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( full review with screenshots: https://www.gaming-parrot.com/post/persona-5-tactica-repaint-your-heart-review-artist-s-block )
Persona 5 Tactica Repaint Your Heart is the day 1 DLC expansion to P5T. The good news is that, unlike a lot of day 1 DLC, it doesn't feel like something they sliced out of the main game. This is a fully standalone story with characters who don't otherwise appear at all and you could easily play base P5T without ever knowing or caring that this exists. The bad news is that, well, you don't ever really need to know or care that it exists. This doesn't add anything to the game other than Kasumi and Akechi and the story is only slightly connected to either Tactica or P5. Even by the standards of Persona spinoffs, this is a filler episode.
The game is set somewhere around October of P5's original story, which puts it quite a bit earlier than P5T's events. That fact is really only relevant to explain why the important bits of Kasumi and Akechi's stories haven't happened yet, and otherwise the game could be set in 1975 and feature totally different characters without changing much. The lack of tie-in is disappointing, but the bigger problem is that this feels stretched out even though it's only 15 missions and a few hours long. A big bad who is obviously working with P5T's big bad has mind controlled an artist, and now you need to get some MacGuffins to bring her back to her senses. The story ties in to P5T thanks to a brief cutscene at the end, but otherwise nothing remotely interesting happens with any of the established characters. It's the classic prequel problem - they've already told the stories of these characters, so now they can't change anything important.
Still, while the story is underwhelming, it's the gameplay that really brings this down. The only new features for this expansion are paint and the two extra characters. Since the characters in the main game already all played more or less the same, adding more obviously doesn't change much (although Akechi's special ability is quite strong) and the removal of Persona fusion and custom equipment goes even further to make everything feel the same. Paint, for its part, just means that most actions cause the ground to turn the color of the acting team. Standing on your color means you can't be knocked down and standing on the enemy's color means you're always vulnerable. It could have been interesting, but it's so easy to change colors that in practice it hardly changes the strategy at all. You'll have seen everything this expansion has to offer about a third of the way through, which is a somewhat ironic problem for an expansion to a game that took too long to get to the good parts. This is quite an overcorrection.
That said, it's not really a pacing problem that causes it to run out of new ideas so quickly. It's not that goes through its gimmicks too quickly, it just only has a few missions worth of ideas to show. The vast majority of the missions are boss fights, but the non-final bosses are really just minor variations on standard enemies and you fight them all more than once. There aren't any other new enemies or systems introduced at any point, so it very quickly feels like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. But it's really worse than that, because they've also removed many of the features from the base game. There's no party customization since there are only three characters, obviously, but you barely even get to customize those since Persona fusion is gone and equipment is limited to pre-determined drops in between some story missions. You still have skill trees, at least, but they give you skill points so quickly that you'll likely run out of meaningful upgrades before the end of the game.
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