You’ll need to judge the situation once you reach the library sprinkled checkpoints if it’s worth leaving or not. SP, used for Persona skills, is very limited as well as the items that replenish it, so when someone runs out you need to either put them on the bench or leave the dungeon, resetting all enemies and everyone’s Showtime gauges. While you always have to have Joker in your party, it’s prudent to swap out your party members frequently or to fit certain situations. It’s exactly like having characters take turns, though with an explosive payoff in the end. Once this buff runs out, you can move on to the next party member to give them the same short benefit and so on. Every time you switch by pressing a button on the D-Pad, your newly controlled character’s Showtime meter increases more quickly for a few seconds. While you can have four characters in your party at once and the AI is very competent at controlling them, you’re incentivized to switch characters constantly through the Showtime meter. It’s striking (pun intended) how well Strikers takes the turn-based structure of P5 and turns it into an action game.
Instead of big battlefields, you explore large dungeons spotting shadows to get the drop on and start combat right then and there. Strikers plays less like a typical Warriors game and more like an action RPG. That holds true here to an extent, you battle tons of enemies at once and use the same Attack and Special combo chains, but that’s where the similarities end.
PERSONA 5 STRIKERS MULTIPLAYER SERIES
Much like Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Persona 5 Strikers is an adaptation of the Persona series into the tried and true Warriors/Muso formula. It’s not entirely necessary to play the over 100-hour JRPG epic to appreciate the emotional core and gameplay of Strikers, but fans will have a much greater appreciation of what this game does while those unfamiliar may be a little lost in the terminology and proper nouns. Persona 5 Strikers is a direct follow up to Persona 5 (not Royal, notably) and continues some of that game’s themes and plot lines. The police want to pin the blame on them, so Joker and friends will have to find the true culprit behind the change of heart incidents to clear their names and avoid jail time. The Phantom Thieves are back in business! After what they thought was a one-off incident in Shibuya, the gang embarks on a cross country road trip to discover why peoples’ hearts are suddenly changing and pockets of the Metaverse are manifesting in the form of Jails.