There’s always a reason, always some justification for why they are the way they are. ‘Bad people are bad’ could do with a little bit more exploration, but Persona 5 Strikers flips the script too much, and it feels like the villains don’t get what they deserve. They’re not bad people, they just made some bad choices, and once they see that, they can be good people again. Strikers inverts that, and instead of defeating your foes, you’re helping them. It lacks some nuance in places, sure, but it never tries to convince us that the teacher grooming his high school students or the sleazy mobster are good people having a bad day. The Phantom Thieves often have a personal stake in taking them down, and they are positioned as bad people - living embodiments of one of the seven deadly sins. In Persona 5 however, these bosses are treated as villains. I’m talking specifically about Strikers here, rather than Persona 5 itself, even though both games have a similar rhythm. Related: Joker In Persona 5 Is An Idiot Please Treat Him Like One The repetitive structure of the game means you see a lot of confessions, but consequences are harder to come by. Back in the real world - these battles all take place in an alternate reality known as the Metaverse - the monarch has no memory of what has happened, but does have a change of heart, reverses their ways, and makes a full confession.

Once you have defeated each monarch, they fall to their knees and confess their sins with real remorse. I want to give Persona 5 Strikers the benefit of the doubt and push it forward as a complex game that takes apart difficult themes in simple, accessible ways, but there’s one roadblock - Persona 5 Strikers is too quick to forgive.

But friendship and especially forgiveness are not such simple themes as they may first appear, each jail’s design is not merely aesthetic but metaphorical, and on the gameplay front the game’s musou mechanics can be as complicated as you make them once you combine them with personas.

It explores the ideas of friendship and forgiveness against the straightforward backdrop of a road trip, and asks you to complete a series of repeated tasks - investigate an area, explore a jail, defeat a mini boss, defeat the actual boss (a monarch), move on. It’s difficult to determine whether Persona 5 Strikers is a complex game built around simple themes, or a simple game built around complex themes.

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