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.

Going hard through my Persona-Adjacent backlog and decided to start with Catherine, I like puzzle games and have been wanting to play it since the release of the original. Glad I finally did! only got 2 of the endings because the last stages are really annoying even on easy but I'll get back and get the rest eventually, or I'll just play Full Body not sure yet.

Great game! I would love to see Atlus do more like this. Some more ~10 hour games with their music and art direction combined with unique gameplay would be great while still having a connection to some themes from a bigger franchise of theirs.

Gameplay is a rollercoaster of feeling like a genius and feeling like the dumbest person in the world. Ignoring a few absurd annoying difficulty spikes (1st playthrough was on normal) you do feel like you're getting better at understanding how to approach and solve new situations of each tower and when you're able to speed through a section you feel like a god. My only real gripe is the boss fights. I'm fine with the bosses having weird effects and attacks to look out for but the speed at which you have to climb the tower on these stages gets really frustrating and I ended up making bullshit moves just to undo them to give myself more time to climb. It reaches its worst point when you have to climb the tower while also worrying about Katherine and her slow ass climbing up for her so half the techniques you've learned don't apply to the stage with the boss speeding its way up. The final boss being the most annoying because he'll just change a block you're climbing onto into a spike killing you before you can react. Fuck those levels.

The story is great too! I first met Vincent in my play through of Persona 3 Portable which is a fun easter egg/ad for Catherine, shame he's not in Reload from what I've seen, and guy who beat the game on his 30th birthday voice hey he's a pretty relatable guy. Going in I knew it was about Vincent dealing with his guilt of cheating on his girlfriend with another woman with the same name but I didn't expect it to turn into managing getting older and moving on into the next steps of your life. Vincent is stressed out about his girlfriend Katherine's talk about getting married when he thinks things are perfectly fine as they are, leading to him cheating on her with the younger Catherine after his friends leave him alone at the bar. The constant, and comedic amounts of, piling on of stressful moments afterwards is really effective. From Katherine visiting unnanounced while Catherine is still at his apartment, to Katherine telling him that she's pregnant you feel the tension that Vincent is feeling especially paired with the art in the game which just makes him out to be the most distraught man in existence. The sound cues when you read text messages from the two girls are really funny too with Katherine being the most bitchy Sigh anyone could come up with. The story is mostly linear except for text messages and the final chapter where your choices for texts and confessionals will impact your ending. (they also impact Vincent's dialogue in some cutscenes but doing two different playthroughs they don't change enough for it to be of note.) My first run I got the regular Katherine ending and in my second run I got the True Catherine ending. The tertiary cast is cool, feels like the kind of people you hang out with when you're 30 and the kind of people you'd see at this kind of bar. Most of the people you encounter there you also find as sheep in the nightmare segments as they're all dealing with their own personal issues that you can help them throughout your playthrough (though I fucked up and only was able to save the cop). The stuff with Erica feels weird though.

Music is great, Art is great, Voice Direction is Fine. It's a little distracting having so many of the same voice actors from Persona that I just associate with those characters instead and also I'm a hater and don't like Troy Baker.

good game, play it sometime.

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.

Every single plot reveal in this game feels like they're doing this without making the tower completely collapse.

Fascinating non-linear sci-fi story that you can play in whatever order you want and at no point does it fall apart because of it. A real feat of storytelling to get everything to work how it does. A game you gotta go in completely blind.

The RTS portion of the game is a lot of fun when you figure it out, I just wish that there was a way to balance it out and make it feel less Start-And-Stop than it is but it is satisfying to see the waves of bad guys explode on the screen. I thought for sure the last mission was going to make my launch PS4 melt through the floor.

cool game.

Great follow up to Alan Wake 13 years later, almost everything is better and more interesting than in the first game. Almost.

Story is cool and more engaging. Love the connections to Control. Music rules. The case board is satisfying to fill out. The plot threads and light diffusion are cooler than any of the environment changes in Control. Puzzles are all fun. Combat is routinely frustrating, Reloading usually means death, enemies even if there's very few of them sometimes take more than a full clip to kill and that just feels bad, The wolves when you play as Saga are the most annoying enemy ever put in a video game, and routinely switching to a healing item or throwable glitches out and makes me stop -> switch to gun -> switch back to item -> die because of how long it takes.

I'll do The Final Draft when the other DLC comes out.

Finished awhile ago but sat with it before typing stuff up.

A fun followup to Like a Dragon! Fixing all my issues with the combat to really bring the transition to a turn-based RPG. A fun continuation of Ichiban's adventures and a final closing(?) of Kiryu's. Though the games narrative struggles with problems that haven't been around since the PS3 trilogy.

From the start its a delight being able to see all my friends in Ijincho again. The decision to make the first few hours of the game be low stakes slice of life is great, we rarely get these kinds of moments in games and when we do they're relegated to side content. It's nice to see everyone hanging out and see how their lives are going since the last game ended and it works as a great setup for getting the franchise out of Japan for the first time. Down on his luck, jobless, not getting a text back from a girl, canceled by a VTuber we've all been there. Why not go to Hawaii to reunite with your long lost mother? Where, even with the looming threat of the Hawaiian underworld surrounding the cast, the general tone is nice thanks to Ichiban's unwaivering spirit and optimism. Though when the stakes start to ramp up, a bit too late for me like in Yakuza 3, the narrative starts to suffer. Splitting the lead roles between Ichiban and Kiryu because they're STILL too scared to keep Kiryu out of the spotlight, and it really makes the ending feel flat because both of them confront the antagonist they have less conflict with and neither are built up in a way that feels cathartic to finally take down. Though I appreciate the time given to Kiryu to pay tribute to his nearly 20 years of adventures we've been along with him, it really takes away from time that could've been used to flesh out Ichiban's adventure and troubles. Though more about that in a bit.

The new additions to the cast with Tomizawa and Chitose are great, Tomizawa feels very American in contrast with the rest of the cast and Chitose's rich upbringing helps her stand out coming from a completely different world as everyone else. Seonhee being added to the group is a lot of fun, finding out she's just as much as a weirdo as the rest of the cast is great. Her helping Saeko and Nanba with Kiryu's bucket list is very sweet, and the three going from Ichibans quirks to Kiryus quirks creates some real funny moments. Adachi, Zhao, and Joon-gi feel tacked on but learning more about them is still nice. Kiryu, as a supporting character, is fantastic. His cancer bringing him out of his element and making him rely on others creates really funny and heartfelt moments, and as previously mentioned leads to my biggest problem with the game. Splitting Kiryu off from this supporting role hurts the game and hurts his growth on screen. Kiryu's journey here is that he has to learn to accept help from others instead of taking everything on by himself and Ichiban is the EXACT person he'd pick that up from, and he SHOULD be learning that by seeing how Ichiban lets everyone help him at the big ending of the game! Instead it's just kind of implied and you can draw the conclusions but it's not great, but enough of this.

Gameplay is fantastic, they fixed the biggest glaring issue with the combat in 7 being that you couldn't position the characters making the attacks that hurt in a row or a cone in front of the character making combat a blast. The positioning makes it so you can do really cool team combos and knock guys against the wall making the fights feel like a rad shonen battle. The monkey's paw with this change is that the fights are way too easy now. I'm sure its nice for people who are still struggling coming from an action game to a turn-based RPG but without any difficulty settings it feels like I'm slepeing through the fights. There's maybe 4 fights that are tough and 2 of them are because of annoying mechanics and less because you have to be creative. Kiryu's turn based breaking special is a blast though, loved how they used that during the Old Man fight.

Side content might also be the best it's ever been. Substories are a lot of fun, especially the ones that really focus on contrasting America with Japan. The trilogy of substories involving movie directors is great. Miss Match might be the funniest use of FMV in the series yet, Sujimon is the best Pokemon knock off this year (take that Palworld) and fills the itch I've wanted for a Gacha game that doesn't cost me money for rolls, Dondoko Island got old quick for me but I know people like that one. Using substories to wrap up loose ends with characters from Kiryu's past was nice (though I think he could've done this while also working alongside Ichiban too). I agree with most of the choices for people to come back into his life one last time and despite some inconsistencies like I'm pretty sure Kaoru fell for a guy in America and not that she just got too busy with work, It was great to see a lot of the people again. I missed Akiyama and will continue to miss him (I also miss Shinada why did he have to be relegated to just a quick memory bring him back). Confirming that the spinoffs are canon as dreams Kiryu had are a nice touch too.

Overall a great game! Well worth playing, I just wish it had more emotional weight and development for Ichiban. Maybe months out I'll feel differently.

Also fuck you RGG for teasing out the fucking cabaret club minigame with Yuki and Koyuki asking Kiryu to be a manager one more time for old times sake. Don't do that shit to me.