Persona 5 Strikers is a perfect excuse to meet with the Ghost Thieves

Atlus is a master of strange spinoffs. In the past, the developer revamped his RPG series Persona like dungeon trackers, fighters and rhythm games. Heroes have been roaming space and time in search of fanfiction worthy teams, all to give players a reason to see their favorite characters again. Persona 5 Strikers goes a step further, transforming an action-packed adventure into a journey that feels right at home with the original game.

Persona 5 Strikers is a direct sequence of Persona 5months after the Phantom Thieves hung their masks. The gang gathers for long-awaited holidays, only to be interrupted by the appearance of Prisons – distorted versions of the reality where a person rules, not unlike the Palaces they found in the original game. To solve the mystery of these prisons, the Ghost Thieves grab a trailer and take their investigation across Japan.

Forward is an action RPG approach in the style of other popular Omega Force spinoffs, such as Hyrule Warriors. He switches from the original’s careful turn-based strategy to pushing buttons through crowds. Players are no longer confined to controlling just the game’s hero, Joker, and can switch between group members like Makoto or Ann at will. In addition to the elementary skills specific to your personas, such as nuclear or wind attacks, each has special physical attacks to help you in battle. Characters I hardly used in the original Persona 5, like Ryūji, became my favorite for the mobs I wanted to fight hand-to-hand; I rarely needed Morgana’s magic, but I loved its ability to transform itself into a car and destroy the shadows.

Despite being able to switch between characters, the gameplay of the game can get boring at times. In a good sequence, I chained combos, accumulated subsequent and total attacks, and hit enemies with magic attacks – but mostly, I spent a lot of time frantically pushing buttons. The amount of events on the screen can sometimes be overwhelming, if not difficult to follow, between characters talking during the battle and shooting across the screen hitting enemies in the face.

Persona 5 Strikers it doesn’t offer an experience as robust as the original game – there are no personality traits to improve and relationships are distilled into a single “Link” metric that applies to your entire team – but it does offer a solid set of ways to break up your playing time. New cities mean side missions, stores to visit and recipes for you to find for cooking; group members often want to visit restaurants and special attractions. Time restrictions have also disappeared. You can get in and out of prisons as often as you like to go out with your friends.

The experiment looks like a simplified version of Persona, the equivalent of a video game on summer vacation. It’s a way to spend extra time with a world that I’ve fallen in love with for dozens of hours and a welcome expansion to the myths of the game. Where Persona 5The palaces were desires taken to the extreme and corrupted, the prisons revolve around trauma. To defeat the monarchs in each prison, you will first need to discover and understand the pain that caused them.

It’s a welcome change, a change that makes people’s cruelty more interesting. Persona 5Examinations of people in their darkest moments sometimes clashed with the cartoon villainy of it all. The rulers you faced were so exaggeratedly bad that taking them down needed no justification. But Forward offers a more complex alternative: it hurts people it hurts people. Monarchs manipulated and cheated, but they are still a way to learn and grow from their mistakes.

As a sequel, Persona 5 Strikers it doesn’t offer much in terms of big revelations – but it doesn’t have to. Like many other spinoffs in the series, fascination is the opportunity to play in their world a little more. Cleaning a prison is fun, but it still doesn’t compare to a night out with your friends.

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