

Well, now it seems Atlus is ready to show off the goods. These moments are enhanced by how many of them draw parallels to what a member of your team went through in the first game.A poorly kept secret over the last week or so was that Persona 5 Strikers (released in Japan in 2020 as Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers) may have been headed for a western release in 2021. I sometimes struggled to sympathize with the characters when the time came for their change of heart, but when this narrative thread works, the story of Persona 5 Strikers delivers some truly touching sequences about how trauma can change a person. Instead of giving in to one of the seven deadly sins, monarchs have had their hearts corrupted by some form of personal trauma. One jail attempts to mix up the formula with a short stealth section and paths with portals that dump you in other areas, but these changes come across more as half-hearted gimmicks that I was glad to see abandoned after one appearance.Įach jail is ruled by a monarch, a powerful individual in the real-world who has found a way to steal the desires of everyday people to essentially enslave them. I appreciated the waypoint always telling me where to go, but when nearly every jail is a point-A-to-point-B venture, I eventually felt like I was simply going through the motions to reach my destination.

However, jails don’t deliver the creativity of the palace design.
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They both exist in the Metaverse, have a ruler you’re trying to defeat to change their behavior in the real world, and are full of Shadows to take down. Jails share many attributes with the palaces of Persona 5. A constant stream of this action would be exhausting, but Persona 5 Strikers does a good job of pacing the encounters out within the jails. My favorite battles had me swapping between characters, rattling off different combos, exploiting weaknesses with their Personas, detonating explosive devices, dropping chandeliers, and delivering devastating final blows to close out the show. The summoning system, when combined with the fast-paced combat and different environmental interactions, delivers a smooth experience that empowers you to take down enemies in stylish and efficient fashion. If you hit them hard enough, you initiate a powerful All-Out Attack, where the whole team pounces on the enemies at once. If you hit an enemy’s weakness, you open them up for a follow-up attack. I loved the frenetic and intuitive action that comes from slashing through hordes of enemies and watching them fly off the edge of Joker’s knife or Panther’s whip, but the combat adds extra depth using the characters’ Personas.Īt any point in a battle, you can summon a character’s Persona the action pauses as you choose a spell to cast and the area it will affect. The hack-and-slash style of combat from Musou games like Dynasty Warriors is implemented in small-scale encounters each Phantom Thief has light and heavy attacks you use in different combinations to perform special attacks with status effects. When it’s time to battle, Persona 5 Strikers changes from a methodical dungeon-crawler to an all-out action game. The familiarity of this formula is like a warm homecoming for those that did play Persona 5, but once you start beating up enemies, it’s evident this is a different beast from the traditionally turn-based RPG series.

While knowing the original game’s story enhances the experience, it’s not a requirement to enjoy Strikers. Along the way, you fight through tons of Shadows as you progress toward the leader of the dungeon for a climactic showdown. Many parts of the Persona 5 experience carry into Strikers after hearing rumors of people abusing their power, you control the Phantom Thieves as you investigate the allegations before jumping to the cognitive world of the Metaverse to infiltrate their dungeon (which are called “jails” this time around) and change their hearts. Even though it drastically changes a few key elements of the experience, it still feels like a true, compelling continuation of the game that stole RPG fans’ hearts nearly four years ago. Persona 5 Strikers reunites the cast from the original game six months later for an all-new trip across Japan. Last year’s Persona 5 Royal gave us an excuse to revisit that same adventure with additional content, but fans yearned for an all-new journey. At the end of Persona 5, we parted ways with a terrific cast of characters we grew to love over the course of a 100-hour story.
