I got through it all with the same mashy tactics I learned in Lego Star Wars 15 years ago. Most situations are easy to get through with each character's basic combo and a dodge and elemental persona attack thrown in for good measure, and there's nothing about the flow of combat or the context of most scenarios that specifically calls for, teaches, or rewards more advanced combos and character switching. Strikers never slows down to truly teach whatever nuances there are in the combat, either. Enemies respawn in dungeons too, ensuring you'll get to know the basic combo all too well. There's some amount of strategy involved, but the action really amounts to managing a crowd, choosing the most efficient Persona attack to perform critical damage on as many enemies as possible, and repeating. You'll see an enemy wandering around a dungeon, bump into it, and suddenly the room's a fire hazard, packed with dozens of enemies.įights are just pockets of Dynasty Warriors action, repetitive melee combat propped up by a Persona summoning system that uses spirit points or precious HP on elemental area-of-effect damage, opening up enemies for special attacks. In Strikers, combat is often initiated like it is in Persona 5, or most other JRPGs.
You're not working through massive battlefields, murdering millions for control points this time though. Even the Berserk spin-off couldn't get me to like the stuff. Light attack, light attack, heavy attack, dodge and repeat, forever. Koei Tecmo's here with that love it or despise-it-more-than-anything Dynasty Warriors style combat, including the finicky camera that never seems capable of highlighting the guy about to bust out a huge attack just out of sight. Strikers can be cute as hell, but the shine comes off while beating down the same blur of grunts and monsters time and time again. It's an optimistic story, too, a roadtrip with old friends that encourages action and hope in the face of seemingly implacable, ages-old institutions.
Nothing about Strikers' story is particularly sharp or deep, but for a younger audience, its critiques could feel revelatory. Most of my attention was spent waiting to see Striker's next wild monster or trippy environment take goofy jabs at insidious social media design. I don't know that it contributes to the theme other than to make Strikers more interesting to look at while characters deliver long, moralizing messages to one another about influence and popularity and the true meaning of friendship, but it works. And the rabbit's big, fluffy tail has a damn mouth. I mean, the first boss is an influencer who turns into a monstrous rabbit at the center of a deranged amusement park. I wish I had something so simple and cool to take a dig at the effects of social media and data collection on daily life through the lens of jazz, anime, and street art when I was younger. The premise might be the only reason I stuck around. I choose you, weird sewer monster shaped like a penis, also why are you crying?! And so on. People fight one another with physical manifestations of their psyche, which basically makes it a game of surreal Pokemon.
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It sounds complex, but the Persona series just dresses up social and cultural issues in surreal fantasy garb. In Persona 5 Strikers you return as the same nameless high school student and reunite with the Phantom Thieves, your group of friends that faced down the invisible psychic threats plaguing the Metaverse in Persona 5. Strikers will give Persona 5 lovers some painful whiplash. Strikers is a wild, but bloated visual novel with almost no room for expression or choice, and with some of the best turn-based combat in existence swapped out for repetitive action game combat. Its social elements and combat aren't as fully-featured or its characters as deeply considered as Persona 5's, so any expectation of parity will lead to disappointment. But Strikers isn't Persona 5, and the comparison isn't flattering for it.
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