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Game Ramblings #133 – Persona 5 Strikers

More Info from Atlus

Persona 5 Ramblings

  • Genre: ARPG / Musou
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam

It’s always been fascinating to me how Omega Force has taken their Warriors gameplay and warped it into other series. Hyrule Warriors did a surprising job of integrating the Zelda items into the chaotic gameplay. Fire Emblem Warriors made great use of the weapon triangle to give advantages in combat. Dragon Quest Heroes and One Piece Warriors feel right at home within the source material of their series. However, Persona 5 Strikers may be the damndest of them all. It’s not just a musou conversion of P5. It straight up has the metagame feel of the JRPG, while still taking place within large scale musou fights. It’s an uncanny conversion that has resulted in a special sequel to what was already a pretty special source game, even if I had some complaints about boss balance in that one. Luckily, some choices were made to really smooth out the experience here, resulting in what is possibly an even better experience as a result.

There’s a certain rhythm to a JRPG experience that just doesn’t jive with what I typically think of with the Warriors gameplay. Those are large battles where you’re running around taking over smaller zones on a larger battlefield. That also wouldn’t jive with the Persona series expectations. Luckily the team seems to have recognized that. Up until you’re actually in a fight, this feels like Persona. The terminology may have changed a bit, but this game’s palaces – now called jails – have the same setup that we already saw. You spend some time exploring the jail, hit some key locations to move the plot of it along, get to the point where you send out a calling card, and then fight the boss of the jail. It’s instantly familiar and easy to fall into, right up until you actually start a fight.

Combat is where the musou influences come into play, and boy is it as fun as ever to be in large scale fights. Trash fights will be anywhere from a handful to dozens of enemies, typically scaling based on how difficult the things you’re fighting are. However, even here it feels familiar. Personas still come hugely into play, as the elemental weaknesses from the previous game are still present. All-Out attacks are there, but they’re instead triggered via stunning enemies with attacks of types matching their weaknesses. Showtimes have returned from 5 Royal, but are now based on charging them up via damage and kills. Gearing and items are also both there in a very JRPG fashion. Basically, all the pieces are there, but now taking place against a ton of enemies in real time.

The real thing that surprised me is how all of those mechanics mesh well within the context of the new combat. The combat is fast and frenetic, but not overwhelming. I spent a lot of time dodging around as a default instinct, helped along by really good enemy targeters giving you a clear indication of when you should be dodging attacks instead of focusing on damage. Magic attacks with your Personas pause the combat, giving you a bit of time to strategize around hitting enemy weaknesses. All-out attacks do a short pause and ping the enemy that can be hit with it, giving you a clear indication that you should be shifting focus. It’s all fast and fluid, but very clear in terms of what’s going on. For a musou title, that’s actually kind of surprising, since they can often be large periods of mindless spam, where the strategy is at a metagame level instead of the actual combat.

It’s also kind of surprising how well this scales down to battles of one. Boss fights are largely one vs the party, and it just kind of works. The bosses have bigger mechanical pieces and a much larger chance to nuke the party if you aren’t paying attention, but it feels fair. Boss nuke mechanics can be interrupted by hitting their weakness, which encourages a pretty diverse Persona squad. However, the boss locations also typically have environmental pieces that can attack those weaknesses as well. I had problems with Persona 5’s bosses, where it often felt like a pattern of die once, figure out the weakness, then easily win. Here, the bosses uniformly felt tough but fair. Going into a fight without the right Persona made the fights significantly harder, but I could still win. Going into a fight without SP generating items meant that I would want to preserve SP for healing, but I could still win. As long as I was committed to dodging mechanics I would get through it based on skill, and not need to cheese the fights.

This is also kind of a hot take but they got rid of the time limiting calendar mechanic and I couldn’t be happier. I get that limiting your activities and forcing you to focus on some subset of things is kind of a Persona standard at this point, but I’ve never been a fan of it. In general I don’t like time gating mechanics, as it feels like an unnecessary forced stress point on players. P5S only has the calendar for story purposes. You can jump in and out of dungeons as much as you want and the calendar won’t move forward. It feels like a best of both worlds. The calendar is there to act as a framing device for the plot, but it’s no longer there to be a limiter on the player.

I’m hoping to see something like this done for future mainline titles, even if it just means that you get a little more freedom to do multiple things within a phase of a day in a future P6. Want to talk to multiple people in an afternoon because they all go to your school and why the hell couldn’t you do that? Yes please. Taking a Persona 5 example, want to do make some progress in a palace then switch over to Mementos because the palace is too high leveled for your current party? Sure why the hell not? Don’t waste an entire day because you were going into the unknown. It feels like there’s options for them to make the calendar less punishing without losing the heart of the series, and I hope that the mechanic being entirely gone in a spinoff allows them the ability to rethink what they want with the mechanic.

This is both a sequel and a spinoff, and it works well in both cases. As a sequel to Persona 5, we get a fun story that makes sense in-world and gives more time with a set of characters that I really enjoy watching. As a spinoff it gives an entirely different type of gameplay, while still feeling familiar in its inclusion of specific mechanics from the previous title. As a Warriors game, it also shows some of the largest range in terms of pulling two series together. It’s just a fantastically well made experience that I can’t recommend enough.

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Game Ramblings #120 – 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

More Info from Atlus

  • Genre: RTS
  • Platform: PS4

I know it’s weird that a game by Vanillaware is a strategy instead of a side scrolling action-focused combat game. However, it oddly works really well. This one combines Vanillaware’s history of good writing and branching narrative, their very distinct art style, and an RTS combat system that combines fast action with some clever tricks straight out of JRPG combat systems into a game that is definitely niche, but something worth exploring.

The first thing to really understand is that 13 Sentinels is to some extent two separate games. Narratively speaking, there’s an entire visual novel section that goes into the back stories of the title’s 13 sentinels and how the characters all came to be together. The RTS section of the game takes place largely after the game’s core narrative, serving as a way to finish the story. While that may sound confusing, narratively it works really well.

Part of why this all works is that in order for the combat to start, things before it have to be explained, and boy do they get explained in great detail. Each of the 13 main characters has their own back story that you work through in a branching fashion. Completing branches gives some back story, but also starts to unlock the stories of other characters. You then end up revisiting a lot of these story points with the other character, seeing how they got there and where they go from there.

For a story that should have been so confusing, it ends up working in a way that somehow didn’t lose me. Reinforcing a plot point from a different point of view really reinforces remembering the core plot. It also effectively fills in information gaps throughout. The way that you jump between characters and different plot branches then ultimately ends up dropping breadcrumbs in a way that gives you enough information to infer some plot points ahead of time, but not enough to avoid some of the big surprises from catching you off guard.

This is all helped by the fact that I wanted to know more about the plot of the game. If I didn’t care about the plot, I definitely would have been lost. However, this one really hit a sci-fi slice that I really find enjoyable. Without giving away too much, you’ve got giant hilarious mecha, you’ve got time travel paradoxes, you’ve got androids and future weapons, you’ve got self-replicating robotic enemies. It’s just such a core of things that I find enjoyable that it was easy to continue to hit the button to start the next story segment and just lose track of time. Ultimately this is Vanillaware’s narrative sense working at full capacity in a way that works far better than it should.

This is all backed by the visual style that Vanillaware is known for. It’s still got a gorgeous hand-painted aesthetic with fluid animation that just continues to work so well. If you’re played Muramasa, Odin Sphere, or Dragon’s Crown, you’re familiar with it. If not, well, there’s three more games I highly recommend…

The other half of the game is all about combat. Technically speaking, it is part of the narrative, but the connections to the story really don’t start to make sense until closer to the end. Luckily, the combat is fun in a way that allowed me to get to the end, and then some.

Good RTS games outside of PC are such a rarity, and a lot of that has always come down to odd control schemes compared to your normal PC keyboard/mouse setup. Games like Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings have worked by replicating that control setup on a touch screen. However, 13 Sentinels goes in a different direction, and is helped along by three main things.

The first real benefit is that control is down to single units. You aren’t trying to group select a bunch of things and move them around all at once. You move one unit, you attack with one unit, you use an ability on one unit. It reduces a point of complexity down to individual decisions that allow you to quickly hop around with cycling on the d-pad, rather than having to drag select a bunch of stuff.

The second is that attacks are not point and click, at least not in the traditional sense. Every unit attack or ability has some sort of AOE capability. Basic attacks may just be first-target or narrow cones. More costly abilities things may be circular AOE or long range line attacks. However, they all originate either from the unit itself and can be set by just pressing a direction on the joystick, or they originate from a specific location in which case you’re just dragging a targeter around on screen. It’s all incredibly effective, but also incredibly intuitive to just drop into. You start an attack, you move it with left stick, and you confirm. No fuss, no fighting controls. Your focus stays on the result of the attack.

However, the third thing is probably the most impactful. While this is technically an RTS, the combat system pulls some features from ATB-style JRPGs. Namely, it brings in meter charge to start a turn, and it brings in combat pausing when it’s a unit’s turn. These two add a nice sense of control the the combat pace which plays well with the general limitations of the platform. What this ends up meaning is that the game can also throw hundreds of enemy units at you without giving you a sense of being overwhelmed.

That said, the combat does have some rough points, particularly around overall balance as the game progresses. I got to a point probably around the 60-70% point where I’d upgraded a bunch of units that can spawn turrets, and it was basically an unbeatable strategy. ALWAYS have four turret guys, then add in two random units, and I was basically going to win with some small amount of effort. As the screenshot above shows, the turrets will shoot all over the place and hit everything, and when upgraded with more range and damage they got kind of ridiculous.

It didn’t ruin my sense of enjoyment of the game, and there’s definitely something to be said about trying out different strategies just for the hell of it, but if you’re a one-and-done clearing type, there’s distinctly optimal crews to use.

All that being said, this was a hugely enjoyable game. It hit a sci-fi plot that really worked well with me. It had the Vanillaware touches that I’ve always loved in their past titles. It had a unique RTS combat system that blended in some JRPG mechanics with some clever choices around console limitations. In general, it all worked in a way that surprised me, even given the studio’s storied history.

Is it niche? Yep, it sure is. Is it worth playing anyway? Also yes.