Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth is a sugary sweet confection 🌸laced with the familiar darkness of the Shin Megami Tensei series, drizzled with the delights of first-person dungeon exploration. It's fanservice at its best; an amalgam of silly character interaction mashed up with hours of grinding and loot collecting, with a cast that play off each other exceptionally well. It's nothing at all like the more stoic iterations series fans are used to, and yet it’s warm and familiar; an adventure you'll absolutely want to embark on. That is🐓, if you can handle an abundance of chibi-fied anime giddiness along the way.

This spinoff unites the cast of Persona 3 and Persona 4 to investigate a bizarre phenomenon surrounding the Velvet Room, the multidimensional meeting area in which the protagonists of both games conduct business related to Personas (the beings summoned by the heroes). After it has some sort of "malfunction", both teams find themselves smack dab in the middle of an enemy-infested Yasogami High School, the setting of Persona 4, as labyrinths open up that both teams of students head into in order to figure out what's going on𝓀.

You'll s💜pend most of your time delving into said labyrinths, exploring revolving dungeon layouts and different types of terrain as you fight off hordes of Shadows, or the enemies prevalent in the previous Persona games. The introduction of the first-person viewpoint forces you to keep abreast of your surroundings even more so than usual, because it’s devoid of even the most rudimentary of game aids - like a map, for instance. You’ve got to make your own.

Tile by tile you explore each area as you go along, marking a mostly empty map on the second screen. Here, you can denote dead ends with any color or symbol you'd like from the tools availab💧le to you, mark areas you've already been before, or even make a note to yourself where specific treasure chests are that you'll need to come back to later. Creating your own map as you go can be a difficult and heady task when all you want to do is uncover new areas, and it was (at least for me) an instant turnoff before I got the hang of it.