This week I will be reviewing Persona 5 Strikers, or P5S as I will be calling it. This game was originally released in Japan on February 20th, 2020. So after a year of waiting, I was excited about its release. It was worth waiting for. As it is a sequel P5 I might be saying some spoilers for Persona 5.

P5S’s story takes place the summer after the events of the original Persona 5, not Royal. So if you were hoping for the new phantom thief member introduced in Royal you will be disappointed. Joker returns from his hometown to Tokyo for summer break to hang out with his friends. But they get interrupted after Joker, Ryuji, and Morgana accidentally find a way back into the metaverse.

The story in this game is great. They develop the Phantom Thieves even more. The new characters introduced into the game are great. I really enjoyed it when the Phantom Thieves were interacting with them. The villains are pretty good. I really like how they try to humanize the villains as opposed to making them the stereotypical bad person that is bad for no reason.

Unlike P5’s turn-based combat, P5S has a completely different gameplay style. P5S has similar gameplay to Dynasty Warriors where you have a party of 4, control one character at a time, and just beat up huge mobs that come at you. You can switch between the 4 party members very on command. Also, they removed the social life simulator aspects so the game has less free time. I was a little disappointed by this but we have side missions named requests and some requests interact with the phantoms thieves.

I went into this game thinking the gameplay would be simple and easy because I had never played a game like this before so I decided to play on hard and I was thrashed around. I spent an hour fighting a miniboss and on the first main boss, I spent almost 2 hours. P5S also humiliated me by offering to lower the difficulty after a certain number of deaths. So don’t underestimate this game.

I really like the fact that you can customize the battle music. I was really surprised to see that I was able to choose songs from the games before Persona 3 as Atlas doesn’t acknowledge them. But you have to purchase the deluxe version of the game in order to acquire these songs. In total, you get 8 battle themes from the previous games.

Of course, the music is really solid for P5S. They remixed some of the original songs into a more rock kind of sound instead of P5’s calm jazz. It really fits the game with its higher energy songs matching the pace of the fights.

This game is much shorter than the mainline persona games. It took me around 60 hours to beat the game with also completing all the side quests. But I had lots of fun playing a new genre of game. I would recommend this game to Persona fans and people who like fighting a huge mob of enemies.

Thank you for reading my reviews and I hope you continue to keep reading them. Make sure to keep reading the MTS times and have a great day.