Persona 5 Strikers

Persona 5 Strikers is the rare kind of game that's able to both feel like a pleasant surprise and a tremendous disappointment rolled up into the one package, and it certainly makes for an interesting experience to think about. There isn't even really an element present here that feels wholly great or wholly terrible either, it's a balancing act where every idea is on the cusp of either entirely falling off the deep end or being something truly inspired that gets the game as a whole to stand out from the original Persona 5. I'd even go as far as saying that if this game were about 10 hours shorter that I'd think it was an outright great little time, but as it stands, the longer things went on, the more the initially small flaws would build up until it created something that I barely could bother finishing.

Transforming Persona 5's core combat from the more traditional turn based combat into a musou was definitely a creative decision that I was initially concerned about since there have been so many instances where a lot of the strategy a game could have ends up getting removed in favour of button mashing, but it's honestly the thing I think Strikers ended up doing the best as I went on. Despite being a musou by definition, with the hack n slash combat paired with waves of usually very weak enemies, I was impressed by just how much of the dynamics of Persona were still present. While the basic hacking and slashing will get you through a lot of the smaller encounters, against anything with even a hint of challenge to it, it immediately feels as if it plays a bit closer to a real time Persona rather than a standard game of the genre, with careful team building and full exploitation of enemy weaknesses both playing a huge role in getting you to the stage where you can take things down. To still provide such a strong incentive to be spending like, 20 minutes at a time in the velvet room to minmax your team and make that time feel worth it is very cool to do when the gameplay style takes such a sharp turn and it leads to some situations that really do feel frenetic, yet rewarding.

This is especially true for the boss fights, which were consistently some of the best parts here, often being on the far more tanky side of things, but always feeling as if they properly took advantage of the genre shift and all made for some engaging and intense fights that would more often than not come down to the wire, the final boss especially mixing things up in clever ways that I won't spoil. Adding those additional flashy moves that could be kited around was also a good move in making the choice to move in this direction feel warranted and meaningful while providing another avenue to provide some additional spectacle to things, keeping up with the theme of everything about Persona 5 being so incredibly flashy. That said, things aren't quite perfect either with the shift in style, with certain ideas getting lost in the process. MP conservation might as well not be a thing considering how much more health everything seems to have in this, you're going to either be staying at full MP or blowing it all in a single bigger fight, and it hinders such a core strategic element that could've been fixed just by giving the party way more or it instead of making it a resource that was even more finite than it was in the original game.

The dungeon design was also really bad for the most part, starting off with a couple that were really fun in one way or another, albeit pretty bland from a layout standpoint, but as things went on, rather than building upon concepts that were established and knowing when to add a little twist to them to elevate the experience to the next level, it just was more of the same, but more of it, and far more formulaic. This reached a peak with the 6th dungeon, which was a genuinely agonising experience because of how much unadulterated tedium was thrown towards the player. This sense of repetition carries over to the narrative as well, as while I love the vibes of the phantom thieves going on a road trip and saving the world in the process, after a certain point it becomes increasingly obvious just how many story beats have just been taken from the original and veeeerrry slightly retooled, just with character writing that feels far heavier on the tropes.

In general there's a certain impersonal feel to how a lot of the narrative is executed, villains that are barely connected with the protagonists in any way beyond vague similarities in their strife, everyone just doing their own thing and happening to cross paths along the way, and basically any other interaction outside of the main cast. While this definitely works in some instances to make the world feel more alive and not something that entirely revolves around the protagonists, it quickly leads to wishing that the game would've at least used this in a more creative way at the very least. These 2nd hand stories of hardship and trauma you hear throughout are obviously still pretty dark and all, but without basically any contextualisation to these beyond the bare minimum, it ends up leaving a very minimal impact in comparison and makes it hard to truly get invested in the antagonists throughout, often feeling explicitly introduced to cause conflict without any other purpose.

The lack of this personal element extends out to the rest of the game too, gone is the sense of proper time progression and planning, instead replaced with the game's date exclusively moving forward when the plot demands it rather than leaving any leniency for one of the best aspects of the original game. Things just have nowhere near as much of a comfy charm when you're not spending a lot of your time just, living life and chatting with characters, and not only are all the side characters from the original not present at all, but the social links or any equivalent are also missing. All of this is replaced with this one bar called the "bond bar" which is just an artificial way of trying to evoke the same feelings without putting in any of the elements that elevated this, and like so many other elements just feels like it was included to keep up the surface level similarities. Funnily enough though, despite all my complaints, a lot of this only started becoming truly detrimental near the end once things began to outstay their welcome, and even amongst this painful end portion, the final boss was still a really great time and there were a few other isolated elements of greatness mixed in, not to mention that the game was almost as stylish as the original, albeit less polished.

I genuinely feel like if you're more used to games on the longer side of things that you'll get more out of this than I did, as I'll admit that I do begin running out of patience after a certain point and it probably makes some of the issues present here feel even worse than they are in reality. Still won't affect my own opinion, but I could definitely see others enjoying this more than me as a result. If you're a big fan of Persona 5 and are fine with a bit of repetitiveness, I could definitely recommend this, it still maintains a very high amount of P5's identity while taking things in a different direction. It's not perfect, but you get to see more Phantom Thieves in action and Haru finally is able to get a reasonable amount of screentime too, and that stuff combined with the surprisingly fun combat ends up making this an alright time even if I personally ended up feeling pretty disappointed and bored towards the end.

Honestly, I don't think I can really justify liking this one as much as I do. Everything great about it already existed in Persona 5, and was either just as good or better there, and the significant changes are all downgrades. Some of the additions are nice - none of the three new major characters are as good as the original set were, but they're all still solid, and the broader range of overworld settings allowed by the plot's road trip conceit is appreciated - but no more than that. The palaces (now rebranded as 'jails') range from 'could have been in the original' at their best to 'significant step down' at their worst; the shift toward making the monarchs victims as much as aggressors, spurred into their actions by their own trauma, doesn't add anywhere near as much to the plot or the emotional impact of facing them as you'd think it would; unsurprisingly for somebody that's never enjoyed this kind of hack & slash crowd combat, I think the combat here is a huge downgrade on the best turn-based system I've ever played.

So yes, there's a very significant amount of stolen valour about this game's qualities. That's basically okay though, because I absolutely fucking love Persona 5. Even if the third time around (fourth if you're counting Royal, I guess) isn't anywhere near as good as the first, it's still such a pleasure to get to spend more time in this world, with these characters, that I don't necessarily mind the combat being a bit of an obstacle to get done as quickly as possible, rather than something to really savour in its own right. (In the interests of fairness, it should definitely be noted here that as I write this I'm about 90 minutes into Yakuza: Like a Dragon [龍が如く7　光と闇の行方], a game that does the turn-based to real-time journey in the other direction, and nothing about this ever made me internally scream 'EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT AND I DON'T LIKE IT' the way Like a Dragon has so far - so things could certainly be an awful lot worse.) I feel like I'd happily take a Persona 5 game in any genre, just as long as there was significant focus on the story and the characters and the aesthetics and mood remains unchanged - and Persona 5 Strikers fits into that very nicely. You'd have to create some unspeakably tedious gameplay to overpower the appeal of those fundamentals, and what's here is a long, long way away from being that bad. So maybe this is ultimately no more than a pleasing diversion for big fans of either of the games it's based on - but I'm one of those fans, and it pleased me.

After finishing it a couple of months ago, I can definitively say this is a good game. Although it might be a bit unnecessary, I think it does a good job carrying on the story of P5 without it feeling forced, and it's a stroke of genius to put the Thieves on a road trip to get them out of Tokyo, up to a bunch of other shenanigans.

The inter-character is as strong as ever, and newcomers like Zenkichi are great additions to the cast. It might retread SOME of the ground of the original Persona 5's story but I think it's made up for by this strong writing.

Now, the gameplay. I think this is where Strikers suffers the most by far. In an attempt to integrate the Musou and Persona combat styles, it's a very alienating game at the start. The fact that the elemental system still exists is probably essential to keeping the Persona DNA, but it feels unsatisfying when you're meleeing an enemy and they have a phys resistance.

Of course, you can exploit the elements, but then comes another problem - if you don't have a persona equipped or party member that can exploit the enemy's weakness, you can't do anything. This is particularly frustrating in boss fights, where you pretty much have to die if this happens since there's no way to swap out party members. The fact that you drain SP and HP so fast is also really rough, and Jail infiltration is not as good as Palaces because you can leave whenever you want with no consequences. For most of my playtime, I found the gameplay very underwhelming.

Another weird thing - the audio mixing on the English dub for this game is AWFUL. I found it impossible to play the Japanese dub with everything going on during combat, but even then it tries to keep that same Persona style by having text boxes in the corner. But the dialogue isn't loud enough to actually HEAR what they're saying.

However, after about 25 hours, the gameplay CLICKED! I found the combat to be really fun once I nailed down how to really exploit it. I wish it hadn't taken that long, but for the last 15 hours or so I found it immensely satisfying. The Jails still aren't as interesting as Palaces to explore, but the boss fights later into the game are much better than at the start, bar the final boss unfortunately.

Overall, if you're a fan of Persona 5 or Royal, it's definitely worth the time basically for the characters alone. At the same time, it's also a bit inconsistent on the gameplay and narrative fronts, so keep that in mind, but overall definitely worth the pickup in my opinion.