 Persona 5 Strikers is really, really good. In fact, it is absolutely the game that I personally needed right now in 2021, which is why you have to tolerate me yammering at you for five minutes instead of Brett and Stripe's more soothing voice. A quick bit of context for historical purposes. It is currently March 2021. It has been one full year since I last saw my friends and many of my family members. I could really use a holiday. I don't care if I hit the beach, enjoy a nice city break, I just need to get out of the house for a change of scenery. I'm also, because of reasons, probably not going to get a vacation any time soon. A few years ago I reviewed, if that's the right word, Persona Q2, new cinema labyrinth. I said that it is a phenomenal, well written game that most 3DS owners should nevertheless avoid, unless they have a couple of spare months to do all their homework by playing the last ten years of Persona games. The 2020 commenters pointed out that they genuinely did have a couple of spare months, so more full me, I suppose. Persona 5 Strikers is a direct sequel to the original Persona 5, which at the time of writing is still locked on PlayStation platforms, even as Strikers is released on PC and Nintendo Switch. If you go into this game blind, you're not going to know who all of the characters are. You're going to get a few minor spoilers for Persona 5, and it's going to take you a while to catch up. That said, I actually think it kind of might be worth it anyway, because Persona 5 Strikers offer something that even the original Persona 5 doesn't give right now. Catharsis. Freedom. Persona 5's primary message is that society is a prison, and that breaking the rules to enact social justice can free you from bondage. Yet right now, Persona 5 Strikers offers the freedom that I crave more than ever. Why? Because it is literally a game about going on vacation with all your friends. Right from the moment I first turned on the game, I couldn't help but smile. Just grin, ear to ear. The story starts with the protagonist, Joker, the Smash Bros. guy, not Joaquin Phoenix, returning to his old school friends for the first time in several months. It's wonderful. Because Persona 5, all of the Persona games for that matter, are so well written, these characters feel like genuine, real people. Actual friends. We've made videos before on how the social simulator side of Persona works. By night you play Pokemon, capturing monsters and fighting in turn based battles. By day, it's a time management social sim. You decide whether to work your part time job, study in the library, or hang out with your friends. As you spend time with people, you develop bonds with them, which helps you in battles, but you also get the joy of seeing their character growth, of learning about them and enjoying their company. So for Persona 5 to give me the chance to hang out with my old friends again? That's incredibly satisfying right now. Friends cracking jokes and teasing each other, there's a lot of playful banter we hear about what everyone's been up to since we last met. It's just beautiful. It's also, as you might have noticed, probably a little impenetrable if you haven't played the previous Persona 5. For me, getting the gang back together is a vicarious joy, because I can kind of sort of pretend that these digital friends are my actual friends in the real world who I miss. If you're coming to this new, it's going to feel a lot like you're hanging out with a group of friends who all know each other really well, and all already have their own in-jokes. It might take a while to learn everyone's names and get a sense of their personalities and backstories. Even so, I feel like this is worth doing, because after spending some time hanging out in Shibuya in the environments from the first game, the road trip begins. As much fun as I might have had visiting my old haunts from across Tokyo, I've been having perhaps even more fun with the rest of the game's content. Going on vacation with my friends, visiting local landmarks, seeing new cities, blowing all my money on cheap souvenirs and tasty local delicacies, it's so much fun even if I'm just pretending. When we got to our first proper stop on the vacation, a brand new city I'd never seen before. Something in my brain just lit up for the first time in a long time. My wife, Breton Stripes, the usual voice for this channel, travels for work up and down the UK. My daughter and I often go with her, staying in hotels, wandering around cities, visiting museums and parks, and generally just soaking up the local atmosphere. I remember distinctly sitting in a soft play in the Legoland Discovery Center in Birmingham in January of 2020 and thinking that the days where my daughter and I get to go on these mini vacations are my absolute favourite part of life. And that was the last trip we got to go on. All of Mummy's in-person training got cancelled. We haven't been anywhere in a year now. So for me personally, as someone who's always connected strongly with the role-playing elements of the Persona games, Strikers feels tailor-made to help me muddle through at a very stressful time. It might be a make-believe holiday with make-believe friends, but that's the best I can hope for at this particular moment in time. Oh, also I did want to speak briefly about the other side of the game, the Pokemon gameplay. I like it a lot more than standard Persona games. Persona 5 is all turn-based RPG battling, which is fine, I guess, but to be honest I've done more than enough of that throughout my life already. Persona 5 Strikers on the other hand transplants many of the original games battle mechanics into an action RPG setting and I feel it works a lot better. I started this game having played quite a lot of Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity in recent months, and I expected that I'd be getting more of the same. Big open fields filled with monsters to slay, but Persona flavoured instead of coated in a Zelda glaze. This is not that game at all. Persona 5 Strikers is, perhaps understandably, a lot more like Persona 5 than Hyrule Warriors. Most of the combat involves smaller pockets of enemies rather than an entire army across a huge battlefield, which better suits the Persona 5 story of thieves sneaking into enemy strongholds and quietly dispatching the guards. Considering that the tutorial for Persona 5 runs for about 20 hours and the tutorial for Persona 5 Strikers takes maybe an hour tops, this is probably the more accessible game for newcomers, even with the previously established story. If you can play Persona 5 first I'd recommend doing so, but that game does take at least a hundred hours to beat. If you want something a little lighter, a little breezier, or if, like me, you're just desperate for a heartfelt reunion with your friends and a nice holiday away from home, you might well find the catharsis you're looking for with Persona 5 Strikers.