PLATFORM: PC, PS4 (REVIEWED), SWITCH | RELEASE DATE: 23RD FEBRUARY

2016’s Persona 5 (and / or its expanded 2019 re-release Persona 5 Royal) is (or are) one (or two) of the most well-received JRPGs of all time. Taking place a few months after the events of P5, Strikers finds the Phantom Thieves regrouping in Tokyo before heading off on a summer-long road trip across Japan. But oh no! Much like what happened in P5, very public displays of extremely unusual behaviour are being reported all over the country and, once again, it’s up to the Thieves to investigate…

Strikers is a crossover with the long-running Warriors series, but it largely sticks firmly to the usual Persona formula – a bunch of kooky anime teenagers wander around various locations, taking ages to figure out what’s going on (why use three or four words when a couple of thousand will easily do?), then infiltrating psychic Jails to deal with the crooked desires of devious villains. The Warriors aspect comes in the form of real-time combo-based brawling, which replaces Persona‘s usual turn-based combat. But it’s a far cry from the regular open world Warriors-style gameplay – rather than running around huge battlefields full of enemies, encountering an individual foe within a Jail reveals a small walled-off area containing a mob of baddies for the Thieves to hack and slash their way through before moving on to the next one.

The Warriors games have never really been known for their deep combat mechanics, but taking down hordes of enemies is usually incredibly satisfying. Unfortunately, Strikers suffers from some of the weakest Warriors gameplay so far. Constantly playing with a party of four, there’s a heck of a lot going on during combat. Even though each character has a range of combos and special moves available, the majority of them are so fast (blink and you will miss them) that everything blends into a gigantic mass of flashes, swooshes and shouting where it’s impossible to tell whether your efforts are really even making much of a difference to what’s happening. You quickly learn to swap out your personas (special moves with elemental strengths) and spam your specials when you come up against stronger foes, which makes the game so easy that it almost feels like cheating, and increasing the difficulty just extends enemies’ health to prolong the fights even further, which is something you’re unlikely to want to do when the gameplay is as shallow as this.

In short, it wouldn’t be wise to go into Strikers expecting any sort of epic hack n’ slash adventure. It’s very much a Persona game with the usual turn-based battles replaced by a stripped-down version of combat from another series. The overall presentation is magnificent, as it usually is in Persona games, but the story is definitely aimed squarely at superfans (roughly half of your overall time with the game will be spend watching cutscenes and listening to dialogue) and the gameplay pales in comparison to most of the games in the series that its mechanics were lifted from. Persona 5 Strikers is very much a game for fans who are looking to spend another 50 or so hours with the Phantom Thieves. If that’s you, go for it! But if not, maybe wait until your mate’s bought it and see if they’ll lend it to you when they’ve finished…