Persona 5 Strikers Review

Persona 5 has been a massive hit for P-Studio winning many accolades and becoming the best-selling Persona game. The extended re-release last year, Persona 5 Royal saw even more acclaim and helped to boost Persona 5’s popularity that is sadly only available on PlayStation right now. Persona 5 Strikers (as Persona 5 Scramble) was announced at the Persona Super Live 2019 concert with the surprising twist that it would come to Nintendo Switch along with being co-developed by Omega Force, developers of Koei Tecmo’s successful Dynasty Warriors series.

Story

Omega Force have done many a cross-over at this point, ranging from Dragon Quest (Dragon Quest Heroes), Fire Emblem (Fire Emblem Warriors) and most recently, the wildly successful Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. One thing these all had in common was the Dynasty Warriors style combat system where the focus is on taking down hordes of enemies across massive battlefields. Indeed, the initial thoughts would be that Persona 5 Strikers would be a similar cross-over, but this is the main area where this differs. There is a lot of confusion about Persona 5 Strikers and what kind of game it is, a lot of people seem to make the mistake that this is similar to the games mentioned above when in fact, it’s a lot closer to a typical Persona game with an action combat system. I’d go as far to say that if you’re looking at this game for a Dynasty Warriors style game, you’ll be left extremely disappointed.

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It’s great to catch up with the gang again.

It has been six months since we last saw the Phantom Thieves and the game’s story focuses on the theme of summer vacation. From the get-go, you will need to know the events of Persona 5 (but not Royal, the new content there is not referenced) which can be a bit tricky if you’re playing this on the Nintendo Switch or PC having never played the original. The game doesn’t really make the effort to catch players up on what happened so it can be a bit confusing and the story loses a bit of its impact not knowing the personalities of these characters. For those of you familiar with the Phantom Thieves and their previous adventure, it’s fantastic to spend more time with this group of characters again. The gang quickly discover an AI in the name of Sophia who allows them to discover Jails, the new dungeons of Persona 5 Strikers that take the place of Palaces from the original game.

In each of these Jails, located across Japan, are Monarchs, not too dissimilar to the Palace Rulers and the Phantom Thieves take on the task of putting a stop to them while trying to uncover the larger mystery. As mentioned above, the story is a major focus of the game, more so than any other game that Omega Force has been involved with further strengthening the fact of this game being more of a Persona game. You will have lengthy cutscenes throughout the game before you gain access to a new Jail and each new city acts as a hub for shopping and mini events to learn more about the current Jail ruler. The calendar system may be present, but it will only progress based on the plot. The story was a pleasant surprise, outside of missing a few key Persona 5 features, it felt like I was playing the sequel to the original in the way the story was structured and despite not reaching the highs of the original, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

With the summer vacation road trip being the theme for the game, you travel across Japan and take on a different Jail at each one. The city hubs might not be as large as Tokyo in Persona 5 but all have a distinct look and the Jails are based off their appearance which adds to the flavor. Most of your shopping needs for equipment will be done via Sophia’s app at the Hideout, now the Phantom Thieves very own campervan, but you will also find a host of shops scattered all over each city hub where you can make purchases not available anywhere else. You will also come across Requests from your teammates usually related to something in that city and these are missable so it’s well worth taking the time to track them down before moving on, which the game warns you about before progressing.

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All of the staples from the Persona 5 battle system are all here.

Dungeons

Outside of the story scenes, you’ll be spending a lot of your time in the Jails themselves, dungeons that are familiar in structure like the Palaces of Persona 5. Having a dedicated jump button adds to the maneuverability and you’ll still come across puzzles to solve and patrolling Shadows, just like in the original. Ambushing the enemy from cover points or objects remains an important part of dungeon crawling in Persona 5 Strikers and once you do, you’ll be thrust into a battle against a handful of enemies most of the time, this is far less than the hordes of enemies you encounter in a typical Dynasty Warriors game or spinoff but more than you would in a regular Persona battle (think around 7-10). There are exceptions to this rule, at certain locations in the Jails, you’ll come across areas that need to be hacked and you’ll need to protect Futaba from waves of Shadows as she performs the hack, this is probably the closest the game comes to mimicking the Warriors style games and even then, it’s still less than those games.

You will also come across stronger Shadows at times, these will be a Shadow larger in appearance and with more defenses, the offset to this however is you’ll always receive the Shadow’s mask following victory. Finally, as the game heads towards the final act, you’ll start getting Requests for even stronger enemies that act as optional bosses, these will require you to enter the battle with specific Personas and characters in mind to exploit their weaknesses. Sometime after the first Jail, you’ll also gain access to Requests, these are short quests that will expand your Bond Ranks (more on this later), unlock access to powerful Personas or just reward you with useful items and some are even repeatable. This is helped further by the fact that you’re never locked out of a Jail in Persona 5 Strikers, thanks to Sophia, the gang can re-enter a Jail at any time even after the story events there.

Unfortunately, Confidants and Social Links are gone from Persona 5 and despite it being a significant miss, it is a system I feel wouldn’t work with the summer vacation road trip that Persona 5 Strikers is going for. In its place is the Bond system that levels up (to a maximum of 99) based on a number of factors such as progressing the story, completing requests or interacting with certain areas in each city hub. As you gain a Bond level, you’re awarded points (which increase with each level) to spend on the Bond sheet where you’ll find many useful skills with many ranks. Skills such as Increased Bond EXP should be your main priority, but you’ll find useful skills such as increasing the Lockpick skill, the Persona Mask drop rate, how much damage certain skills do and even recovering HP and SP when ambushing enemies, it’s an incredibly useful system. In order to max out all of the skills however, you’ll need to do some serious grinding as it’s not unusual to reach around Level 50 at the end of your playthrough.

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Bosses will require you to exploit weaknesses and avoid attacks.

Combat

The meat of the gameplay is the combat system though and it’s a perfect blend of action combat with all of the features that makes Persona, well, Persona! It has the Warriors style button mapping such as regular attacks combining with special attacks but what really makes it all click is the Persona system. All of your enemies will have the usual weaknesses found in Persona 5 and the stronger enemies will have a shield that breaks down as you hit their weaknesses or score critical hits. Once a single shield is depleted, you’ll get the chance for a “1 More”, a follow-up attack with deals increased damage and should you deplete all the shields of a particular enemy, you’ll get a chance for a powerful “All-Out Attack” which will deal significant damage to your foe and momentarily stun them after. Everything from Persona 5 is here, you can cause Technical attacks by burning or shocking your foes and following them up with Nuke or Wind spells, buff and debuff with auxiliary spells such as Tarukaja and Rakunda to the brand-new powerful Showtime attacks, gained by filling a gauge by attacking weaknesses. With that said, it can be overwhelming at first, after the tutorial, you’ll have access to the full party from Persona 5 along with newcomer Sophia, add on top of that one more newcomer towards the second half of the game and that’s nine characters with distinct playstyles to get used to.

Especially during the first dungeon, you may find yourself a bit lost while learning all the options available to you in combat (further pushing this away from a typical Warriors game) and you can switch between any of your four chosen party members by using a Baton Pass using the directional buttons. As mentioned, each character has their own style, Joker is focused more on quick slashes combined with gun attacks and of course the power of the Wild Card will allow you to obtain more Personas to change around as needed (more on this in a moment). Ryuji is focused on slow physical attacks and is hard to flinch while Morgana has the ability to morph into his van from Mementos. Ann can imbue her whip with the fire element as can Makoto with the Nuke element (and also ride around on Johanna) and Yusuke is focused on using timed counter attacks on your foes. Haru is similar in style to Ryuji and packs her powerful grenade launcher while newcomer Sophia is all about extending her the range of her attacks with careful timing. As you can see, there’s quite a variety between them and they all possess their Persona’s with almost the same skillset from Persona 5 meaning some will be better suited to certain situations. Master Arts, learned by using the character in battle, further expands your move set giving you a deep combat system that is really satisfying.

As mentioned above, like in Persona 5, Joker’s main use is the fact that he can obtain masks from your enemies to call upon new Personas. The overall list is down from Persona 5, a total of around 70, but each Persona has a skill list similar to their Persona 5 counterparts and you can even call upon them during combos to dispatch their skills without using up your SP, making some of the late game ones truly powerful. You’ll gain the option to use the Persona Compendium and Fusion is back in all it’s glory to create truly powerful Personas, alternatively, you can use the Persona Points you gain from fusing and obtaining duplicate masks to increase their level or stats, there’s a lot of customization here. Later in the game, you will also gain requests to take on powerful adversaries, defeat them and you’ll unlock them for Fusion too. This arguably makes Joker the most useful party member but as SP is in limited supply, especially early on, there is still value in switching around who you control to hit weaknesses which is the ideal way to play Persona 5 Strikers.

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There’s plenty of optional content in the form of Requests and optional bosses.

Technical and Sound

The excellent sound design from the Persona series returns and despite there being a lot of reused tracks from the Persona 5 soundtrack, it will never get tiring listening to “Life Will Change” play when on the way to take down a Jail’s Monarch. The new tracks are of varying quality, the new city hub tracks are average, none of which really stand out but there’s some fantastic battle remixes (call out to the excellent remix of Rivers in the Desert) and some of the new battle themes are right up there with the quality of Persona 5’s greatest tracks. If the new battle theme isn’t to you liking (which is hard to imagine) you can import your save file from Persona 5 and Royal (on the PS4 version) to gain access to the battle themes from those two games to vary your musical selection even more. Like Persona 5, the majority of the game is voiced, and the excellent voice cast all return to reprise their original characters, delivering a fantastic performance that only helps to amplify how great a group the Phantom Thieves are. Newcomers Sophia and Zenkichi deliver great performances too and fit right in with the gang while all the adversaries are believable in their delivery.

Technically, Persona 5 Strikers is a bit of a mixed bag but at the very least, the game ran smooth for me (playing on a PS5) even when in battles with plenty of enemies, the most important part to nail for a game like this. The game could do with some much-needed Anti-Aliasing as character outlines especially look a little rough and despite being quicker on the PS5, the loading times between the real world and the Jails could be quicker still even if they are ultimately massively improved over playing it on a regular PS4. It’s also a shame to see some of the tired jokes reused from the other Persona games, there’s of course a hot springs event with the exact same “joke” that plays out and it wouldn’t be Persona without a beach scene that focuses on over sexualizing Ann especially. You can expect Persona 5 Strikers to take around 35-40 hours for a first playthrough if you’re focusing on just the main story but there’s plenty of optional content, a post-game with more requests and stronger battles and the Merciless Difficulty unlocks with more bosses on a New Game Plus, my own playtime rounded out around 60 hours by completing most of the content available on a first playthrough.

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Persona Skills play a heavy part in combat.

Once my summer vacation came to an end with the Phantom Thieves, I was once again left with the empty feeling I had when both Persona 5 and Royal came to a close, I love this cast and having the chance to dive back into the crazy world of the Phantom Thieves is always welcome, even if the overall plot doesn’t hit the highs of the original. I was still satisfied with the outcome and I’d love to see a sequel to Strikers at some point down the line, the experimentation with an action combat system worked fantastically and I don’t want the experiment to end there!