Persona V Strikers
PERSONA 5 S TRIKERS reunites the gang for a bland road trip.
This spin-off has all the style and confidence of Persona 5, plastered with bold colours and glittery character animations that give each scene the liveliness of a manga panel, down to the menus. A smooth, jazzy soundtrack establishes a psychedelic ’70s spy movie energy, even though we’re dealing with teens taking on criminals throughout Japan. There’s even a 30-hour story with most of the original cast returning. It walks and talks almost exactly like Persona 5, a game that isn’t even on PC yet.
But Strikers isn’t Persona 5, and the comparison isn’t flattering for it. Its social elements and combat aren’t as fully-featured or its characters as deeply considered as Persona 5’ s, so any expectation of parity will lead to disappointment.
Strikers is a wild but bloated visual novel with almost no room for expression or choice, and with some of the best turn-based combat in existence swapped out for repetitive action game combat. Strikers will give
Persona 5 fans some painful whiplash.
In Persona 5 Strikers you return as the same nameless high-school student and reunite with the Phantom Thieves, your group of friends that faced down the invisible psychic threats plaguing the Metaverse in Persona 5. It sounds complex, but the Persona series just dresses up social and cultural issues in surreal fantasy garb. People fight one another with physical manifestations of their psyche, which basically makes it a game of surreal
Pokémon. I choose you, weird sewer
monster shaped like a penis, also why are you crying?! And so on.
The big bads have shifted from greedy adults to the more intangible effect of social media on young people, with villains building massive dungeons out of ego, from Hot Topic-infused nightmare amusement parks to goofy fantasy castles ripped from the pages of contrived young-adult literature. These scenes, split between a real-world road trip through Japan, make Strikers sound like the ideal side story, a special summer reunion episode. And the story is fine, it’s just missing Persona 5’ s special ingredient.
GHOST TRICKS
In Persona 5, the social simulation was the heart of the game. Going to school, plotting out who I’ll hang with afterwards, paying attention to what my friends like and what their problems are so when the time arises I know the right thing to say – my schedule, set against the ticking clock, created the tension and forced me to make interesting decisions. Do I hang out with Ryuji today or study for my exams? With limited days between massive, story-altering deadlines, my choices determined who I made lasting friendships with and who I left as casual acquaintances.
In Strikers, the daily rhythm doesn’t exist. There are no social links to tend to. I’m just occasionally gifted upgrade points after certain scenes, most of which feed into buffs for the bland combat. Dialogue choices rarely matter, and if they do, there’s no feedback saying so. Passing time in Strikers gets monotonous, with endless dialogue and scene changes devoid of interaction. It really coasts on the hope that you loved Persona 5 and have bottomless patience. Besides a few limp character beats, Strikers has few reasons to hang around for 30 hours.
The premise might be the only reason I stuck around. I wish I had something so simple and cool to take a dig at the effects of social media and data collection on daily life through the lens of jazz, anime, and street art when I was younger. I mean, the first boss is an influencer who turns into a monstrous rabbit at the centre of a deranged amusement park. And the rabbit’s big, fluffy tail has a damn mouth. I don’t know that it contributes to the theme other than to make Strikers more interesting to look at while characters deliver long, moralising messages to one another about influence and popularity and the true meaning of friendship, but it
I choose you, weird sewer monster shaped like a penis