Persona 5 Strikers is really, really good. In fact, it’s absolutely the game that I personally
needed right now, in 2021 – which is why you have to tolerate me yammering at you for five minutes
instead of BretonStripes’ more soothing voice. A quick bit of context, for historical purposes:
it is currently March 2021. It’s been one full year since I last saw
my friends, and many of my family members. I could really use a holiday. I don’t care
if I hit the beach, or enjoy a nice city break. I just need to get out of the house for a change of
scenery. I’m also, because of reasons, probably not going to get a vacation any time soon.
A few years ago I “reviewed”, if that’s the right word, Persona Q2:
New Cinema Labyrinth. I said that it’s a phenomenal, well-written game that most 3DS
owners should nevertheless avoid unless they have a couple of spare months to do all their homework,
playing the past ten years of Persona games. The 2020 commenters pointed out that they
genuinely did have a couple of spare months, so more fool me I suppose.
Persona 5 Strikers is a direct sequel to the original Persona 5, which at the time of writing
is still locked on PlayStation platforms, even as Strikers is released on PC and Nintendo Switch.
If you go into this game blind, you’re not going to know who all the characters are, you’re going
to get a few minor spoilers for Persona 5, and it’s going to take a while to catch up.
That said, I actually think it kind of…might be worth it anyway? Because Persona 5 Strikers
offers something that even the original Persona 5 doesn’t give right now: catharsis. Freedom.
Persona 5’s primary message is that society is a prison and that breaking the rules to enact social
justice can free you from bondage. Yet right now, Persona 5 Strikers offers the freedom that I crave
more than ever. Why? Because it’s literally a game about going on vacation with your friends.
Right from the moment I first turned on the game, I couldn’t help but smile. Just, grin,
ear to ear. The story starts with the protagonist, Joker, the Smash Bros guy, not Joaquin Phoenix,
returning to visit his old schoolfriends for the first time in several months.
It’s wonderful. Because Persona 5 – all of the Persona games, for that matter – are so
well written, these characters feel like genuine, real people. Actual friends.
We’ve made videos before on how the social simulator side of Persona works.
By night you play Pokemon, capturing monsters and fighting in turn-based battles.
By day, it’s a time management social sim. You decide whether to work your part-time job, study
in the library, or hang out with your friends. As you spend time with people, you develop bonds with
them which help you in battles, but you also get the joy of seeing their character growth,
of learning about them and enjoying their company. So for Persona 5 Strikers to give me the chance to
hang out with my old friends again? That’s incredibly satisfying right now. Everyone’s
cracking jokes and teasing each other, there’s a lot of playful banter, we hear a little about what
everyone’s been up to since we last met up. It’s just beautiful.
It’s also, you might have noticed, probably a little impenetrable if
you haven’t previously played Persona 5. For me, getting the gang back together is a vicarious joy
because I can kinda sorta pretend these digital friends are my actual friends in the real world,
who I miss. Hi Dan.
If you’re coming to this new, it’s going to feel a lot like you’re hanging out with a group of
friends who all know each other really well, and all already have their own in-jokes. It might
take a while to learn everyone’s names and get a sense of their personalities and backstories.
Even so, I feel like this is worth doing, because, after spending some time hanging
out in Shibuya in environments from the first game, the road trip begins.
As much fun as I might have had visiting my old haunts across Tokyo, I have been having perhaps
even more fun with the rest of the game’s content. Going on vacation with my friends, visiting local
landmarks, seeing new cities, blowing all my money buying cheap souvenirs and tasty local delicacies.
It’s so much fun, even if I’m just pretending. When we got to our first proper stop on the
vacation, a brand new city I’d never visited before, something in my brain
lit up for the first time in a long time. My wife, BretonStripes, the usual voice for
this channel, travels for work, up and down the UK. My daughter and I often go with her,
staying in hotels, wandering around cities, visiting museums and parks and
just generally soaking up the local atmosphere. I remember distinctly sitting in a soft play in
the Legoland Discovery Centre in Birmingham in January 2020, and thinking that the days where
my daughter and I get to go on these mini vacations are my favourite part of life.
…And that was the last trip we got to go on. All of Mummy’s in-person training got cancelled.
We haven’t been anywhere in a year now. So for me personally, as someone who’s always
connected strongly with the roleplaying element of the Persona games, Strikers feels tailor made
to help me muddle through at a very stressful time. It might be a make-believe holiday with
make-believe friends, but that’s the best I can get at this particular moment in time.
Oh, also, I did want to speak briefly about the other side of the game; the Pokemon gameplay.
I like it a lot more than standard Persona games. Persona 5 is all turn-based RPG battling, which
is…fine, I guess, but to be honest, I’ve done more than enough of that throughout my life already.
Persona 5 Strikers, on the other hand, transplants many of the original game’s battle mechanics into
an action RPG setting, and I feel it works a lot better. I started this game having played
quite a lot of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity in recent months, and I expected that I’d be
getting more of the same: big open fields filled with monsters to slay, but Persona-flavoured
instead of coated in a Zelda glaze. I even expected the controls to be the same.
That is not this game at all. Persona 5 Strikers is, perhaps understandably,
a lot more like Persona 5 than Hyrule Warriors. Most of the combat involves smaller pockets of
enemies rather than entire armies across a huge battlefield, which better suits the
Persona 5 story of thieves sneaking into enemy strongholds and quietly dispatching guards.
Considering that the tutorial for Persona 5 runs for around twenty hours,
and the tutorial for Persona 5 Strikers takes maybe an hour tops, this is probably the more
accessible game for newcomers, even with the previously established story.
If you can play Persona 5 first, I’d recommend doing so, but that game does take at least
a hundred hours to beat. If you want something a little lighter, a little breezier, or if, like me,
you’re just desperate for a heartfelt reunion with your friends and a nice holiday away from home,
you might well find the catharsis you’re looking for with Persona 5 Strikers.