Persona 5 Strikers

[mfnick]

So, 10 hours in, is Persona meets Musou any good? Thankfully, yes! Even if like me, you don’t like Musou games.
 

This is basically a direct sequel to Persona 5 but with a new combat system. So much so that I could not recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played P5 main. But for those of us who have played and enjoyed the original I highly recommend it.

 

From the first moment all the characters came together and started having a chat in Sojiro’s I had a huge grin on my face, so great having the Thieves back together. There’s also a new member who I absolutely love and has already become a favourite of mine. She is great and the voice acting delivery is spot on for her. There’s another major new character in this too who is also fantastic, when he makes some discoveries (sorry to be vague - spoilers) the interactions have been brilliant and I’ve laughed out loud a few times. 
 

It is still the most stylish game series ever too. 
 

There are issues, it’s definitely a cut back Persona experience. The social stuff outside the meta verse is practically non existent which is disappointing. It does have character interactions, side quests etc. but there’s very little to do really. I do appreciate the totally different locations though provided by the road trip narrative. The Palaces/Jails aren’t anywhere near as interesting and fleshed out as in P5 main either. Still has that visual flourish though thankfully & I’m enjoying the parallels with the main characters. 
 

Now, the combat. I’m still not sure about it but it’s a lot better than I expected. First of all, it’s actually not a s much of a Musou game as I thought it was. You don’t have a huge boring areas where you’re just mashing square doing 700hit combos thank God. You’re still in traditional style dungeons, the enemies are singular in the environment like in the main game and you start battles with them in the same way. When you do start a battle they explode into a lot of enemies in a combat arena but not to the numbers of a Warriors game. It’s something like 10-20+ for most battles made up of shadow fodder enemies and Persona enemies. Some are larger in scale but that’s the normal scenario. 
 

It is surprisingly deep too, you have lots of combat abilities, different combos for each character and different special abilities as well as Persona abilities along with baton passes, All out, 1 more attacks etc from the main game. The problem is it’s all just too chaotic IMO. The amount of stuff happening in screen is ridiculous as well as all the UI elements it’s really hard to actually tell what’s going on making it near impossible to actually plan and be smart about your attacks. Any tactics go out the window.
 

Good luck actually pulling off any character combos as well, it’s so easy to get hit due to the chaos while doing them you’ll usually get knocked out of it, you’re basically better mashing and hoping. The other problem is any Persona enemy is basically immune to square attacks. You need to use your Persona on them, which is fine but the SP needed to use them is incredibly stingy. You can leave and re-enter the meta verse through checkpoints which replenishes it but it has to load twice and there’s some menus to press through, it’s a bit of a pain, why not just replenish it at the checkpoint? 
 

But it’s still reasonably fun, even with these issues. I’m going to give it a few more hours to see if the chaos gets easier to parse out but I may end up dropping it to easy just to enjoy the story if I can’t get better at controlling what’s going on. It’s by no means ruining the game like I expected it too but I much prefer the turn based stuff off the main game. 
 

Everything else about it is absolutely fantastic, I’m loving it regardless of the problems. 

[DANGERMAN]

I was surprised by how Persona it is. I forget where I heard it, but someone said it's the reverse of what happened to Yakuza, where an action game have rpg combat put in to it, Persona Strikers is an RPG with action combat. So not just the skills of the rpg, the elemental weaknesses, items, characters, all that sort of stuff, but also the length of the areas. I've been playing for hours and I'm not done with the first dungeon yet

 

it's a little hard to read because it's so busy. You can switch characters mid-fight using the d-pad, and sometimes it urges you too because they have a special move ready, but knowing which direction is which teammate, in the heat of battle, is difficult, as is seeing if you're taking damage. It's a bit too busy with a few too many systems (I'm not 10% sure if those switch specials use sp, and I'm not 100% sure how to heal Futaba)

 

I'm enjoying it though, it really does feel like a Persona game, and while it's a bit wordy, and certainly a bit overwhelming, I do think it will will make more and more sense as you play more

[mfnick]

37 minutes ago, DANGERMAN said:

but knowing which direction is which teammate, in the heat of battle, is difficult, as is seeing if you're taking damage. It's a bit too busy with a few too many systems (I'm not 10% sure if those switch specials use sp, and I'm not 100% sure how to heal Futaba)

It’s a pain and not ideal but if you hold R1 for the abilities it pauses combat so I’ve been using that to basically stop combat to double check which character is on which direction. Helps a bit. 
 

To heal Futaba if you select heal it pops up a L1 prompt to pick her. 

Not sure on the SP thing when doing the ability swap either. 
 

I’m definitely getting better at reading what’s going on in combat and managing to dodge attacks a lot better. The SP issue is better now I’ve specced Bond levels to replenish and increase it too. Still just think it’s far too busy to actually appreciate what’s going on though.

 

[mfnick]

Completed. Took around 30 hours. 
 

Thoughts at the end were basically same as at beginning. It’s basic, but spending time with Phantom Thieves again was great. The new characters were also all great IMO. Some of the later designs are pretty cool. 
 

I never clicked fully with the combat. It was ok and nowhere near as bad I was expecting it to be. I was tired of it by the end. 
 

In fact I did get a bit tired of the game overall by the end. I’d say I really enjoyed it for about 25 hours but that last 5 was a bit of a slog, I was just ready for it to finish even though some fairly interesting story beats happen.

 

Overall I definitely still recommend it to fans of the main game. For the most part I really enjoyed it and it’s a lot more Persona than you may expect. If the combat clicks for you there’s a ton of side content to do too - mostly just kill X enemy at X location but it’s there if you want it. 
 

7/10
 

 

[DANGERMAN]

I completed this too, my game clock was nearly 100 hours but real time was probably in the 80s. I only had a couple of side quests not dome (but a couple of the secret fights that hadn't revealed themselves because I hadn't done the one before). I was also keeping everyone fairly well levelled, which probably explains the time

 

I really enjoyed it, it really feels like a Persona game to an extent I just wasn't expecting. I've a few issues with it, to make the higher level personas you start needing the base personas to be at a certain level, so a Pyro Jack who I stopped using at level 9 needs to be level 40. There's no easy way to get to that, although there is apparently a way to cheese it. It's not time I'm willing to spend though.

 

I'd say it's a bit too long, but MFNick beat it in 30, so it's clearly a case of me dragging it out rather than the game itself being too long. I don't have a lot of deep criticism to say about it, the combat is good, it pays to think about your combos to throw out special attacks, but beyond that, and not leaving yourself weak to stuff, it's fairly basic but more involved than I was expecting

[spatular]

i've been playing this, really enjoying it overall, i was a bit worried about playing it after the zelda one, but as it plays really differently it's been fine. in some ways the combat doesn't seem as good as the zelda one but i think it's partly because i'm playing on easy and you don't get long enough to really get into it on most battles as they're so stop/start and over so quickly. The longer battles against bosses and stuff are more fun as you've more time to do some combos and look at enemy weaknesses, but then i'm still glad its on easy as i wouldn't want the game drawn out too much. but on the story side of things it's been really good, as already said, it's like a proper follow up to p5. 

Spoiler

the main guy is a bit crap though

 

the music is amazing as you'd expect, and it looks really nice and stylish too considering it could probably be a ps3 game.

[mfnick]

Spoiler

Regarding the main guy, you mean the cop? He gets a lot better and more interesting as it goes on.

 

[spatular]

Oh i meant joker, its fine really 

Spoiler

His presence doesnt seem to influence the story at all, like in p5 you get the powers first and assemble the gang and stuff, in this its like the main character doesnt really do anything, its fine, its just odd for a game to be like that. Also not sure why i was spoilering this in the first place!

 

[Nag]

I started this at the weekend, been at it for around 6ish hours and I'm only just ready to send a calling card to the first monarch (that's what they're called here, right?)... how the hell did you finish this in 30 hours @mfnick?

 

It's good to be back in the company of the Thieves again but I'll echo mostly what others have said that during the fighting I have no fucking clue what's going on most of the time. I'm spending most of the time looking for button prompts and wondering why I'm constantly out of SP.😂

 

I've enjoyed what I've seen so far though and hopefully things will click a little better given a few more hours.

[mfnick]

I turned it down to easy and mainlined the fuck out of it. I wasn’t bothered about the gameplay in this one, I just wanted the story. 

[Nag]

Finished the story earlier today, game time is sitting around 45 hours i believe... for the most part I really enjoyed my time with it although after the second jail I did an @mfnick and dropped the difficulty down to easy, there's just too much going on to keep track of and I realised I was enjoying myself just brute forcing and button mashing my way through to care.

 

There's still some post game stuff I'd like to pass (for the trophies of course 😂) but I think that's mainly a case of challenging bosses again and defeating strong enemies so hopefully that won't be too bad.

 

Playing this and Persona 5 has made me quite eager to see what Persona 6 ends up looking like... and to think both of these games came through subs... Great stuff.