![]() ![]() ![]() You build a party of four characters between fights and can then swap between them on the fly while the other three are controlled by AI, with each Phantom Thief offering their own flavor of Strikers’ simple combo system. The combat mechanics aren’t especially deep, but they’re not mindlessly shallow either. However, swimming through those oceans of pushovers like sharks are tougher enemies that need a more nuanced touch to take down, usually relying on exploiting one of their elemental weaknesses to stagger them for follow up attacks and additional damage. While that's decidedly different from a musou’s usual open warzones, these battles do share that genre’s signature deluge of weak opponents that act as little more than fodder to satisfyingly hack through. Fights are broken into discreet encounters triggered by stealthily engaging a lone enemy, but once you do so they’ll explode into a whole horde of baddies. Thankfully, Strikers’ combat is a lot of fun regardless of your familiarity with Persona 5. Granted, that’s true of most sequels, but given Strikers isn’t being outwardly framed as such a direct follow up (and Persona 5 still isn’t available on PC or Switch like Strikers is), it feels particularly notable here. So while I enjoyed that Strikers treats its story as a genuine sequel and didn’t waste time telling me what I already knew, I couldn’t shake the feeling that anyone who hasn’t played Persona 5 will probably not have nearly the same emotional connection to its characters and events. I greatly prefer having the whole gang together right away, rather than there being some arbitrary reason why you have to gather them all over again, but there certainly seems to be the assumption that you will already know the general strengths, weaknesses, and specialties of each one. There’s also the fact that you start with a full JRPG party of eight playable characters pretty much from square one. ![]() You could probably still enjoy the overarching story of Strikers without that context, but don’t expect to understand things like why there's a talking cat insists he’s not a cat and can also turn into a bus. That stretches from mentions of small character moments that occurred in Persona 5 all the way to its climactic finale. The characters are all sharp and entertaining on their own here – including a couple of excellent new additions to the cast, who even managed to handily outshine Royal’s new characters by the end – but their backstories and the events they went through in the original game are referenced far more often than they are explained. That said, no matter how much developer Atlus tries to frame Strikers as an accessible game for newcomers to the series, I really can’t imagine playing it without having beaten (or at least having played a significant amount) of Persona 5 beforehand. It was easy to forget I wasn’t just playing more Persona 5 when I wasn’t in real-time combat. It was a thrill to slip so seamlessly back into this world, and Strikers maintains everything from Persona 5’s wild, stylistic flair through all its menus and UI to the almost visual novel presentation of its dialogue (with the same excellent English voice cast returning) to the downright incredible soundtrack, this time full of excellent high energy remixes alongside entirely new tracks. It retreads some of the same ground as the first game in a way that generally feels cleverly referential rather than derivative, justifying itself as a different adventure while tying into the previous one (and even pushing back on some of its assumptions) enough to feel like a proper sequel – at least story-wise.Ĭonsidering all that’s different, it’s truly remarkable how much Strikers still feels like Persona 5, and rejoining the Phantom Thieves as someone who has beaten the original and earned the platinum PlayStation trophy for its expanded Royal edition genuinely felt like coming home. It’s a fun twist on the previous structure, and the overarching story is a genuinely great one. Another shift is the time scale: instead of going day-by-day over the course of a year, Strikers is condensed into a single summer vacation road trip that takes the Phantom Thieves all across Japan. ![]()
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