The post game depression hit hard after I finished royal. I kept telling myself I wouldn't jump right into strikers cause I had other games I needed to prioritize on my backlog, but I finally caved in (plus it felt appropriate to make a game about a summer road trip one of the last games I played this summer).
Strikers is pretty fun and does a lot of things I really like. I enjoyed the game giving some extra screen time to some of the more underdeveloped characters from royal and the new characters and storyline fit right in with the world and I ended up really liking them (Zenkichi is the goat!). The story was fun too and I really enjoyed a lot of the new set pieces and environments. It was not particularly groundbreaking but I'd say most of the reveals/twists were still effective and enhanced the story overall.
It took longer for strikers to really click for me than royal did. The opening is nowhere near as effective as it's predecessor although I never found it bad. The game finally clicked for me once the actual road trip started and there were more things to do outside of combat. I still miss the social links, but being able to do requests and talk to more people outside of combat was still appreciated. I really started messing around with the different combos and experimenting with personas and team layouts at this point which really helped the combat click for me.
The combat itself is fine. It's one of those easy to spam, but tough to actual be good with sort of systems. If you put in the time, you can do some really fun stuff with it, but if you don't want to bother you can get away with spamming a lot of high damage sp moves. I think the combat is at it's best in merciless mode and this is when the combat really clicked for me as something I actually really liked. Merciless really forced me to approach fights in a entirely different way since most enemies can one or two shot you. This really forced me to mess around with the timing of combos and when to use status conditions to restore SP or heal.
Most of my issues with the game became negligible the more I progressed. My biggest issue with the game is that I was not a big fan of the new level requirement for persona fusion at first. Now, I feel pretty mixed on it overall because if you use a fusion loop (which can be done relatively early with cheap, low level personas) you end up with so many persona points that the level requirements become pointless since you can dump them into any persona to level them up and still have millions of pp left over (I ended up with over 60 million persona points by the time I was done building my merciless team). On the one hand, the level requirement is a complete non issue since this is super easy to do, but I also don't think this should be necessary in order to fuse personas since it takes up a lot of time that could be used to progress further in the story or grind. I'm not sure the best way to fix this (maybe lowering the level up threshold for personas you use?) and it's ultimately not a huge issue, but it's something that I was thinking about a lot when I was playing through the story.
I will say this game is not worth going for 100%. Going for all the requests is fine, but the final trophy required for the platinum (the bond rank trophy) is really tedious since it will require you to either grind an end game boss for around 10+ hours or farm an earlier boss in merciless mode for around 6-7 hours.
If you really want to go for 100% I would recommend getting Joker to lvl 90 off that end game boss, then building a bunch of really strong personas with the spell master skill for a merciless run. Then play merciless up to the second dire shadow and farm that until you get max bond rank. This is what I did and I think it makes for a relatively fast and the overall least monotonous grinding experience (ended up only having to grind the dire shadow for about 5-6 hours since the bond also goes up a bit as you play through merciless).
Overall strikers is a good time. It's not perfect and it has a few annoying elements, but those are few and far between. It's a fun little adventure with characters I really like and it's a game I could see my rating increase for on repeating playthroughs. I'll definitely return to finish my merciless run some time in the near future.
Strikers is pretty fun and does a lot of things I really like. I enjoyed the game giving some extra screen time to some of the more underdeveloped characters from royal and the new characters and storyline fit right in with the world and I ended up really liking them (Zenkichi is the goat!). The story was fun too and I really enjoyed a lot of the new set pieces and environments. It was not particularly groundbreaking but I'd say most of the reveals/twists were still effective and enhanced the story overall.
It took longer for strikers to really click for me than royal did. The opening is nowhere near as effective as it's predecessor although I never found it bad. The game finally clicked for me once the actual road trip started and there were more things to do outside of combat. I still miss the social links, but being able to do requests and talk to more people outside of combat was still appreciated. I really started messing around with the different combos and experimenting with personas and team layouts at this point which really helped the combat click for me.
The combat itself is fine. It's one of those easy to spam, but tough to actual be good with sort of systems. If you put in the time, you can do some really fun stuff with it, but if you don't want to bother you can get away with spamming a lot of high damage sp moves. I think the combat is at it's best in merciless mode and this is when the combat really clicked for me as something I actually really liked. Merciless really forced me to approach fights in a entirely different way since most enemies can one or two shot you. This really forced me to mess around with the timing of combos and when to use status conditions to restore SP or heal.
Most of my issues with the game became negligible the more I progressed. My biggest issue with the game is that I was not a big fan of the new level requirement for persona fusion at first. Now, I feel pretty mixed on it overall because if you use a fusion loop (which can be done relatively early with cheap, low level personas) you end up with so many persona points that the level requirements become pointless since you can dump them into any persona to level them up and still have millions of pp left over (I ended up with over 60 million persona points by the time I was done building my merciless team). On the one hand, the level requirement is a complete non issue since this is super easy to do, but I also don't think this should be necessary in order to fuse personas since it takes up a lot of time that could be used to progress further in the story or grind. I'm not sure the best way to fix this (maybe lowering the level up threshold for personas you use?) and it's ultimately not a huge issue, but it's something that I was thinking about a lot when I was playing through the story.
I will say this game is not worth going for 100%. Going for all the requests is fine, but the final trophy required for the platinum (the bond rank trophy) is really tedious since it will require you to either grind an end game boss for around 10+ hours or farm an earlier boss in merciless mode for around 6-7 hours.
If you really want to go for 100% I would recommend getting Joker to lvl 90 off that end game boss, then building a bunch of really strong personas with the spell master skill for a merciless run. Then play merciless up to the second dire shadow and farm that until you get max bond rank. This is what I did and I think it makes for a relatively fast and the overall least monotonous grinding experience (ended up only having to grind the dire shadow for about 5-6 hours since the bond also goes up a bit as you play through merciless).
Overall strikers is a good time. It's not perfect and it has a few annoying elements, but those are few and far between. It's a fun little adventure with characters I really like and it's a game I could see my rating increase for on repeating playthroughs. I'll definitely return to finish my merciless run some time in the near future.