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Persona 5 Strikers does not play like the game before it. Combat runs in real time against a Musou-style crowd instead of a turn order, there is exactly one ending, and progress is measured in cities. Through the month of August the Phantom Thieves move from Shibuya to Sendai, Sapporo, Okinawa, Kyoto and Osaka before the last two Jails, the Abyss and the Tree of Life and Wisdom, and every stop runs the same loop: a day or two in the city talking, shopping and taking requests, a Jail with a Lock Keeper and a Monarch at the end of it, and then a reason to come back. Our pages fit that loop, and this guide walks it in order.
Before the first Jail
Two of our pages are worth reading before you set foot in Shibuya Jail. The beginner's guide is a list of habits rather than a tutorial, and the ones that pay off longest are the least obvious: opening the summon menu freezes time, so it is your breathing room in a crowded fight; the AI is a poor healer, so switch to the healer yourself and press summon while the switch animation is still playing; loot chests refill once you leave an area, unlike the original game; and there is a single ending, so nothing you choose needs second-guessing. It also names Mokoi and Pixie as the early Personas to lean on and points at the mask drop-rate perk as the quiet engine behind Persona Points. The best characters page then settles the first party question. Its five picks are Queen for Johanna's bonus technical damage on Shocked, Frozen or Burned enemies, Panther for fire, Fox for ice and specifically for Sendai Jail, Sophia because she both heals and hits with Bless, and Joker because he can carry any element the situation wants.
In the city
A city day in this game is where the missable things live. Investigation sections want every marked NPC spoken to before the percentage reaches 100, friends hand over cooking recipes on a fixed date in a fixed spot, and requests that are not taken before you leave are not offered again on the way back. Our cooking recipes page maps nineteen recipes to shops, friends, story beats and request rewards, from the Leblanc Curry and Coffee Joker knows at the start to the Master versions unlocked after the credits, and because a single Curry restores 20 SP to the whole party, the kitchen is the cheapest way to fund magic in a game where four of our five boss pages tell you to walk in with SP items. The requests themselves are covered on our requests and Jails guide, which splits the 81 of them into the 31 you can do once and the 50 that pay out again on every replay, with Prison Mail, Lavenza's fusion orders, and Kuon Ichinose's Junk Collection deliveries at opposite ends of that split. The beginner's guide's advice not to sell junk to Sophia's shop is really a pointer at those deliveries.
Inside the Jail
A Jail is the Metaverse version of the city outside it, and in five of them the route to the Monarch runs through a Trauma Room, or in Okinawa's case a Monitoring Room, guarded by a Lock Keeper. Our Lock Keepers page covers all five, from the Axe Lock Keeper in Shibuya at level 10 to the Bazooka Lock Keeper in Osaka at level 60, and the detail that ties them together is that Bless and Curse work on every one of them. That is not true of the Monarchs. Our bosses guide sorts the five Monarch fights we cover by how many damage types will break the stagger shield: Mad Rabbit Alice and Snow Empress Mariko each give you two, the False God Demiurge gives you Bless and Curse across both of its forms, Hecatoncheires in Kuon Ichinose's Jail of the Abyss is weak to Bless, the one weakness our page names, and Akane's Joker has no weakness at all and is fought one on one with ailments, quick-time events and a motorbike. For a whole Jail from door to Monarch, the Kyoto Jail walkthrough is our only complete route, with its Zenkichi stealth opening, the eavesdropping hunt for the Father Fox Shrine and the five-shrine prayer order that leads to the Monk of the Valley.
Two kinds of pickup hide inside every Jail as well. Strong Shadows are where our magic skills page locates seventeen of its spells, Jail by Jail, and each Jail holds one Forgotten Desire, a cube that looks like ordinary loot and completes one of the Trapped-in requests. Our hidden desire locations page places all eight, from the Shibuya sluice gates to the fifth floor of the Tree of Life and Wisdom, with the accessory stock, Bond cap raises and skill cards each one unlocks.
Building Joker between stops
Joker is the one Thief who cycles through Personas mid-fight, and fusion is where that stock comes from. Our mechanics guide reads the four systems behind that as one SP ledger. The magic skills page prices 64 spells from 6 SP to 38, with a location for 23 of them that forms a rough ladder from Shibuya to the Tree of Life and Wisdom. The best Persona fusions page gives one recommended Persona per damage type, from Yoshitsune and his Hassou Tobi for physical to Kali for Psy, and notes which of them make SP go further: Alice's Spell Master halves costs, Lucifer's Lamentation earns SP back under fire, and every physical skill on the page is priced in HP instead. Lucifer is the expensive one in every sense, since fusing him consumes five of the other ten. On the equipment side, the best weapons page picks a signature weapon for each character, almost all of them Replica weapons in the 290 to 308 attack range that arrive as request rewards, with a second tier of New Game+ weapons such as Cartagena at 344 for anyone starting over.
Why you go back
Nothing in a finished Jail is finished. The requests page turns each one into a place you revisit for four different reasons: Painful Past and Painful Past+ rematches against its Monarch, which exist for five of the seven and on the plus tier hand a weapon to one Thief the first time and 21,000 to 30,000 yen on every win after; a Strong Shadow hunt that pays a fusion item, from Black Frost in Shibuya to Metatron at the Tree; a Thief's Challenge, which in six Jails is a stealth run to the tower without checkpoints or being spotted; and a Junk Collection delivery whose repeat payout reaches 120,000 yen at the Tree of Life and Wisdom. Kyoto alone carries six of those returns after its story visit. Read together with the Lock Keeper levels and the boss recommendations, that is the shape of the whole game: a city, a Jail, and a Jail that keeps paying long after its Monarch has been talked down.
What we have not written up yet is worth saying plainly. Two Monarchs out of seven still lack a boss page, namely Sendai's Ango Natsume and Osaka's Akira Konoe; no other Jail, from Shibuya to the Tree of Life and Wisdom, has a walkthrough to match Kyoto's, and the Dire Shadows our requests page mentions in passing are not explained anywhere. Everything else in the game starts from one of the pages above.