Persona 5 strikers switch review full#

Sure, you can hack and slash with your sword, string together predictable combos, and dodge out of the way of attackers – typical mechanics for this type of game.

Persona 5 strikers switch review full#

But while I generally find many musou games to be pretty mindless, combat in Strikers is challenging and demanded my full attention while playing. The turn-based combat of the original has been replaced with real-time, hack-and slash combat that shares a lot in common with the musou subgenre of games. Here is where the first major difference between Strikers and Persona 5 becomes apparent. In order to progress through the game, the Phantom Thieves have to track down and fight the “Monarch” presiding over the area, but getting to them means battling through thousands and thousands of enemies. Each major city that the Phantom Thieves travel to in-game has its own alternate version in the Metaverse. Most of the game is spent exploring a parallel dimension called the Metaverse, which is a bizarre, hyper-stylized version of reality infested with monsters called shadows. Persona 5 Strikers is essentially split into two halves. It helps that the main antagonists of the game – who I won’t spoil – all feel like real people who genuinely need to be stopped, even if there is a level of absurdity to some of their actions. While the game begins in Tokyo, it isn’t long before the Phantom Thieves are exploring mountain towns, seaside villages and major cities across Japan, and this frequent change of scenery really makes the stakes of Persona 5 Strikers’ narrative feel much higher. But it quickly became clear that the scope of Persona 5 Strikers is significantly larger than that of its predecessor. The premise certainly shares a lot in common with Persona 5 and at first, I was a little worried that Strikers would feel like little more than a rehash of the original game’s story. In an effort to clear their names and figure out what is behind the strange behaviors, Joker and company decide to travel across Japan to try and change the hearts of those affected. Unfortunately, a mysterious string of events happening around Japan is negatively affecting the public at large – people in positions of fame and power are somehow manipulating their followers to act in strange, sometimes cultish ways, and the police believe the Phantom Thieves are the ones responsible. As a huge fan of the original Persona 5, seeing the cast of angsty anime high schoolers again felt like revisiting old friends, and I was thrilled to see that all of the original English voice actors had reprised their roles. The game begins with the gang meeting up at Café LeBlanc to hash out plans for a summer road trip across Japan, having saved the world from cataclysm only a few months ago as the Phantom Thieves.

High school in Tokyo is out for the summer, and Joker – the protagonist from the original game – has returned to the city to reunite with his old friends. Strikers begins a few months after the conclusion of Persona 5, and ignores the extra story content added in the expanded Persona 5 Royal, so those who have only played the 2017 version of the game can still jump right in.