Persona 5 Spinoff Mobile Game Announces Crossover With... Itself? Players Roast P5X for 'Collaborating' With the Very Game It's Based On — Triple Gacha System and 2 Chapters of Content Add Fuel to the Fire

What happens when a spinoff mobile game decides to 'collaborate' with the very game it's based on? That's exactly what P5X (Persona 5: The Phantom X) just did — announcing a crossover event with Persona 5 Royal. The NGA community was left scratching its head. As the original poster put it: "It's like the Atelier mobile game doing a crossover with Atelier Sophie. Just... why?"

Some users quickly corrected the OP — P5X is the mobile game, and the crossover target is P5R (Royal), not the base P5. But if anything, that correction makes the whole thing even more absurd. One commenter delivered a legendary roast: "A spinoff collabing with its own source material is already weird enough. But with OP's typo, it's literally 'me from 10 years in the future collabing with me from 10 years ago.'" The OP later edited the post, admitting the mistake.

A few users tried to defend the move by pointing to FGO — after all, Fate/Grand Order has done crossovers with Fate/Zero, right? But the community shot that down instantly: FGO has only ever collabed with FZ, never FSN (Fate/Stay Night). Someone else added that FGO even did a crossover with its own arcade version, featuring Beast Ereshkigal (兽尼/Shou Ni) as the crossover Servant. Even so, FGO's crossovers involve distinct entries within the same universe — a far cry from P5X, a mobile spinoff, 'collaborating' with the original single-player RPG it literally derived from.

What stings even more than the collab concept itself is P5X's monetization structure. A player who tried the game described the triple gacha system: character pulls, weapon pulls, AND Persona (stand/替身) pulls — all requiring separate gacha currency. "Generous with pay-to-win content" would be the polite way to put it. As one commenter bluntly stated: "They literally wrote 'give us your money' on the box." The single-player gaming crowd was never going to embrace heavy monetization easily, and P5X leaned into it harder than most.

Then there's the content drought. Players who watched P5X's beta streams reported that the available content only stretched to chapters 2 or 3 — as one user noted, "You can't even reach the point where Ann joins the party compared to the original P5." The character roster is equally thin: the permanent selector pool forces a 3-choice pick, which players interpreted as the devs having barely enough characters to fill the pool. One sharp-eyed commenter observed: "It's obvious they only licensed P5. The only characters they can release are Phantom Thieves in different outfits — a gacha pool you can see the bottom of from day one."

Some players are already reading the writing on the wall. "If the revenue's good, they'll buy the P4 and P3 licenses and keep milking the franchise," one predicted. But most are far more pessimistic. A commenter delivered what might be the thread's most damning verdict: "This is purely for franchise loyalists. Every IP-based gacha game I've seen — except Tencent's Naruto — hasn't survived a year."

As for P5X's future, the player sentiment is best captured by one user who declared: "Once I finish rolling at launch and don't get the full original Phantom Thieves lineup, I'm uninstalling." When players can't even find a reason to stick around, a mobile game's fate may already be written — in the sarcastic comments of its own community.