The Persona franchise has become one of my favorite gaming franchises. I avoided these games in the past, because I thought these games were nothing more than a visual novel. This franchise is developed and published by Atlus, who have also become one of my favorite developers and publishers.

So, you have game studios that develop a game franchise from scratch, and they obtain a large fan following due to the quality of the games that they’ve released over the years. But, you also have game studios that take an existing game franchise from another game studio, promising to deliver a refreshing new take on an existing successful system. Letting another game studio work on a franchise that they don’t own normally ends up in a complete shitshow, and the same applied to Persona 5 Strikers.

The Persona games are a turn based RPG series, where you have to collect Personas, which are demons, angels, mythological creatures & gods, that you’ll use to fight other Personas. Each of these Personas will have their own strengths and weaknesses, which is where a strategic element comes into play.

Persona 5 Strikers grabs that core concept, and replaces the turn based battle system with an extremely spammy button mashing game. Each character can still learn all the abilities, that you’re also able to learn from the other Persona games, but the way you use these abilities just becomes a nuisance. Using a spell costs a lot of mana, so the game basically punishes you for learning and using new abilities. The game basically wants you to use certain combos that are attached to basic abilities, which results in you spamming the same combos over and over again.

The story and new characters are also a mixed bag. All of it combined is supposed to give you this grand feeling, but the level design kinda counters the road tripping around Japan concept. I’m also not saying that the Persona 5 characters aren’t flawed, because they are, but if the Persona 5 characters are products that are being sold in a store, these new characters are the ones that you’ll find in the discount bin.

I don’t have this feeling often, but I really wanted this game to be over. The button mashing was just too much and challenging gameplay was basically just bosses with way too much health, so that every fight take way longer then needed. Nothing about this was enjoyable.

My overall opinion: 3/10