Persona 5 strikers is a sequel to persona 5 taking place a few months after the events from what happened with the conspiracy disbanding and the phantom thieves going inactive until now where now a new bunch of corrupt people are taking over and have their own diabolical plans in mind and a much bigger conspiracy behind it too.
This game doesn’t really have much connections to royal keep in mind and you’re also going to have to play the first game before hand to know what has happened and who is who too.
Theres new locations to explore now that were pretty interesting.
The story is pretty much more or less a rehash of the first game and characters aren’t really that different as they were before other than Futaba going outside more and attending classes. Morgana also doesn’t restrict you to sleeping at a certain time like before.
On the otherhand though, Morgana and Ryuji are still as obnoxious as before too. And not helping either at least for me is that Haru’s fiance is still out there and Misa still has yet to get properly punished for being a golddigger too.
The villains in the game are a lot more sympathetic in comparison to the ones seen in persona 5 and the police still sees the phantom thieves as the villains even more so than ever since the humiliation they faced is still stinging them.
Like in the last game, each dungeon is based on the “vice” of each respective dungeon ruler and you must go through a repeated amount of objectives to face them. The boss fights for the most part were pretty fine.
The voice acting was good as ever with much of the original cast returning for the most part and the localization it can still be questionable with dialogue sounding Awkard just like the last time with persona 5 was released.
This isn’t the first action oriented game in the shin megami tesnei franchise, Jack Bros for the virtua boy was the first action gameplay based shin megami game and devil summoner eventually went for a tales series approach to combat.
This take to combat was based around the musou hack and slash style by koei tecmo/omega force and it worked surprisingly there is still the stealth elements of persona 5.
You can still sneak up against enemies and you still have to keep in mind that meter where you have to be forced to leave in case it reaches past 100 percent.
All out attacks return too where you can use them when an enemy is down and you can switch between party members too.
Like before you can bargain and get various enemies to fight with your side and also use them to aid you in combat and even enhance your stats too.
The music is as good as ever with new remixes and new tracks.
The art and graphics are as good as ever too.
Sophia serves as the shopkeeper combining all the stores into one app for this game since you can’t really visit previous confidants like Tae for example.
The confidant system is replaced by bonding events where completing them gives you bonsues and stuff and at this point, the confidant system especially with how pesona 5 handled with character development only being limited to there and not the main story should go through a massive overhaul as at least soul hackers 2 made decisions and dialogue choices matter cause yeah, the biggest flaw with persona games still exist here sadly.
The request system returns where you go back to dungeons and do certain things for bonuses.
Another big flaw I can find was the story villains not having really the full potential they have like as a spoiler, the first one you had this idol her past was being bullied and well she ended up becoming one in the future by using all sorts of slander to ruin others careers and in the end and to me at least, there was a chance to see the bullies also reach their own downfalls too even show that they’ve been bullied too but sadly they didn’t go for that route and they also didn’t show much of the aftermath either of the idol or anyone elses downfall too.
So really the biggest downfall of the game came from the repetive objectives,filler and story.
Not helping either was the ending did felt sort of sequel baity too especially not helping the case that ATLUS has been admittedly overly reliant on 3-5 to the point other ips in their library have been neglected and forgotten and at this point one more game persona 5 related is only going to hurt them badly to the point they’ll end up in financial dire straits again like in the past before.
Overall this was a decent game.
It gets 4 out of 5 stars.
Now we are getting a sequel but not like musou style to persona 5 strikers, persona 5 tactics which does takes place in the winter and it focuses on the gradutation of the phantom thieves. Also too persona 3 reloaded finally.