It was easy to forget I wasn’t just playing more Persona 5 when I wasn’t in real-time combat.
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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.
It feels familiar in that you still call on personas to cast spells, exploit the elemental weaknesses of your enemies, and explore elaborate, otherworldly dungeons, but the JRPG fundamentals of the original have been replaced, and many of the elaborate systems around it – like Persona’s iconic calendar system – are slimmed down significantly.Īnother 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. Persona 5 Strikers rejoins the lovable gang of misfits that make up the Phantom Thieves just a few months after the end of Persona 5 (awkwardly pretending Royal never happened), swapping its signature turn-based combat for combo-driven hacking and slashing. In reality, however, the simple but engaging real-time combat of Persona 5 Strikers is structured much closer to action-JRPGs like Kingdom Hearts, barely resembling a musou game at all – and what seemed like it could be a throwaway summer vacation romp actually delivers the story of a full-blown Persona 5 sequel nearly worthy of the ‘2' Atlus avoided putting at the end of its title.
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When a Persona 5 spin-off made in-part by Dynasty Warriors developer Omega Force was announced, most folk assumed it would be a Persona-skinned, musou-style action game similar to the studio’s other licensed series like Hyrule Warriors or One Piece: Pirate Warriors.