Strikers captures the affable singularity of Persona 5 while shifting its perspective from a turn-based slow burn to an action-focused escapade. At the same time, Strikers' devotion to its source material succeeds in keeping the player active and invested amid the turbulence of its strained support structure. It's a summer vacation masquerading as a sequel, and that seems to suit the Phantom Thieves just fine.
Persona’s contemporary operation as a rigid series of turn-based role-playing games hasn’t prevented it from twisting and contorting its identity into the guise of disparate genres. Arc System Works combined sequels to Persona 3 and Persona 4 into pair of 2D fighting games. Atlus itself leveraged Etrian Odyssey’s labyrinthine dungeon descents into a couple of competent side stories. Even the trio of rhythm games were successful on their own merits. The natural order of things dictates a Warriors-styled spin on Persona was inevitable. Atlus and specialists at Omega Force made it a reality with Persona 5 Strikers.
Warriors games are an evolutionary branch of the beat ’em up genre and specialize in the generalized obliteration of scores of bad guys. The malleability of this model, trading rigorous character action for the grandeur of scale and spectacle, has successfully woven threads of The Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, and Gundam into specialized tapestries. Strikers, as a direct sequel to Persona 5, comes with its own unique expectations. It has to capitalize on the finalized narrative and developed characters of Persona 5 without recycling themes and rewriting story arcs. It needs to rework Shin Megami Tensei’s unique turn-based battle mechanics into a real-time system. Strikers would also do well to avoid the Warriors pratfall of losing the player’s focus to erratic pacing and mindless repetition.
Persona 5 Strikers opens with a premise that sets its next forty hours in place. Summer vacation returns Joker to Tokyo where he meets up with his friends and fellow Phantom Thieves. Returning to the Shibuya Streets and back alleys, ever so briefly, felt warm and fuzzy after spending 200 hours there across both Persona 5 and its update, Persona 5 Royal. Before long, plot machinations conspire to jam the gang in a camper and send them on a two month road trip all across Japan. Persona 5 Strikers takes place during July and August and scours locations across Sendai, Kyoto, and Okinawa, among others. Gone is Persona 5’s rigid day-by-day time rationing system. Its more guided replacement, still adhering to a calendar but more or less choosing activities for the player, is a smart and effective means of bridging the gap between an original hundred hour RPG and its curtailed action-game sequel. It is summer vacation, after all. There is no such thing as a schedule when you’re an unemployed teenager.
Strikers’ road tripping story revolves around a familiar communal ill: social media. The new EMMA app has captured the attention of the smartphone wielding masses. EMMA’s so-called Monarchs all across Japan have gained a suspicious amount of attention, and have used that power to cast their followers desires into Jails. Freeing those desires snaps the populace out of their Jails and unseats the local Monarch. If you’re thinking this sounds suspiciously like Persona 5’s Palaces and their vile rulers, well, you would be correct. Jails and Monarchs are artifice that provide the Phantom Thieves with another opportunity to invade the Metaverse and change the hearts of their villainous kingpins.
At Strikers’ onset, a new set of antagonists proves to be a reliable foil for the existing cast. All of the characters we met in Persona 5 finished their arcs and finished them again in Royal. They are who they are. Strikers only allows them to grow when they’re challenged by new opponents. Ann, Yosuke, and Haru benefit the most from their reflections in Strikers’ first three Monarchs. And then Strikers drops that angle entirely. The narrative presses on, but the weight of the plot conquers any attempt at further developing the main cast. Every subsequent Jail was too heavily invested in EMMA and broader plot entanglements to spend time advancing individual cast members.
Control that Strikers loses in its cast is taken back through its Monarchs. The rulers of Persona 5’s Palaces were unquestionable obelisks of evil. Monarchs, as the Phantom Thieves come to find out, are ultimately products of circumstance. Persona 5 didn’t spend a lot of its time dwelling in moral grey areas and rarely sought to challenge the status quo. Strikers presents its antagonists as conflicted and sympathetic figures and compounds their motivations with omnipresent temptation (and poison) of social media. Manipulating and monetizing desire by way of a social network is a relatable measure of societal decay and stands in stark contrast to Persona 5’s amplified and inward facing melodrama. Both are ultimately successful in their own space, but Strikers’ more grounded tone (or as grounded as anything with high school students battling demons in shadow worlds can be) challenges actual structures of power more than the actors inside of its system. Persona has a long way to go before it offers meaningful commentary on our busted planet, but Strikers is a step in the right direction.
The absence of Persona 5’s Confidant structure and a centralized plot certainly doesn’t prevent Strikers from indulging in lengthy and fully voiced dialogue sequences. It’s as chatty as its predecessors, with the Phantom Thieves taking time to comment on their surroundings, the machinations and implications of escalating conflict, and razzing each other. Ryuji being volunteered, without his consent, into the worst schemes and Yosuke’s insufferable obsession with fine detail are character facets that never run dry. Watching the normally reserved Haru lose her temper with an authority figure was a treat. Could Strikers have done with one fewer bathhouse scene? Probably, but its sins are more dated than harmful.
The most difficult challenge in a Warriors game is keeping the player active and engaged inside of its interminable fighting sequences. This is where Strikers leverages Persona 5’s trappings as integral pieces of its operation. Players move through Jails, often divided into floors, and control whoever they wish. The Phantom Thieves all retain their elemental affinities while Joker and his stable of personas are meant to cover missing elements. Four can run through Jails at a time, and passing the baton to another party member is easy and seamless. Frequent checkpoints and easy character switching reduce the stress of stamina point consumption and allow players to fulfill their destiny of becoming killing machines.
The bulk of combat is spent dispatching hordes with ruthless efficiency. Opponents are pulled from generic Shadows and Shin Megami Tensei’s long running stable of demonic monsters. Two button combo strings, with persona attacks serving as heavy finishers, compose the bulk of physical attacks. Strikers’ take on magic feels more clever, allowing the player to pause the action at any point and unload a spell to strike at the enemy’s weakness. The strength of the spell (like going from Bufu to Mabufu to Bufudyne) is reflected by a clearly rendered plane on the battlefield. The more powerful it gets, the wider its spread.
Like Yakuza’s recent transition to turn-based combat, Strikers’ shift to real time respects its source material and utilizes the player’s intuition effectively. There’s a rhythm to getting in sync with personal performance. Weaving in and out of fodder enemies, focusing on the larger presence and bigger health bars of bosses, and managing magic attacks across four party members works into a satisfying flow and, more often than not, rewards patience over impulse. Dodging at the last moment and striking back with magic, which breaks down shields and leads to the coveted All Out Attack, is as gratifying as it’s ever been in Persona proper.
Strikers does its best to create mechanical distinction between the Phantom Thieves. Morgana can transform into the van from Mementos and ram enemies all over the battlefield. Yosuke’s slow speed is offset by his charged flurry of slashes and counter ability. Makoto’s nuclear skills can trigger technical hits on enemies fried from Ryuji’s lighting or scorched by Ann’s fire. The AI does a bang up job handling whoever you’re not using, although the bulk of the damage is still unloaded by the player character. A couple of new faces also join the Phantom Thieves (somebody had to cover Bless attacks after Akechi’s exit from Persona 5) but I don’t see what good it does to spoil them here. The final member, however, has a risk/reward system with their health and attack power that showcases a more dangerous and experimental form of engagement.
Character progression is a bit tricky. Everyone’s forgotten their respective persona’s abilities, citing a long layover after the Phantom Thieves closed up shop last winter. This creates a plausible excuse to collect experience gain fifty levels from scratch again. Complimenting familiar abilities are Bond Levels and Master Arts. The former are global upgrades that apply to every single character (basic stat boosts, restoring HP and SP after a battle, opening difficult locks on treasure chests) while the latter are additions to combo strings gained simply by using characters with some frequency. A more robust system would have been nice, but the granularity available by fusing persona Velvet Room is meant to service that need.
Striker’s road trip framing device lends itself to a variety of environments. Kyoto’s jail takes place at Fushimi Inari and features its famous foxes. Ebisu bridge is present in Osaka’s Dotonbori. Sapporo’s frigid weather creates a plausible excuse for snow and Okinawa’s sun drenched shores makes for a fleeting day at the beach. While not scouring Jails, Strikers takes its time to let players roam around slices of local urban infrastructure. There’s not much to do other than buy HP/SP restoring food from vendors and chat up your friends, but it’s a nice slice of life all the same. The moments when Strikers allows itself to breathe, rather than always drill down on combat and conversation, are drastically important to its flow and pacing. It’s summer vacation. Please, relax a little.
Less successful are Strikers’ attempts to break up basic dungeon traversal. Jails sometimes break off into brief side-scrolling sequences with finicky spotlights and dodgy controls. Kyoto’s teleporting experiments with non-linearity are more irritating than intuitive. A stealth sequence is prosaic and ineffective. It’s easy to see why a combat focused game would reach for anything to break up the monotony of its primary activity, but it reveals Omega Force’s craft isn’t as refined once they get away from their battle expertise.
Strikers’ PlayStation 4 release ran beautifully on a PlayStation 5. I was taken aback the first time I saw familiar spaces in Shibuya running at sixty frames-per-second. Doubling Persona 5’s frame rate also serves combat well, allowing the player to pause the action at the precise moment before a boss attacks and knock them out by casting magic against their weakness. Load times were practically non-existent and, had the save file system not inexplicably shot back to the PlayStation 3 days, Strikers would feel like a modern game. Its technical presentation serves its every need.
It may be a side effect of playing forty hours of Strikers in five days, but my patience with the combat wore thin in the last two Jails. Health bars seemed to extend into the abyss and began to test my resolve instead of my skills. Strikers is also out of new things to throw at the player well before it’s done pitching. Thankfully, an incredibly forgiving difficulty option is available at any time. I wish there were something between medium and easy for a more suitable approach to difficulty, but easy is a great option if all you want from Strikers is another opportunity to hang out with the Phantom Thieves.
Strikers also suffers from Persona’s achilles heel. Its narrative runs significantly longer than necessary and it’s consumed by Explaining Shit that doesn’t require a doctoral elucidation. Strikers can’t decide when it’s over and falsely notifies players about a final battle more than once. It’s out of gas but it keeps going, and I wonder if it’s in the Persona handbook that every conflict must escalate to the highest echelons of divinity and existence. The fallout of an app that dominates humanity is a more compelling call to arms than whatever amalgamation religious lore is slotted into antagonism this time around. If nothing else, it’s at least consistent with Persona’s brooding respect for demonic influence in a natural world.
In the end, it’s hard not to consider Strikers as a minor miracle for implausible demand in a flawed system. Its weaknesses are endemic to the faults of both Warriors and Persona, and it’s hard to blame Strikers for not finding a way around either obstacle. For every sin of oversight (it ignores the events of Persona 5 Royal!) or indifference (my romantic misadventures in Persona 5 were suddenly irrelevant!) I’m reminded of how well combat mechanics transition to real time, how much fun I had hanging out with friends I made four years ago, and how seamless the new soundtrack performs alongside the original.
Strikers captures the affable singularity of Persona 5 while shifting its perspective from a turn-based slow burn to an action-focused escapade. At the same time, Strikers’ devotion to its source material succeeds in keeping the player active and invested amid the turbulence of its strained support structure. It’s a summer vacation masquerading as a sequel, and that seems to suit the Phantom Thieves just fine.
