Persona 5 Strikers
PC, PS4, Switch
So desperate is it to appropriate the JRPG’s rhythms that at times it slips into unintentional parody
Developer Omega Force, P-Studio Publisher Atlus
Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch Release Out now
The Japanese title, with hindsight, is closer to the mark. This fusion of Persona-style RPG and musou hack-and-slash is a real Scramble, a muddle of disparate elements that make sense individually but never manage to come together as a whole. It’s rescued by its irresistible style and a story that gives Persona 5 players the opportunity to catch up with characters with whom they’ve spent a good hundred hours or more hanging out. If you want to know what Joker, Futaba, Makoto and the gang did next, you’ll be happy to join them on this 40-hour road trip from Shibuya to Osaka and beyond. If you’re a Switch owner looking for a musou game, however – well, you had a better option just a couple of months ago.
Indeed, if Age Of Calamity felt as much a celebration of Breath Of The Wild as a prequel story, this is a gushing love letter to Persona 5. It sees Omega Force apparently so enamoured with the series it’s partnering with that its own identity fades into the background. So desperate is it to appropriate the JRPG’s rhythms that at times it slips into unintentional parody. Sure, Persona isn’t exactly shy when it come to cutscenes, but they’re a constant interruption here. The developer doesn’t just pause the action for key narrative moments, but to deliver the most perfunctory exposition – rather than the usual musou strategy of communicating key shifts in an ongoing conflict while you’re in the thick of it.
Yet while most musou games are all about throwing yourself into the fray, Strikers would often rather you avoid conflict – or at least to be careful about how you initiate it. As you explore its metaverse Jails – similar to Persona 5’s Palaces, although these match the layouts of the cities in which you’ll find them – you’ll be asked to sneak around cautiously, zipping between cover positions to avoid raising the alert level. (You’ll be kicked out if this reaches 100 percent, though there’s no meaningful penalty besides.) The idea is to launch surprise attacks, ambushing guards and drones while you’re perched above them, or darting out of cover when their backs are turned. Yet the small clusters of enemies that spawn when you strike first are often defeated within seconds with the classic All-out Attack.
Longer encounters await, with minibosses and setpieces where you’re asked to protect Futaba while she hacks electronic locks, but the hybrid of realtime and turn-based fighting feels awkward and unintuitive in the early game, and predictable later on. As in the main game, Joker can amass a range of Personas, which can – in keeping with tradition – be fused and upgraded via the Velvet Room. Yet your limited SP meter means you can’t really use them often, while the rest of the party being stuck with a single Persona makes them less flexible – unless theirs has an elemental attack to which your opponent is vulnerable. Otherwise you’ll mostly rely on regular attack combos or environmental features for a little variety: you can swing around lampposts, fire off giant crackers, and even detonate police cars for a crowd-pleasing bit of consequence-free anarchy.
But the crowds here aren’t particularly pleasing: you’ll never rack up combos in the thousands, or even hundreds. And yet the battlefield gets visually messy: context-sensitive prompts can result in you pulling off the wrong move in the heat of the moment, and with the whole party wading in, the action isn’t always easy to parse. That isn’t a problem in most musou games, since you can usually withstand plenty of punishment. Not so here, however: you won’t always know if you’re under-levelled or under-equipped until an innocuouslooking trio of smiling Jack Frosts smack down one party member in three hits. At which point you realise that avoiding patrols altogether is a bad idea – and that the efficiency with which you dispatch your enemy is less about your combat skill and more your patience for grinding through dozens of underwhelming battles. There’s plenty of style, but little sense of the momentum or escalation we expect from Omega Force.
Still, what style. There’s no denying Strikers looks and sounds the part, right down to its interface design; we find ourselves dipping into the menus just to watch the gorgeously animated transitions. The Phantom Thieves are, as ever, delightful company. And even larded with unnecessary filler, the story is absorbing enough to see you through to the finish. In each city, large groups of people have fallen victim to a collective delusion, the perpetrators (from a wannabe idol to an anxious author) having effectively brainwashed them en masse via an app that garners their unwavering support. Though the process is repetitive (a rudimentary investigation is followed by a trip into the metaverse for proof, before the source of the culprit’s trauma is revealed, resulting in a boss battle against their shadow form), there’s enough character work to invest you in these tales. Meanwhile, ongoing plot threads involving a detective who strikes a quid pro quo deal with the gang and an ambiguous AI that gains human form in the metaverse provide a strong narrative throughline.
That, we suspect, will be enough for some, but the whiff of missed opportunity remains. Forging bonds with your friends feels less rewarding when it’s earned through simple progression, while dialogue choices usually amount to three slightly different ways of saying the same thing. It’s summed up by an early battle against an enemy horde where a cutscene intrudes, each of the Thieves pulling off dramatic moves before you’re finally invited to “mop up” the handful that remain – a baffling choice that undercuts the musou power fantasy. The ingredients might sound tasty in isolation, but the recipe isn’t quite right, leaving us with a dish best described as an attractive hotchpotch.