April 24th, 2021
I’ve never cared much for the Dynasty Warriors style of games (sometimes referred to as Musou) from an outside perspective. I plant my flag in the territory of games like Ninja Gaiden and compared to their style of combat the Musou series always looked to be more of a power fantasy than anything that takes any sort of relevant skill. The gameplay loop of “Oh let me just press the same button four times before doing one of two super moves that kills fifty guys. Aren’t I awesome?” just didn’t appeal to me, and so I was ridiculously skeptical of the announcement of Persona 5 Strikers. My outside bias against the Musou genre aside it seemed like an unprompted jump between types of games that couldn’t be more different, replacing turn-based RPG combat with button mashing against hordes of enemies, but as I quickly discovered the developers did everything they could to squeeze the most “Persona-esque” experience out of the concept.
There’s a bit to chew over when it comes to the design decisions that went into Strikers, but before we get to that we have to talk about the one thing that I loved about the game which also makes it not for everyone: the fact that it’s a direct sequel to Persona 5. If you’ve never played Persona 5 before you’ll have no idea what’s going on, who these characters are, or how they do what they do, and Strikers takes very little time getting you onboard. In many ways I like the last part of that sentence even more than the game being a direct sequel, as these spin-off games so often devolve into “welcome, new fans, here’s a ton of exposition to wade through” but Strikers just goes “six months ago we had adventures and I can’t wait to see my friends again.” So yeah, if you haven’t played Persona 5 before (or Royal, though all the bonus content from Royal is never mentioned in Strikers) then go do that before coming back to this review to decide if Strikers is for you. I’ll wait.
Man, Persona 5 sure was great, wasn’t it? The people working on Strikers certainly thought so, since they did everything they could to make the game’s downtime moments feel exactly like Persona 5. The music is the same (which is especially surprising considering the remixed tracks in combat), the things you do when you aren’t fighting Shadows are very similar, and you have long conversations with your friends who are all very much in character. But while a valiant effort has been made at this reproduction there’s many little bits that just feel…off. Maybe it’s the animated menus being 3D instead of 2D, maybe it’s lines on the character models not being quite as crisp, but something gives Strikers the air of being an impostor, like someone cosplaying as your best friend. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. The point is that this is the first Persona spin-off game that feels the closest to an actual Persona game, which is a far cry from whatever the hell the Persona 4 Arena series was doing.
That’s not to say that you’ll be doing social links, managing your time, or playing mini-games. Strikers doesn’t sit still long enough for that, with the central premise being a road trip across Japan to stop people that are abusing changes of heart for their own purposes. People have made jokes already about how Strikers is essentially an advertisement for tourism in Japan, and it’s hard to shake that feeling when you’ve hit the fourth tourist trap in a row and the characters won’t stop saying “Oh man, when you go to this city you’ve gotta see this and try that and visit these exact places!” This leads to cities feeling more like just places where the devs hid item shops near landmarks than a place you can learn to live in, but you’ll spend so little time in each location that it hardly matters.
When you aren’t buying items or running around a city area to talk to your friends you’ll spend most of the gameplay fighting in Strikers’ “Jails.” These are Strikers’ version of Palaces from Persona 5 proper, and unfortunately they aren’t the most interesting things in the world. They all follow the same basic pattern, with the objective of finding three “keys” that relate to the Jail’s main bad guy (called a “Monarch”) before you have to fight an unimaginatively generic mini-boss to get a key before you can fight the Monarch proper. These keys are always kept in the same sort of area and are almost always guarded by a mini-boss, which leads to everything feeling rather redundant. Some highlights stick out, like the snow Jail, but for the most part there’s nothing that memorable about the areas you’ll be fighting in.
To be honest with you I wasn’t a huge fan of the combat, but it wasn’t for Strikers lack of trying. Let’s start with what I liked about it: the character variety. A real effort has been made here to make all of the Phantom Thieves play differently and for the most part it succeeds, aided not only by the characters individual weapons but also in the unique features each brings to the table. Ann, for example, has great reach with her whip, a fantastically quick dodge, and can coat her whip with fire to exploit enemy weaknesses, meanwhile Haru takes big swings with her axe and you can hold down attack buttons to draw out her combos. I quite enjoyed messing around with the different move sets of all the characters, and you’re encouraged to do so with unlockable abilities that enhance or encourage a playstyle in a certain direction, such as Joker’s focus on guns. I’m also a big fan of dodge mechanics in action games and Strikers has an ability where if you dodge at the right second you can get in a powerful counterattack, so that definitely made combat more engaging during the sixty hours it took me to finish the game.
But with the good comes the bad. The important thing to know about the combat is that it’s surprisingly hard, which is good, but not for the right reasons. Persona games place a big emphasis on striking enemy weaknesses for All-Out Attacks and Strikers is no exception, with enemies having large shield bars that need to be broken with critical hits or special attacks to soften them up so that they’re vulnerable to an AOE attack from your whole team, but unfortunately that’s really the only way to deal reliable damage. You’ll quickly discover that your basic attacks serve almost no purpose at all, outside of Ann and Makoto’s ability to turn their attacks into elemental strikes, and the majority of the time you may as well just swing at thin air until you reach the point in your combo when you summon your persona to do a weak version of your primary spell. Every character has at least one version of this weakened persona attack, but it can’t be stressed enough that this attack is FREE, with no health or SP requirements that are normally attached to such abilities. It’s your best way to damage enemies and make them vulnerable to All-Out Attacks, to the point where you can just do the previously mentioned swinging at thin air while you build to that point in your combo…and that’s pretty much exactly what I did. With no reason to use non-elemental melee attacks I would spend every fight dancing outside of my enemy’s range and attacking nothing for two to three weapon swings (depending on the character) before blasting them with a free special attack.
At this point someone that’s played other Persona games might point out that basic weapon attacks have never been ideal in Persona and typically had their place only when one was trying to conserve SP or finish off a weakened enemy. I would agree with this observation, but it’s also worth noting that this is an ACTION GAME, where feeling like you’re actually doing something during fights is sort of the point. Outside of the aforementioned Ann and Makoto everyone else just feels like they’re killing time in between special moves, sort of like if you only play Ninja Gaiden using the Izuna Drop: the first five hits don’t mean anything, only the final hit is the one that matters. The way the primary enemies in the game are designed only further supports a playstyle of fighting at a distance as well, since that makes it easier to dodge their AOE attacks.
I could also spend this time complaining about the AI companions and their inconsistent dodging, but instead I’ll focus on the thing that makes the game’s difficulty meaningless: the free returns home. Persona as a series is about endurance and proper time management; you have to get as far into a dungeon as you can on the items and SP you have, knowing you have a limited amount of time to get things done and can only recover SP fully once you return to the real world. However Strikers is on a fixed schedule, with time advancing only after you hit certain story beats, so you can return home from fixed checkpoints at (almost) any time, fully heal, and just jump right back into the Jail again with the only penalty being respawning enemies and lost meter charge for your super moves. On the one hand it’s nice that the game’s difficulty is tempered by this way to easily recover your lost power, but on the other it makes the challenge relatively pointless.
The worst part of all though comes from the implementation of fusing personas. It’s rather similar to what one might expect from a Persona game, where weaker persona are fused into stronger ones and you can transfer certain abilities over between them. There’s even fusion accidents (to the point where I got more fusion accidents than I ever have before) but everything else has been twisted and warped to meet the more stringent requirements of a much smaller persona pool. There are only sixty-six persona in this game compared to the hundred plus you might expect in a proper Persona title, and as such certain incredibly painful concessions have been made. The worst offender of this and the only one worth talking about is how you need certain low level personas to be a ridiculously high level to fuse later game persona. I’m talking a persona that’s level four needing to be level forty levels of ridiculousness, and the game’s attempts to bandage over this problem don’t go nearly far enough. It’s clear they realized this would be an issue so they added a special sort of currency that you can spend to level up your personas and all persona on your team gain experience during combat rather than just your front man, but they forgot to tone down the amount of experience necessary per level. A common feature in Persona is exponential XP requirements to get persona to higher and higher levels specifically to encourage you to make new ones, but that remains in Strikers so it costs an absurd amount of currency to level a persona up five levels, let alone the ten or twenty you need once you hit around level fifty-eight. And it gets even worse the higher you go, to the point where I all but gave up on trying to get a complete collection when the level requirements are so severe.
I only have two comments on Strikers‘ presentation, outside of my earlier comments about everything not feeling quite as sharp as the previous Persona 5 titles. I wasn’t a huge fan of the new music in the game, with most of the soundtrack being either music from the previous game or remixes of those songs into something a little more uptempo. There are a few gems to sift out, but none that I especially feel like listening to again nor would they stop me from smashing the “classic music is now unlocked” button as soon as I saw it after beating the game. However on the technical side (for the PC version) I have to say that Strikers was one of the games with the most crashes I’ve ever played. Cyberpunk 2077 got a lot of crap for its shoddy launch and numerous glitches, but unlike Strikers it only hard crashed on me once. Strikers died something like ten times for me, which almost always happened during loading screens, and there’s also a common glitch where cutscenes play at like three frames a second that I was only able to fix by restarting my computer. Ten technical problems out of sixty hours isn’t horrible, but I’d rather have Cyberpunk‘s barrage of silly walking through cars and disappearing pants than losing thirty minutes of progress because the game can’t handle a loading screen.
At the end of the day Persona 5 Strikers is a game that I wouldn’t have played if it wasn’t a game in the Persona series, and even then I may not have touched it if it wasn’t a direct sequel to Persona 5. The story and characters are enjoyable enough but it’s not welcoming to newcomers, and either Musou games aren’t for me or Strikers‘ translation of their gameplay mechanics clashes too much with trying to have a more faithful Persona mentality to the combat. Either way if you like Persona and don’t mind action games you should find enough to push you through to the end, but if you have problems with chaotic real time combat or don’t care about the franchise then you may as well stay away.
