SethGob55
Bio
I review games on a 9 point, fully word based scale. I hate rating with numbers as their meaning is subjective - 2 people can interpret 7/10 in different ways but when I say a game is "bad" or "great" it's much clearer what I mean.
My scale goes:
5 - Amazing
4.5 - Great
4. Very Good
3.5 - Good
3 - Decent
2.5 - Mediocre
2 - Bad
1.5 - Very Bad
1 - Awful
I'll include the word in the word, but please ignore the number, it's there out of obligation.
Besides that - I'm a hardcore Nintendo fan and I love platformers, action games and RPGs. I review whatever games I play for fun, as I always have something to say.
I review games on a 9 point, fully word based scale. I hate rating with numbers as their meaning is subjective - 2 people can interpret 7/10 in different ways but when I say a game is "bad" or "great" it's much clearer what I mean.
My scale goes:
5 - Amazing
4.5 - Great
4. Very Good
3.5 - Good
3 - Decent
2.5 - Mediocre
2 - Bad
1.5 - Very Bad
1 - Awful
I'll include the word in the word, but please ignore the number, it's there out of obligation.
Besides that - I'm a hardcore Nintendo fan and I love platformers, action games and RPGs. I review whatever games I play for fun, as I always have something to say.
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3.5/5 - Good
After reviewing Risky's Revenge, Pirate's Curse, and Half-Genie Hero, my Shantae marathon comes to an end with Seven Sirens. I've heard this game talked up a lot - and I enjoyed it greatly... But also had quite a few issues with it, and consider it inferior to the previous 2 entries. After doing a different kind of review for each game, I'll finish this off by simply reviewing this one normally, as this just fits what I have to say the most.
I'll start with the positives, as there are plenty:
The controls - I am very happy to see they actually solved the dance problem! I often see people beg for the Pirate abilities to return simply because they are more convenient to use than slowing down and dancing - and while I agree, Shantae is known for transforming into animals, not being a pirate, that gimmick made sense as a 1-time thing. Seven Sirens actually solves the problem by mapping transformations to direct commands, and this makes the game totally snappy and smooth to play! Although, I found the fusion dances they did include to be rather annoying, even if mostly optional.
The music - I see people often say it's forgettable and I really don't see it. It isn't as good as Jake Kauffman's work, but the songs here had a great energy to them and plenty of wonderful melodies to jam out to, with their own unique style!
The story - while this game can't match up to the silly and endearing writing of Pirate's Curse, I found it to definitely beat HGH with its story that actually managed to have some decent twists and surprises and fun character interactions. Nothing amazing but I enjoyed it. Although, I was bothered by some odd characterizations, particularly how infuriatingly whiny they made Sky, and the fact that Shantae is just... TOO nice to Risky, treating her like her best friend, even though unlike PC she shows absolutely no such connection back and is entirely evil the whole way...
The dungeons - This is where the game shines the most. I especially enjoyed the even-numbered ones, with the 6th likely being my favorite, all combining creative platforming challenges, interesting puzzles, and fun combat! Even the battle tower was actually a really great challenge. Although, I found the first one to be a bit too simple, and the third one, while strong in some ways, had frustrating elements.
And now we get to the issues. I already pointed out half of them - you could see that every positive point I presented also had a small caveat holding it back. But I'd still be loving this game if not for it's single greatest problem: the world itself. One of the most frequently praised parts of this game is the return to a full-on Metroidvania structure, and I agree... in concept. In practice, this is one of the more forgettable and basic Metroidvania worlds I have seen. This is a product of 2 factors:
First, the visuals. Almost every single underground area relies on the metallic-looking tileset for its geometry, simply recolored and with some extra details added in, but it just isn't enough. The sheer aggressive amount of asset reuse here makes every area completely blend together for me, only really remembered for its music.
And this gets worse due to the second factor, the level design. It seems almost all of the unique gimmicks and designs were reserved for the dungeons, as with some minor exceptions, almost every area is made of simple platforming and enemies, without much special happening at all.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't bad at all - platforming around using all of your cool transformations, fighting enemies with your magic skills, exploring for secrets, it's fun at its core, but that's entirely a result of the good core gameplay, while the world design itself is extremely bland and uninteresting. I remember a lot more of the levels of PC or HGH and it's been much longer since I've played those. This issue is what brings this game to being very good, but not quite great.
And that's it, every Shantae game reviewed! Except for the first one, maybe I'll check it out one day. I enjoyed the romp! Excited for Risky Revolution!
After reviewing Risky's Revenge, Pirate's Curse, and Half-Genie Hero, my Shantae marathon comes to an end with Seven Sirens. I've heard this game talked up a lot - and I enjoyed it greatly... But also had quite a few issues with it, and consider it inferior to the previous 2 entries. After doing a different kind of review for each game, I'll finish this off by simply reviewing this one normally, as this just fits what I have to say the most.
I'll start with the positives, as there are plenty:
The controls - I am very happy to see they actually solved the dance problem! I often see people beg for the Pirate abilities to return simply because they are more convenient to use than slowing down and dancing - and while I agree, Shantae is known for transforming into animals, not being a pirate, that gimmick made sense as a 1-time thing. Seven Sirens actually solves the problem by mapping transformations to direct commands, and this makes the game totally snappy and smooth to play! Although, I found the fusion dances they did include to be rather annoying, even if mostly optional.
The music - I see people often say it's forgettable and I really don't see it. It isn't as good as Jake Kauffman's work, but the songs here had a great energy to them and plenty of wonderful melodies to jam out to, with their own unique style!
The story - while this game can't match up to the silly and endearing writing of Pirate's Curse, I found it to definitely beat HGH with its story that actually managed to have some decent twists and surprises and fun character interactions. Nothing amazing but I enjoyed it. Although, I was bothered by some odd characterizations, particularly how infuriatingly whiny they made Sky, and the fact that Shantae is just... TOO nice to Risky, treating her like her best friend, even though unlike PC she shows absolutely no such connection back and is entirely evil the whole way...
The dungeons - This is where the game shines the most. I especially enjoyed the even-numbered ones, with the 6th likely being my favorite, all combining creative platforming challenges, interesting puzzles, and fun combat! Even the battle tower was actually a really great challenge. Although, I found the first one to be a bit too simple, and the third one, while strong in some ways, had frustrating elements.
And now we get to the issues. I already pointed out half of them - you could see that every positive point I presented also had a small caveat holding it back. But I'd still be loving this game if not for it's single greatest problem: the world itself. One of the most frequently praised parts of this game is the return to a full-on Metroidvania structure, and I agree... in concept. In practice, this is one of the more forgettable and basic Metroidvania worlds I have seen. This is a product of 2 factors:
First, the visuals. Almost every single underground area relies on the metallic-looking tileset for its geometry, simply recolored and with some extra details added in, but it just isn't enough. The sheer aggressive amount of asset reuse here makes every area completely blend together for me, only really remembered for its music.
And this gets worse due to the second factor, the level design. It seems almost all of the unique gimmicks and designs were reserved for the dungeons, as with some minor exceptions, almost every area is made of simple platforming and enemies, without much special happening at all.
Don't get me wrong, it isn't bad at all - platforming around using all of your cool transformations, fighting enemies with your magic skills, exploring for secrets, it's fun at its core, but that's entirely a result of the good core gameplay, while the world design itself is extremely bland and uninteresting. I remember a lot more of the levels of PC or HGH and it's been much longer since I've played those. This issue is what brings this game to being very good, but not quite great.
And that's it, every Shantae game reviewed! Except for the first one, maybe I'll check it out one day. I enjoyed the romp! Excited for Risky Revolution!
3.5/5 - Good
I enjoyed Persona 5 Tactica. I found its narrative to be interesting and often quite deep, and its gameplay to be quite fun. But I also found it to be an extremely problematic release for many reasons. It’s a game that feels to me like it’s consistently entirely content with being just “good” and no more, sometimes aggressively so. A game that lacks budget, but also lacks the ambition to do much more with the money it was given than making a product worthy enough of shipping to stores with the name “Persona 5” on the box. I mean this with no ill will to the developers, I truly believe they wanted to make a quality product, but I just feel they didn’t want to do any more than that, in a way that just ended up immensely disappointing me, especially because of the incredible legacy of the name the chose to attach this game to. Persona 5 Royal is not only my favorite video game of all time, but even Strikers was a game I was constantly comparing this one to in my mind, simply because of how incredibly ambitious and impressive it is, managing to create a game that could stand as a sequel to Persona 5 with the budget of a spin-off, almost putting this game to shame in almost every category. Tactica is a game I truly did enjoy yet while playing through it I was haunted by a voice constantly comparing it to other games, Strikers especially, and being disappointed at how honestly… lame I found the experience.
Let’s start with the story. I will begin with the positives, because there really are positives: I want to very strongly stress that this story gets the absolute bare fundamentals absolutely right. The main characters of the game, Toshiro and Erina, have interesting personalities, strong arcs, and a great dynamic, their story was exciting and interesting the whole way through and was written quite well for the most part. I want to make it clear that despite the fact that I am about to be talking about this story negatively for the most part, I actually found it to be quite good - but what makes it good are the essentials, things I basically already elaborated on with those few sentences. But while the foundations of it are great, the story falls short in a myriad of ways that, while absolutely not killing it, harm it from being seen in my eyes as anything more than a cute spin-off.
A major problem would be the presentation. I found the entire way this game presents its story to be a slap in the face from previous entries. Already since it was revealed, I feared that the cutesy art style, while not a problem inherently, hinted at an intent to present the story in a simpler way than previous entries, and those fears were correct. The problem is an amalgamation of downscales in lots of places. Of course, the visual novel cutscenes are part of the problem. The game’s ability to present dynamic scenes with different locations and poses was harmed. On top of that, this issue as well as some gameplay issues I will discuss later combine to harm the way the villains are built up in certain ways, losing a lot of the nuance to telling their story. The biggest case of this is Marie - while previous P5 villains would have their stories told slowly throughout their palace or jail by investigating different parts of its design, hers is dumped on you right at the end and all in automated cutscenes since exploring her castle isn’t something you get to do. The other villains sometimes feel affected by this as well. But the game also uses far less fully animated cutscenes - both Royal and Strikers often used proper hand-animated cutscenes or anime cutscenes during most of their strongest and most impactful moments. Tactica contains far fewer of these kinds of cutscenes, often conveying incredibly important scenes with the same 2D visual novel scenes. This is hard to present as a flaw in the objective sense but it simply made this game feel cheap.
But beyond the way the story is presented, the narrative itself has another major flaw. Before addressing the new characters, I think the most important point to make actually has to do with the way the game uses the Phantom Thieves - or more so, the lack thereof. This game is honestly “Persona 5” in name only, as the PTs are mere side characters in this story. This comes into effect in 2 ways - the first is the simplification of their writing. It feels to me like the writers of this game simply did not have a true grasp on how to write these old characters that they did not create - they have proven to me that they can competently write their own original creations, but the same expertise does not apply to the veterans. It often feels like there was a simple list of bullet point “character traits” for these characters, and the writers simply tried shoving these points into scenes as much as possible to create the illusion that they are the characters you know. This is usually felt when mid-scene, a PT will just interrupt the serious dialogue with some kind of one-liner that basically feels like they’re telling the audience “Hey guys, remember I have [insert trait]?” I just don’t have any other way to phrase it, they just force a simplified trait into their sentences at random. Sometimes it’s random lines, but sometimes it’s entire scenes, driven entirely by these flat character descriptions, and I just feel it. These are just shells of the PTs to me. And I feel the need to compare this to Strikers again since that game managed to brilliantly juggle both the new and old thieves being equally as important, to give them all development, personal stakes, connection to the villains, to make it feel like THEIR story, when this does not.
But the 2nd way this problem comes into effect is in their integration into the main plot - or more so, yet again, the lack thereof. Absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, in this plot has anything to do with them. The entire story revolves completely around Toshiro. He is the protagonist. The thieves lack any sort of personal stakes here - every side character, villain or hero, is related to Toshiro in some way, and the PTs have never even heard of any of them. Toshiro and Erina are the only ones who actually get character arcs, with Erina’s of course being inherently tied to Toshiro. The PTs are just… tagging along. They just serve as some playable combat units, driving scenes with random quips throwing around simplified character traits and going on about their general values and beliefs in ways that don’t actually necessitate them being present or bring out any of what makes them stand out. And I want to make this clear - I LOVE Toshiro as a protagonist, I find him to be a well-written, compelling, and deep character with a great arc, but I often ask myself whether or not this story would have just been better off not being tied to Persona 5 at all and starring exclusively Toshiro and Erina - and it is really telling when I can imagine a version of this story with all PTs cut out where very little has to change.
This is a very good story, mainly driven by its compelling character arcs and exciting drama, but is hurt by a problematic presentation and an ensemble of unnecessary characters that achieve nothing but marketing. Now, for the gameplay. This is the part of the game that I saw more people consistently say they liked. I’m… actually on the opposite end. The story, despite its issues, was absolutely what kept me going. The gameplay - I liked it, but I found it to be even more flawed.
The biggest slap in the face to me is the sheer fact that this game contains absolutely nothing but combat. I found the lack of any sort of explorable dungeons hurts: A. the gameplay loop, by making it more repetitive - a fact that is at its absolute worst in the final kingdom, where, despite the story reaching its natural climax and not having much left besides the final fight, the developers chose to pad the game out with multiple additional hours of near storyless battles and even boss refights that feel like a total slog, making for the lowest point of the game until the ending, and B. the storytelling, due to the aforementioned issue - the game’s narrative seems to call for real dungeons, where we could explore and naturally learn about the villains, their stories, and also go on missions and interact with the locals, there are just so many points where such a thing just feels… missing. This is, once again, in sharp contrast to Strikers, a game that downright impressed me with its ability to not only include proper fully designed dungeons that connect both with the story and the combat seamlessly, but also the real-life sections giving you cities to explore and even pseudo-s-links with the various requests that have you team up with a party member, truly trying to replicate the Persona experience the best they can within their limitations - while this game remains, yet again, no more than a cute little spin-off, fully content with doing only what is entirely necessary.
But even the combat itself has a lot of problems. And oh boy, do I have a lot of them. First, I found the way the game handled cover to be very problematic - I played the whole game on the merciless difficulty yet I found the sheer act of going behind cover trivializes the game. Not even your positioning matters - cover block chance is irrelevant, as even half cover facing away from the enemy is enough to considerably cut your damage and let you shrug off attacks willy-nilly. This undermines the core design of a tactics game. Second, the game’s enemy variety is quite lacking. It took over half the game to introduce more than the 4 basic enemies - the regular shooter, shooters with AOE, heavy enemies, and supporters. They add a few more new ones later but it just feels like too little too late, where I find a game like Mario + Rabbids which has a similar feel to this had multiple TIMES more enemy types than this game. It just got stale. Third, the overall encounter design can feel uninteresting, with only a few occasional gimmicks being introduced quite late in, and directionless, with a lot of encounters just being very “general”, trying to use every enemy type a few times, which misses the whole point of set encounters, making many of them blend together and demand similar strategies. This point ties to the fourth, the character design - as I find that for a game with 8 set units that have pre-established distinct traits, I often struggled to grasp any clear playstyle for any of them, leading to my picks sometimes feeling downright random, and even the fifth, being that the character skill trees felt full of the same abilities for every character that barely even feel impactful anyway, reinforcing the previous point. A sixth issue is the implementation of sub-Personas - due to only increasing HP and SP, which after barely a 3rd of the game were almost never an issue, I quickly found that replacing your sub Persona with higher level ones later on was entirely unnecessary, and quickly fell on to one for each unit who’s skills synergized with them well, as higher level Personas don’t really have stronger skills. Fusing weapons with your stock helps give it a use but then those are just stat sheets making it less fun. And for a seventh issue, I can point to the fact that when using the tactical camera to view a unit’s skills, things like charge benefits, passive party buffs, follow-ups, and other such mechanics all display within your list of passive skills alongside your actual passive skills, making finding that information in the list a huge chore, where the game could have given these dedicated mechanics their own display.
But. The combat… Was pretty fun. I found it to be a big mess and enjoyed it a lot less than I did the story but it definitely shines sometimes. Despite being rather repetitive, comboing one mores together to chain long turns and execute huge all-out attacks is a lot of fun. A lot of the later enemies do end up making for some fun strategies. While lacking in variety, some missions can offer some really unique designs. I especially found most of the side quests to actually be a highlight due to their dedicated-level design. This whole system is full of a lot of holes but they do often make the best of it.
Now, while I don’t mean to be cynical, there are a few more gripes I need to get off my back - specifically when it comes to sound. The first one is the sound mixing, which is not good at all. Cutscenes often have the music play louder than the dialogue making it hard to comprehend what’s happening. But more interestingly, I was even sorta let down by the OST. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, GREAT even, but when facing 2 other OSTs that are far, far more than great - with Strikers actually even surpassing Royal in this field by a bit for me - and with even the mobile gacha game having some superb music, somehow Tactica just feels.. off in some ways. There’s excellent stuff here but a lot of it feels a lot less exciting or interesting and sometimes just OK. Revolution in Your Heart in particular is a track that upon its initial reveal I already found rather boring. I really aren’t trying to dislike this game, this is just how I feel.
This review feels extremely negative, but this is just a game that I don’t see any other way to discuss. Because it’s a good game, it really is. Almost everything it does is GOOD. But that’s all it is. Just… pretty good. The reason I’m so negative is because I don’t see this game doing anything EXCEPTIONAL, anything outstanding, anything worth pointing out for its high quality. The easiest things to point out for this game… are it’s many, many flaws. I wrote this review out of frustration for seeing how content this game was with its sheer decency. It frustrates me to see Atlus put out such an unambitious title that feels like it wants to be no more than a product. It’s a game I enjoyed playing, yet left me unsatisfied.
I enjoyed Persona 5 Tactica. I found its narrative to be interesting and often quite deep, and its gameplay to be quite fun. But I also found it to be an extremely problematic release for many reasons. It’s a game that feels to me like it’s consistently entirely content with being just “good” and no more, sometimes aggressively so. A game that lacks budget, but also lacks the ambition to do much more with the money it was given than making a product worthy enough of shipping to stores with the name “Persona 5” on the box. I mean this with no ill will to the developers, I truly believe they wanted to make a quality product, but I just feel they didn’t want to do any more than that, in a way that just ended up immensely disappointing me, especially because of the incredible legacy of the name the chose to attach this game to. Persona 5 Royal is not only my favorite video game of all time, but even Strikers was a game I was constantly comparing this one to in my mind, simply because of how incredibly ambitious and impressive it is, managing to create a game that could stand as a sequel to Persona 5 with the budget of a spin-off, almost putting this game to shame in almost every category. Tactica is a game I truly did enjoy yet while playing through it I was haunted by a voice constantly comparing it to other games, Strikers especially, and being disappointed at how honestly… lame I found the experience.
Let’s start with the story. I will begin with the positives, because there really are positives: I want to very strongly stress that this story gets the absolute bare fundamentals absolutely right. The main characters of the game, Toshiro and Erina, have interesting personalities, strong arcs, and a great dynamic, their story was exciting and interesting the whole way through and was written quite well for the most part. I want to make it clear that despite the fact that I am about to be talking about this story negatively for the most part, I actually found it to be quite good - but what makes it good are the essentials, things I basically already elaborated on with those few sentences. But while the foundations of it are great, the story falls short in a myriad of ways that, while absolutely not killing it, harm it from being seen in my eyes as anything more than a cute spin-off.
A major problem would be the presentation. I found the entire way this game presents its story to be a slap in the face from previous entries. Already since it was revealed, I feared that the cutesy art style, while not a problem inherently, hinted at an intent to present the story in a simpler way than previous entries, and those fears were correct. The problem is an amalgamation of downscales in lots of places. Of course, the visual novel cutscenes are part of the problem. The game’s ability to present dynamic scenes with different locations and poses was harmed. On top of that, this issue as well as some gameplay issues I will discuss later combine to harm the way the villains are built up in certain ways, losing a lot of the nuance to telling their story. The biggest case of this is Marie - while previous P5 villains would have their stories told slowly throughout their palace or jail by investigating different parts of its design, hers is dumped on you right at the end and all in automated cutscenes since exploring her castle isn’t something you get to do. The other villains sometimes feel affected by this as well. But the game also uses far less fully animated cutscenes - both Royal and Strikers often used proper hand-animated cutscenes or anime cutscenes during most of their strongest and most impactful moments. Tactica contains far fewer of these kinds of cutscenes, often conveying incredibly important scenes with the same 2D visual novel scenes. This is hard to present as a flaw in the objective sense but it simply made this game feel cheap.
But beyond the way the story is presented, the narrative itself has another major flaw. Before addressing the new characters, I think the most important point to make actually has to do with the way the game uses the Phantom Thieves - or more so, the lack thereof. This game is honestly “Persona 5” in name only, as the PTs are mere side characters in this story. This comes into effect in 2 ways - the first is the simplification of their writing. It feels to me like the writers of this game simply did not have a true grasp on how to write these old characters that they did not create - they have proven to me that they can competently write their own original creations, but the same expertise does not apply to the veterans. It often feels like there was a simple list of bullet point “character traits” for these characters, and the writers simply tried shoving these points into scenes as much as possible to create the illusion that they are the characters you know. This is usually felt when mid-scene, a PT will just interrupt the serious dialogue with some kind of one-liner that basically feels like they’re telling the audience “Hey guys, remember I have [insert trait]?” I just don’t have any other way to phrase it, they just force a simplified trait into their sentences at random. Sometimes it’s random lines, but sometimes it’s entire scenes, driven entirely by these flat character descriptions, and I just feel it. These are just shells of the PTs to me. And I feel the need to compare this to Strikers again since that game managed to brilliantly juggle both the new and old thieves being equally as important, to give them all development, personal stakes, connection to the villains, to make it feel like THEIR story, when this does not.
But the 2nd way this problem comes into effect is in their integration into the main plot - or more so, yet again, the lack thereof. Absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, in this plot has anything to do with them. The entire story revolves completely around Toshiro. He is the protagonist. The thieves lack any sort of personal stakes here - every side character, villain or hero, is related to Toshiro in some way, and the PTs have never even heard of any of them. Toshiro and Erina are the only ones who actually get character arcs, with Erina’s of course being inherently tied to Toshiro. The PTs are just… tagging along. They just serve as some playable combat units, driving scenes with random quips throwing around simplified character traits and going on about their general values and beliefs in ways that don’t actually necessitate them being present or bring out any of what makes them stand out. And I want to make this clear - I LOVE Toshiro as a protagonist, I find him to be a well-written, compelling, and deep character with a great arc, but I often ask myself whether or not this story would have just been better off not being tied to Persona 5 at all and starring exclusively Toshiro and Erina - and it is really telling when I can imagine a version of this story with all PTs cut out where very little has to change.
This is a very good story, mainly driven by its compelling character arcs and exciting drama, but is hurt by a problematic presentation and an ensemble of unnecessary characters that achieve nothing but marketing. Now, for the gameplay. This is the part of the game that I saw more people consistently say they liked. I’m… actually on the opposite end. The story, despite its issues, was absolutely what kept me going. The gameplay - I liked it, but I found it to be even more flawed.
The biggest slap in the face to me is the sheer fact that this game contains absolutely nothing but combat. I found the lack of any sort of explorable dungeons hurts: A. the gameplay loop, by making it more repetitive - a fact that is at its absolute worst in the final kingdom, where, despite the story reaching its natural climax and not having much left besides the final fight, the developers chose to pad the game out with multiple additional hours of near storyless battles and even boss refights that feel like a total slog, making for the lowest point of the game until the ending, and B. the storytelling, due to the aforementioned issue - the game’s narrative seems to call for real dungeons, where we could explore and naturally learn about the villains, their stories, and also go on missions and interact with the locals, there are just so many points where such a thing just feels… missing. This is, once again, in sharp contrast to Strikers, a game that downright impressed me with its ability to not only include proper fully designed dungeons that connect both with the story and the combat seamlessly, but also the real-life sections giving you cities to explore and even pseudo-s-links with the various requests that have you team up with a party member, truly trying to replicate the Persona experience the best they can within their limitations - while this game remains, yet again, no more than a cute little spin-off, fully content with doing only what is entirely necessary.
But even the combat itself has a lot of problems. And oh boy, do I have a lot of them. First, I found the way the game handled cover to be very problematic - I played the whole game on the merciless difficulty yet I found the sheer act of going behind cover trivializes the game. Not even your positioning matters - cover block chance is irrelevant, as even half cover facing away from the enemy is enough to considerably cut your damage and let you shrug off attacks willy-nilly. This undermines the core design of a tactics game. Second, the game’s enemy variety is quite lacking. It took over half the game to introduce more than the 4 basic enemies - the regular shooter, shooters with AOE, heavy enemies, and supporters. They add a few more new ones later but it just feels like too little too late, where I find a game like Mario + Rabbids which has a similar feel to this had multiple TIMES more enemy types than this game. It just got stale. Third, the overall encounter design can feel uninteresting, with only a few occasional gimmicks being introduced quite late in, and directionless, with a lot of encounters just being very “general”, trying to use every enemy type a few times, which misses the whole point of set encounters, making many of them blend together and demand similar strategies. This point ties to the fourth, the character design - as I find that for a game with 8 set units that have pre-established distinct traits, I often struggled to grasp any clear playstyle for any of them, leading to my picks sometimes feeling downright random, and even the fifth, being that the character skill trees felt full of the same abilities for every character that barely even feel impactful anyway, reinforcing the previous point. A sixth issue is the implementation of sub-Personas - due to only increasing HP and SP, which after barely a 3rd of the game were almost never an issue, I quickly found that replacing your sub Persona with higher level ones later on was entirely unnecessary, and quickly fell on to one for each unit who’s skills synergized with them well, as higher level Personas don’t really have stronger skills. Fusing weapons with your stock helps give it a use but then those are just stat sheets making it less fun. And for a seventh issue, I can point to the fact that when using the tactical camera to view a unit’s skills, things like charge benefits, passive party buffs, follow-ups, and other such mechanics all display within your list of passive skills alongside your actual passive skills, making finding that information in the list a huge chore, where the game could have given these dedicated mechanics their own display.
But. The combat… Was pretty fun. I found it to be a big mess and enjoyed it a lot less than I did the story but it definitely shines sometimes. Despite being rather repetitive, comboing one mores together to chain long turns and execute huge all-out attacks is a lot of fun. A lot of the later enemies do end up making for some fun strategies. While lacking in variety, some missions can offer some really unique designs. I especially found most of the side quests to actually be a highlight due to their dedicated-level design. This whole system is full of a lot of holes but they do often make the best of it.
Now, while I don’t mean to be cynical, there are a few more gripes I need to get off my back - specifically when it comes to sound. The first one is the sound mixing, which is not good at all. Cutscenes often have the music play louder than the dialogue making it hard to comprehend what’s happening. But more interestingly, I was even sorta let down by the OST. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, GREAT even, but when facing 2 other OSTs that are far, far more than great - with Strikers actually even surpassing Royal in this field by a bit for me - and with even the mobile gacha game having some superb music, somehow Tactica just feels.. off in some ways. There’s excellent stuff here but a lot of it feels a lot less exciting or interesting and sometimes just OK. Revolution in Your Heart in particular is a track that upon its initial reveal I already found rather boring. I really aren’t trying to dislike this game, this is just how I feel.
This review feels extremely negative, but this is just a game that I don’t see any other way to discuss. Because it’s a good game, it really is. Almost everything it does is GOOD. But that’s all it is. Just… pretty good. The reason I’m so negative is because I don’t see this game doing anything EXCEPTIONAL, anything outstanding, anything worth pointing out for its high quality. The easiest things to point out for this game… are it’s many, many flaws. I wrote this review out of frustration for seeing how content this game was with its sheer decency. It frustrates me to see Atlus put out such an unambitious title that feels like it wants to be no more than a product. It’s a game I enjoyed playing, yet left me unsatisfied.
This review contains spoilers
Persona 5 Royal is my favorite video game of all time. From it's beautifully realized world, to its deep and interesting gameplay systems, to my favorite thing about it, the greatest narrative I have ever experienced. Persona 5 Strikers - is my favorite sequel of all time. A special game, truly worthy of being the sequel to such a legendary title. Let me tell you why.
The game’s core gameplay revolves around a shockingly accurate replication of the Persona 5 gameplay loop that I wouldn’t expect a game with a spin-off budget to be able to pull off. It bounces you back between 2 halves:
In the real world, you can explore different cities. The framing device of a road trip allowed for a lot of different distinct locations around Japan to be visited, which affords the game a lot of variety and supplies some excellent world-building. These locations have places to explore, shops to visit, and events to encounter. The game has the Phantom Thieves engage in plenty of fun friendly activities, showing you their bond growing even better than the original game did. While the game’s quest system offers various quests with mini storylines revolving around your various friends, managing to somewhat replicate Persona’s social link system, which is downright impressive.
And within the metaverse, the new jails are as fun and interesting as the palaces ever were, not losing a hint of the scale and feel. Each of these places have large areas to explore, puzzles to solve, actiony setpieces, platforming sections, entertaining story moments, important build-up to their ruler and their past, and of course - the combat system. I was personally a very big fan of the combat, as I found the action m mechanics fused with Personas to mesh delightfully well, making for a fast, challenging, and engaging system. In fact, I found it often surpassed the original turn-based system, as combat was one of P5R’s most flawed components, while it never stopped being fun here.
Every other aspect of the game is full of quality - the graphics and presentation are absolutely full of the Persona 5 style, character-building and management is quite deep and every character’s playstyle is distinct, side quests, cooking mechanics, and other side activities keep the game fresh - and the OST deserves a big mention, as I downright found it to be BETTER than Royal’s - similarly amazing new battle themes and great remixes of old ones, city themes that had me waiting at every new city just to hear them, and multiple of my absolute top songs from the saga, with Counterstrike in particular standing as my absolute favorite.
But all of this was just build-up. As what makes Persona 5 Strikers truly special - is the narrative. A sequel that feels not just warranted, but necessary. My all time favorite sequel story. And the rest of this review will be a full dissection of it.
I will begin by dissecting the core of the story, the primary theme that drives it, and sits at the center of what makes it work so well.
One complaint I’ve seen held against Strikers’ narrative is that it feels like the same thing again - a point I greatly disagree with. The reasoning for that fact is rooted in a major contrasting element between the 2 games: their villains. As good of a story as Persona 5 is, its story can be seen as rather idealistic. Its characters struggle through hardships in life but manage to find each other and bond over their struggles, and on top of that, overcome them with the use of other-worldly powers that do not exist in the real world, in a way that involves a lot of perfect circumstances. In reality, a person experiencing struggles similar to the Phantom Thieves may simply wish they could perfectly find such friends, and of course, have such powers to be able to fight back. I am well aware of the large number of people who still managed to find Persona 5 to be greatly inspiring, who were driven by it to fight back against their oppressors or rise up against their struggles, and I do not mean to take that away from the game - but rather, to point out how it’s sequel managed to use this point to tell a new story that enriches and improves the one that succeeded it immensely.
Now, as I’ve previously stated, the villains, jail monarchs in this case, lie at the center of my point. And that is because, to me, they are twisted and un-idealistic versions of the Phantom Thieves - versions of these characters that went through similar struggles to the Phantom Thieves but lacked the special powers, or even the supportive group, that they had to climb their way out - instead, spiraling downwards more and more, until, when they were given their own powers, they were too far gone, as the harsh reality we live in pushed them down a dark path of seeking power, fame, and control, to make up for what they lacked in the past. And it is these villains that show the PTs that not all people who do bad things are pure evil - and that leads them on a path to help them. In P5R, the PTs faced their oppressors and made them pay. In P5S, they face other oppressed, and help them recover.
This links to another point I wanted to make. the PTs’ arcs in the original game were already complete - they learned valuable lessons, fought against hardships, and came out of the adventure as more complete people. Creating a sequel with such complete characters is difficult, but Strikers found the perfect solution - because in this game, they’re passing the torch forward. The Jail Monarchs are people who had the potential to be Phantom Thieves themselves but not the circumstances the group was in to actually do so, which leads to the group passing on those very lessons they previously learned in the hope that they can inspire more people to fight back as they did. And I believe a major reason why this works is the way they change the monarchs’ hearts - with words. These people are not pure evil, they’re real people with depth, and this game shows that you don’t need magical powers to fix a broken person. With each jail, we see a different PT sympathize with its ruler and inspire it to fight back the same way they did. Just as Ann told off Kamoshida and set herself on her own path, she sees in Alice someone who wanted to bring happiness to people as she does and shows to her that she still can. And so follow Yusuke, and Haru. They’re passing the torch, making the whole world better, even those that weren’t as lucky as they were, as it is their obligation to share their luck with others.
But following those jails, the rest bring this point even more depth. Akane’s arc brings an interesting subversion when it shows Akane’s own idealization of the PTs as perfect heroes only to disprove this fact by showing her the very flaws that make even them human too - both when they meet her in reality and in the metaverse. It is an excellent new perspective to show in a story all about the impact of the PTs on other people and their connection to people less lucky than them. Ichinose too is a case of a person broken by the coldness of her surroundings who simply needed someone to confide in but blamed her loneliness on the whole world, but the PTs just needed to reach out and offer her a helping hand. But my favorite villain in the game has to be Konoe. A character that perfectly embodies the other villains in one: an Anti Phantom Thief. Konoe, just like the PTs, was wronged by society and sought to take matters into his own hands and fix the world himself. But he went too far and got mad with power, was twisted by his own past, and lacked companions to set him right, veering further and further from reason - and as similar he is to the PTs, everything they learned thus far is put to the ultimate test as they prove to him what makes them different - the way they make people better by letting them be themselves.
And they later prove this point by sending their final calling card in the entire duology - a calling card… to everyone. All residents of Japan. But I believe there’s more to this one. This calling card is addressed not only to the fictional residents of digital Japan, but to you as well, the player. As they say, they’re gonna change YOUR heart. They teach you that everything they went through wasn’t because they were lucky or because they stumbled upon a perfect group unrealistically or because they had superpowers - it’s because they had the courage to stand up to their oppressors and to the world itself, and you can too. They wanted to encompass everything that’s happened in the rest of the game - every word they’ve said to Alice, to Natsume, to Mariko, to Akane, to Konoe, to Ichinose- just as they inspired them to be better and rise to the challenge even without magic, they hope those words reach you too. And that’s how the people of Japan no longer let EMMA make their choices for them, and how you shouldn’t let anyone make choices for you, either. This is the true POINT of Persona 5 Strikers.
But it’s far from the only important quality of this excellent narrative. As I’ve established, the PTs, despite being such complete characters previously, are expanded in great ways here. An important way in which this is done is by giving multiple of them another arc focused on them where they get to shine - and likely the most necessary of these is Haru, as a common complaint for the original game is a lack of screentime for her, which I believe the Sapporo arc perfectly addresses, allowing her to shine and show the strongest aspects of her character. And on top of that, the group bonds in this game more than ever before. Another common complaint with the first game is that the PTs didn’t feel quite like a friend group and often more like colleagues, and I found Strikers gave me all the moments I needed to change this, bonding the group together in a beautifully charming summer vacation that got me to connect with them more than ever before. I’ll add that this is also helped by the game’s larger focus on humor, which worked well for me as I laughed at a lot of the jokes.
But there is one last aspect I have to bring attention to. This story manages to succeed its predecessor so excellently not just thanks to what it does with its old characters, but thanks to the new ones it introduces as well. Not just the new villains, but the new heroes too. Strikers introduces 2 new Phantom Thieves - and they’re both in my own top 3 best members of the whole group, a fact that I believe came from their high prominence in the story - the inclusion of only 2 new members in the whole game allowed for a far greater amount of focus to be put on the stories of each one, and it shows.
Zenkichi Hasegawa was an incredibly deep character who provided a unique take on what a Phantom Thief could be and bonded with the group very well. The use of an adult as a member was a pretty big spin and I believe it really paid off. Zenkichi remained a highlight of the game for its entire run - his arc, bonding with the PTs throughout the game and learning to become one of them was beautiful, the tension surrounding his true alignment was suspenseful, his energy and personality were very entertaining, and I always enjoyed seeing him on screen. But the chapter he got to shine in the most was Akane’s jail - I had intentionally held off on discussing this arc as Zenkichi was its star. A Jail ruled by a daughter in which the father awakens to his own Persona. It highlighted his struggle to be a good father, to fulfill his duties in the police… and to be something. For once, it is the father who wishes his daughter was truly proud of him, because maybe, if she was, he could be proud of himself. Only to learn that the distance between him and his daughter was also caused by his very obsession with being good enough. His growth was absolutely captivating, and he was a worthy addition to the team.
Sophia, meanwhile, absolutely shocked me with her depth by the end. What originally seemed like yet another cute mascot turned out to be so much more. I’m definitely a fan of Morgana myself but he’s still my least favorite PT while Sophia is among my favorites. And it all lies in her story. While the game begins by making her seem like a simple cute character to assist the team and help them find their way, as it goes on, her true mission is revealed to you - understanding the human heart. And this story is more than an individual arc, as I believe it also ties into the game’s entire theme - everything she knows by the end, she learns from the PTs. Their own experiences help shape her own perception of the world. The lessons they learned, the values they stand by, and the people they choose to be every day stand as an example of what it means to be human in front of Shophia’s eyes every day. She always has questions to ask, and she always gets an answer, but never a perfect one, showing her how complicated being a human really is. And she gets to truly shine in another jail I skimped over - the final jail, in which Ichinose has a starring role. Ichinose stands to represent the depths a person can sink into when they’re alone. A woman in need of companionship, of the same kind the PTs all have - a woman who needs their help more than anybody else. But it is not the PTs that convince her of this - but rather, it’s Sophia. Ichinose’s very own creation. Born to be her companion, originally failing at this task, it is here that she shows her understanding of everything that the Phantom Thieves are, everything they represent - when she is now able to fulfill her original function, to be humanity’s companion, and offers Ichinose a helping hand. A perfect cap off to this group and their connections to each other, all encompassed in a single character, sent off by the end to help more people see the same light as the PTs - as showing people that light is their true calling.
And all of that was almost entirely about the characters. I can also bring attention to the absolutely gripping plot - the game managed to hold me in so many ways. The jails being artificial brings constant mystery to the question of who created them, fueled consistently by our small glimpses of their effects, the intervention of Maddice, and especially the exciting Okinawa jail. The question of Zenkichi’s trustworthiness is another one you almost never stop asking yourself, all until Akane’s jail fully shows you what side he’s on. The use of a fakeout villain making you shrug at “yet another corrupt politician” only for him to be quickly discarded by the real puppetmaster, a dark PT mirror pretending to be Iron Man, was a genius play, and the final jail with Ichinose’s true plan at the end felt like a perfect climax and had me at the edge of my seat. This part is less organized because talking about drama and mystery isn’t quite as deep, I just want to give the game credit for tying it all together into such a gripping storyline.
From its complex themes that tie into and enrich the original story, to the excellent ways in which it expands upon existing characters, to it’s brilliant new characters that are among my favorites in the saga, along with great group dynamics, funny humor, thrilling twists, and a sense of adventure, Persona 5 Strikers’ story kept me captivated for it’s entire runtime. This, along with gameplay that, while not as special as the original, was quite fun to me in and of itself, many elements tying the package together into a true Persona experience, and an even better OST than it’s predecessor, made for one of my all-time favorite video games, yet another unforgettable experience in this world. And I hope I helped some others see what I see in this masterpiece.
The game’s core gameplay revolves around a shockingly accurate replication of the Persona 5 gameplay loop that I wouldn’t expect a game with a spin-off budget to be able to pull off. It bounces you back between 2 halves:
In the real world, you can explore different cities. The framing device of a road trip allowed for a lot of different distinct locations around Japan to be visited, which affords the game a lot of variety and supplies some excellent world-building. These locations have places to explore, shops to visit, and events to encounter. The game has the Phantom Thieves engage in plenty of fun friendly activities, showing you their bond growing even better than the original game did. While the game’s quest system offers various quests with mini storylines revolving around your various friends, managing to somewhat replicate Persona’s social link system, which is downright impressive.
And within the metaverse, the new jails are as fun and interesting as the palaces ever were, not losing a hint of the scale and feel. Each of these places have large areas to explore, puzzles to solve, actiony setpieces, platforming sections, entertaining story moments, important build-up to their ruler and their past, and of course - the combat system. I was personally a very big fan of the combat, as I found the action m mechanics fused with Personas to mesh delightfully well, making for a fast, challenging, and engaging system. In fact, I found it often surpassed the original turn-based system, as combat was one of P5R’s most flawed components, while it never stopped being fun here.
Every other aspect of the game is full of quality - the graphics and presentation are absolutely full of the Persona 5 style, character-building and management is quite deep and every character’s playstyle is distinct, side quests, cooking mechanics, and other side activities keep the game fresh - and the OST deserves a big mention, as I downright found it to be BETTER than Royal’s - similarly amazing new battle themes and great remixes of old ones, city themes that had me waiting at every new city just to hear them, and multiple of my absolute top songs from the saga, with Counterstrike in particular standing as my absolute favorite.
But all of this was just build-up. As what makes Persona 5 Strikers truly special - is the narrative. A sequel that feels not just warranted, but necessary. My all time favorite sequel story. And the rest of this review will be a full dissection of it.
I will begin by dissecting the core of the story, the primary theme that drives it, and sits at the center of what makes it work so well.
One complaint I’ve seen held against Strikers’ narrative is that it feels like the same thing again - a point I greatly disagree with. The reasoning for that fact is rooted in a major contrasting element between the 2 games: their villains. As good of a story as Persona 5 is, its story can be seen as rather idealistic. Its characters struggle through hardships in life but manage to find each other and bond over their struggles, and on top of that, overcome them with the use of other-worldly powers that do not exist in the real world, in a way that involves a lot of perfect circumstances. In reality, a person experiencing struggles similar to the Phantom Thieves may simply wish they could perfectly find such friends, and of course, have such powers to be able to fight back. I am well aware of the large number of people who still managed to find Persona 5 to be greatly inspiring, who were driven by it to fight back against their oppressors or rise up against their struggles, and I do not mean to take that away from the game - but rather, to point out how it’s sequel managed to use this point to tell a new story that enriches and improves the one that succeeded it immensely.
Now, as I’ve previously stated, the villains, jail monarchs in this case, lie at the center of my point. And that is because, to me, they are twisted and un-idealistic versions of the Phantom Thieves - versions of these characters that went through similar struggles to the Phantom Thieves but lacked the special powers, or even the supportive group, that they had to climb their way out - instead, spiraling downwards more and more, until, when they were given their own powers, they were too far gone, as the harsh reality we live in pushed them down a dark path of seeking power, fame, and control, to make up for what they lacked in the past. And it is these villains that show the PTs that not all people who do bad things are pure evil - and that leads them on a path to help them. In P5R, the PTs faced their oppressors and made them pay. In P5S, they face other oppressed, and help them recover.
This links to another point I wanted to make. the PTs’ arcs in the original game were already complete - they learned valuable lessons, fought against hardships, and came out of the adventure as more complete people. Creating a sequel with such complete characters is difficult, but Strikers found the perfect solution - because in this game, they’re passing the torch forward. The Jail Monarchs are people who had the potential to be Phantom Thieves themselves but not the circumstances the group was in to actually do so, which leads to the group passing on those very lessons they previously learned in the hope that they can inspire more people to fight back as they did. And I believe a major reason why this works is the way they change the monarchs’ hearts - with words. These people are not pure evil, they’re real people with depth, and this game shows that you don’t need magical powers to fix a broken person. With each jail, we see a different PT sympathize with its ruler and inspire it to fight back the same way they did. Just as Ann told off Kamoshida and set herself on her own path, she sees in Alice someone who wanted to bring happiness to people as she does and shows to her that she still can. And so follow Yusuke, and Haru. They’re passing the torch, making the whole world better, even those that weren’t as lucky as they were, as it is their obligation to share their luck with others.
But following those jails, the rest bring this point even more depth. Akane’s arc brings an interesting subversion when it shows Akane’s own idealization of the PTs as perfect heroes only to disprove this fact by showing her the very flaws that make even them human too - both when they meet her in reality and in the metaverse. It is an excellent new perspective to show in a story all about the impact of the PTs on other people and their connection to people less lucky than them. Ichinose too is a case of a person broken by the coldness of her surroundings who simply needed someone to confide in but blamed her loneliness on the whole world, but the PTs just needed to reach out and offer her a helping hand. But my favorite villain in the game has to be Konoe. A character that perfectly embodies the other villains in one: an Anti Phantom Thief. Konoe, just like the PTs, was wronged by society and sought to take matters into his own hands and fix the world himself. But he went too far and got mad with power, was twisted by his own past, and lacked companions to set him right, veering further and further from reason - and as similar he is to the PTs, everything they learned thus far is put to the ultimate test as they prove to him what makes them different - the way they make people better by letting them be themselves.
And they later prove this point by sending their final calling card in the entire duology - a calling card… to everyone. All residents of Japan. But I believe there’s more to this one. This calling card is addressed not only to the fictional residents of digital Japan, but to you as well, the player. As they say, they’re gonna change YOUR heart. They teach you that everything they went through wasn’t because they were lucky or because they stumbled upon a perfect group unrealistically or because they had superpowers - it’s because they had the courage to stand up to their oppressors and to the world itself, and you can too. They wanted to encompass everything that’s happened in the rest of the game - every word they’ve said to Alice, to Natsume, to Mariko, to Akane, to Konoe, to Ichinose- just as they inspired them to be better and rise to the challenge even without magic, they hope those words reach you too. And that’s how the people of Japan no longer let EMMA make their choices for them, and how you shouldn’t let anyone make choices for you, either. This is the true POINT of Persona 5 Strikers.
But it’s far from the only important quality of this excellent narrative. As I’ve established, the PTs, despite being such complete characters previously, are expanded in great ways here. An important way in which this is done is by giving multiple of them another arc focused on them where they get to shine - and likely the most necessary of these is Haru, as a common complaint for the original game is a lack of screentime for her, which I believe the Sapporo arc perfectly addresses, allowing her to shine and show the strongest aspects of her character. And on top of that, the group bonds in this game more than ever before. Another common complaint with the first game is that the PTs didn’t feel quite like a friend group and often more like colleagues, and I found Strikers gave me all the moments I needed to change this, bonding the group together in a beautifully charming summer vacation that got me to connect with them more than ever before. I’ll add that this is also helped by the game’s larger focus on humor, which worked well for me as I laughed at a lot of the jokes.
But there is one last aspect I have to bring attention to. This story manages to succeed its predecessor so excellently not just thanks to what it does with its old characters, but thanks to the new ones it introduces as well. Not just the new villains, but the new heroes too. Strikers introduces 2 new Phantom Thieves - and they’re both in my own top 3 best members of the whole group, a fact that I believe came from their high prominence in the story - the inclusion of only 2 new members in the whole game allowed for a far greater amount of focus to be put on the stories of each one, and it shows.
Zenkichi Hasegawa was an incredibly deep character who provided a unique take on what a Phantom Thief could be and bonded with the group very well. The use of an adult as a member was a pretty big spin and I believe it really paid off. Zenkichi remained a highlight of the game for its entire run - his arc, bonding with the PTs throughout the game and learning to become one of them was beautiful, the tension surrounding his true alignment was suspenseful, his energy and personality were very entertaining, and I always enjoyed seeing him on screen. But the chapter he got to shine in the most was Akane’s jail - I had intentionally held off on discussing this arc as Zenkichi was its star. A Jail ruled by a daughter in which the father awakens to his own Persona. It highlighted his struggle to be a good father, to fulfill his duties in the police… and to be something. For once, it is the father who wishes his daughter was truly proud of him, because maybe, if she was, he could be proud of himself. Only to learn that the distance between him and his daughter was also caused by his very obsession with being good enough. His growth was absolutely captivating, and he was a worthy addition to the team.
Sophia, meanwhile, absolutely shocked me with her depth by the end. What originally seemed like yet another cute mascot turned out to be so much more. I’m definitely a fan of Morgana myself but he’s still my least favorite PT while Sophia is among my favorites. And it all lies in her story. While the game begins by making her seem like a simple cute character to assist the team and help them find their way, as it goes on, her true mission is revealed to you - understanding the human heart. And this story is more than an individual arc, as I believe it also ties into the game’s entire theme - everything she knows by the end, she learns from the PTs. Their own experiences help shape her own perception of the world. The lessons they learned, the values they stand by, and the people they choose to be every day stand as an example of what it means to be human in front of Shophia’s eyes every day. She always has questions to ask, and she always gets an answer, but never a perfect one, showing her how complicated being a human really is. And she gets to truly shine in another jail I skimped over - the final jail, in which Ichinose has a starring role. Ichinose stands to represent the depths a person can sink into when they’re alone. A woman in need of companionship, of the same kind the PTs all have - a woman who needs their help more than anybody else. But it is not the PTs that convince her of this - but rather, it’s Sophia. Ichinose’s very own creation. Born to be her companion, originally failing at this task, it is here that she shows her understanding of everything that the Phantom Thieves are, everything they represent - when she is now able to fulfill her original function, to be humanity’s companion, and offers Ichinose a helping hand. A perfect cap off to this group and their connections to each other, all encompassed in a single character, sent off by the end to help more people see the same light as the PTs - as showing people that light is their true calling.
And all of that was almost entirely about the characters. I can also bring attention to the absolutely gripping plot - the game managed to hold me in so many ways. The jails being artificial brings constant mystery to the question of who created them, fueled consistently by our small glimpses of their effects, the intervention of Maddice, and especially the exciting Okinawa jail. The question of Zenkichi’s trustworthiness is another one you almost never stop asking yourself, all until Akane’s jail fully shows you what side he’s on. The use of a fakeout villain making you shrug at “yet another corrupt politician” only for him to be quickly discarded by the real puppetmaster, a dark PT mirror pretending to be Iron Man, was a genius play, and the final jail with Ichinose’s true plan at the end felt like a perfect climax and had me at the edge of my seat. This part is less organized because talking about drama and mystery isn’t quite as deep, I just want to give the game credit for tying it all together into such a gripping storyline.
From its complex themes that tie into and enrich the original story, to the excellent ways in which it expands upon existing characters, to it’s brilliant new characters that are among my favorites in the saga, along with great group dynamics, funny humor, thrilling twists, and a sense of adventure, Persona 5 Strikers’ story kept me captivated for it’s entire runtime. This, along with gameplay that, while not as special as the original, was quite fun to me in and of itself, many elements tying the package together into a true Persona experience, and an even better OST than it’s predecessor, made for one of my all-time favorite video games, yet another unforgettable experience in this world. And I hope I helped some others see what I see in this masterpiece.