Dungeon crawling is a staple of thePersonaseries with each entry pitting players against Shadows as they make their way through Tartarus inPersona 3 Portable, the TV world inPersona 4 Golden, or Mementos and Palaces within the Metaverse inPersona 5 Royal. While most of these dungeons feature some puzzle-solving mechanics,Persona 5 Royalups the ante by introducing more robust environmental puzzles within its Palaces. However,Persona 6could take this mechanic even further by taking a page out ofThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s book.
One of the most highly-praised aspects ofZelda: Tears of the Kingdomis the way it allows players to manipulate the environment to solve puzzles using a variety of unique abilities including Fuse, Ultrahand, Recall, and Ascend. These abilities turn Hyrule into sandbox for players to get creative with the ways in which they approach the puzzles found within the game’s shrines and temples. While the nextPersonagame doesn’t need to go all-in on sandbox-like features, giving its characters unique abilities to use outside of battle could help freshen up the series' dungeon exploration gameplay.
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How Persona 6 Could Include Environmental Manipulation Like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Puzzles withinPersonaseries dungeonsare usually limited to navigating their maze-like levels trying to find the stairs that will take the party to the next floor. However,Persona 5changed things up by adding more complex challenges players need to complete to progress through a Palace, such as finding the bank vault codes to reach the depths of Kaneshiro’s Palace or navigating past the timer puzzles in Okumura’s Palace. Most of these puzzles still only require players to push an in-game button in order to solve them and future dungeons could stand to benefit from unique player abilities only available outside of battle.
For the most part, the only party members that can utilize special abilities outside of battle arePersona’s navigators, such asPersona 3’s Fuuka,Persona 4’s Rise, andPersona 5’s Futaba, who are able to provide intel on the dungeon such as its layout and locations of treasure.Persona 5 Royaladded the use of the grappling hook for dungeon traversal outside of battle, but this ability’s use was limited to specific locations within dungeons. As thePersonaseries continues to iterate upon these dungeon traversal mechanics, drawing inspiration fromZelda: Tears of the Kingdomis the logical next step.
A great wayPersona 6could raise the bar for dungeon crawling is by giving each party member a unique skill that can only be used outside of battle that can affect the environment to help with level traversal akin toLink’s abilities inTears of the Kingdom. Perhaps one character can allow the party to pass through certain types of walls, or another might be able to create blocks that allow the party to reach otherwise inaccessible places. Not only would a mechanic like this add to the creativity in level design, but it would give players a reason to swap out their active party members often.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomis likely going to be an influential title for a lot of future games, but short of going fully open-world, there some crucial aspectsPersona 6could pull from the game. While the majority of thePersonaseries' gameplay is split between JRPG combat and life sim elements, its dungeon crawling plays an important role that can’t be overlooked. As Atlus continues to push the envelope for thePersonaseries, revamping dungeon crawling with unique abilities for use outside of battle should be amajor point of focus forPersona 6.
Persona 5 Royalis available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
