Those boss battles do have a habit of spiking in difficulty – and can be frustrating as a consequence – but they are suitably impressive highlights to the action. Different in tone as they were, those bosses too are all about finding the most effective and efficient way to burn through your resources to whittle down the boss’ health bar. They are sustained enough that you’ll use up pretty much every resource that you have to hold the tide back, and that’s a nice contrast to the boss battles, where one particularly powerful enemy is overwhelmingly dominant. My favourite of these was the defence battles, where you need to protect a target from hordes of unrelenting enemies. Persona 5 Strikers encourages you to see its dungeon layouts as a puzzle in the same way.Įvery so often there will be a pitched “mass battle,” too, where you need to fight off a few waves of enemies. I was almost reminded of the classic dungeon crawler series, Etrian Odyssey, with the FOEs, which were all-but unbeatable at first, so you needed to instead sniff out ways to navigate around them. The dungeons themselves are effective labyrinths and have some creative placement of some really difficult enemies that you just do not want to take on.
There’s some nice variety in what Persona 5 Strikers offers. Because, once again, it really, really is not a Musou game.
#Persona 5 strikers review series#
It’s the most accessible “Musou” game to date as a result, and if that series has traditionally put you off, there’s no reason, whatsoever, to imagine that this one would be the same. The actual Musou bit – where you “button mash” combos, brawler-style, to get big KO counts, is barely present when the focus is so much on the same elements as Persona 5’s turn-based action. You’ve got magic abilities that you need to manage (and make extensive use of), Personas to flit between during battle, weaknesses and resistances for each enemy, and the need to “surprise” them before battle to gain an advantage. If you replace the turn-based combat of Persona 5 with a short, 30-second to minute-long battle with a small horde of enemies that you fight, Musou-style (bosses are a different matter, and more on them soon), then you’ve got an approximate explanation for Persona 5 Strikers’ combat. It’s only when combat is joined that Koei Tecmo’s role becomes clear. The point here is that the writers have been exceedingly careful to maintain the right balance of characters and tones to retain the authentic Persona 5 cast, and Persona 5 Strikers has an oddly nostalgic quality to it in that you, the player, feel like you’re hanging out with old friends again as well. Ann is… well, Ann’s just the sexiest princess-type, and yet she’s also quite down to earth, and it is essential for the writers to nail that, else it would make no sense that she’s out there hanging out with the likes of delinquent Ryuji and the utterly dull Makoto ( watch as the review’s comments fill up with very mad people now…). Futaba is a hikikomori recluse… but she’s also a very particular kind of sharp and scathing which elevates her beyond what you’d expect for that trope.
He’s a specific kind of artsy pervert with a very dry way of delivering his unique brand of creepiness. It’s not just that Yusuke is a pervert, for example. The characterisation is spot-on for each character, and while they’re all quite archetypical and anime tropsey, getting the tone right is still a challenge for any writer. As an added bonus, the world of Persona 5 is expanded in some significant ways, too, in that you get to visit new cities across Japan and take in different sights (and, of course, there are all-new labyrinths to explore). Right up until the point where you fight things, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’re playing a direct sequel by the same development team. Rather than tread existing ground all over again, Strikers does do things to gently subvert and play on its predecessor (none of which I’ll give away here, because spoilers and so on), but the point here is that the game does “feel” like a native continuation of Persona 5, rather than a completely separate project. Of course, that wasn’t to work out in quite the way that they were hoping for, and before they know it, they’re all dragged back into the alternate universe where monsters prowl and they need to “capture treasures” in this realm to change the “hearts” of people gone bad in the “real” world.
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