Persona 5 Strikers is a perfect excuse to find the Phantom Thieves

Atlus is a master of strange spinoffs. In the past, the developer has revamped their RPG series The person like dungeon crawlers, brawlers and rhythm games. The heroes have crossed space and time for fanfiction-worthy teams, all in the service of giving players a reason to see their favorite characters again. Persona 5 Strikers takes it one step further by turning an action-packed adventure into a road trip that feels right at home with the original game.

Persona 5 Strikers is a direct sequence of Person 5, set up months after the Phantom Thieves hung up their masks. The gang reunites for a long overdue vacation, only to be interrupted by the appearance of prisons – warped versions of one-person-reigning reality, much like the palaces encountered in the original game. To solve the mystery of these prisons, the phantom thieves get a motorhome and carry out their investigation across Japan.

Strikers is an action-RPG game in the vein of other Omega Force spinoffs from popular series, like Hyrule Warriors. He trades in the careful turn-based strategy of the original for smashing buttons through crowds. Players are no longer limited to controlling only the in-game hero, Joker, and can swap between party members like Makoto or Ann at will. In addition to their character-specific elemental abilities, like nuclear or wind attacks, each has special physical attacks to aid you in battle. Characters I barely used in the original Person 5, like Ryuji, became my go-to for the crowds I wanted to mingle; I rarely needed Morgana’s magic, but I loved her ability to transform into a car and cut shadows.

While it is able to switch between characters, the game’s heavy gameplay can get monotonous at times. On a good streak, I was stringing together combos, stacking follow-up and all-out attacks, and zapping enemies with magic attacks – but most of all, I just spent a lot of time frantically pressing the buttons. The amount happening on screen can be dizzying if not hard to keep up at times, between characters talking during battle and roaming a screen crushing enemies in the face.

Persona 5 Strikers doesn’t offer as robust an experience as the original game – there are no personality traits to improve upon and relationships are distilled into a single ‘Leap’ metric that applies to your entire team – but it does offer a solid array of ways to break up your playtime. New towns mean side quests, shops to visit, and recipes to find for cooking; group members often want to visit restaurants and special attractions. The constraints of a deadline have also disappeared. You can get in and out of prisons as often as you like to hang out with your friends.

The experiment looks like a simplified version of The person, the video game equivalent of summer vacation. It’s a way to spend more time with a world I’ve fallen in love with over the course of tens of hours, and a welcome extension of the myth of the game. Where Person 5Palaces were desires pushed to their limits and corrupted, prisons revolve around trauma. In order to defeat the monarchs of each prison, you will first need to discover and understand the pain that caused them.

It’s a welcome change, a turning point that makes people’s cruelty more interesting. Person 5Reviews of the darkest people sometimes ran into the caricature of it all. The rulers you faced were so grossly bad that bringing them down did not need justification. But Strikers offers a more complex alternative: hurting people hurting people. Monarchs have manipulated and deceived, but they are still a way for them to learn and grow from their mistakes.

As a continuation, Persona 5 Strikers doesn’t offer much in terms of big reveal – but it doesn’t have to. Like the series’ many other spinoffs, the allure is the opportunity to play their world a little longer. Emptying a jail is fun, but it still can’t compare to a night out with your friends.

Persona 5 Strikers is available on Nintendo Switch, PC and PlayStation 4.