DISCLAIMER: Persona 5 Strikers is a sequel to Persona 5 Original, NOT Persona 5 Royal. Confusing a little, I know.
This review is going to be a pretty short one, because there isn't a lot that I can dive deep into with P5S. The story is a lot better than I thought it was going to be, and some of the new characters are cool. One of the new Phantom Thieves, Zenkichi, has a really really good english voice actor. His name is Tom Taylorson, and some of his other games he's VA'd for include Bugsnax, Mass Effect Andromeda, and Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Check him out sometime.
Anyway, back to P5S- I want to talk about the antagonists. In the original Persona 5, critics complained about the villains feeling too cartoon-ish and not realistic, which is pretty true, but the remaster-piece of Persona 5 Royal added a villain that was less of a bad guy and more of an antagonist, because the player was able to sympathize with his goals, and even though he was taking away people's feeling of accomplishments by making them work for it, the final battle enforced that it was a battle of Ideals, not good and evil.
With Persona 5 strikers, now every antagonist is a character you can kind of sympathize with because of their trauma that led to them being evil. For example, in the second dungeon (really small Spoiler Warning) you face of against Ango Natsume, a corrupted book writer who rides the coattails of other famous works of art, and indirectly brainwashes an entire small town into making his book a bestseller with the power of the Metaverse. Because of his grandfather being a famous writer, he had to face the challenge of living up to it, but his trauma comes from the fact that his publishers don't even care about what he writes, and relying on his grandfather's fame to exploit him for money. Once you complete the dungeon, Yusuke (one of your team members) encourages him to take up writing again, but this time writing with his own original ideas. Each villain is true with this theme. They were good people, but the corruption of others led to the destruction of themselves. Solid villains, right?
Gameplay is always important when it comes to video games, and Strikers is no exception. In this case, the combat is good. The dynasty warriors-like fights are awesome, due to no cooldowns and more management of how many special moves you pull off. Another awesome piece that is more optional, but makes the game fun is that you can switch between 3 other phantom thief members to use different combo moves and elemental attacks to freshen up your experience. And the boss fights are well made, none of them are way too tough, but the first few can be downright easy. (Mostly because you can spam their weakness) The combat was pretty much the big focus of the game, and it wasn't made terribly. It's kind of weird that the biggest focus has the least amount of words from me.
There we go! Those are my thoughts on Persona 5 Strikers. While not my Game of the Year for sure, it was still fun to visit with the Phantom Thieves for a nice action-packed summer vacation. 4 Phantom-mobiles out of 5. I didn't mention this, but DANG the music is still there. Super fitting with the vibe of Persona 5, while still being action-heavy in tone.