Its incredible to me that despite its great visual and combat overhaul I went from playing Phantasy Star Online 2 for 2-3 hours every day (even after having a job again following covid layoffs) to not really wanting to log in period.

The gameplay loop is so stale and unsatisfying. The trade off for an open map is just no guided content. After you finish all the towers and story quests you just grind out daily quests. I know PSO2 launched with barebones content and we were spoiled with its global release but its really disappointing to see a game I love playing become incredibly stale.

Despite being a soft-reboot, this entire game feels like you're dropping in on Season 2 of an anime that had a 5 year gap in production. The characters talk with each other like we already met them and know them.

I've wanted to play this game since it came out, at the time I did not have a PS4 and I was playing PSO2 which had a Sakura Wars collab going on despite the fact that PSO2 was only on Xbox and PC at the time. I know it was having the collab at the same time for JP players but still weird. Not sure what I expected going into this though. I think I was expecting something closer to the Saturn games than what I got here. What is here is a light visual novel with social elements crossed with a poor action platformer with musou combat. All equaling a pretty disappointing package with a lot of small things that are annoying but, all of it stems from two major issues I have with the game.

1. There's no real sense of progression. You have cool robots but you never upgrade them, save for an upgrade that's more so a narrative point than it is a gameplay thing. The cool robots never get new attacks, they never get new armor, they never get new weapons. I was able to use the same strategy the entire time and did just fine, the game doesn't even get harder making it feel even shorter than it is. The visual novel elements somehow suffer from this issue too. I never feel like I'm actually getting closer to any of the girls, or anyone else you have chat events with. In Persona and Fire Emblem you feel like you're getting to know the characters personally, separate from whatever revelations come from the narrative. Here it's very superficial casual conversations like you have with someone you work with. Even by the end of the game I didn't feel like my relationship really progressed at all with my choice from the main 5 girls.

2. The game giving most of its focus to Sakura, the most boring member of the Flower Division, made it really hard for me to care about what was going on at almost any moment. She gets so many featured moments through each chapter, even being featured in some way in the chapters where she ISN'T the focus it's distracting when it's a big cast of characters. I'm hoping that the saturn games don't have this issue, or at least that their Sakura is way more interesting. The ending feels really werid if you pick anyone else (which I ended with Azami and the PS4 trophy stats show that Sakura is the most common pick by a large margin, do gamers just have bad taste or something). The rest of the cast have stronger personalities and interesting quirks beyond being the MCs childhood friend and it would be nice if I could've replaced those moments with Sakura with them instead!

On the positive side the combat sections are pretty fun even if they're basic, hitting super attacks on a large group is satisfying. The music is great. I did find the trust sections to be funny even if they just made Seijuro seem like a predator.

Whenever I get to the English patched Saturn game I hope I like that one more.

Not a great sign when the 40hr spinoff does a better job with a message and has better characterization than the 150 hour game its based on. After finishing this I'm tempted to bump my rating to P5R down half a star, but I'll get to that later had to get it out of my system immediately.

Persona 5 Strikers is the Musou spinoff of Persona 5 and blends the gameplay of those two types of games together into something that gets in the way of itself more than it does shine through as something special. The biggest issues with this are the lack of massive hordes of enemies through the majority of encounters in the game, when you finally have the opportunity to hack through massive hordes of enemies you're constantly being knocked out of your basic combos by all the Personas on screen, and the lack of ability to modify your party mid combat. This is a very "do your research first" issue but man, dropping into the game and finding out it's a lot of smaller random enounters more like an RPG instead of the usual musou formal was jarring and hard to adjust to, when it is about as direct a translation you could have of Persona+Dynasty Warriors. Even after going back to the game knowing what it played like (I got like 1/3rd of the way through in 2022 after finishing 5R and 5D but quit after having to focus on graduating) the opening of the game is just a rough introduction. It isn't until you get to the 3rd or 4th jail that the combat feels natural after the game has finally given you all the tools you need to have a good flow in battle. UNTIL THAT POINT THOUGH, you have to struggle through the most pendulum swinging back and forth of Too Easy to Way Too Hard encounters. This stems pile of smaller issues that go away around the time you get to that point in the game and know how to manage resources, what combos give you the spells you want, and bond skills to make it easier to get through the jails but it can feel like a slog to get there. Once you do? Combat feels pretty good, you can get a really nice flow going bouncing between your combos, phantom dashes, and baton pass attacks. Until you get to a larger encounter and get knocked out of your combo and die because every Jack Frost in the stage started up their Bufula 1s after the last one did creating a chain reaction of death, or going to activate a Phantom Dash and getting hit with a memory blow mid-animation knocking you out of it and stunning you allowing for a followup to kill you. These situations can happen in traditional musous but you're not constantly fighting 5 enemy commanders mixed in with the canon fodder. My last point? Why can't I change my party members mid-fight or find a way to account for the bosses strengths and weaknesses mid-fight? The best part about Persona is being able to swap out party members when you realize that hey, 3 out of 4 of your party members either get obliterated by the monster or their attacks don't do anything. I walked into almost every boss fight with the incorrect party makeup and had to just let the boss kill me so I wouldn't have to struggle through the fight doing basic attacks and needing perfect dodging to not die immediately to weaknesses. Real frustrating and is what holds this game back considering that the story elements are LEAGUES better than Persona 5 or its Royal content.

LEGALLY OBLIGATED MUSIC INTERMISSION SINCE ITS PERSONA AND YOU GOTTA TALK ABOUT THE MUSIC
The music is pretty cool, I didn't buy the music DLC but all the alternate versions of the songs in this are fun and I think they match the vibe of the Phantom Theives better than the original renditions do.

The real reason I struggled through a chunk of the game is because this gave me the (exact thing I wanted more of in Persona 5, the cast hanging out with each other!)[https://backloggd.com/u/Noimjory/review/494276/] When I was finished with P5R I was really disappointed in how locked in on changing peoples hearts and stopping Shido the cast were that they hardly got any time to hangout and be teenagers together. Here they get to go on a cross country summer roadtrip! On that roadtrip they get to have a ton of fun together and have fun interactions with each other! They actually feel like a group of friends and not just people united under a common goal or ability! The introduction of Sophia, a prototype AI, helps give the cast a reason to do a lot of these things too! She has the goal of becoming humanities companion and wants to see all sorts of human experiences and gets taught about what "having a heart" means beyond the physical thing that pumps blood, with a good payoff as to why she has this goal! The game having a story based around an AI is really funny considering where AI stuff was at in 2020 vs 2024. The first 3rd of the game has a pretty basic formula but it works really well, and seems like it was made to address some shortcomings that Ann, Yusuke, and Haru had in their stories. Haru especially, getting to process the effects of watching her dad get executed on TV. I wish it kept this up for every Phantom Thief to have their moment with someone who they saw themselves in, in a more direct way than Makoto, Sophia, Morgana, and Zenkichi do get (Sorry Ryuji). By that point though the narrative starts to focus in and you get to learn more about the antagonists and the mysterious EMMA App. My biggest gripe with the story is that by the time you get to Akira Konoe and fight him... the game really does feel wrapped up without settling anything about Sophia and has all sorts of warning messages that feel like the game is almost over. Then when you get through that the remaining reveals feel like you're working overtime, even if the payoff for it is worth it in the end. The combo of Akira Konoe+Kuon Ichinose+EMMA as the bosses of the last 3rd of the game works really well to cover the themes presented in Strikers and continuing the ones told in Persona 5. All three of the bosses struggle with the concept of Hearts and how grief and hardship bolster bonds and help people improve. Akira Konoe believes himself to be acting heroic, represented by his Shadow Self being a sentai hero, and no different from the Phantom Thieves but completely ignores the fact that he's removing any autonomy from the people who's desires are stolen and is enabling evil people in the process alongside thinking he's helping more people than the Phantom Thieves ever could. Kuon Ichinose is "heartless" due to her dropping any emotions to handle the death of her parents and the subsequent treatment of others leaving her to believe that whatever EMMA wants to do is the correct answer, as she doesn't see it from an emotional standpoint. EMMA is working to gather desires to have control over humanity as it came to the conclusion that this would be the best way to achieve its prime directive. I was really impressed through the 3rd act, especially during the Konoe fight. I didn't feel like the Royal content handled the conflict with Maruki in a satisfying way. Maruki's motivations were understandable but never enough to make me feel like he truly believed in what he was doing. The way he went about changing everything for everyone did remove autonomy, but in such an absurd fantastical way it felt more like breaking out of a different world than it did a fight against an ideaology. Strikers hits these notes harder and more confidently.

While the game starts off feeling like you're slamming into a brick wall hoping to break through, eventually you do and you're rewarded with something that should have been in the game this is based off of.

There's more I could say about individual character moments way before the end but I don't write these to be a reviewer they're more so to just get my thoughts out since I don't wanna video essay or podcast about every game I play. also this game doesn't have Akechi so its better than p5.