Persona 5 was a pretty good time. Great visuals and hud elements (weird thing to compliment but they did look awesome and were very animated), fun characters, great fighting system and way too much talking in-between actual gameplay, but it works in its favor, mostly. I skipped Royal because… I’m not interested in playing most games a second time… I might have double-dipped if it came to Switch, but it hasn’t so… meh.

Strikers was announced some time ago, it feels like it took a while to release… and looking at release dates, we got it a whole year after Japan, so yeah, we waited a bit. I was under the impressions that this was gonna be a pretty random musou game using characters and enemies from Persona, but after playing it I see that I was mistaken.

So let’s go and see if this is a good follow up to Persona 5!

Developer: Omega Force/P-Studio
Publisher: Atlus/Sega
Release date: February 23rd 2021
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Musou-style RPG

This takes place around a year after the original game. The characters are in college now (except for Futaba),  it’s summer vacation time and Joker is back to Tokyo to hang out with his phantom thief buddies for the summer. However, it seems like between the time they defeated a god and the metaverse stopped existing, another form of the metaverse has popped up and people are getting their hearts changed, with a bunch of weird events all over the place. Obviously the cops have the phantom thieves as their key suspects, as the phantom thieves try to find out what’s going on. Ryuji and Joker end up randomly in a “Jail”, the new metaverse style thing, in Shibuya, and find Sophia, an AI that was abandoned. They end up finding out who controls the Jail, what it does (it seems to take peoples’ desires from them) and how to stop people from getting their hearts changed by the person “running” the Jail. There’s a link between Jails and a new AI program called EMMA, and it seems Jails are popping up all over the place. So the Phantom Thieves borrow an RV and travel across Japan to find Jails, defeat their Monarchs, do the Phantom Thief thing of changing peoples’ hearts for the better and investigating who is behind those Jails… and maybe killing a god or 2, of course.

There’s a few new characters, namely Sophia who joins the phantom thieves as a member in the Jails (and otherwise hangs out in Joker’s phone when in the real world), Zenkichi who is a cop assigned to find evidence of foul play from the group and a few Jail Monarchs, who are people in the real world who are really successful in some way or another and seem to have a massive rabid fanbase for some reason, which ends up being related to the Jails. Monarchs are people that the game try really hard to make you feel bad for them by the end of their stories, but pretty much all of them are assholes so… I dunno. I really like Zenkichi, he definitely gets the most development, Sophia being right behind him as she’s kinda the main character here. All the Phantom Thieves… they pretty much just… exist. If there’s a disappointing aspect to the story here, it’s that the main characters from the previous game have had basically all their development in that game and don’t really do much here. I’m pretty sure you could cut Haru or Yusuke from the game entirely and not much would change (and that pretty much goes for all the others except maybe Futaba). Each “chapter” has a slight focus on one of the party members, but even that is… not much. Also this game has nothing like the Confidant mechanic in the original game, so there’s no separate relationship building, and I’d say none of the dialogue choices affect the game in any way. Someone would ask something and you’re get 3 different ways of saying “yes”. Not much to it here.

Visually I will say… it certainly looks like a lot of recycling. The visuals look pretty much exactly like the first game… to a fault. I mean, it has the style of the first with the really dynamic menus with lots of animation and cool transitions, that’s all good stuff. The monsters are pretty much all stuff you’ve seen before in P5 and previous persona games, which are still great designs of course. So I was playing this on PC and… this sure looks like a PS3 game. Even on PC there’s not much as far as graphical options so the textures are really pixelated, and even with anti-aliasing at the best setting it’s still jaggy af, I would expect the PC version, especially played on my PC, would look better. But Persona is more about style over technical quality, and it is pretty darn stylish. If you liked how the original looked, this is more of that and you’ll probably like it. I was just expecting my semi-beast PC to make it look above the original game graphically and it doesn’t. I have to assume a lazy port job.

And I don’t even really need to talk about music, right? I mean, it’s awesome in the first game, this re-uses a lot of the same music, it’s still great.

So let’s stop with all the fluff and talk about the meat and potatoes, the gameplay. At its core it does function semi-similarly to the original. You have segments outside of dungeons where you explore whatever city you’re currently in, talk to people and buy things in shops. There’s not much to these. And then you have dungeons, which are the more important parts of the game. Outside of dungeons, like I said I already mentioned there’s shops, there’s also requests, which tend to revolve around doing specific things in specific dungeons, and there’s the Velvet Room where you can play around with Joker’s personas. You can fuse personas together to make new better personas, use persona points (which you get from dungeons) to level up personas (or individual stats), and use money to buy back personas you registered. This is one of the main ways Joker himself powers up.

You can also equip your characters with different weapons (either found in chests or bought in the shop you have access to from your RV), armor and accessories. Obviously useful to do. The Bond system is basically a meter that levels up as you kills monsters in dungeons and go through story events. When you level up you get bond points, which you can spend on the Bond board. Each spot on the board gives different things such as extra phantom dash damage, better stats, better loot drops and a variety of useful things. You get access to more things in the Bond menu as you progress through the story, and doing side-quests can sometimes remove a level cap on some of the spots (some chests, for example, can’t be open if you have low lock-picking, but you can only increase lockpicking with certain quests). So there’s some ways to customize your party a little bit.

Dungeons are the funnest part of course. So actually exploring dungeons functions much the same as in Persona 5. You walk around, you can hide behind cover or climb up on certain environmental elements, ambush enemies if you’re close enough without them noticing you, attack them normally to start battles without ambushing and so on. And here you can run, I don’t remember if you could in the original game. You can also press L2 to use the “Third Eye” feature. Basically it highlights interactable objects or shows invisible objects, it’s used like twice in the whole game for anything meaningful. No idea why that’s a thing.

When an enemy is touched, attacked or ambushed (or if they see you and decide to attack you), battle is started with a team of up to 4 characters, which you select before going out to explore the dungeon (or switch out at a checkpoint). If you were attacked, your characters start stunned, if you ambushed the enemies start stunned and damaged a bit (sometimes enough to do an all-out attack). At its core, combat functions similar to a musou/warriors game. You get normal attacks, special attacks (which are different by character), then you have a pile of unique things you can do.

Holding L aims the gun, which acts a bit differently per character (some lock-on to a target like Joker and Makoto, some require manual aim like Sophia and Ann), and some of the guns have special features like Sophia shooting black holes. It took me a while to notice how strong guns are, definitely use them a lot. Holding R will give you a menu of spells for your current character to use, you can navigate around with the d-pad to select what you want to use then press whatever the accept button is to launch it. It does give you the area of effect of the spell which is useful. If you’re Joker during your spell selection, you can go left and right to switch personas (which gives you that persona’s stats) and use their spells. One of the buttons lets you “phantom dash” to certain environment elements, which is used for cover outside of battles, or to get on top of different things in battles, which you can then launch off of for physical attacks, or blow up for elemental attacks. Also you can jump, and do air attacks. Yay.

Combat relies quite a bit on elemental weaknesses, as is tradition with Persona/SMT games. Hitting enemies with weaknesses and getting hp down enough allows you to perform an all-out attack. This hits everything around the targeted enemy for pretty good damage. There’s occasional big enemies… literally they’re just bigger versions of regular enemies, and they spawn minions… These monsters have shield icons below their HP. Bosses have the same thing. Hitting these enemies a lot eventually breaks those shields, though hitting them with their weaknesses breaks the shields faster. Of course all your attacks also damage their HP, but breaking the shields is what allows for an all-out attack.

One thing I will say about the combat here, compared to proper musou games, is that combat is WAY more dynamic. Enemies are way more aggressive (while in musou games only captains and special units are really any threat, here everything actually attacks you), your teammates do way more stuff (sometimes even using spells), you can switch quickly between your characters (or combo between them in certain situations), there’s lots of different possible moves in battle with all the normal attacks, a large variety of spells (some attack, some are nerfs/buffs), the guns, the phantom dash moves. Some attacks have the option for follow-up moves as well… Basically, combat is really fun here. It’s really well done.

I do have some minor complaints, namely that you have access to 9 characters, which is fine for an RPG… but I’d say there’s never any reason to play with different characters than whatever 3 you prefer+Joker. Joker covers literally all the elemental weaknesses since he can have like 10 personas at once (I don’t remember the exact amount, I remember it going up partway through the game though)… so yeah. Other characters cover just one element each, so they kinda barely matter, in a way… Sure it’s good to have and extra character with correct weaknesses, but it’s not like you ever know what the boss battles will be weak to generally (plot-wise there’s hints for a few of them). There’s one time one of my characters was taken out of my party for story reasons (and that battle isn’t really a battle anyways), and there’s one battle where you have to use everyone. Characters you don’t actively use get substantially less EXP, but it really doesn’t matter for the one battle where you need to split your party if you put one good character in each party, one character is enough to beat what you need to beat. So yeah… Choose Joker and 3 characters you like and you’ll have no problem.

I also find there’s so few SP-regenerating items. Very few stores/vending machines sell them but they sell SO MANY items that recover 10 HP which is… meaningless. You can cook some, but you run out of them fast especially if you rely on spells a lot… which you kinda have to since combat does rely quite a bit on elemental weaknesses. And they recover so little too, you have to use several to recover enough for a spell or 2. There’s a few minor ways to recover SP otherwise but they’re either random (Futaba offering support) or come really late into the game and suck anyways (“Recover 1SP for doing an all-out attack” is pretty fucking pathetic, it might get slightly useable if you grind it up a lot?).

Overall

My expectations were a musou game with Persona characters, what I actually got was a Persona game with musou-like combat… This was quite interesting overall. It actually feels like an actual sequel to the first game (or at least a nice side-story), just with different combat and basically no relationship stuff outside of dungeons (but still lots of story).

The story is fun and only relies a bit on convenience, in a way that’s actually pretty believable. The gameplay is fun though I think there should be more SP-recovery items, the fighting is really dynamic, there’s a bunch of stuff to do for powering up and overall… it’s a good time.

Definitely recommend this one, though yes playing Persona 5 first is pretty much a requirement if you want to understand what is even happening, and to get actual development for the main party characters.