Persona 5 Strikers
/Gameplay & Combat
Tying spell element to charge attacks is a really good way of making you think a bit harder about which specific attacks to use
Enemies really don’t seem to flinch much, which doesn’t feel to great, especially when there are so MANY enemies most of the time
Even against single enemies, I rarely really feel like I have the confidence to go for the really long combos, because you’re kind of just praying that you aren’t going to get punished for it, there doesn’t seem to be a solid way to MAKE SURE you’re going to be safe to go for a big combo, outside of big staggers
It’s ridiculously easy to get lost in the pure chaos of enemies, and so many of them have abilities that can inflict status ailments and the like, which become very hard to read in time
It also feels like enemies do a ton of damage to you, which makes some sense if the idea is that you’re avoiding damage, but it means the consequences are really big when you do get hit
Combined with how much chaos a lot of the battles have, things tend to fall apart really fast
I like the Futaba hacking parts, it’s a nice way to pull her into the gameplay a bit more, and it feels like the truest Musou experience, with most of the game being dedicated to smaller encounters sprinkled throughout a larger dungeon
It feels harder to ambush enemies than it used to be, unless there’s a car or something to jump to (in which case, it becomes almost too easy)
Part of this is just that, the areas are much more open and so sneaking up on enemies is harder
A BIG part of this though, is that it’s really hard to tell where you can actually hide. Cars and things revealed with Phantom Vision are obvious, but not every hiding spot is revealed with Phantom Vision
In P5 it was always pretty obvious when you could hide in a corner or something, but this is NOT the case in P5 Strikers
And yet, Phantom Vision has 0 indication of where these non-obvious hiding spots are, so it’s hard to build a plan of approach
It’s definitely really nice being able to hit enemies with an elemental attack WITHOUT having to spend SP
It’s also cool that this adds another little something to each Persona, in the form of their “charge attack” action, it fleshes out their personality even more, and also can add a little something to Persona that are mostly physical focused
It would be really nice if there was a way to use your allies’ magic without having to switch to them, at least to do buffs and heals
In particular, your AI allies seem like pretty inept healers. They’ll literally just stand there and let you die even if they are the only person on the team with healing magic
In this way, character “roles” don’t really seem to exist in the way they may in an RPG. Every character is intended to be the main character when you’re controlling them, and useless when you’re not
You definitely got to a point where you can afford to use your abilities much more aggressively, and at that point the combat’s rhythm really starts to feel a lot better
A big part of this is because your enemies spend a lot more time locked down because you can target their weakness more aggressively
You eventually get to a point where you can kind of take on anything as long as you have the SP to lock it down, but this feels really bad in long fights, and when you end up having to scrounge around for items to keep yourself going, it just feels bad
All this to say, the boss battles in this game suck - everything else is fine
Persona that can heal as their charge action adds an interesting wrinkle, it’s very convenient having that source of constant free (but smallish) healing.
You can do it in battle, but it comes at the cost of a lot of your offense.
You can do it out of battle for unlimited full heals, but that can become a tad tedious
When you enter the Persona menu in combat, the camera is always facing whatever direction the analogue stick is pointing
This, for me, leads to endlessly dodging away from something, holding the button to open the Persona menu on the first available frame, and then being faced 180 degrees from where I want to be faced
You can avoid this if you are locked on to your target (which I generally prefer not to do, in favor of controlling the camera myself)
I’m just not sure what the advantage is to doing it this way, instead of just using the camera’s position when opening the menu
Whipping the camera around to a completely different direction is jarring and unexpected
This is perhaps the best control method for a player who is consciously choosing their directions BEFORE opening the Persona menu, but I don’t feel like players would tend to play that way
All of this is also true of entering “gun mode”
I wish they had leaned more towards having your allies saying more contextual / conversive things, because their mid-battle callouts are impossible to pay attention to, and if anything I find them distracting / easier to just tune out entirely
I’m really glad that, in the end of the day, action game or not, having the right persona for the job is still the most important thing - a little bit of planning can completely undo the need for any amount of skilled execution
Systems & Progression
It feels really strange that this game is so faithful to P5 in every way, but the new systems don’t jive super well
Particularly, the fact that this game has very limited sim elements, and no time management elements
Persona games work largely because of the time pressure, and consequently the release of that pressure in between plot beats - but this game has none of that
The result is that, a lot of the game loops kind of short circuit, and you wind up with a much more mundane loop masquerading as the same old Persona 5 world.
It also means there’s almost no risk/reward in dungeons, there’s no incentive to go out of your comfort zone, and even when you leave the dungeon, there isn’t really anything to do on the outside other than immediately return to the hideout, sell some stuff, and then dive back in
There’s also no pressure on your wallet, because you can farm dungeons infinitely, and so the amount of item scarcity is directly tied to your patience
If anything, it kind of feels like you’re encouraged to leave the dungeon frequently, as you’ll often gain access to new Requests that can be completed in the dungeon you already want to be in
It does feel pretty good to double up by having your sidequests in your main quest dungeon, though
Being able to exit dungeons at any time for a full heal is so antithetical to the way Persona games are structured, but at least enemies and Showtime gauges reset when you leave, so it’s not truly “no downside” like the game would have you believe
It’s a little overwhelming having so many party members dumped onto your team at once, especially considering that they all have their own gameplay quirks in this game
It’s nice that, even if they’ve hugely trimmed down the systems in this game compared to Persona 5, they still have rough equivalents of the social link system. The feeling of powering up by becoming closer with your friends is absolutely integral to the series, and it would not be the same without the hangout scenes
I really like that they made cooking a more central mechanic, and centered it on Joker
He could learn curry and coffee in the first game, so it’s a nod to that, but now he is really branching out and becoming a much better chef overall
Learning new recipes feels like a really measurable way to mark his growth, which counts for a lot because he is a silent, mostly ambivalent protagonist
Learning new recipes also requires you to do a lot of looking around the world, visiting lots of shops, trying lots of dishes, buying lots of ingredients, but rewards you with a lot of Bond Experience, so it ties nicely into the game’s overall progression mechanics as well
Late in the game, you get the ability to regen SP on “1 more”s and all out attacks, and this should honestly have been in from the start of the game
It feels great, it rewards you for properly using the battle mechanics, and it smooths out the flow a bit, so you can afford to be less reserved with your skills
It starts out at a very small amount that, would probably not even break the game at the very start (if anything, the start is the hardest part, and this would be the MOST helpful there)
I think we could pretty easily have gotten this as our first BOND skill, and then just wait until late in the game to unlock upgrades to it
UI/UX
Which target you “snap” to with circle can be pretty weird to manage, especially in vertical spaces.
I find myself frequently snapping to geography rather than getting followup attacks on enemies, which feels really bad
The menus are as visually impressive as ever, and I really like that they worked in a little bit more colour in places, so it feels like a nice upgrade that’s still true to form
However, I also feel like they went too far with some of the animations, and as a result, the usability of the menu has gone noticeably down, despite still looking amazing
I definitely do not miss the more sprawling version of Shibuya, even if the game world feels a little cramped with all the areas being so small
It’s real nice to be able to summon a registered persona directly from the fusion list
Similarly nice to be able to register Personas before they are used in Fusion
It would be so nice if we could just map the 4 party members to the 4 dpad directions, it adds a lot of mental bandwidth required to switch characters to only use 3 directions and swap the characters around
Of course, dpad down is used for a quick heal, but I think it would be better served with a button combo, or in the menu. You can’t quick-heal in battle anyways!
It would be VERY NICE if the objective marker would consistently display on the dungeon map
It often does show, and then, other times it just doesn’t, I have no idea why
Same is true of Request markers (Though for these, most of the time it makes sense that finding the thing is just a part of the request)
Come to think of it, why does the dungeon map function differently than the exploration map?
It’s really clever of them to suggest moves that your partner can do, as a way to promote more frequent baton passing (because I know I sure tend to forget, or get lazy, and find the prompt really works to jog the memory)
Additionally, it seems like they purposefully suggest abilities on characters that would perform well in the given situation (ie an enemy is weak to fire, so it will suggest the character that does fire things)
Managing your current list of active Personas is kind of annoying, in large part because you automatically collect every mask that ever drops, so your list quickly grows, and you may not even notice you’re picking up these Personas
This can also lead to you NOT picking up a Persona that you DO want, because your list is full without you realising it - due to no actual choice that you made
That being said, you DO get to summon it for free when you return to the Velvet Room, if you actually realize you do have it, which isn’t an awful workaround
This means that a lot of the time, your party is going to be largely just whatever you can fuse
But even then, you can’t really see your current list of Persona, or dismiss Persona when you are in the Velvet Room, so this makes it even harder to make informed fusion decisions, free up spots if you need to summon a registered persona for one of your fusions, etc.
It’s a small thing, and maybe somewhat unavoidable, but it’s unfortunate that the first 3 dungeons all start with ‘S’. Looking at a list of locations is much harder to parse when it’s all S locations
It’s really unfortunate that there’s no way to organize your inventory. You get so many different items, that it’s really hard to keep track of what you’ve even got, let alone find good answers to the problems you’re trying to solve mid-combat
I wish it was easier to find your newly obtained items. If you happen to miss what you got out of a chest, for example, there isn’t really a good way to find what it was, other than going through your entire inventory
It’s a little cruel of them to lie to you about the Point Of No Return (ie. They tell you to wrap everything up because there’s no going back, when that’s not the case)
It doesn’t matter too much, because it works out in the player’s favour, but in the end of the day, you’re still lying to the player about something important
It’s a bit weird that you can never see the gun’s damage in combat.
It makes some sense when you’re looking at something like Ann’s machine gun
but to charge up Joker’s shot and not know how much damage it actually did, is annoying, and removes a lot of the impact of that moment
You can’t always tell what type of attack a Persona will do with its charge attacks, unless you throw it on and try it out
This can be especially annoying, because often planning your team, requires fusing existing Persona (and so if you make a mistake, you can’t just go back to your old team)
They label each Persona with an element, but sometimes that element isn’t applied to their 3hit charge attack, or their 5hit charge attack (or sometimes neither)
Once your list of Persona gets decently large, it becomes a huge pain to swap between them
P5 had an “auto suggestion” at least, that would suggest something your current target is weak against
You can see a couple persona of each direction from your current one, but that doesn’t really help
the scan time it would take to recognize your desired persona’s portrait is longer than it would take to just go in a direction until you find it
The list doesn’t really have a beginning or an end, as in battle, it’s goes from whatever your current Persona is, so you can’t even remember it as “this one’s around the middle”
The only way to really get around this, is to memorize the list, and where each Persona is relative to each other
This of course, is rarely worth doing because your list of Persona changes so often
There are a lot of voice lines to announce that something in the dungeon is nearby (an enemy, a chest, a valuable, etc), but it seems like the triggers for these only look for distance
This results in a lot of scenarios (arguably, most of them) wherein the “thing” being called out is behind a wall or a closed door
In these scenarios, the information is not only bad, but untrue
I don’t think it really leads to big problems in any case, but it definitely contributes to the player becoming fatigued by ally messages of questionably useful value
Putting all types of fusion into one list is definitely convenient, and it’s very easy to find the persona you need in this game
That being said, it would definitely be nice if there were more ways to refine your search a tad, which have been removed from previous games
Sometimes I just want to find something I can do with a specific Persona, but I can’t really pick one persona and let the game give me possible pairings like in P5
Persona with 4+ fusion components are in the same list, but are also kind of in their own class of Persona, so especially by the time you unlock 4 and 5, the big boy Persona can kind of get lost in the list
This happens because the list suggests EVERY POSSIBLE COMBINATION you have access to, so it can become very long, especially considering some persona that have many different ways to obtain them
Misc & Narrative
This game is such an earnest followup to Persona 5, and it feels amazingly good just to see the crew again
It’s a little depressing being able to interact with all the little things that, in Persona 5, would be different ways to spend your time, each with its own little quirk. They all served a purpose of some kind, but in this game, they kind of don’t do anything but give you some filler dialogue
Same story when it comes to things like Iwai and Takemi being out of town, Big Bang Burger and the various restaurants being reduced to shops, etc
I’m not gonna lie, turning the game into a road trip with the gang is a really great idea, especially considering how scaled back their locations are - it’s a great opportunity to have many different locations
One small advantage to not having Takemi in this game is that, the type of restorative items you can get are very decentralised. You’re much more incentivised to hit up tons of different shops and vending machines, which has a lot more narrative flavour (plus, they all have different costs, so you get the feeling of deal hunting)
It’s a little weird how every storyline (so far) feels like a remix of a beat in the last game - simply with the protagonists seeing their struggles in an antagonist instead
Of course a continuation can’t hit the same beats, as the protagonists have already explored their pasts and battled their demons - it’s just a bit strange, and mayhaps a bit derivative, to just see those same challenges again
A kind of weird thing to think about is just the timespan of this game. P5 was a bit slower paced for the player, but not hugely so. But on the flipside, while an arc in P5 is typically a month, in this game it’s closer to 3-5 days
It doesn’t really feel any less like a long journey, but it’s kind of weird to think about how ABSOLUTELY PACKED these kids’ summer is
The roadtrip vibe is a really big strength of this game, and it’s just really fun to visit so many different, lively locales across Japan
I think it was also really important to get the game out of Tokyo. Running around the same locales as P5 caused me to make a lot of unfair comparisons between the 2 games, but once the crew leaves Tokyo, it feels like P5 Strikers becomes a lot more free to be its own thing
There’s this moment near the end of the game where the party all shares keepsakes with each other, which are all accessories granting damage reduction with their given element
I really like this for one, because it’s a touching scene that commemorates their travels, through an item that embodies the character
But also, they become really good accessories for another character in the party, because someone will be weak to that element
It’s strangely touching to think about the party all using their friends’ strength to cover for their own weaknesses