"Persona 5 Strikers" Review - You'll Sometimes See it Co-miiiiiing

Available for: Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Nintendo Switch

Ever since Doom 2016, I've been the kind of impatient, action-oriented gamer that my younger self would've laughed at and accused of having a "tiny dinosaur brain." As evidenced by how quickly I dropped last year's Yakuza: Like a Dragon without a second thought, if it isn't Pokemon, I tend not to give most turn-based combat games the time of day. But even before this overall change in my gameplay preferences, I was never a big fan of JRPGs. There have been standout titles over the years such as Resonance of Fate and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but in general the JRPG formula has never been one I've meshed with. With all that in mind, 2017's Persona 5 shouldn't have become one of my absolute favorite games of all time. It was a turn-based JRPG with a whopping 100+ hour base runtime (meaning 100+ hours of turn-based shenanigans and JRPG characteristics), and yet I can think of few games that have stuck with me as long and come to mind as frequently as it did. Hell, I have a Persona 5 poster on one of my walls and a Phantom Thieves decal on my car's rear window, so deep is my love for this title. The wonderful story, the compelling premise, the cast of imminently lovable characters, the indomitable sense of style, everything about Persona 5 comes together to make it a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. Having now said that, this isn't a review of Persona 5. This is a review of Persona 5 Strikers, the Omega Force-developed Warriors-style sequel to Persona 5. While reviewers have seemed to like this sequel, they do seem to always emphasize that this isn't so much Persona 5 2 as it is Persona 5 1.5. A straight-to-DVD sequel, if you will. This is primarily due to the fact that Strikers isn't, you know, a mandatory 100+ hours of content, but there are other factors that contribute, which we'll get into later. As for my thoughts, I think "straight-to-DVD sequel" is an accurate descriptor, but Strikers is definitely more on the Lady and the Tramp 2 side of that spectrum than, say, the Hunchback of Notre Dame 2 or Fox and the Hound 2 side....Persona 5 Strikers is quite good, that's the point I'm trying to get at. So wake up, get up, get out there, and let me tell you all about it!

At the start of Strikers, it's summer vacation, and Joker has returned to Tokyo to reunite with the rest of the Phantom Thieves for some classic summer hijinks: road trips, camping, barbecues, you name it. However, while he, Ryuji, and Morgana are out on the town trying to pick up supplies for their vacation of a lifetime, they stumble across fashion icon Alice Hiraagi, and within moments of speaking with her, find themselves back in the metaverse. This metaverse space is unlike any they've seen before, and it's clear that Alice poses a threat, so vacation is put on hold as the Phantom Thieves get back to work. From there, our heroes meet a few new allies and discover that this metaverse space known as a "jail" is but one of many that has recently popped up across Japan. So a road trip ensues to shut down these jails, save those who have fallen victim to the heads of these jails, and unravel the vast conspiracy behind this new phenomenon. The premise this time around is definitely a bit contrived compared to the base game, but I can appreciate that it's at least a different approach to the metaverse concept. In fact, I'd have to say that the differences between "palaces" in the base game and "jails" in this one makes for slightly better-written villains. All of the villains in the base game were cartoonishly evil, and that was fine, but instead of mustache-twirling egomaniacs, the villains in Strikers are people pushed down the path of evil through trauma. None of them are incredibly deep even with that in mind, but it's an interesting new direction to take for this sequel. It's also a double-edged sword, though. On one hand, it is an interesting new direction that provides villains with slightly more to them. On the other hand, though, kicking in the teeth of an aspiring writer and forcing him to confess to fraudulently accepting an award as he bawls his eyes out and demands to face the consequences isn't quite as satisfying as kicking in the teeth of an evil P.E. teacher and forcing him to confess to violently raping the (lest we forget, underage) female student who had attempted suicide earlier in the month as he bawls his eyes out and demands to face the consequences. The game trades in the "serves you right, asshole!" feel for "this was certainly a tragic situation," in other words. That's the first aspect of the game that gives it that "straight to DVD sequel" atmosphere. 

Now let's talk about another aspect that contributes to it: the formulaic nature of the first half of the story. One could somewhat-convincingly argue that the base game was formulaic in its own way, but when put side-by-side with the first half of Strikers, the person making that argument might retract it. That isn't to say it's bad, just that it has a pretty obvious structure (especially compared to how the story takes off after the first half). The Phantom Thieves find a jail, discover who the "Monarch" of it is, one of the Thieves who didn't get as much character development in the base game feels some kind of personal connection with the Monarch and makes it their goal to make them see the error of their ways, the team goes through the jail and sends a calling card, they fight the monarch, one of the Thieves gives an impassioned speech to the shadow version of the Monarch, the Monarch has a change of heart and confesses their crimes, then Joker has a brief conversation with one of the new characters about how the experience is related to the human heart. For the first half of the game it's pretty much that every single time. But again, that doesn't mean it's bad. As I implied in that play-by-play, characters who either didn't get a lot of screen time in the base game or who were shown as slightly more one-dimensional get a bit more to them in this story. For instance, one of the characters that ends up feeling a connection with one of the villains is Yusuke. He had plenty of screen time in the original game, but though he did get some solid development, his personality always seemed to go back to "art." In Strikers, he gets a bit more time to shine...and yeah, he's still basically just the lovably quirky artist character by the end of it all, but we do get to see sides of him we haven't seen before in Strikers. The folks at Omega Force definitely made wise choices about who to give extra love in this game.

Speaking of characters, let's talk about some of the new key players: Sophia and Zenkichi. Because this isn't a 100+ hour game and most of the plot revolves around the characters we already know, Omega Force had their work cut out for them to introduce two new characters and make them compelling, but somehow they pulled it off. Sophia starts off as basically just an adorable AI, but as the plot goes along and she learns more and more about people, that adorableness changes from just that to "How DARE you make Sophia sad?! I'm gonna kick your ass!" She goes from being a pretty surface level character to someone whose happiness you find yourself invested in, in other words. Then there's Zenkichi, the shifty-but-lovable detective who probably wears casual shoes with his suit. There's not a lot I can say about him without spoiling things, but suffice it to say he's a great character as well. Beyond these two, there's actually one more character I want to discuss, and that's Joker himself. In the base game, the dialogue options you could pick 90% of the time were all variations of the same answer, and so most of the time Joker didn't have anything interesting to say. Not so in Strikers. This time, the writers clearly had a lot of fun coming up with things for him to say and ways to have the other characters react. Throughout the game, there were times where I would look at my options and legitimately laugh out loud at one or two of them. One of my absolute favorite interactions involved the team talking about how nobody remembered how they saved the world at the end of the base game. Ryuji commented that it would be great to get a bit more recognition, specifically if he could have fangirls or something like that. At this point, you're presented with a few dialogue options. One of them is "EEEEEK! It's Ryuji!!!!!", clearly mimicking a stereotypical fangirl. So naturally I had Joker say that, and Ryuji, at the top of his lungs as if totally expecting his best friend to say that, replied "NOT YOU!!" This kind of thing is present just often enough to be consistently entertaining without making the whole story potentially farcical. 

But enough about all of that irrelevant crap. When it comes to story in a game acting as a sequel to Persona 5, I know you don't care about any of what I've just talked about. There's one question you want answered more than anything else. I can still recall talking with an ex-coworker about games and bringing up Persona 5. He mentioned liking it, but then his head went into his hands as he exclaimed, "but my GOD, the explanations..." My younger brother actually timed it during his playthrough, and evidently the first 4 hours of the base game are mostly explanations of the cognitive world, and even after that's over you're still not entirely thrown into the primary gameplay loop. So I know that the question on everyone's mind is this: "Is Strikers as egregious with its explanations as the base game?" I'm proud to report that the answer to that question is "no." Explanations do happen because jails are different from palaces, but this time around Ryuji doesn't constantly not get it (thus prompting even more explanations). One thing that definitely hasn't improved in Strikers, however, is the developer's estimation of player intelligence. See, Persona 5 seemed to think its players were braindead morons, so it spelled out the obvious every chance it could and constantly cut away to the villains talking on the phone saying things to the effect of "yes sir, our eeeeeeevil plan is well underway," just in case the player didn't understand that the villains were evil. Strikers seems to have the same impression of its players. I remember there was a point where the Thieves heard a flashback where a woman very clearly connected to a little girl who had passed away was screaming at another person. She was saying things like "my poor little girl," and "give my daughter back to me!" and in reflecting on this flashback a couple minutes later, one of the Thieves hesitantly asked, "do you...think the woman was that poor girl's mother?" to which another team member responded "it's definitely a possibility." There's not nearly as much of it and that's pretty much the worst example, but it's worth noting. 

With that, we come to gameplay. I'll spare you the pages upon pages of details that would come with reviewing the gameplay aspects of the base game, so suffice it to say that it's basically the same combat system adapted for realtime, Warriors-style 1-vs-1000 combat. Like in the base game, you use you and your teammates' personas to hit enemy weaknesses or mess with stats, just not in a turn-based setting this time. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. The attack-followup attack-all out attack economy from the base game actually translates to realtime excellently. When you hit an enemy weakness, you then press a button to perform a follow up attack, which ups the feeling of speed in combat, and when an enemy is eligible for an all out attack, pressing that same button will have whatever character you're currently controlling leap across the arena to wherever that enemy is, and from there the entire team will perform that attack and take out an entire horde of enemies. So a lot of the moment-to-moment gameplay is immensely satisfying and makes a system made for a turn-based context equally engaging in this different style. Where it doesn't quite work as well is in the tactical side of things. In the turn-based structure things move more slowly and reducing enemy stats/upping party stats matters more, but in the Strikers context, you're attacking a lot more than you do in a turn-based system, so at least for me utilizing stat-based abilities felt like a waste of seconds that could've been better put to use attacking a couple times. Plus, the effects of these abilities appear pretty negligible in this context and there's no real indication that the stat changes have happened in the first place. In other words, in a turn-based system you cast the spell and a clear message comes up saying that the enemy's attack dropped or the spell missed or whatever, but in a system as fast-paced as the one in Strikers, those messages are easily lost amidst the chaos. The same goes for "technical" combos. If you inflict a "burn" status on an enemy, you can use wind or nuclear attacks to trigger a technical combo for massive damage. Same goes for using psychokinetic attacks against an enemy inflicted with a "fear" status. In the base game, knowing and executing these combos was sometimes key to succeeding, and the system is still in place in Strikers. But just like with the stat abilities, there's rarely any indication that any of the statuses that prime an enemy for technical combos have been inflicted. At one point I was fighting one of the optional boss enemies, and as I was flipping through my personas I stopped on one who used wind attacks because I noticed a "technical" label on one of the attacks. This clearly meant that I could trigger a technical combo with it, but when I looked at the boss, I couldn't at all tell that it was burned. So again, there's just not much there to tell you that the thing you know how to do is currently possible. 

Thus far, my discussion of the gameplay here can largely be boiled down to "moment-to-moment: good, most of what you'll recognize from the base game: messy." You'll know if that's right for you or not, but there's unfortunately one last bit of this formula that doesn't quite work, and it's something that's been referenced a couple times thus far: the chaos of combat. Doom Eternal was my Game of the Year for 2020, so I love fast-paced gameplay, but Strikers is an example of a not exactly stellar adaptation of it. As I've said, the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun, but even when you're not trying to do tactical stuff, the speed of combat and the lack of signposting in enemies makes for a sometimes incredibly confusing experience. When an enemy is about to use an attack, the only indicator is a very small sign above their head, and in arenas where you're up against a hundred or more enemies, what enemy is doing what and where they're aiming tends to get lost in the chaos (noticing a theme yet?). I can't count the number of times I got essentially juggled to death by enemies without any clue what had actually happened. I'd get hit by an attack, then by another, then by another over the course of maybe two seconds and then I'd be dead, all without knowing who had targeted me, what kind of attacks they were, or even how many overall attacks I'd taken. Make no mistake, it's going to take you a while to get a hang of the combat, and even when you've gotten the hang of it, it's still going to surprise you in unpleasant ways. Luckily, I did discover a way to make the game immensely more enjoyable and remove a lot of the frustration from not being able to tell what all was happening on screen. You go to settings, then difficulty, and then set it to "easy." If that sounds like sarcasm, it isn't. In easy mode you still have to be on your toes and try to be as tactical as possible, otherwise you can still get killed in seconds. But the difference is that you no longer need to try and take in absolutely all of the chaos you're seeing. So it's still a challenge, but the challenge is less artificial feeling. It seems that I've talked more about the negatives of combat than the positives, but I want to make sure that you understand that this game is fun to play. It's just that there are a couple glaring issues that keep it from being truly outstanding. There's a bunch more to combat than what I've discussed here, but I think this gives a good bird's eye view of it. 

Finally we come to the technical side of things, which is quite the unusual mixed bag. Let's start with the positives. This game was developed by the same people who made Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. I played this game on the Switch, the same console I used for Hyrule Warriors. There's objectively more chaos on screen in this game than in Hyrule Warriors, as well as far more visual effects to load. That's why it's shocking to me that Strikers has a 100% stable framerate. I didn't experience even one framerate drop, no matter the on-screen chaos, which is a real head-scratcher given everything I've just said. But I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, so I'll just say props to Omega Force for getting that right this time! The other positives are perhaps not a surprise, given the IP. That signature Persona 5 sense of style is alive and well in Strikers, and the soundtrack, GAH, the soundtrack! It's obviously impossible to capture the exact same degree of quality from the base game in a sequel, but the devs did a fantastic job getting as close to that lightning in a bottle sound as they did! I mean, just go and listen to "Counterstrike," (a song used primarily for late game boss fights where the stakes are "if we lose, they're going to enslave all of humanity!") and when you come back, I defy you to tell me that you didn't feel like dancing embarrassingly while listening to it. I feel like that's part of why I had such a great time with the game in spite of the problems in gameplay. After all, the sense of style is part of what kept me invested in the base game in spite of my general disdain for turn-based combat, and given that everything that made the base game as stylish as it was is still here, it makes sense. Beyond that, I also never experienced any glitches, texture pop-in, or hard/soft crashes across my 35-40 hours playing Strikers. 

Unfortunately, there are also a few negatives that need to be discussed. For starters, yes, I didn't experience any texture pop-in, but asset pop-in? There was plenty of that, and it was really bad. It's as if you have a small area surrounding the protagonist while in the cognitive world, and things like boxes/traffic cones/other small assets like this in the environment can only load when they're in that small loading zone. So you'll be walking through the cognitive world and every step you take a new batch of small assets in the world will pop in...it's literally just about every step. Is it preferable to having ugly textures that take time to load? Yes. But it's still incredibly distracting until you eventually get used to it. Then there's the gun mechanic that you might remember from the base game. For some reason, there's a solid full second of delay between when you start holding down the gun button and when you actually draw the gun. It's the only button/mechanic that has this problem in the entire game, and it happens every time you use it without fail. But by far the biggest technical problem with Strikers is a technical problem that it shares with Hyrule Warriors. For some reason, Omega Force could fix the framerate problems from the latter title, but they decided they didn't want to put forth the effort to fix the camera. In fact, the camera is worse here than in Hyrule Warriors. In every instance where control over the camera is most important, it seems to get hung up on something. No matter how fast you set the camera speed and sensitivity, when it matters most, it literally feels like you're trying to turn it around in a pool of quicksand. The instances I'm referring to are when you're backed into a corner and when you're prepping an ambush. There was a point where I failed a side quest where I had to get to a certain point in a jail without being noticed all because when I jumped to the point where I was going to ambush an enemy, the camera auto-turned to the exact opposite direction of the enemy and simply would not move around to face the enemy at a speed greater than 1 mile per hour. And then there's the opposite kind of camera problem that happens when you lock on to a boss. If a boss isn't gigantic, then you'll notice that the camera rapidly auto-turns fast enough to make you nauseated. For example, I noticed this problem was especially egregious during the optional boss fight against the persona called "Seth." So to summarize, the technical side of things is a truly mixed bag with some great strengths and puzzling failures.

Folks, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that you'll love Persona 5 Strikers if you haven't played the original. A lot of reviewers have really hammered that point home, so I think it's important that I do the same, just in case you've read this and mistakenly believe this might be a good entry point. This is a game made BY Persona 5 fans FOR Persona 5 fans. And you know what? If you are a fan, I think you'll enjoy getting to take a road trip with the Phantom Thieves that we all know and love. Really, this whole review could probably have boiled down to that. This is a slightly different kind of game, but it's a brand new adventure with beloved characters. There are some blunders in the translation from turn-based to realtime combat, and there are a few technical issues that can occasionally distract from the experience, but as far as straight-to-DVD sequels go, this is perhaps the greatest one ever made!

Let us review:

Formulaic first half - 0.3

Combat blunders - 0.5

Technical problems - 1.0

The final score for Persona 5 Strikers is...

8.2/10 - Great

Excellent work, Omega Force, excellent work!