#EDIT OH MY GOD I JUST REALIZED I COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT YAKUMO WHEN I TALKED AB THE CHARACTERS

[party-pixie]

yo, owner of daily demon spotlight here, what'd you think of smt v? i wanna have tempered expectations for when vengeance comes out, so i was curious how someone who played it felt about it. ty in advance! :)

hi!! overall i really liked smtv tbh, at least enough to keep playing to get every ending (and then see the vengeance reveal THE NIGHT I FINISHED MY LAST RUN 😭)

i'll try to keep it a little vague in case you don't want too many spoilers but......there's still some spoilers lmao i'm so sorry but i at least tried to leave out the huge details or not explicitly say them

in terms of gameplay, it's really fun!! it's pretty difficult at first (i played on hard mode my first run but i've read that normal and casual can be challenging too i guess esp if you're new to the series) but it gets easier as you progress. a lot of people seemed to have a problem with the level scaling, esp for the shiva battle since he's a lv96 superboss (optional really but required for the secret neutral ending) but the bosses in the very final dungeon are like......lv80-85. even the final boss is only like lv85 unless you're doing the secret neutral route then he's lv90 i think. i didn't really think much ab the level scaling until i saw other people talking ab it but.......yea i had HUGE problems with shiva, i had to max out the level of my whole team just to take him on, but then it turned the endgame bosses into a total joke. i had a hard time with some of the other bosses too, the ones i remember the most being hydra, nuwa, lahmu, surt, and vasuki but it might be different on lower difficulties. the magatsuhi gauge + the skills were fun to use but the one you get at the very beginning that just comes with being a nahobino is.........kinda the only one you really need a lot of the time since you can just crit everything when you use it. it didn't really make all of the other ones obsolete tho since some were really good for survival like buffs/healing, it's just that it was a little too easy to get away with using the critical one for most of the time

oh, the unique skills were a good addition too, a lot of them were super useful like idun's, demeter's, and danu's since they all had good healing + extra effects. a lot of the new demons were good too, i haven't used all of them but the ones that i did use either really saved my ass or i just enjoyed having them on my team. although, i'm pretty disappointed the last 3 bosses aren't fusible and i'm ESPECIALLY disappointed that lucifer isn't fusible considering he was in apocalypse. he has such a good design in this game i'm so upset i can't have him on my team 😭 oh yea, and demons being locked behind an alignment is a little annoying but i don't really mind it much????? idk i feel like it gives the game a little more replay value, so i don't mind as long as it's not overly difficult to get. danu. inanna. and maria being locked behind certain alignments and ALSO being locked behind 70% compendium completion was a little annoying, but if you've got the macca to burn you can just summon directly from the compendium for new fusions until you get 70%, so it's not overly difficult to do. maybe a little tedious. i also liked the essence mechanic, but getting them was SUCH a pain since there isn't really any consistent way to farm them except for the aogami essences which are a little easier to get. i prefer the demon whisper from iv/a tbh but essences makes it easier to get certain skills on demons without having to do fusion gymnastics to get the perfect build

another thing is that there were only two real dungeons since the open areas were kinda supposed to serve as dungeons to a certain degree, but those two dungeons were........pretty underwhelming. the first one was really annoying cus it had a fan mechanic that would blow you to certain areas around the rooms and you kinda had to be careful with the timing on certain ones. it wasn't overly difficult to get around, it's just the fans that were a pain. the second dungeon was also the second to last area you go thru in the whole game and the setup was so ridiculous??????? like, it had a ton of long hallways and dead ends which is kinda to be expected but when you see a pic of the whole map for each section it's like "who the hell designed this?!" it's not even difficult to get thru, it's actually SUPER easy even with the time stopping doors gimmick which you can just......ignore entirely and the only consequence is losing out on some treasure. the layout is just weird and chaotic and seems like it might've been rushed cus it's also pretty empty, tbh both dungeons are

for the game's story..........oh god. it's pretty clear it was really rushed cus it was super underbaked. i didn't hate it, i actually liked the beginning a lot! but it falls off really bad after the second lahmu fight imo and the pacing just ends up all messed up. like the second lahmu fight feels like you're still early in the story but it's more like closer to midgame. and after finishing each major area, you end up going back to tokyo and having a meeting with your friends and director koshimizu at the research center, so all of those cutscenes look more or less the exact same since it's always in the same room and even the placement of the characters is almost the same. i've seen some people complain ab the lack of world building and while i don't think it has as much as iv/a did, a lot of the world building just ends up coming from talking to npcs and doing side quests instead of the main story. idk if that's good writing/design really but it's how the game ended up. there's also a few parts where they seem to be building up to something really big, but then the thing they were building up to ends up being mostly underwhelming. like the part where you meet yuzuru in da'at in front of the broken train, it feels like something is ab to happen, like a demon is gonna ambush them or they're gonna run into another friend like dazai, but then the convo ends and nothing happens. but it feels like something should've happened! and the pandemonic summit should've happened a lot earlier imo, idk i just feel like the placement of it is off cus after the summit, you're in the last main area and the end of the game is basically right around the corner. as long as you can beat the shit out of odin, zeus, and vasuki, you can get to the end relatively quickly, but it feels like more should've happened between the summit and the end of the game

i really liked a lot of the side quests tho! i think the khonsu one was my favorite and i wish he and miyazu didn't get sidelined so badly 😔 but the gameplay was really what kept me coming back for ng+ so many times tbh

the characters are all severely underdeveloped too, the only character that gets much at all is dazai tbh. yuzuru is off doing his own thing for a huge majority of the story and his sister miyazu is completely useless, getting minimized to being the chronically ill girl who just hangs out in the fairy forest the entire time. she get sidelined so badly which was so sad to me cus i ended up loving her, esp after the khonsu quest. sahori could've been given a little more, i wish she had a bigger role or something. tao also could've been expanded on a lot more especially considering her role in the grand scheme of things. even aogami doesn't get much of a backstory but it seems like they meant to try and touch on that but couldn't cus of time constraints. dazai is the only one that gets much of an arc at all, and it's decently interesting. i get that they might've wanted to try to do what nocturne did where you almost immediately split off from your friends and only meet intermittently, so their development happens offscreen, but i don't think this game did that very well. it also doesn't help that the world of v is so much more whimsical compared to nocturne

and oh god the ending...... i thought the cutscene where you finally ascend to the throne was beautiful so i don't necessarily hate it, but the way they tied the ending in with everything else was so obviously rushed and not well done. if you've played any of the other mainline games (mostly nocturne and iv/a are my frame of reference since i haven't played i or ii and haven't finished strange journey redux yet) it's really different in a way that i didn't really like. after you beat the final boss, the cutscene where you'd see or at least get an idea of the kind of world you created is so.....disappointing a little bit???? i won't spoil the endings for the other games in case you haven't played them, but the gist of them is that you're with your respective alignment rep and they're talking to you. but in v it's just.....you're getting narrated at by some guy! the whole thing is kinda just an info dump of how the new world turned out instead of getting to infer from the conversation with the alignment rep you sided with! like, really?? it would've been nice to see how the alignment reps felt about the new world at least

i was treating this as kinda a spoiler but tbh if you've played any other mainline game you can kinda expect lucifer to be the final boss or an endgame boss, but they basically used him as a huge infodump at the end?????? if you do the secret neutral ending he starts talking sometimes mid-battle about stuff about the universe that was never mentioned earlier in the story???? like, he talks about how the universe is doomed to reincarnate (which i know is par for the course in smt but still....) and that you have to kill him to break the cycle, but nobody else really mentioned that during the story. and i guess you could suspend your disbelief and say only he knows about it since he consumed the knowledge of the creator so of course none of the other characters would know, but that whole thing just felt really random, like the devs suddenly remembered that smt is supposed to have themes of reincarnation so they threw that in at the end. i don't think he mentions any of this in the other endings, and you don't even fight him in the normal neutral ending! and then after you kill him and see the cutscene about the new world, you find out in the post credits cutscene that none of that shit even worked!! so what the hell was all that for!?!!?!? i get that smt always has huge nihilist themes so the whole "you just did all of that for absolutely nothing cus we're doomed to reincarnate forever" thing isn't out of left field, but man seeing that post credits cutscene REALLY made it feel like i just did all that for absolutely fuckin' NOTHING. i'm kinda conflicted about it honestly, cus it was an interesting twist! i was surprised by it and the way they revealed it was really cool! but it also felt like it just diminished all of the world building lucifer just dumped onto us literally 10mins prior

the requirements for the secret neutral ending also felt really weird cus you're supposed to help all of these demons and it's basically showing you that even the demons aren't completely evil, but then the ending for that route is just "nah fuck all of them, this world is only for humans" and i just don't think it was a very good writing choice. the requirements make you feel like maybe there IS a solution for all of this conflict and maybe there is some kind of way to coexist with demons in a positive way, but then you see the ending and it's like oh......nvm then. maybe it turned out that way cus of time contraints, i don't know. i pretty strongly believe the secret neutral ending was meant to be a route centering around miyazu and khonsu considering the requirements to get it, but then the time constraints made atlus have to dump khonsu and miyazu off into a side quest and shift things around

overall, i'd say it was a good game! the gameplay is a lot more compelling than the story, but the problems with the story really only become glaringly obvious if you play it 4 times over like i did lmao. i've seen some people ask if they should play the game or wait for vengeance, or say that they got the game to play while waiting for vengeance to release and tbh.......i don't think it's all that worth it, if i didn't have the game already i'd just be waiting for vengeance since the story of the original game is still gonna be available, it'll just be a different path entirely. plus vengeance is supposed to have a lot of improvements both storywise and gameplay wise, so i feel like it's better to just wait. i'm really looking forward to it tho, i've been loosely following the trailers/news and it looks like miyazu will have more of a role and they've added a lot of cool gameplay mechanics 🥰

i wasn't expecting this to be so long, but i feel like there's a lot to say about the game even if it seems like there isn't. i just really liked the game despite all its problems and it's in really close second as my favorite after iv, so the release of vengeance makes me wonder if it'll top iv as my favorite. thanks for giving me a chance to word vomit ab it lol