This is honestly way more ambitious than I thought it would be. It doesn't feel like a standard Koi Techmo game at all, and more so just feels like an action RPG take on the Persona formula and I think its so neat that this just casually exists. Is it as fleshed out as standard Persona 5/Royal? No, not even close. But I was completely expecting something way more limited, like Age of Calamity, thats technically canonically relevant to the main game, but just doesn't really matter and had mission based structure or something. I’ll be honest, I didn't like Age of Calamity really at all, it doesnt really take gameplay cues from Breath of the Wild at all and is more so just an excuse to tell the story, but the story sucked and retconed itself within like 10 mins. This feels like an actual sequel and just like “something else” to play after Persona 5. The amount of voice acting is insane, the new music is so good, Zenkichi and Sophie are nice new characters (and I kinda like them better than Maruki and Sumire) the amount of cities you get to go to an explore is surprisingly fleshed out. I really love what they tried here. There are some things though that weigh the experience down. To start, the pacing did kinda drag at points, especially towards the 4th and 5th jails. Despite Persona 5 Royal being literally 100 hours longer, Strikers can feel longer at times, probably due to not having as much gameplay variety to mix things up. It’s more or less, dialogue and story, drive to city, go to jail, fight fight fight, wash rinse and repeat. The confidants, simulator and slower nature of turn based combat really help balance out the pacing in Royal. That said though, getting through a jail and being rewarded with more story was always a good reward, especially with the nearly full voice acting. And exploring the cities might be my favorite gameplay aspect of Strikers, it feels like a tourism simulator and is just so satisfying to walk around and talk to your party members and go to the shops. But another small aspect I think Strikers kind of fumbles is the Persona fusion stuff, it somehow made even less sense to me in this one and I just rarely bothered with it, I understood it better in Royal. Something I was curious about while playing though is story similarities with Royal’s new content. Spoilers for Royal and Strikers Towards the end of Strikers, the main ambition of Emma is really similar to Maruki’s and I was wondering if both these stories were written at the same time but by separate writers. I just played Royal, Dancing and now Strikers in the span of like 2 months, and it’s probably just more noticeable to me because of that how there kinda the same plot point, just maybe slightly less fleshed out in Strikers. Its not really a big deal though, its still a slightly different take on the “no free will” concept, and it plays nicely with P5’s Rebel motif. Other than that, I played the Switch version and it runs really well (docked at least), so pretty impressive job for that. I also love the bonus app that includes the art book, soundtrack and documentary. Lion King/Aladdin on the switch did a similar thing but I think this app is even better, I loved the 1 hour documentary on the music. Really wish more companies would do this, but also on gameplay development too, so people can appreciate how much work is actually put into each game. Overall, just a really fun, lighthearted sequel.

Yeah, I don't like this game all that much. I did a short review for this game here before but I... don't think it was very good actually so yeah, new review baybeeeee.

On a positive note, the controls, storytelling and worldbuilding are better than any Mega Man game prior to this and the new weapon system is cool. The Cyber-Elf system is cool too and I like that the levels are interconnected, it was really cool finding that out for the first time. Also, and I have no idea why, this game gives me a feeling of nostalgia even though I only played it for the first time last year... I seriously don't know why but I dunno it's cool.
On a negative note though, man... the fact that you don't what are the bosses and stages like when you're going to choose the mission is really lame and the new mission format in general is just so confusing. The soundtrack was honestly, for the most part, pretty unremarkable. The level design is not the worst thing out there but it can be pretty rough especially in that desert level and that stupid dumb second Neo Arcadia level. But honestly the thing that really makes me not want to play this again is the save system, fuck the save system in this game, it's so bad.
Overall... Mega Man Zero is not a great start to the Zero series. It's just like Mega Man 1, it's the first in the series and it definitely feels like it.