With Persona 5 Strikers, Atlus' role-playing game saga has also entered into a crossover with Koei's Warriors series. As with Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, Persona 5 Strikers also impresses with an incredibly stylish anime touch, in which everything from the effects and animations to the direction and outfits to the background music and menu design is perfectly coordinated - including splendidly embedded story sequences.
The plot takes place a few months after the events of Persona 5. The additions made in Persona 5 Royal are unfortunately not taken into account. So don't be surprised that Kasumi and others are simply missing. Ann, Ryuji, and Joker are still students at Shujin Academy, while Makoto and Haru have transferred to the college. But since the vacations have just begun, a meeting is immediately organized at Café Leblanc, where of course Futaba, Morgana, and Yusuke can't be missing.
While they are making vacation plans together, Futaba draws attention to a cell phone app called EMMA, whose voice-supported AI is supposed to set new standards and therefore seems made for further vacation planning. In addition, the installation of EMMA also elegantly adjusts settings on the game. After that, it's off to Shibuya for shopping, where Joker receives an EMMA invitation code from pop starlet Alice Hiiragi. After activating it, however, he suddenly finds himself together with Ryuji and Morgana in a parallel world of Shibuya populated by attack-minded shadows, which immediately brings back memories of their previous missions as phantom thieves.
The formerly turn-based battle system has of course been changed to real-time action in the course of the Warrior's cooperation. However, you don't run around slaughtering everything in your path like in other Musou titles. Instead, you stay true to the stealth approach of the original and rather scurry from cover to cover to launch acrobatic surprise attacks on stunned enemies at the right moment. If you botch the ambush, however, you have to take a beating yourself before you can defend yourself.
Conclusion
With Persona 5 Strikers, Atlus serves up a not-so-lush, but still very tasty Persona adventure in which the Phantom Thieves travel across all of Japan with new locations. Two personnel reinforcements also increase the number of playable characters to ten. New additions from Persona 5 Royal, however, are not included, and Strikers unfortunately only ties in with the original Persona 5 in terms of content. However, the staging as well as the level and enemy design are still great, and the hunt for new Personas and other improvements is incredibly motivating. Even the battle system, which has been converted to fast real-time action, doesn't simply give in to the typical Musou formula but shines with elementary interactions, tactical breaks, and extravagant environmental interactions, which ultimately makes it a rather atypical Warriors crossover, but perhaps that's exactly why it's so good!
