At long last, the Phantom Thieves ride again as Persona 5 Strikers — the Atlus RPG turned Koei Tecmo hack and slash — is out in North America. I’m a big Persona 5 nerd and I’ve been anxiously waiting for fellow nerd Luke Plunkett to get far enough into the game that I could finally have someone with whom to scream about this game. We didn’t scream so much as have a thoughtful chat about our feelings surrounding the unexpected but delightful sequel to one of our favourite games.
[referenced id=”1205540″ url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2021/02/persona-5-strikers-the-kotaku-review/” thumb=”https://www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/02/13/persona-5-strikers-1-300×169.jpg” title=”Persona 5 Strikers: The Kotaku Review” excerpt=”It’s now or it’s never, and I’ve got to
Make my decision
This time it could be my moment
Is this a mirage or a chance to fulfil my mission?”]
Ash Parrish: Hi Luke. So how’ve you been enjoying Persona 5 Strikers so far?
Luke Plunkett: Hi Ash! I have been enjoying it slightly, for reasons I think we’re about to get very into here.
Ash: I guess then to start, what’s your feelings on musou or hack and slash games? Have you played one before this?
Luke: I’ve dabbled in musou games briefly, but only enough to find I’m very much not a fan. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is probably the last one I played, and I made it maybe 30 minutes in before I put the controller down and never came back. I get the appeal of them for other folks — there’s a lot of stuff going on! — but for me I find they’re too repetitive for my tastes.
Ash: I get what you mean. I deeply disliked Age of Calamity even though I generally enjoy those types of games. I’m a story oriented person, so I was more let down by not getting the kind of story out of it that I wanted.
How do you feel about Persona 5 in general? Has experiencing P5 through a Dynasty Warriors lens enhanced or detracted from your enjoyment?
Luke: Your problem with Age of Calamity was also my problem with Age of Calamity and is also kinda my problem (perhaps the only major one!) with Strikers. I loved Persona 5 with all my heart. Every magical high school teen, every hot doctor, every despairing teacher who is also a maid, we’re all best friends. I’ve finished it twice and written about it maybe 100 times on this website. A game that directly continues on from Persona 5‘s story should be perfect for me, but I waver between getting angry and just enormously upset that this story is being held hostage behind an entirely different genre of game than the one I liked in Persona 5.
Ash: Then I can already tell this is gonna be a slog for you, because the gameplay doesn’t really change. You can level up your characters and make things smoother, but that gate is always gonna be there. I will say it’s worth persevering through. I think this is a worthy sequel that Persona fans will enjoy, though if you’re not a musou fan, the level of work you have to put in to get that story might be disheartening.
For a musou fan like myself, I didn’t mind it. I really liked how Strikers subverts the expectations of musou games with how it plays with the arena and your persona powers. Fans of Persona will like this, but it’ll take work. Musou fans who are also Persona 5 fans: we’re eating goodt.
But, since you’re not a musou fan, Luke, what would make this game better? What would you do with it beyond taking the bones of the story and putting it back into an RPG format?
Luke: I appreciate the lengths to which they’ve gone here to try to spread the musou genre over all of Persona 5‘s quirky RPG systems. Like how you still have to sneak and trigger encounters in dungeons, and how a lot of that levelling up and upgrading you mention tries to copy the menu screens, if not the actual function, of the original game.
But what would I do to make it better? I don’t know if anything short of just “making this an RPG” would help. One of my biggest annoyances about the game beyond the combat is the way the game has the veneer of Persona 5‘s defining traits, like its schedule and character interaction, but little of their breadth or consequences. So while I’m getting the same voice actors and art and writing that makes it all feel like one continuous adventure, I also keep getting this nagging feeling that I’m playing some kind of…imposter Persona game? A very good clone, that was able to look like the game I loved so much, but just continually feels “off” every time I push at it.
I guess to answer your question more directly, just make the easy mode so damn easy I can almost skip battles entirely and just play the game as one very long cutscene. Not because I’m finding it difficult, just because I get so bored playing through each dungeon.
Ash: There will come a time when fights are as easy as one or two button presses. That doesn’t help much for the game’s sameness, but it can give you the story delivery mechanism you desire.
Luke: The repetition just sucks the life out of the game’s flow for me. I love all the road trip stuff and the story so much that I dread every time I have to jump back into a dungeon and do it all over and over and over again.
I think having got all this off my chest, and making it sound like I hate this game, I’m still going to stick with it and try to see it through. That’s a testament to just how good a fit the story and writing are: The whole thing feels like the most perfect continuation of Persona 5‘s story. Even the vibe is right, how this is a summer road trip, a spin-off from their lives the way this is a spin-off from the main series.
Ash: I love the road trip so much, and I’m so glad they decided to go with that instead of sticking the kids in Shibuya again. And you’re right: that narrative is a natural fit for the Phantom Thieves. We get the chance to see how much they’ve grown in the intervening time between the end of Persona 5 and now. How Futaba’s dealing with her agoraphobia and how Haru and Makoto are adjusting to college life. I will say I was really hoping for some kind of hints as to who Morgana is — looks like we’ll have to wait for another spinoff game.
Do you like Sophia? She took a moment to grow on me and for me to get her combat down, but once I did, she was pretty great. Do you primarily play with Joker or do you switch it up? I found Joker’s combat to be the most repetitive of the thieves. If repetition is your sticking point, learning the other characters’ more varied combat might help. I grinned like an idiot when I got the hang of Yusuke’s anime-like sword swinging.
I just really like how you can hop from thief to thief to thief chaining together attacks that can level a room in seconds. Yeah it can get mindless, but the slickness of it all makes up for it.
Luke: That’s maybe my favourite combat-related thing, the ability to pull the camera away from Joker and play as Makoto or, surprisingly, Ryuji, who for some reason I felt was way more useful here than he was in P5. I’m still on the fence when it comes to Sophia. I really like her design (which has a real strong “EVE from Wall-E” energy), but having her exist on an app in the real world seemed pretty awkward in all those cutscenes where Joker is having to continually move his phone around just so she can stay involved.
https://kotaku.com/persona-5-confidants-ranked-1795211534
Ash: Not any more awkward than what we do now because of quarantine. My mum and sister on FaceTime calls will frequently ask me to move my camera so they can see my dog.
Luke: Persona 5 Strikers as a commentary on the pandemic would be interesting like this if…the rest of the game wasn’t built around kids sharing a van and then driving around Japan walking straight into enormous crowds every chance they get.
Ash: Not that I’m jealous of kids constantly being forced to save the world, but I’m jealous of these kids who constantly have to save the world. A) Who has that many friends you know in real life that you have a level of familiarity and comfort to go on a road trip with? B) Whose parents let their kids go on a cross country road trip like that? C) Damn they have cool outfits!
Luke, you live in Australia, which has utterly kicked US’ arse in terms of covid precautions. You live almost normally, right? How does playing a game that revolves around kids freely travelling and being in public feel to you?
Luke: I used to and still do take road trips all the time with friends, sometimes to concerts, sometimes for board game weekends, other times just to hang out at the beach. So it was cool seeing that kind of vibe dealt with here. I’ve written before about how Persona games let you relive your high school years in some of the best ways possible, and having everyone go on this cheap-arse drive was a great way of reliving my immediate post-high school years as well (in a way that I literally can’t think of a single other game trying to cover).
Ash: Gosh, I wish I had that experience. I was a hermit in high school. So this is all a fantasy to me.
But though it’s hard for me to relive my high school years through Persona 5 because what those teens do wasn’t close to my experience at all, I do appreciate the ‘road trip by proxy’ feelings I got. I liked seeing the pufferfish in Osaka later in the game. I know that was a real thing that existed in that place, so it felt I was getting a fanciful taste of the Japan trip I’ve always dreamed of.
Luke: You should play some Yakuza then, it’ll hit you the same way!
Did you play any of Persona 4‘s spin-offs? I never even bothered with those (not really a fan of fighting or dancing games either), but they also seemed easier to skip because they didn’t feel like “canon” the way this does. I’m wondering what brought this recent trend on, like Age of Calamity, where a particular type of game gets what’s basically a full-blown prequel/sequel, only…it’s a completely different type of game?
It’s like, if the next Forza was a turn-based RPG, or the next FIFA was an RTS, people would lose their minds! But for whatever reason, this pair of very popular Japanese series just decided to roll with it. I’m guessing it’s because it’s a lot cheaper and quicker to do something like this than have to spend years on a big RPG, but I’m wondering if there’s not a better way to get series fans what they want without having to pull such a huge switcheroo.
A visual novel or adventure game would surely have been a better fit for a narrative-heavy turn-based RPG than….frantic button-mashing!
Ash: Persona 5 was my first Persona game. And you’re right, this is new territory for these franchises. Maybe they saw the successes of the Attack On Titan crossover and thought the story was fungible enough to be put in a musou.
Luke: Ah, well. I know I’ve said some mean things about it, most of them born more out of disappointment based on my own personal tastes than anything wrong with it as a musou game, but I’m still going to stick with it. I owe my magical teen friends and their loser adult accomplices that much. It may not be the game I wanted, but at least it’s the kind of story that works!
Ash: I think as you go through more of the game and the characters get stronger, you might find yourself enjoying it as a whole package — story and gameplay. I hope that happens for you.
Luke: Same!
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