on the box it surrounds itself with more ceremony than is necessary to express pretty simple ideas. I certainly enjoyed tearing apart the shiny packaging, but once it's out in the open there's just not much to actually do with it.

The good

Absolutely stunning visual design not quite like anything else out there.

A colorful cast of characters that are (usually) fun to get to know through side stories.

Sessions are clever, splashy, and fun enough, if not incredibly strategic.

The bad

The game often feels like it plays itself.

The game's musical core can fall flat.

Dungeons and certain side content can overstay their welcome.

The ugly

For a long-awaited crossover, you sure as hell have to strain to notice the Fire Emblem parts.

Verdict: Try it if you want to see Atlus' latest experiments in dungeon crawling and combat, but not if you're solely in it for Fire Emblem.