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.
