At the end of Persona 5, we part ways with a great cast of characters that we love throughout a 100-hour story. Last year’s Persona 5 Royal gave us an excuse to revisit that same adventure with additional content, but fans yearned for a whole new journey. Persona 5 Strikers reunites the cast from the original game six months later for an all-new ride across Japan. While it dramatically changes a few key elements of the experience, it still feels like an immersive, authentic sequel to the game that stole the hearts of RPG fans nearly four years ago.
Many parts of the Persona 5 experience transfer to Strikers; After hearing rumors of people abusing their power, you take control of the Phantom Thieves as you investigate the allegations before jumping into the metaverse’s perceived world to infiltrate their dungeons (this time called). as “prison”) and change their hearts. Along the way, you battle through tons of Shadows as you head towards the dungeon’s leader for an climactic showdown. While knowing the story of the original game enhances the experience, enjoying Strikers is not a requirement. The familiarity of this formula feels like a warm homecoming for those who’ve played Persona 5, but once you start beating enemies, it’s clear that this is a different beast from the RPG series that follows. traditional turn.
When it’s time to go to war, Persona 5 Strikers changes from a methodical dungeon crawling game into a full-blown action game. The hack-and-slash fighting style from Musou games like Dynasty Warriors is implemented in small-scale encounters; Each Phantom Thief has light and heavy attacks that you use in different combinations to perform special attacks with status effects. I love the frenetic and intuitive action that comes from slashing through hordes of enemies and watching them fly off the Joker’s blade or Panther’s whip, but the combat adds depth using the characters’ Personas.
At any point during the battle, you can summon a character’s Persona; The action pauses when you choose a spell to use and the area it will affect. If you hit an enemy’s weak point, you open them up for a follow-up attack. If you hit them hard enough, you’ll initiate a powerful all-out attack where the whole team lunges at the enemy at once. The summoning system, when combined with fast-paced combat and various environmental interactions, provides a smooth experience that allows you to take down your enemies in style and efficiency. My favorite battles have me swapping between characters, unleashing different combos, exploiting weaknesses with their Personas, detonating explosives, releasing chandeliers, and delivering final blows. cruel to end the show. Such a constant stream of action will tire you out, but Persona 5 Strikers does a great job of pacing encounters inside the prison.
Prisons share many attributes with Persona 5’s palaces. Both exist in the Metaverse, having a ruler you’re trying to defeat to change their behavior in the real and Shadow-filled world. dark to beat. However, the prison did not bring creativity in the design of the palace. I appreciate that the waypoint always tells me where to go, but when nearly every prison is an adventure from point A to point B, I end up feeling like I’m simply going through transitions. move to the destination. A prison tries to mix up the recipe with a short sneak and paths with portals that take you to other areas, but these changes are like half-baked gimmicks that I’m happy to see abandoned after one appearance.
Each prison is ruled by a king, a powerful individual in the real world who has found a way to steal the wishes of ordinary people to essentially enslave them. Instead of yielding to one of the seven deadly sins, kings had their hearts broken by some form of personal trauma. I sometimes struggle to empathize with the characters when it’s time for them to change their hearts, but as this narrative sequence works, Persona 5 Strikers’ story offers some truly moving scenes of how trauma is. Love can change a person. These moments are enhanced by the number of them being similar to what one of your party members experienced in the first game.
Catching up with the different members of Phantom Thieves is my favorite element of Persona 5 Strikers, and it delivers for the most part. I love learning what they’ve been up to since the first game and watching them grow even further through this adventure. However, I am disappointed that there are few opportunities for social simulation. The social link mechanism is absent in Strikers. Instead, you have a bond system that allows you to upgrade the party. You can talk to characters around the city and invite a companion of your choice to perform certain activities throughout the story, but the conversations are often sporadic and not very smooth. .
While not every different element comes together as well as in Persona 5, I’m excited to go on another adventure with the characters I developed such a bond with in 2017. The action could play out completely differently, but the heart of the series remains intact.
