Parent's Guide: Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth is a dungeon crawling role-playing game in which the casts from previous games, Persona 3 and Persona 4 collide, and are tasked with exploring the labyrinths that have been popping up in their school. Now trapped inside, it's up to the two teams of characters to work together to find a way out, and recover the lost memories of some of their party. By entering these dungeons and battling their way to the bottom, they get one step closer to escaping the strange world they now find themselves in. While it may feature characters from two of the earlier games, there's no need to be a big Persona fan, or to even have played the earlier games here, as the story itself is stand-alone.

Most of your time with Persona Q will be spent exploring the game's labyrinths - which, in an interesting twist, requires you to draw your own map on the 3DS' Touch Screen, marking in traps, walls and doors (amongst other things) as accurately as possible. Often, this is key to solving some of the dungeons' puzzles, which may require you to avoid or distract the game's frighteningly powerful FOE enemies, which wander around on a set path inside. A few flips of some switches later, and you should be able to redirect them, giving you plenty of chance to slip by. While you don't want to engage these in battle unless you have to, other battles occur randomly as you explore against much less deadly foes - these battles are turn based, with each character, friend or foe, taking it in turns to attack and use magic or items.

The influence from the award-winning Persona games, with its emphasis on socialising and story, makes Persona Q an extremely text heavy game, with plenty of jokes, essential story sections and bonus missions all spelled out in text alone. While much of the main portion of the game is fully voiced, there's still plenty that's told through text alone, making a decent reading ability pretty important. And, with this game being a mixture of Persona and the hardcore Etrian Odyssey games, Persona Q is also rather challenging, and pretty much unplayable by normal people on anything above normal - fortunately the Easy and Safety difficulties cut down on any frustration, making it a lot easier, and, in the case of the latter, letting you retry straight from where you died.

Despite it's cute, 'chibi'-like appearance, Persona Q can be relatively 'adult' at times. Combat itself, in which players fight against fantastical creatures, demons and evil spirits, is relatively tame, with enemies simply fading away when defeated - blood splatters occur only in one specific boss fight, although bloodstains can be found in and around one the scenery of a dungeon as you explore. Some enemies - and the "personas" your characters can channel - have exposed breasts or phallic-shaped heads or torsos, while the likes of the succubus and incubus have in-game descriptions describing their sexually deviant activities (although not in any great detail) e.g., "They visit sleeping men/women and have sexual intercourse with them". As your party consists of a load of teenagers, dialogue can sometimes stray into innuendos and the like, particularly when the wannabe playboy but terribly unlucky with the ladies Teddie character is involved. Language can also be a bit questionable at times, with words such as s**t and b**tard muttered from time to time.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS