YMMV / Persona 5 Strikers

• Adorkable:
  • Sophia bounces adorably when praised, fails to see what's wrong when using crypto-currency to pay for a gold bar, and rolls up into a ball when first entering the Sapporo Jail.
  • Zenkichi Hasegawa of Public Security has earned a number of fans for his dorky attempts to look cool and fit in with his newfound teenager friends only to fall back into Totally Radical territory every single time, not to mention his comical reactions to all the supernatural hijinks he gets dragged into prior to his Persona awakening. It helps that he's also a genuinely sweet and good-natured man despite his shady exterior.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The boss of the Okinawa Jail. It's just a big Lock Keeper.
  • False Joker at the end of Akane's jail. The cutscene teases an entire team of fake Phantom Thieves, and everyone even decides to split up during the battle, presumably for each of them to face their own counterparts. However, only Joker's counterpart is fought, alone, in what is arguably a fairly tedious boss fight. The other fake Phantoms don't even show up afterwards in the post-battle cutscene.
  • The final boss, False God Demiurge. While the Sefirot spheres are definitely no cakewalk due to their tendency to flood the whole field with elemental magic and minions including the Okinawa Lock Keeper (which has high durability and has a tendency to be healed by Chesed's Mediarama), the Demiurge herself is among one of the slowest enemies in the game, with all of her Magic projectiles being telegraphed very heavily that you will actually need to try getting hit by them. The only danger that she can potentially pose is from the scepter strikes, which are very fast unlike her other attacks. Given the wider variety of elemental weaknesses the spheres have in addition to how easy the Demiurge is to evade, it's a perfectly valid strategy to send out every other party member to defeat the spheres and leave Joker alone to kill her; provided that he's been prepped enough with gear and abilities to survive a one-on-one battle, he can easily take the final phase of the fight all by himself.
• Anvilicious: The Persona 5 series doesn't hide the fact that there are several corrupt police officers on the force. Strikers shows that there are many truly altruistic officers like Zenkichi and Commissioner Kaburagi who exist, but they can be held back by the very same corruption that threatens the innocent and empowered their morally-bankrupt counterparts. Zenkichi wants to believe in justice and do the right thing, but is hampered by police policy and red tape, and in the past had his faith in the system steamrolled by Owada killing his wife and being blackmailed to back down. Commissioner Kaburagi is aware of her department's corruption and genuinely wants to redeem the police, until Owada and Konoe's brainwashed Commissioner General force her to arrest the Phantom Thieves on obviously false charges. She wearily goes along with it because she knows that disobeying direct orders will end very badly and believes the only way she can purge the corruption is by playing along until she has enough authority. It can be hard do the right thing when you are under pressure, especially when it involves law enforcement, threats for defying those in power and crises pertaining the supernatural.
• Awesome Art: One of the most warmly received aspects of Strikers other than the music is the game's menu interface, noted for being as stylish as it was in the original. The game's opening animation also drew a lot of praise and favorable comparison to Royal's, which in contrast was met with lukewarm reception for its choppy-looking animation.
• Awesome Music: The combination of Persona 5's stylish soundtrack with the Warriors series' style of rock would of course give this game enough great music that it has its own page for it.
• Base-Breaking Character: Depending on who you ask, the Final Boss EMMA/the Demiurge is either a lazy rehash of the Final Boss of the original Persona 5, or their origins, developments within the story and social commentary on AI and smartphone addiction are unique enough to set them apart.
• Best Boss Ever: Shadow Konoe is an epic two-phase fight, fitting for the game's Climax Boss. First you are up against his Humongous Mecha, which has a ton of impressive attacks that still give enough opportunities to dodge and counter, and you can climb to higher ground around the arena to hit him with railguns. Once the mech is destroyed, Akira The Hero himself proves to be even more capable in a fight without it, making it a no-holds-barred fight against one man in armor with a BFS. Both phases are also set to Awesome Music, the first to a rock remix of "Rivers in the Desert," and the second to an amazing new song, "Counterstrike." And finally, for many fans, the fact that he's weak to Ryuji's element makes it even better.
• Breather Boss: Nightmare Dragon Ango comes between Mad Rabbit Alice and Snow Empress Mariko, and is significantly less of a threat. His main gimmick is a self-buff attack that can be canceled (which also leaves him vulnerable, mind), most of his attacks are obviously telegraphed and don't come out as fast as Alice's, and the objects around his arena, the holy swords, are not only much more plentiful than those in Alice's and Mariko's fights, they're also renewable. It's justified by the story, as Ango is a Boisterous Weakling.
• Breather Level: The Okinawa and Kyoto Jails are this in comparison to the others that came before and after it, especially considering both of them are completed within the span of a single day and are very straightforward dungeons to crawl through. However, in the Kyoto Jail's case, this is set back because the stage boss is incredibly difficult.
• Broken Base: Due to being concurrently developed with Royal, Strikers ironically caused a debate amongst fans, professional reviewers, and even members of this wiki over the game’s continuity as a result. One camp argues that Strikers is canon to vanilla Persona 5, since the game never makes any references to the Third Semester, nor does it mention the absent characters such as Akechi, Yoshizawa, and Maruki. Another camp argues that the lack of references, and mentioning of the characters from the Third Semester, doesn't necessarily mean the events of Royal are non-canon. None of this is helped by the fact that some parts of the English localization, contains substantially different dialogue compared to the original Japanese script which seemingly implies that this games ties more to the continuity of Royal instead of vanilla Persona 5.^note  Notably in the Japanese dub, during the climax of the game Morgana mentions a palace fusing with reality occurred "Half a year ago," which matches Maruki’s palace that did fuse with reality. The English dub however, changes his dialogue to "Last year" presumably alluding to Yaldabaoth. Persona 5 Tactica, released a few years after Strikers, eventually more or less confirmed that Royal is the canon timeline, much to the joy to several players in the "Royal is canon" camp, and the irritation to several in the "Vanilla P5 is canon" camp.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • Once the new character Sophia was revealed, it was basically taken as a matter of course that the final boss would be the Demiurge.
  • Basically nobody would doubt for a second that Ichinose was the mastermind and traitor, since she basically slips up about her involvement with the EMMA-related Change of Heart incidents as soon as the second time you meet her. On top of that, the audience knows absolutely nothing about Ichinose, even after the Phantom Thieves were making their way back to Tokyo in the belief that they had succeeded in neutralizing and capturing the culprit behind the Change of Heart incidents. This is compounded by the fact that a similar plot twist was already used in the previous four games, and her having both a character portrait and a cut-in at all are major red flags because only plot-relevant characters usually get them. ^{Note — major spoilers from past games!}Ikutsuki/Ryoji from Persona 3, Adachi from Persona 4 and Nagi/Enlil from Persona Q2, who can all be exposed as antagonists despite featuring little or no involvement for most of the game because of them having portraits and the player knowing close to nothing about them before The Reveal.
• Catharsis Factor: Killing any of the Lock Keepers except the one in the Okinawa Jail is guaranteed to be this, considering the pathetic scum they represent, and how their actions caused the Jail Monarchs' tragic and crazed rise to power.
• Contested Sequel: While the game's UI and interfaces, music and gameplay have been widely praised for being of the same quality as the original game, a few elements are divisive among fans.
  • There are those that enjoy the Lighter and Softer tone, the sympathetic villains (as opposed to 5's lineup of Hate Sinks), and the focus on the character interactions between the Thieves. On the other hand, detractors of Strikers call its story "predictable" and too similar to the original Persona 5 but with motifs straight out from Royal, and the quality of the in-game graphics debatable (with the PS4 version of Strikers receiving the most scrutiny on this front). Other criticism is aimed towards the absence of several Royal characters notably Maruki, Sumire, and Akechi who are able to fight with Personas, especially because the latter two were members of the Phantom Thieves in Royal.^note Though considering Strikers was developed at the same time, the lack of more prominent elements from Royal makes complete sense.
  • Some fans view the lack of Persona characters from other games besides P5 as a wasted opportunity, since this game was originally planned to include them. Others don't mind the game's focus on just the characters from Persona 5.
• Continuity Lock-Out: The game doesn't re-introduce the members of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts to the audience (besides the brief scene of them introducing themselves to Sophia), meaning that someone who starts with this game first will have to make do with what the game shows them. It's not necessarily required to play the original game to understand what's going on in Strikers. However, this is mostly averted when it comes to players that stuck with vanilla Persona 5 without getting Royal. While Persona 5 Scramble contains some references that suggest Royal is the canon version which are noticeably absent from the Persona 5 Strikers Western localization, one can jump right in from the vanilla version without losing many important plot details. It's also worth pointing out that much of this was fueled by the fact that Strikers was released on the Switch alongside the PS4 back during its initial release in Japan, followed by a PC port when the game was later announced to release in the West alongside said platforms; both the original Persona 5 and Royal were still PlayStation exclusives at the time, and would not be ported to other consoles until well over a year after Strikers was launched internationally.
• Demonic Spiders: Crawlers in the 6th and 7th Jail are a pain both on the field and in battle. They're often positioned in places where it's hard to ambush them, and if they notice you you only have a few seconds to react before they leap into the air and crash down on you, triggering a disadvantaged encounter and ruining the Jail's "head to the target location" Thief's Challenge if it was active. In battle, they have a lot of health and no weaknesses, so there's no way to easily stunlock them or break their shields. They also have a variety of dangerous attacks, from a long range Macross Missile Massacre to a jumping shockwave, and often show up alongside tough regular Shadows like Ganesha and Sarasvati.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: It's hinted at several places that Ichinose killed her ability to feel most emotions. This, along with her Lack of Empathy, is an actual symptom of dissociative disorders.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final Jail, the Tree of Knowledge/Tokyo Radio Tower consists of a handful of extremely small, cramped floors without much exploration or fighting, and is visually uninteresting outside of the last room. (Being simply a series of mundane food courts overtaken by veins) It feels more like an extension of the preceding dungeon, or even a glorified Boss Corridor, than a dungeon in its own right.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • The display of the company logos in the first trailer is set to a backdrop with the signature colors of the past 4 (technically 5) mainline Persona games, fueling speculation that characters from those games (especially 3 and 4) may join the roster down the line, which was further spurred by the game's DLC featuring tracks from past games and their remake. This theory was Jossed when the game came out and a datamine confirmed there was nothing hinting at any sort of DLC beyond music tracks.
  • When the first trailer for the game was revealed, many fans noticed that Akechi and Kasumi were absent despite both being playable members of the Phantom Thieves and being prominent in advertising for the then-upcoming Persona 5 Royal, leading to confusion about whether the game followed after vanilla or Royal's story, with some speculating whether the two were being withheld for use as DLC characters or if they would even appear in the game at all. Like the above, these theories were Jossed as a datamine of both the demo and the full game failed to find any references to either of them in Japanese, and a hint towards the end of the game's Japanese version semi-implies that it uses the Royal continuity.
  • The identity of the mysterious red-haired girl Joker encounters in the reveal trailer for the game brings up several theories if you're familiar with Gnostic lore. Why? The name of our mystery red-head in this game is Sophia. As in, the true god who created the Demiurge aka Yaldabaoth. It turns out that she's a prototype AI for the EMMA app, and that the final incarnation of the app is run by an AI version of the Demiurge. Despite this, Sophia and the Demiurge are unrelated to Yaldabaoth from the previous game.
  • The surprise appearance of Shadow Joker, mainly due to his resemblance to Sho Minazuki. In the game itself, Shadow Joker is actually My Dear Joker, the boss of the Kyoto Jail and leader of the fake Phantom Thief copies created by Akane Hasegawa's Shadow. It's also drawn a lot more compared to its owner Akane.
  • The mysterious Persona shown near the end of the second trailer is shown to be possibly awakened by Zenkichi Hasegawa, a character initially presented as an antagonist to the Phantom Thieves. This was later confirmed to be the case in a later trailer, which also confirmed Zenkichi would be playable as the Metaverse user codenamed Wolf.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Upon his reveal, Akira Konoe was nicknamed Tony Stark or Kamen Rider Iron Man due to his close resemblance to Robert Downey Jr.. His English voice actor, George Ackles, even sounds like Robert Downey Junior when he talks.
  • Much like "Roger" for Makoto Yuki, fans also ironically consider "First Last" as Joker's Canon Name.^note Like with Persona 4 Golden, this game defaults to a preset name for the protagonist if the language is changed. In this case, however, instead of "Ren Amamiya" like in the 2022 port of Royal, the game defaults to "First Last", which becomes trolling material due to the annoyance it causes to fans.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Like the infamous Amagi Inn scene in Persona 4, many players like to believe that the Hot Springs Episode at Kyoto never happened due to the boys being unfairly punished over a misunderstanding and others viewing it as the girls (Makoto in particular) acting out of character. It helps that it's also something of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment lacking any important plot details^note thanks to Zenkichi, whose actions in taking their place under arrest are the only reason they weren't caught in a police ambush while recovering from the incident and which is never touched upon again afterwards.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: Due to the often-criticized absence of Akechi and Kasumi, it's a popular trend for fanfics based on Strikers to bring them along for the ride.
• Fanfic Fuel: The fact that Monarchs were popping up across the whole of Japan means it's possible that there are some who the Phantom Thieves never discovered, meaning some other Persona users such as the Shadow Operatives, Investigation Team, or an entirely new group had to deal with them.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Alice keeps calling "Joker" cool, and she takes an interest in him after she sees that he's the only man who isn't instantly charmed by her. When the Phantom Thieves manage to turn off the searchlights to her castle, she announces that she finally has something that she wants after seeing Joker make progress. Among most fans of Joker in Japan, they enjoy the ship; however, reactions are mixed in the West due their age difference, since she's an adult while he is still in high school.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Metaverse Medic Bond skill greatly boosts the potency of healing items for both HP and SP. As healing items in this game are noticeably much more limited in supply, maxing this skill out can drastically reduce the rate at which you burn through your items, making the game much more manageable.
  • Similarly, there's Ambusher and Oracle Recovery to help with healing in the event there's a shortage of items to use. Ambusher restores a bit of health every time an ambush is successfully pulled off, and at its max level can even bestow a full heal. Meanwhile, Oracle Recovery has Futaba provide smaller boosts to both HP and SP after winning a battle, which is even more of a lifesaver considering there are fewer ways to reliably restore SP this time around. While there are no time management penalties in returning to the real world for a full restore since the game doesn't adhere to the calendar system of traditional Persona games, these skills at the very least give players enough restoration options such that it would save them time.
  • Bondmaker increases the amount of Bond experience gained, and is one of the first skills available to buy when the system is first introduced. While its high point count makes getting to that point a long grind, prudent players can actually get it to level 2 before beating the Shibuya Jail. The increased gains from the perk make it far easier to then progress towards other Bond skills, and it'll be easier to notice when the party heads to Sendai and watch the Bond meter grow multiple times on their first day there before even entering the Jail.
  • Certain Persona skills can be performed as combo finishers by default or after unlocking the respective Master Art for the character in question. While it's slower to perform than just accessing it through the menus, the biggest trade-off is that they have no SP requirement, meaning that it's entirely possible to repeatedly put Shadows in a Cycle of Hurting by abusing their elemental weaknesses or performing healing/buffs/debuffs for free. For obvious reasons, given that he's the only member of the party who can wield more than one Persona, Joker benefits from this the most as he can spam his relatively safe and fast finishers to trigger any one of his diverse skills depending on the Persona he has equipped.
  • It's possible to grind out a Persona with 99 in every stat extraordinarily fast after unlocking stat-boosting options at the Velvet Room. When you spend Persona Points on stat boosts, these stat boosts become "accumulated power", and a portion of the stats granted via this method can be passed down to another Persona via Fusion. However, accumulated power doesn't decay by passing the stats down through chained Fusions. The fact that the cost to boost stats scales exponentially based on the base stats of the target Persona means that it is possible to induce a chain reaction of Fusions that gradually add more accumulated power to the mix by stat-boosting weak, low-level Persona and using it as a Fusion ingredient, then "looping" the recipes by fusing back to a weak Persona with the accumulated power intact. You can then pass down this accumulated power to virtually any Persona you want, allowing them to get max stats for minimal cost. The best part is that Fusion Accidents also adds a crapton of free accumulated power to the resulting Persona, and if you're particularly high-level, you can fuse away this Persona and get a crazy amount of free Persona Points in return while keeping the chain active. None benefit more from this than Arsene, who as detailed on the main page continues to learn high-level skills if he's still leveled up long after his stats produce diminishing returns; combining higher stats with skills like One-Shot Kill that he learns naturally can make him utterly terrifying.
  • You can completely trivialize SP costs during dungeon crawling by using Soul Thief in conjunction with some method of reliably inflicting status conditions to large groups of enemies. The ability to drain SP from enemies by inflicting status effects sounds like something you shouldn't get until very late in the game, but you can get it as early as level 5 by leveling Jack O' Lantern, and from there fuse it onto other personas as you progress. Just upgrade status effect rate in the Bonds menu and combine it with ailment boosters, and watch as you recover far more SP than you spent to cast the skill by throwing it into a crowd of enemies.
    • In general, status effects are more powerful in this game, particularly burn, freeze and shock on account of susceptibility to those being tied to resistances to their respective elements for all units, including the Reaper. Not only that, but unlike either version of the original game, weakness and Technical hits stack, allowing you to combine type boosters, Technical adept, ailment boosters and Knockdown style as well as the usual buffs, debuffs and Charge/Concentrate boosts to bury enemies in attacks that reliably do damage in the thousands, even in Merciless mode.
  • You can also trivialize SP costs by abusing the shop refresh system. Every few fights in the Jails will refresh their inventory. Simply dropping by the shops every time you hit a checkpoint and buying any SP restoration items as well as ingredients will, along with the recovery Bond Skill, give you more than enough SP items for the last half of the game. The money-dropping Bond Skill will give you more than enough funds for this.
  • It wouldn't be a Persona game if Yoshitsune wasn't overpowered. Hassou-Tobi is still the game's single best Physical Skill, and combined with Technical High, Technical Adept, Knockdown Style and the Burst Emblem accessory, you can inflict statuses on your foes then cast a Charged Hassou-Tobi to chop up their Down Gauges into ribbons in an instant.
  • Ryuji can hit as hard as, if not more than, other Persona users without actually even using his own Persona thanks to his high Attack stat and unique Immune to Flinching mechanic. You can charge his moves to build up more damage, and with some mild buffing and support, he can bash his way through just about all enemies save for those that null/absorb Zio or Physical skills, which are on the rarer side. Once more Bond skills are unlocked, such as increased physical skill damage, HP, Strength, etc, Ryuji can deal insanely high damage at end game, and practically just No-Sell everything except for attacks that target his weakness to Wind. Even his low magic stat can be bypassed by charging his Zio combo finisher, which will result in it dealing heavy lightning damage to a wide area.
  • The cooking item Churrasco, which applies a Heat Riser effect to the entire party. Instead of spending lots of SP and time applying Heat Riser to each of your party members one at a time (during which your enemies could potentially get an attack in), Churrasco means you can just instantly give Heat Riser to all of them at once. For free. It's also easy to make in the endgame, so just cook a bunch of Churrascos and you have all the instant setup you'd ever need for bosses in a singular meal. The only downside is that it doesn't last as long as a Heat Riser cast by your party, but given how easy it is to make you can simply just consume another one after the first effect runs out.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The names of the enemies that the EMMA-Demiurge summons during her boss fight are based on the 10 circles of the Sefirot. Their general attacking behavior is also somehow easy to guess by their meanings.
  • Natsume's resists and weaknesses are the same as a Dragon-type Pokémon. Pretty fitting for someone who plagiarises others' works.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: According to Taiwanese video game website GNN Gamer, Strikers sold so many copies in South Korea and Taiwan that it was in the top 5 games in their video game charts for a few weeks.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The "gunner" form of the basic security Shadows. They start appearing around the 3rd Jail, and their attacks don't do much damage, but they have an annoying tendency to interrupt combos with shots from afar. They like to keep their distance too, forcing you to go out of your way to take them out.
  • On Merciless, some basic Shadows that formerly resisted Physical and Gun now Null them, forcing you to either spend SP or use Persona skill combos to damage them. Slime is one example, and it appears as early as the 2nd Jail and in large groups.
• Goddamned Boss: While the Demiurge isn't particularly hard, they're easily the most tedious boss fight in the game, since it mostly consists of button-mashing against a wall-sized target while dodging heavily telegraphed attacks every now and then, made worse by the fact that they're a Damage-Sponge Boss. The only real challenge you're likely to have is dealing with the Sephirah sphere, and even then if you choose your teams carefully that will still come down to spamming elements to bring them down as quickly as possible. On Merciless, they can easily take an hour or more to beat, and you have to do the fight three times to fight the Reaper and get Joker's best weapon.
• He Really Can Act: Zenkichi's VA, Tom Taylorson, was mostly known as Octodad. However, he is able to balance both of Zenkichi's goofy moments with the emotional turmoil and resolve to atone for his sins.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Zenkichi is voiced by the same person who voices Octodad. This hilariously foreshadows Zenkichi's Papa Wolf.
  • The surnames of Persona traitors: Adachi, Akechi, Ichinose. Notice a pattern?
  • A fan-made crossover with Code Vein called Akane no Mai was originally planned to have a consolidated revised final draft with the same title as the series. Even before that, the early draft had Hifumi gaining a goddess form named Sophia that was written before the actual Sophia was introduced. Come January 27, 2020's announcements, Hasegawa was revealed to have a daughter named Akane. Of course, the fanfic author and his main contributor have confirmed plans to incorporate the events of Strikers (alongside Royal) in the revisions.
  • One of the lyrics to the song "Life Will Change" from the original Persona 5 is "I'm not a robot, I'm not an AI challenging you." In Strikers, one of your teammates is an AI... and then the AI lyric reference gets removed, because it's just not a robot or phantom... and it's in your face.
  • The pre-release trailers of Royal caused many people to speculate that Kasumi would be the instigator of the Third Term's contradictory events due to her "stealing dreams" in the trailer. While this was revealed to be false, the Big Bad Ensemble's goal in Strikers is to steal the dreams or "Desires" of people to create a utopia.
• Ho Yay:
  • On August 7, after clearing the second Jail, there's an optional hangout event with Futaba where she wants to take a photo of Yusuke at a samurai-themed photo standee in front of the temple. However, halfway through the shoot, she asks Joker to be in the standee of the princess, and Joker gets to comment that the princess and the samurai are husband and wife. Yusuke doesn't even act shocked or disturbed by the implication at all.
  • On August 8, Makoto becomes exhausted for driving 12 hours to Sapporo, so everyone quickly tries to get ways to let her relax. The only offer Makoto accepts is Ann's, who offers to give her a massage.
    • Later that day at the bath house, Futaba starts complimenting the other girls' boobs, while the guys awkwardly listen in silence. Afterwards, Joker can then say "Lookin' good, Ryuji."
  • When you cook the Miso Ramen recipe for the first time, Ryuji is blown away by the taste so much so that he asks Joker to make it for him every morning, at which point Futaba straight up asks if Ryuji is proposing to Joker. The dialogue ends there, without Ryuji reacting to her comment, leaving room for ambiguity.
• I Knew It!:
  • Many correctly guessed the p5s.jp URL from the aforementioned list of registered domains was intended for a Nintendo Switch game - however, the common belief was that P5S would simply be a port of the original Persona 5 to the platform.
  • Virtually everyone predicted the Demiurge would be the final boss.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The general consensus on Merciless difficulty it's simply too hard to bother with, unless the player does an insane amount of grinding before New Game Plus to get the best stats and Personas. Every enemy's attack power is ramped way up, and every boss has an obscene HP pool that takes ages to whittle down. The time inevitably lost to party wipes during the lengthy boss battles adds up quickly, and only if the party is buffed to maximum or near-maximum levels does it become a reasonable challenge (where the player can still die easily).
• It's the Same, So It Sucks:
  • A common complaint against Strikers is that the game borrows a lot from Persona 5 and Royal. The story is updated slightly for even more real-world relevance, and ponders the repercussions of a world where unaccountable corporations and inscrutable AIs have total control of the human experience. But you'll notice that this is really just a refinement of the earlier games' theses. The similarities continue: two new characters, Sophia and Akane, have nearly identical backstories to Morgana and Futaba, respectively. The deadly sin motif among the bosses is repeated and their relationship to the true villain is basically the same. The final dungeon is a cognitive prison for the masses like Mementos (with some influence from Royal's Eden), while the final boss is again based on the Demiurge and assumes the form of an Abrahamic relic. Many of the similarities to the previous games are lampshaded as well, which, depending on the player, will make things even more frustrating. Part of the hilarity of these observations comes from the fact that Omega Force's work on Strikers occurred in conjunction with the main Persona team's work on Royal, hence the lack of direct references to the updated plot.
  • Another complaint of the plot is the game's usage of The Big Bad Shuffle is also fairly similar to Persona 4. Owada is a Red Herring culprit with no redeeming qualities that could stand in for Mitsuo, who is quickly overshadowed by Konoe who could easily be viewed as a stand-in for Namatame, up to that he arranged Akane's brainwashing to do his bidding while being kept in the dark, something that was very similar to Namatame's kidnapping of Nanako, where he was unaware that he wasn't saving her but exactly putting her at risk. Zenkichi also has traits from Dojima in several aspects, including losing his wife and having an estranged relationship with his daughter and the only difference being Nanako is nowhere near as hostile to Dojima as Akane is to Zenkichi, furthering the similarities. The true culprit, Ichinose was also fairly similar to Adachi in the way how she was presented, being a Cloudcuckoolander with seemingly minor involvement on the plot and making occasional cameos here and then, and her creation, EMMA can be seen as being similar to Ameno-Sagiri in her role, although her relationship with the human culprit was different from Ameno-Sagiri and Adachi. Though there isn't a character who's similar to Izanami.
  • Almost like it's a running gag for Atlus at this point, Strikers has its own Hot Springs Episode. The only difference is the boys actually did stay in the bath past their allotted time, but they didn't realize this until after they heard the girls entering. They quickly try to escape, but are caught and unfairly dealt with by the girls. Many non-Japanese players disliked this scene due to how the joke had already been overplayed in the previous two games.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • All of the Monarchs.
    • Alice Hiiragi is an introverted girl who was bullied horribly during high school years. She worked hard as a designer and found enough success to be featured on the cover of a famous magazine, until one of the girls who bullied her showed up and started to leak her past at Shujin Academy into the internet. Alice then used the EMMA app to artificially bolster her reputation to get revenge... and she does the exact same thing the bullies did to her towards other people (namely, stepping on them and taking pictures of the act).
    • Ango Natsume is a writer with mediocre skill being fleeced for profit using the name of his more accomplished grandfather. His response is using the EMMA app to sell plagiarized work for tons of money so his publishers get no royalties.
    • Mariko Hyodo is a genuinely dedicated and honest public servant who almost lost her post as mayor when one of her councilmen conspired with one of her aides in taking over her seat by getting kickbacks from a company that built snow statues during a city-organized winter festival, one of which collapsed and killed a child. While the extent of her involvement in the affair was granting the company that built them the approval to construct the structurally unsound sculptures, Hyodo's failure to do a background check on the soundness of the sculptures has made her obsessed with ridding Sapporo of corruption and micromanaging and overworking all her personnel. This caused her to resort to having EMMA force all opposing council members to confess to corruption and resign, and then inorganically amass support among Sapporo's population in order to get re-elected through the same app.
    • Akira Konoe might seem like another Hate Sink similar to the targets in Persona 5, but it turns out that his father was the real one, who hated him to the point that he wanted to kill him and his mother over money... to which he responds first by killing his father as a child (note that the Western localization phrases this as a premeditated act while the Japanese dialogue implies it was committed in self-defense after Akira's father immediately turned against him), and then as an adult by instigating most of the events of the game by weaponizing Ichinose's EMMA AI into a vendetta-based application.
  • The Mastermind is Kuon Ichinose, whose innately unsettling stance sets off a massive domino chain of trauma and isolation, as nobody even bothered to reach out to her or try to understand her unique way of looking at the world, instead writing her off as an inhuman, emotionless doll. Eventually, she came to believe everyone around her, becoming an absolute mess of a woman who desperately wants to help people, but is drowning in so much self-loathing that she has come to believe emotion itself is a toxic concept — which led to her creation of EMMA not out of greed or anger, but out of the sincere belief that creating such an amoral AI was the only thing that could make people happy.
• Magnificent Bitch: The seemingly peppy Kuon Ichinose is actually a brilliant AI researcher who created Sophia and EMMA to better understand and help humanity. Unable to answer Sophia's question on what a human heart is, Ichinose focuses her efforts entirely on EMMA's directive to give all of humanity their desires before handing EMMA to Akira Konoe for him to spread EMMA's influence in Japan, leading to the creation of Jails and human desires being stolen throughout. Ichinose allies herself with the Phantom Thieves, having them unknowingly keep tabs on EMMA's progress before becoming an obstacle for them as they try to stop EMMA, brainwashing Sophia to turn against the Phantom Thieves and attempting to wipe them out herself. Only failing due to Sophia's bond with the Phantom Thieves overriding her brainwashing, Ichinose is convinced by Sophia to turn against EMMA, helping them destroy her creation before parting ways with the Phantom Thieves to go on her own journey, asking Sophia to come with her.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Scramble is a soccer/football game.^ExplanationReports initially stated that the official English title for Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers could be shortened to Persona 5 Strikers. People have jokingly said that the title fits a soccer/football game better, and comparisons have also been made to the Mario Strikers games. Hilariously, when the official English trailer was revealed, these reports were completely correct.
  • Tony Stark is a Persona villain!^Explanation Akira Konoe, The Heavy of the game, has been noted by many to be a Younger and Hipper Expy of Tony Stark, right down from his physical appearance to him being the CEO of a massive futuristic conglomerate. Not helping matters is his Shadow self, who wears a mechanised suit which resembles that of Iron Man's while bearing Featherman elements
  • RYUJI SAID "FUCK!" ^explanationA sequel to the "Let Ryuji Say 'Fuck'" meme of the original game, this was a Call-Back to the fact Ryuji always said "What the eff" despite Persona 5 bearing an M rating. Strikers has Ryuji finally deliver a true Precision F-Strike and the fanbase took notice.
  • An edited version of Haru's introduction in the opening animation◊ saw some use as a reaction image.
• Moe: Sophia is an adorably diminutive AI companion who just wants to help humanity in any way she can.
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• Narm:
  • Alice and Hyodo's freakouts in the real world are extremely outlandish and might come across as unintentionally hilarious despite them being taken seriously by the narrative, with the former physically attacking her manager by stepping on him just like her Shadow Self (mind you, Alice is a grown woman despite her height and appearance), and the latter can be seen several times berating a civil ward for something ridiculous like not watching the flowers 24 hours straight.
  • While Akira Konoe's past is tragic and horrifying, the fact it is shown by having a generic NPC model punching and yelling at nothing instead of a shadowy figure makes the scene unintentionally funny, especially compared to the other Monarchs who have the NPC in question simply talking to them or about them. This was almost certainly because showing a child being physically beaten on screen was seen as too intense for players to watch, but the game presenting a man grabbing at and beating up what is essentially air really hurts the moment, making it look like Konoe's father is just extremely angry at some kind of invisible being rather than a person.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: The English dub makes it easy to figure out that EMMA plays a larger role in the story than it initially seems because her voice actor, Susan Bennett, is far and away the most prolific of the game's cast, having gained fame as the original voice of Apple's Siri AI. As it turns out, EMMA, or rather the Demiurge she transforms into, is the Final Boss.
• Obvious Judas: Kuon Ichinose is the very definition of the trope. She does nothing for a broad majority of the game, bar some brief investigation deals, in addition to acting in an incredibly comical and unbelievable manner. In fact, anyone who sees her speaking with the Phantom Thieves after Konoe's press conference will guess that she is the true culprit, because she just literally spills the beans there. It's quite clear that she's obviously the mastermind behind EMMA, she's there to monitor the Jails^spoilersalthough unlike Akechi she wasn't doing it specifically to monitor the intruders and she basically kickstarted nearly everything circulating the game's supernatural incidents.The only thing that isn't predictable about her is the fact that she makes a Heel–Face Turn thanks to Sophia, a genuine Meta Twist that isn't present with other Persona 5 traitors.
• Polished Port: Unlike most ports made by Koei Tecmo, the PC port is actually quite polished. It runs at 60 frames per second even on low-end computers (although it requires a 4GB graphics card), has multiple graphical and resolution options, separate volume sliders for BGM, SE, voices and cutscenes (something that didn't exist in the original release), and just like the console release, it provides the option to switch between the English and Japanese voices. Although, there are a couple of relatively minor issues that keep the port from being truly excellent, notably the inability to using either a keyboard or a mouse by themselves, or "hybrid" controllers like the Steam Controller or analog keyboards.^note Firstly, controlling the camera with a mouse has negative mouse acceleration and thus works like a joystick (meaning it doesn't feel good to control and you don't get the full benefits of a mouse); secondly, there's no option to lock button prompts to either keyboard or controller, causing the prompts to switch constantly on a hybrid mouse-keyboard setup.
• Porting Disaster: When the game was released, it was plagued with a lot of game-breaking glitches, constant crashes, and loading screens that could potentially last forever. Those who pre-ordered the Digital Deluxe Edition and received the game four days early on PC didn't have any problems until the game launched for everyone. The reason for that is Sega forgot to include the Denuvo DRM in the Digital Deluxe Edition; when the game went live for everyone, Sega patched the DRM into it, causing the aforementioned bugs.
  • And even after those were fixed, the developer never fixed the aforementioned negative mouse acceleration problem, which is painful for keyboard and mouse users due to how bad it feels, meaning you may as well just use a controller instead.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Morgana, like Teddie before him, was found annoying by many due to his borderline creepy obsession with Ann and his tendency to antagonize Ryuji for no real reason. In Strikers, Morgana's crush on Ann is toned down to a Precocious Crush that he doesn't intend on ever going forward with, and he goes out of his way to do nice things for her with Joker such as finding sweets to surprise her with. As for Ryuji, though Morgana still occasionally teases him, it's nowhere near the level of verbal abuse he heaped on him in the previous game, and they even have several moments where they stick up for each other.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The boss fights. While games in the Warriors series (such as Hyrule Warriors) are no stranger to boss fights, most of them take only a few minutes. Strikers decided to turn every boss into a Damage-Sponge Boss, following the example of most other Atlus games. The player will spend a majority of the time chipping away at their health with single digit damage for each attack, even with exploiting weakness. And even if you use Showtime or an All-Out Attack, the amount of damage you deal is next to nothing. Because of this, boss battles can take up to fifteen minutes, turning them into a chore. And if you die, you're forced to either start the battle all over again or go back to the Jail's entrance.
  • The inability to adjust AI behavior is a sore spot. While the party AI isn't outright bad, whichever Phantom Thief you're not controlling will often use SP skills without consideration for how much they have left, or use physical skills while already low on HP. There are a number of times where you'll want to switch to a character, but that Thief won't have enough SP left for it to matter. This is moderately balanced by being able to leave and come back with a refreshed party at checkpoints, but in sections where you can't leave the Metaverse, this overly-aggressive AI behavior makes it hard to play carefully.
  • Persona Fusion. Unlike past games in the franchise, fusions require the component Personas to meet a level threshold. If you're not chasing the highest tier Personas, this won't raise any issues, but fusing the real monsters like Alice or Yoshitsune requires early game Personas to reach late-game levels, which will cost a lot of time and Persona Points. Additionally, you can no longer fuse by selecting persona individually. Lavenza will show a list of all possible fusions and you will have to sift through the gigantic list until you find the combination you want to use, which can be a giant pain if you're trying to transfer specific skills.
  • Speaking of fusions, fusion fails appear to be a lot more common than they were in Persona 5, which can waste you a lot of money and Persona Points.
  • While the ability to leave dungeons without penalty at any checkpoint was welcome players are still forced to sit through two loading screens every time they leave and re-enter, which is tedious if the player only want to restore their SP then come straight back.
  • The Okinawa Jail has no Checkpoint in front of its boss room. Worse, the nearest checkpoint is right before a complicated room that requires jumping between hooks to progress, with enemies constantly spawning on the floor below. Not only is this an annoyance if you need to heal before the boss fight, but several Request bosses (Mara and The Reaper) use the same boss room.
• Special Effect Failure: The girls' towels are visible in the water at the Kyoto hot springs.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Strikers is possibly the closest thing to a third Raidou Kuzunoha title, due to the use of Persona skills during battle, as well as Persona Fusion. It helps that while Raidou was the star of a previous Action RPG Megaten game, he also dressed up in a campy black outfit, had a talking black cat sidekick and embraced a suave jazzy aesthetic before Joker did.
• Strawman Has a Point: Zenkichi is meant to come off as more reasonable during an argument with his daughter Akane, but she ultimately makes a pretty good point about him that the game glosses over. Akane may have been threatened by The Conspiracy, but she was right for pointing out that Zenkichi still pinned his wife's murder on the secretary of the man who actually did it, letting him get away with murder and leaving the family of the falsely-accused secretary with guilt and shame over a crime they didn't commit. Keep in mind that Akane was brainwashed during the argument and was thus portrayed as unreasonable and consumed with rage, but she still rightfully points out her father's role as an accessory to murder who kept quiet only for his own peace of mind. Granted, Zenkichi does acknowledge he completely messed this up and gets better, but not only do the Phantom Thieves refute this, they are framed as being in the right for doing so. Despite this, Akane's point about Zenkichi being selfish and ineffective in his role to serve and protect is still pretty reasonable.
  • Overlaps with Values Dissonance, but Akira Konoe's murder of his father. While in either translation he's killed someone and covered it up, he brings up the obvious point that he was almost certainly next, and no one was ever going to help him otherwise. The Thieves don't have a rebuttal to this. Even if Konoe is deep in Black-and-White Insanity when he said that, he has a point that the Phantom Thieves can't save every person out there in the world and there would be a few that they can't save in time.
• Tainted by the Preview: When the game was first announced (especially after speculation that the rumored "P5S" was to be a Switch port of the original that followed Joker's surprise announcement as DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate), it was met with disdain as another Musou spinoff, as the first trailer did nothing to dissuade this notion. It was later trailers (trailers that far fewer people saw or heard about) that showed that the game was much more "Persona 5 with action- instead of turn-based combat" and less "Persona Warriors".
• That One Achievement:
  • The Eternal Bonds trophy for the PS4 version requires reaching the maximum party bond Level of 99. Upon clearing the main game, this level will likely be no higher than 60. And, while there are several ways to grind through the rest of the levels, they are either incredibly tedious or require an enormous amount of prep time. The only way to reach Level 99 in a reasonable timespan is to play Merciless mode, and even then you probably won't hit it until at least halfway through.
  • Mask Connoisseur requires you to achieve 100% in adding Persona into the Inmate Registry. Like the Compendium from the original game, this can be a time sink and will also require a New Game Plus run to actually unlock the final Persona to get it to 100% completion. The Inmate Registry is arguably more tedious than the Compendium before it because Fusion now has a minimum level requirement for all the Personas to be fused in the process. On its own, this is not so bad, but higher-level Personas such as King Frost, Yoshitsune, and Metatron require getting low-level personas to levels absurdly higher than you likely would've gotten these Persona on because they already stopped learning new moves. And while Persona can level up using Persona Points, this is an entirely different grind that forces the player to get enough points to boost their Persona to the required level threshold, although they can be farmed by summoning and releasing Personas if you have enough cash.
• That One Attack: Demiurge's staff strike attack. Most of their other attacks are slow and easily telegraphed, but this one comes out quickly and hits three times. If it crits, there's a good chance it will kill you, especially if you're fighting her using Joker alone.
• That One Boss:
  • After the Breather Boss that was Dragon Ango, Snow Empress Mariko proves he was the exception and not the rule. She's deceptively fast for her size, has attacks that cover a wide area and can be hard to see coming, as they come from tentacles all around her body. She also gains several dangerous gimmicks later in the fight: moments of permanent Rage status (at the only cost of opening her to Technical damage from Psy attacks, which she was already weak to anyway), blizzards that slow you to a crawl and force you to activate a random heater on the corners of the arena, and especially "Dinner Time", which gets one of your party members Swallowed Whole, and given the AI it's almost inevitable it'll hit someone. The only way to get the party member back is to either drop a chandelier on Mariko (and she needs to be under it — and there's a limited number of them, meaning you very likely may have used them all up before knowing about this attack) or deplete her entire Break Meter. And swallowed characters are considered KO'd for the purposes of Game Overs, which makes a Total Party Kill from her area attacks even more likely.
  • My Dear Joker, the final foe in the Kyoto jail, a cognitive creation of the Monarch, Akane Hasegawa, is a Mirror Boss that Joker has to fight alone, while most of the party is occupied with their doppelgangers. He's rather fast, has a lot of health for a Duel Boss, hits hard and unlike the other bosses, has no weaknesses. As such, he's a rather frustrating boss.
• That One Sidequest:
  • "A Thief's Challenge: Mona." Like all Thief's Challenges, you must reach a certain point in a dungeon without using Quick Travel or increasing the security level. This one, however, asks you to traverse the entire dungeon from the start to the deepest part. Although it's one of the shorter ones, all the hallways are full of enemies, and if you miss even one Ambush you'll have to start from the beginning. This gets especially frustrating in the last stretch, which features a lot of Crawlers. As mentioned under Demonic Spiders above, if you're noticed by a Crawler, even from within cover, you have less than a second to hit the Ambush button before it forces a battle and ruins the quest.
  • Doing any of the stealth-based Requests on Merciless is a huge chore. This is because of a small change that Merciless makes to the Security Level rules, in that being noticed at all, even if neither the enemy nor the player start an encounter, raises the Security Level by 5%. This ends up turning most "stealth" missions into "kill everything between you and the goal", since just shooting an enemy from a distance where they can't see you and getting rid of them is a more straightforward and easier solution than actually attempting to evade their sight. You also need to do this if you want the Omnipotent Orb, since like in a normal run the Optional Boss only unlocks by clearing all other Requests in the game.
    • Special mention goes to "A Thief's Challenge: Queen", as the change in mechanics turns the blob-like Bomber Shadows into the bane of any thief's existence. Unlike other overworld Shadows, these guys have a fixed area but not a fixed patrol route. They essentially move by despawning and respawning at random intervals and have a nasty tendency to spawn right next to you if you set foot on their turf. If that happens, you're spotted. There goes your perfect security level. In Okinawa's Jail in particular, they patrol several key hallways that you have to traverse through. You'd better hope one of them doesn't pop out next to you, and even if you see one that hasn't noticed you, you've got milliseconds to react before they do, failing the mission. Even if you know which hallways they patrol, it can mostly come down to luck trying to get past or ambush them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • With the advent of Royal, the absence of Akechi and Sumire was brought up by a good portion of the playerbase. There is the justification that the game was developed before or alongside Royal and so including both could present problems, not to mention Akechi's rather ambiguous fate in Royal, but the playerbase would have loved to see a mention of them in-story at the very least, if not as playable DLC characters. The lack of any DLC characters, the two of them specifically, is often cited as a disappointment given that even if they weren't part of the story, just having them playable would have been welcome.
  • Sae Niijima once again for a second time in a row, this time only making a cameo during the second half of the game. Makoto ends up calling Sae in as reinforcement once Zenkichi is arrested and detained after the Phantom Thieves are framed for a crime they didn't commit. With Sae acting as a Big Damn Hero, many saw this as a missed opportunity to finally make her a playable character. Given that Zenkichi himself was playable and shared similar circumstances with Sae in the original game, it would've been a nice opportunity to see Sae transition from being a Confidant/collaborator to a full-blown member.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Out of all of the targets, despite being arguably among one of the more sympathetic and relatable ones within the game, Alice was never heard of again after her confession broadcast. Unlike Natsume, Hyodo or Konoe who at least got a chance to meet a party member personally after their confession so they may atone, Alice has no such moment, leading to fans wishing that she could join the Phantom Thieves instead. Ann does mention that she does want to befriend her several times, though, so maybe that ends up happening after the end of the game.
• Unexpected Character: Sophia's true Persona being Pandora, the final boss of the first Persona game, was not expected by many people.
• Win Back the Crowd: Initially dismissed as a shallow Warriors clone and even being the target of scorn for not being a Switch port of Persona 5, the first full trailer for Strikers managed to pull this off by showing other varied aspects of the gameplay, like platforming sections and stealth taking precedence over defeating large numbers of enemies on a map to capture their base, while retaining daytime social interactions in the real world as found in the original Persona games. Fans of the overarching Shin Megami Tensei franchise that Persona spun off from pleasantly noted that the end result was far closer to a blend of Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army and Persona 5 instead of being Dynasty Warriors with a Persona 5 paint job, given that Raidou was the previous star of an Action RPG MegaTen game.
• The Woobie:
  • Sophia initially puts on a cheerful front, but it's made clear at numerous points in the story that, despite building a rapport with the Phantom Thieves, her inability to understand her role as humanity's companion or interact with the physical world leaves her feeling very alone and she suffers from random bouts of self-loathing. The extent of how bad this was only comes into full view when her past was revealed: she was callously abandoned by her creator, Kuon Ichinose, just for asking a question shortly after her creation, something that acted as the kickstarter of the in-game catastrophe. And before this comes to full light, Ichinose also brainwashed her to turn against and kill the Phantom Thieves.
  • Akane Hasegawa is a young woman who grew up without her policeman father Zenkichi, and when her mother died due to the personal negligence of someone connected to Shido, her father tried to investigate the circumstances only to be sent death threats involving her. As a result, she grew to hate both the National Police Agency and her father even more, since the police (especially Zenkichi) cannot investigate anyone connected to Shido without putting themselves in danger. Not helping matters is that said father even told her that he "should find a new daughter," and he is assigned to track down and arrest the Phantom Thieves. It gets worse from here when her residence gets searched by Police because her father was cooperating with the Phantom Thieves, then she got eavesdropped by EMMA and Mind Raped into a Monarch for Konoe's delusional crusade of justice and because EMMA liked it. She went completely out of character, her Shadow becomes a Psychological Projection of Konoe and the Phantom Thieves had to save her.
  • Zenkichi suffers from an extremely strained relationship with his daughter Akane, who wants nothing more to do with him because of his failure to investigate the man who killed his wife and avenge her death. Said failure weighs heavily on him, and it's made clear later on that he wanted to do so, but was forced to step down because The Conspiracy threatened Akane.
• Woolseyism:
  • The original Japanese version used the English word "Kings" for the Jail bosses. In the West, although there have certainly been female kings before, the term generally refers to male rulers. The English localization changed this to "Monarchs", which is more gender-neutral.
  • One of the crimes Konoe confesses to is killing his father. In the Japanese version, he killed him in self-defense. Japanese laws are a lot less lenient with murder in self-defense, which may confuse some Western players. So, in the English version, it was changed to a premeditated murder, albeit still one committed because the culprit had good reason to fear for his safety as Konoe's father had hit him before and had murdered his mother.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Zenkichi's thief outfit comes with a cowboy hat with a weirdly long point on the front. It looks like he could put someone's eye out with it.

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