The Shin Megami Everything Thread

[Augemitbutter]

i did a quick replay/cleanup of Soul Hackers 2 before starting this one and she was in my party, maybe they got access from there.

Ok, some npc uncovers the Miman guys for a fee. Is that guy new too?

I see other people talk about how they got locked into pay to win dlc by buying the deluxe version. Thing is, i get Mitama spawns all day and i don't have any deluxe dlc. I wouldn't even know what to do with even more spawns.

[Steven]

The funny resist everything build is still here.



I'll replace the resist passive skills with null/drain/repel when I am able to. I do have access to Physical Pleroma, but I'm keeping Rakunda for now because it's very useful.

This build feels super cheap, especially once you have null/drain/repel, so I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it's there if you want to break this already easy game.

Ok, some npc uncovers the Miman guys for a fee. Is that guy new too?

He's always been there.

I see other people talk about how they got locked into pay to win dlc by buying the deluxe version. Thing is, i get Mitama spawns all day and i don't have any deluxe dlc. I wouldn't even know what to do with even more spawns.

You can disable the extra Mitama DLC, although it defaults to on. They are EVERYWHERE if you enable it. Their stats change depending on what area you are in, but the rewards don't, so you can get access to Megido/Megidolaon, go to Minato-ku, and annihilate them all if you really wanted to.

[Sanguis]

I'm really not a RPG guy (well, I used to be, as a teenager), but I'm getting interested in the SMT series because it seems focused on gameplay (and challenge) rather than story.
Well, I was hoping to start with the most welcoming episode (V apparently) but it seems terrible according to most opinions here. I'm looking forward to Steven's final impressions on Vengeance.

[Steven]

Play SMTIV. It's the best one and will actually give you a relatively accurate representation of what the series is. It also has a stupidly good soundtrack, which makes up for Smirk being broken. It's worth playing just for the music, which is the best in the entire Megami Tensei franchise.

III is a weird outlier that is totally different from I, II, and mostly IV aside from Press Turn, and V is unfortunately like III but easier and with more polished gameplay (which is the nice way to say it's a less annoying game, although the new HD version fixes some of the annoying things), which includes analog movement, something that III lacks for some inexplicable reason. There is also Strange Journey if you like games that would be way better if they didn't have unbearably shitty music. Pretend IV Final doesn't exist. if... also exists and the female protagonist from if... later shows up in the first two Persona games, which nobody played. if... is kind of weird and stuff, but from what little I've played it's closer to I and II than it is to anything else.

V is a super disappointing and clearly incomplete game. Skip it, especially now that Vengeance exists, is pretty much the same thing but better, and has both the entire original version of V and the new story. The new Vengeance story seems oddly non-SMT-like so far. It says I'm 68% done with the game so far.

There are also some non-SMT spinoffs like Avatar Tuner and Devil Survivor. The 3DS versions of Devil Survivor and Devil Survivor 2 are possibly the best thing in the entire franchise, so if you skip everything else, make sure you play Devil Survivor. I need to go find Avatar Tuner eventually and play it/them.

[Steven]

I'm now at like 27~28 hours and the PS5's UI says that I am 83% finished with the game. Might be able to finish tomorrow. I just finished the first boss fight that I thought might be considered difficult until I realized I had a way to cheese it while barely taking any damage at all, which instantly reverted it to easy status.

It seems that the guest characters only kind of take a space in your demon stock. If you have a space open, they'll take it. If you don't, they'll make a space for themselves and once they leave that space goes away. At least they don't make you delete a demon just to have them join.

No specific comments on the story or anything yet, but it's completely diverged from the original story.

[Augemitbutter]

I think i'm around 50% finished with the orignal story according to trophy tracker? But trying to finish as many sidequest as possible and fusing anything i can. About 30 hours in.

[Steven]

Spoilers for both the original story and the new story:

Spoiler

Dazai removes his hat and becomes comically evil AGAIN in the new story. It's both somewhat earlier and slightly less completely ridiculous this time, but he still makes a really weird face that made me laugh. Dazai, you weird, poorly developed character who's barely in the game in either story and yet still manages to be in the game more than Atsuta...

At least Atsuta was here more this time than he was last time and had some more relevance to the story even though he died way earlier this time.

I have heard that this game might run at 30FPS on PS4. If so, what the hell? Really???

General random thoughts: play the old story first if you didn't play the original version unless you don't care about the story. You'll be missing some context from the original story if you don't, so you won't understand some of the more minor plot points. That said, if you only play one, do the new story.

The new story is... better, I guess? There's more of it, but that doesn't say much when Sonic 3 & Knuckles has a better and better told story than the original SMTV. It's still not an especially interesting story, but at least this time the story actually exists and you get to see it working instead of the old story's go to area -> kill demons -> get an awkward exposition dump from Koshimizu -> repeat until the game is over. There is still awkward exposition dumping from Koshimizu, but the story actually exists outside of that now.

[cfx]

.

[Steven]

Assuming the PS4 version runs at 30FPS, I'd consider the Switch version to be better just because the Switch controller's battery lasts like 5 times longer than the terrible battery life of the PS4 controller, and that doesn't even have anything to do with the game itself. It was never unplayable on Switch and is tolerable, but it definitely does struggle a lot at times and the input lag is annoying. Handheld mode is also pretty nice, which the devs said is the primary reason they made the original version for the Switch. Yep, handheld mode officially is why it was a Switch exclusive.

Unfortunately it's not like the PS5 controller battery life is any better than the PS4 controller's, and I have run the battery all the way from full to getting the battery warning indicator a few times playing this game, but I guess you can just play wired.

[cfx]

.

[Augemitbutter]

The PS5 controller battery lasts because there is nothing to drain it in this game. No rumble support etc. Must be around 8 hours game time.

[ryu]

I have heard that this game might run at 30FPS on PS4. If so, what the hell? Really???

Sounds about right for me. With 60FPS I get that uncanny, artificial game feel. It's much easier to get immersed into a 30 FPS game for me, so 30FPS is crucial for RPGs and anything that's supposed to have an atmosphere.

[Steven]

I have heard that this game might run at 30FPS on PS4. If so, what the hell? Really???

Sounds about right for me. With 60FPS I get that uncanny, artificial game feel. It's much easier to get immersed into a 30 FPS game for me, so 30FPS is crucial for RPGs and anything that's supposed to have an atmosphere.

Higher framerates are always better unless they cause the game to break, as they inherently have lower input lag, which the original Switch version has surprising amount of, and Nvidia posted a cool thing on their website about how higher refresh rates can theoretically make you a better player. I am disappointed by the performance of the PS5 version, which I have found can't even maintain 60FPS, as it drops when using certain attacks in battle (Hassou Tobi), but I suppose it's not going to change that much for this game.

[ryu]

Higher framerates are always better unless they cause the game to break, as they inherently have lower input lag, which the original Switch version has surprising amount of, and Nvidia posted a cool thing on their website about how higher refresh rates can theoretically make you a better player.

But Shin Megami Tensei isn't an action game series...

Obviously players playing at higher refresh rates have advantages. But for me that's a reason to restrict refresh rates to 60hz.

The industry should be investing in developing inherently better display technologies instead of pushing resolution and refresh rates every couple years.

[Augemitbutter]

3rd area NPCs keep talking about fog but i barely see any. Is this something they changed?

[Steven]

Current time is 40 hours and 1 minute. Decided to go mess around for like 10 hours to do sidequest stuff, but I am currently in

Spoiler

the crappy dungeon thing right before you get to 至高天 (no clue what the hell this is called in English, so don't ask)

now, so I'm basically done with the game unless they changed anything, which I highly doubt. All I have to do now is run through a hallway that's impossible to get lost in because it's a hallway (again, unless they changed it, which I still highly doubt), kill a few relatively easy bosses, and the game is over. I think it's too early to give final thoughts, so I guess these are pre-final thoughts:

If you hated V, you'll probably still hate Vengeance. Even on the new Vengeance-exclusive route it's still closer to being identical to V than it is to being a different game, although I think the new area in the Vengeance route is one of the best areas. The Vengeance story isn't much better or more interesting, but there is more of it this time, so that's probably an improvement. It's easier unless you play on the new unlockable hardest setting, which I don't know how to get, but I guess it requires at least three playthroughs or something. Might be wrong, but that sucks because the game is way too easy and I'd rather have the option from the start.

You can tell they definitely redid the level scaling thing because the enemies and especially the bosses in the final area don't immediately kill you in one hit even though you are still 15~20 levels below most of them when you arrive. Spoilers for those bosses:

Spoiler

Vasuki is replaced by Beelzebub. I seem to remember Vasuki as being one of the more annoying bosses in the area. Ended up soloing him on skill auto because he couldn't really do anything to me because of my resistances. Even though he spammed Randomizer on me and I never bothered to undo it, I didn't have any problems with him aside from having to watch out for an occasional Zanbarion, which I only resist instead of null.

Odin and Zeus are also replaced... by a fight with both of them at the same time at Odin's place. They have way less HP now and this fight was actually easier than Beelzebub. Odin no longer seems to spam the shit out of Gungnir, which was what made him super dangerous in the original route, and this makes him way easier. Both of them like to use Mahaziodyine now, so if you have just one thing in your party with null/drain/repel elec it's a really easy fight.

Spoilers for the late-game story:

Spoiler

They shouldn't have showed off the new Nahobino form in the trailer because exactly what you think happens to get you that form happens: Aogami dies and you fuse with Tsukuyomi/Koshimizu. Then you go through a new dungeon that at least is kind of nice to look at but otherwise nothing special. While you are in there Tsukuyomi/Koshimizu also does an offhand "Oh yeah BTW the fake Tokyo is disintegrating or whatever" in a non-voiced event. Yeah, that's a major plot point by this game's pitiful standard and it's delivered in a non-voiced throwaway line in this story route? Really? That was a mildly interesting (for this game's incredibly low standard) and major scene in the original and here it's just a thing mentioned in passing. We'll see what happens with the ending, but I don't expect much.

Many people have complained for the past decade about Neutral being too good of an ending. That's fixed here because there is no Neutral ending at all in Vengeance, only Law and Chaos, the latter of which is what I am getting. The plot reason for there being no Neutral ending is absolutely hilarious, but not in a good way: Yakumo shows up and says "my girlfriend died offscreen while you weren't around, so I'm out. Have a fun existence!" Yep. That's why there is no Neutral ending.

It always seemed to me that the original game had two Law heroes (Dazai and Tao), a Neutral hero (Yakumo), and only one Chaos hero (Atsuta), but it seems that they decided to make Youko the second Chaos hero here. I'm guessing that the new Law and Chaos endings are going to be Tao and Youko endings.

Uh... yeah. I will probably finish the game on Saturday night, but maybe earlier or later. It seems to me that you can't do the cool Trumpeter resistances + Resist/Null/Drain/Repel Physical this time, as Trumpeter no longer has his non-instant death resistances, so if you want to do an all-resist build you have to do the one with the Belphegor resistances that I posted earlier. I did beat Trumpeter (he was always super easy in this game, but he's even easier now that he doesn't resist everything but physical), so I'll check it out in more detail later once my level is high enough to make Trumpeter.

Higher framerates are always better unless they cause the game to break, as they inherently have lower input lag, which the original Switch version has surprising amount of, and Nvidia posted a cool thing on their website about how higher refresh rates can theoretically make you a better player.

But Shin Megami Tensei isn't an action game series...

Synchronicity Prologue is an action game. It only supports 60FPS, though.

The industry should be investing in developing inherently better display technologies instead of pushing resolution and refresh rates every couple years.

There isn't even really advancement in resolution and refresh rates unless you play on PC. I wonder if it's because the damn PS4 and Switch haven't died yet and everyone wants to develop for those and then port to other systems. We're probably like halfway to PS6 already and many games are still stuck at 60FPS on PS5.

[Sima Tuna]

If you hated V, you'll probably still hate Vengeance. Even on the new Vengeance-exclusive route it's still closer to being identical to V than it is to being a different game, although I think the new area in the Vengeance route is one of the best areas. The Vengeance story isn't much better or more interesting, but there is more of it this time, so that's probably an improvement. It's easier unless you play on the new unlockable hardest setting, which I don't know how to get, but I guess it requires at least three playthroughs or something. Might be wrong, but that sucks because the game is way too easy and I'd rather have the option from the start.

Thanks dude. That sounds awful. I'm gonna pass. More of a bad and boring story is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. My favorite part of SMT V was the very first section where you talk to demons and do random shit while stumbling around the desert. But even there, the armor suit was always yapping in my ear about something dumb. Multiple playthroughs to unlock a harder difficulty is garbage design. Doesn't really matter what game it is. If a difficulty level is present in the game, then it should be offered up-front. Same applies to easy modes, like NG's Ninja Dog and DMC3 easy. Those should be available at the start of the game as a selectable option and the game should never offer to switch me down to an easier difficulty. Ever. If I select hard difficulty then that's what I want. If I need an easier difficulty then I will start a new save file.

The last SMT games I enjoyed were all on 3ds and most were remakes/remasters of even older games. I guess it's time to admit I don't vibe with what SMT has become. I hated 4A and V. "Easy" should never be a word used to describe SMT games, incidentally. So that just demonstrates a failing of the designers to understand what they're making, in my view. An SMT game can be "easier" than a harder SMT game, but should never actually become "easy." When I played vanilla SMT V, I absolutely steamrolled with no opposition. Killed almost everything on turn one or two with a very unoptimal setup. It's sad tbh.

[cfx]

.

[Steven]

If you hated V, you'll probably still hate Vengeance. Even on the new Vengeance-exclusive route it's still closer to being identical to V than it is to being a different game, although I think the new area in the Vengeance route is one of the best areas. The Vengeance story isn't much better or more interesting, but there is more of it this time, so that's probably an improvement. It's easier unless you play on the new unlockable hardest setting, which I don't know how to get, but I guess it requires at least three playthroughs or something. Might be wrong, but that sucks because the game is way too easy and I'd rather have the option from the start.

Thanks dude. That sounds awful. I'm gonna pass. More of a bad and boring story is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. My favorite part of SMT V was the very first section where you talk to demons and do random shit while stumbling around the desert. But even there, the armor suit was always yapping in my ear about something dumb. Multiple playthroughs to unlock a harder difficulty is garbage design. Doesn't really matter what game it is. If a difficulty level is present in the game, then it should be offered up-front. Same applies to easy modes, like NG's Ninja Dog and DMC3 easy. Those should be available at the start of the game as a selectable option and the game should never offer to switch me down to an easier difficulty. Ever. If I select hard difficulty then that's what I want. If I need an easier difficulty then I will start a new save file.

The last SMT games I enjoyed were all on 3ds and most were remakes/remasters of even older games. I guess it's time to admit I don't vibe with what SMT has become. I hated 4A and V. "Easy" should never be a word used to describe SMT games, incidentally. So that just demonstrates a failing of the designers to understand what they're making, in my view. An SMT game can be "easier" than a harder SMT game, but should never actually become "easy." When I played vanilla SMT V, I absolutely steamrolled with no opposition. Killed almost everything on turn one or two with a very unoptimal setup. It's sad tbh.

The last good new/non-port Megami Tensei game that was actually made by Atlus was... SMTIV? You could make a case for that Persona 4 rhythm game, too. That was pretty good, so when I heard that the P3 and P5 rhythm games were not very good I was surprised. Synchronicity Prologue is cool but I don't think Atlus made it. Persona Q was passable but unremarkable and I never played the sequel, but I'm guessing it's more of the same.

Basically they have made exactly zero great new/non-port games in their most important franchise since they were bought by Sega. The point when Sega bought Atlus was when Sega started to stop being terrible and become cool again for the first time since the Dreamcast died, but that only lasted for a few years before Sega started reverting to being as bad as it was in its immediate post-Dreamcast phase, so maybe Atlus got contaminated by Sega. Judging by the amount and quality of the DLC in SMTIV, it wasn't entirely Sega's fault, but it's the best theory that I have now unless a bunch of cool people left and I don't know about it. I wonder whatever happened to Cozy Okada. At least they managed to make a handful of great games without him.

There isn't even really advancement in resolution and refresh rates unless you play on PC. I wonder if it's because the damn PS4 and Switch haven't died yet and everyone wants to develop for those and then port to other systems. We're probably like halfway to PS6 already and many games are still stuck at 60FPS on PS5.

Perhaps, but isn't it just as likely because most people don't have displays that are above 60Hz? Does that even exist in TVs? I know it's there in computer monitors, but no matter how common that is (I have no clue), PC monitors aren't what most are playing their consoles attached to, I'd wager.

But if you're right, it's not going to change with the demise of PS4 and Switch, because there's no way the Switch successor is going to support anything above 60 Hz either, because Nintendo is never going to make the hardware any more powerful (or expensive) than absolutely necessary, and all they really care about is supporting the attached screen anyway.

More than that, how many users actually care? People willingly buy Switch versions of multiplat games that perform like garbage on the thing where they'd run better elsewhere because they value portability above all else, or because they're Nintendo fanboys.

I think there are TVs that support higher refresh rates, but I use a PC monitor for everything that has HDMI output. I don't have an HDTV, not that I'd have anywhere to put it if I did.

Anyway, it doesn't matter because people care more about graphics than performance for now. It's starting to change on consoles because PS5 games sometimes offer graphics settings, with SMTV Vengeance being an example, as you can disable ambient occlusion, anti-aliasing, and some other stuff. I have no idea why you'd disable those things because it's not going to make the game run any better and disabling them will make the game look worse, but it's there if you want to. Unfortunately you can't disable chromatic aberration, which is the one thing that I wish that I could disable in every game but but the option to get rid of it is not there in this game!

There are some other PS5 games that offer settings like this, but until it becomes the standard it won't matter, and once it does become the standard why even play on consoles at all when PC gives you exactly the same shit but better? Minus games with shameful always-online DRM, of course, like this one, which is why I'm playing on PS5 instead of Steam Deck or my normal PC.

[Steven]

Alright, I made it to the

Spoiler

Metatron

room. Of the very few mandatory bosses in the game that are difficult, this is probably the hardest one. Reasons:

Spoiler

Dekaja
Dekunda
Almighty spam
no weaknesses
resists or nulls everything but phys and expel

This is the last thing in the game that is actually somewhat difficult unless you do the optional bosses.

My current stats... spoilers for Vengeance route, I guess, even though this was shown in trailers:

Spoiler

Even with this build this boss will still suck, partially because all of those resistances and nulls mean absolutely nothing. I don't have a strategy right now because I forgot my old strategy. Here goes.

Edit: success on first attempt. They definitely made this boss WAY easier, or maybe the removal/reduction of level scaling made it easier. Pretty sure they REALLY toned down the Almighty spam, as it didn't happen at all here, or maybe I'm wrong and it never happened at all.

Now for the hard decision: kill optional super boss yes/no. I want to get it over with so I don't have to do it again, but it's annoying, time consuming, and preparing for it will ruin the rest of the game because I'll be way too powerful for the rest of the bosses to be able to do anything to me. Unfortunately, this is another one where I forgot my strategy from the Switch version.

Edit: it's done. Took a few tries and some cheese, but I killed Shiva at exactly 0400. He's actually not that hard once you know what to do. Time to go to sleep now. Will finish the rest of the game tomorrow since there's nothing that can stop me now.

edit 2: could not sleep, so finished game. Unskippable credits rolling now. Final thoughts after I sleep.

So in the end it's just more SMTV. If you liked it or hated it before you'll probably have the same feelings now because it's pretty much the same game but easier. They did put a few new bosses in the new route that are really weird and have a ridiculous amount of HP and take forever to kill and you absolutely have to respect them and play by their rules, even if you've defeated Shiva. I did not get the ending I was planning on because I ended up disagreeing with that philosophy at the last possible moment and switched endings. Uh... yeah, that's about all I have to say. I guess I'll talk about how I would fix this series (it needs it, desperately) later.

[Steven]

Alright, I don't have anything better to do right now, so let's fix SMT. This is how to do it:

Spoiler

• Ditch the pseudo-open world thing. It sucks, especially because half of the areas in V are so restricted that they are essentially really wide hallways, but they are also really empty and not interesting to explore. True open world doesn't make games like this better anyway, it just makes them take longer and be more boring, so don't do that either.

• Doi sucks at designing demons. Get someone else and never use most of Doi's designs again. His human designs are generally good, aside from Deep Strange Journey's weird-looking new girl, who looks like she got last place at a Star Trek cosplay convention, and the redesigns of the original Strange Journey cast, which look strange to me for some reason.

• Also ditch the sand-covered abandoned Tokyo setting. It wasn't very interesting in III and it's even less interesting here.

• 世界観 (there is no English equivalent to this word as it's used in Japanese. You can translate it, sure, but the translated meaning doesn't convey what it really is, or how important it is) is a huge problem with V. Return to the cool "this was definitely made in the 90s" cyberpunk thing that games like SMTI, SMTII, Devil Summoner, the original Soul Hackers, and SMTIV have. Aesthetically, Soul Hackers was really cool, so can we just take that, add the typical post-nuclear holocaust thing from SMTI, II, and IV, and call it perfect? Please? Let's ABSOLUTELY NOT do another boring, empty desert or whatever Soul Hackers 2 is supposed to be. I like my edgy post-apocalyptic cyberpunk game series to actually have edgy post-apocalyptic cyberpunk games. V is not edgy or cyberpunk and its 世界観 is a failure. Those other games have perfect 世界観 and V doesn't have one beyond "empty desert"

• PLEASE add some fucking dungeons or something! Preferably ones that are interesting and varied? V is just not interesting at all! Do something, or anything! Just don't do more of V's emptiness!

• This series is ultimately about the war between Law and Chaos. Unfortunately, Neutral has pretty much become the unofficial "good ending" and the others are less desirable. This REALLY needs to be fixed somehow. Vengeance actually fixed this! Kind of, anyway, because Neutral simply doesn't exist due to a poorly written off-screen plot development, the Law heroes are kind of bland and only one Chaos hero (Youko) has a meaningful presence. Law especially is problematic since it's almost always just "lose free will and become a slave to YHWH", with various amounts of "commit genocide because YHWH says to do so", which is obviously not very compelling

• Have an actual route split and do it way earlier. V is especially disappointing because all it does is change the two bosses before the final boss. The rest of the game is completely identical! Let's have a more meaningful route split that takes us to radically different locations with completely different enemies and bosses, and do it much, MUCH earlier in the game so it actually matters, maybe at like the 60%~70% point, not literally at the last possible moment.

• Can we please have it so that choices are not extremely blatantly Law or Chaos aligned? All you have to do currently to get Law is choose the "be nice" options and for Chaos you choose the "be mean for no reason" options. These types of options are ridiculous, extremely obvious, and very stupid because being nice or being mean has absolutely nothing to do with the Law/Chaos/Neutral ideology!

• No more of this stupid minimalist story crap like like III and especially V. I, II, IV, and Strange Journey show that you can have an interesting story that's actually there and good enough to pretend to care about. Just don't do another IV Final thing EVER AGAIN. I'll take the nothingness of V over that shameful travesty! Also have the Law/Chaos/Neutral heroes actually be in the damn game next time instead of vanishing for 70% of the game only to suddenly show up in the final dungeon to give some bluntly awkward exposition dump about their philosophy and then try to kill the player.

• Keep the current composer. Sorry composer dude, I forgot your name, but you're good! This dude's best work was SMTIV, with the new stuff from SMTIV Final being pretty even, and collectively these two have the best music in the franchise. More like these two, please. Alternatively, something like the soundtracks of SMTI and II would be cool as well.

• Keep press turn, but make it not super unbalanced this time. Smirk was ultra broken in IV, but I think the Magatsuhi system in V is actually even more broken! There are only two types of Magatsuhi skills: the game-breaking ones, which are Critical and Accursed Poison, and the useless ones, which are all of the rest. This turns the game into waiting until your meter is full and then either annihilating everything or rendering it helpless so you can annihilate it without risk of taking damage. This needs to go away, partially it's not very interesting at all, but especially because it's completely imbalanced.

• Although I want to keep press turn, it's getting a bit stale. Do something to change it, like maybe adding two more party members, just like how SMT used to be before III came along. Maybe do something with a front row/back row positioning strategy or something, but if you do it make it so that there are always meaningful tradeoffs for putting anything in either the front row or the back row. If you can't figure out how to make positioning both interesting and balanced, don't do it. I can't think of anything specific to make it better, but that's what professional game designers are for. Do something else other than just adding more battle participants if you have something better, but do something!

• Reevaluate and fix character builds/stat allocation. In V, you get enough random stat increases from leveling up that the optimal build is to simply dump every point you get into strength or magic and ignore everything else. Vengeance makes this worse by giving you more points. There is no strategy beyond choosing whether you want physical or magic and dumping all of your points into that one stat.

• Related to the above: can we go back to having equipment please? I don't really care for the simplified no-equipment approach of III and V. Let's not do it like how IV did it, because in IV your sword and gun don't actually increase the damage of your physical or gun skills, which is really weird. This leads to the next point, which is

• Bring back Gun element and elemental ammunition. This brings back an additional layer of strategy, especially for phys/gun builds

• Return Hama/Mudo to how they used to be: chance of instant death, no damage. Add damaging skills of the same elements that don't do instant death. Persona 5 does this properly! Just copy that!

• Have physical skills cost HP again. Strange Journey fucked this up by changing it to MP and IV made it worse by giving physical demons terribly small MP, so they could do like one or two attacks and then become useless for anything other than being there to use items or to be an extra press turn!

• Everyone will hate this, but too bad: return to first person for the majority of the game, or do it exactly like how IV did it, and I do mean EXACTLY. Yes, I really liked the first person battles and first person story sequences with the text descriptions of what is going on. It gave the game a really cool and intriguing quality that I find hard to describe. Maybe even make it a first person dungeon RPG again! That would be pretty great.

There's probably some more stuff that I for, but this is about it for what I can remember. Also make Devil Survivor 3.

[ryu]

I thought V was somewhat unpolished and unbalanced (I especially agree on the problem with the special bar, no idea why I didn't stress that more in my review), but otherwise fine if you ignore that most areas are rather bland visually. Definitely not the best SMT game, but also not a terrible one either. I really liked the atmosphere in the final region and actually enjoyed exploring the world.

[Steven]

V is super unbalanced, but it's in the player's favour aside from the level scaling, and even that is only really an annoyance for the first boss and the entire final area. In regular V you don't have many options other than to rely on instant death from Hama for a while when you get there because so many things are weak to it while you're doing very little damage. If you want to be really cheesy you can get White Rider and God Arrow everything to death, which is what I did in regular V. Of course, now that level scaling is either gone or greatly reduced, it doesn't really matter.

Having super cheap items to block elemental damage was really terrible. This was a huge mistake. It's really really bad because all you have to do is use 万里の眼鏡 to scan the enemy, figure out what they will use when they do their Magatsuhi Critical, and then once they use the Magatsuhi Critical thing you use the item and get a turn of guaranteed no damage for only 150 Macca. At least you can only hold three of each type at once.

One of the weirdest things about V is how you are drowning in money and yet healing is so cheap that it might as well be free AND there's a thing to make it cheaper. I ended my playthrough today with about 900,000 Macca. That's a lot. There are not many things worth buying except for your own registered demons, which is probably why.

I just realized I forgot to mention my completion time: 44 hours and 42 minutes. A lot of this is probably due to familiarity with the game since about 70% of it is the same as before, aside from the story, so first time players can probably expect it to take longer.

Unsure what I will do now, but I'm thinking about doing a few more cycles using the option that lets you keep your stuff to see all of the endings. Skipping cutscenes and sidequests should probably let me finish the game in 3~5 hours.

[Augemitbutter]

The last area is so big, i didn't expect to spend so much time in it with quests and bosses popping up everywhere. The map looks more Ubified than previous areas with symbols everywhere. Even then i think i've spend more time fusing than running. Currently at 70%+.

[Sima Tuna]

Spoiler

Ditch the pseudo-open world thing. It sucks, especially because half of the areas in V are so restricted that they are essentially really wide hallways, but they are also really empty and not interesting to explore. True open world doesn't make games like this better anyway, it just makes them take longer and be more boring, so don't do that either.[/list]

Agreed. SMT is not an open-world series and should not be. Even SMT III (the game SMT V desperately wants to be) was fairly linear. You could make a few choices at specific points but you had to follow the line of progression. Regardless, I would still argue that SMT III, as good as that game is, kind of loses steam over time due to feeling a little too large. Strange Journey is a long game, but you're always progressing into a new dungeon that changes up gameplay completely. Each dungeon feels grueling and rewarding.

• Doi sucks at designing demons. Get someone else and never use most of Doi's designs again. His human designs are generally good, aside from Deep Strange Journey's weird-looking new girl, who looks like she got last place at a Star Trek cosplay convention, and the redesigns of the original Strange Journey cast, which look strange to me for some reason.

They look strange because the redesigns are SHIIIIIIIIIIIT. Strange Journey is one of my favorite games ever. Nobody wanted to like Deep Strange Journey more than me. I still DO like it, because it ultimately is still Strange Journey. But they made the game way too fucking easy, threw in a bunch of Doi designs and a megadungeon that sucks balls to actually explore. The protagonist went from a useless fuck you'd grow to love, to a monstrously overpowered beasting machine... Just like all other nu-SMTs. How I long for the days of Souls Hackers and vanilla SJ!

• PLEASE add some fucking dungeons or something! Preferably ones that are interesting and varied? V is just not interesting at all! Do something, or anything! Just don't do more of V's emptiness!

This is a problem that extends way beyond just SMT. Persona has had a dungeon design problem since Persona 3. And SMT has had one since... Possibly SMT IV or SMT III, depending how charitable you feel. SMT V is definitely a low point, however. Right down there with Persona 4's identical box rooms.

• This series is ultimately about the war between Law and Chaos. Unfortunately, Neutral has pretty much become the unofficial "good ending" and the others are less desirable. This REALLY needs to be fixed somehow. Vengeance actually fixed this! Kind of, anyway, because Neutral simply doesn't exist due to a poorly written off-screen plot development, the Law heroes are kind of bland and only one Chaos hero (Youko) has a meaningful presence. Law especially is problematic since it's almost always just "lose free will and become a slave to YHWH", with various amounts of "commit genocide because YHWH says to do so", which is obviously not very compelling

• Have an actual route split and do it way earlier. V is especially disappointing because all it does is change the two bosses before the final boss. The rest of the game is completely identical! Let's have a more meaningful route split that takes us to radically different locations with completely different enemies and bosses, and do it much, MUCH earlier in the game so it actually matters, maybe at like the 60%~70% point, not literally at the last possible moment.

• Can we please have it so that choices are not extremely blatantly Law or Chaos aligned? All you have to do currently to get Law is choose the "be nice" options and for Chaos you choose the "be mean for no reason" options. These types of options are ridiculous, extremely obvious, and very stupid because being nice or being mean has absolutely nothing to do with the Law/Chaos/Neutral ideology!

Good points, all. I think the mark of a good Law/Neutral/Chaos choice is when all of their viewpoints feel intelligent and reasonable. Devil Survivor Overclocked did this the best of any SMT I have played. It's not entirely obvious which route is which alignment (since they are tied to character alliances) and your main character sees a satisfying conclusion no matter which route you take, so long as it isn't an obvious cop-out bad end.

Too many of the SMT games hold up True Neutral as the undisputed good end for the story. Which is also usually the least interesting conclusion where everyone lives happily ever after and the world returns to normal. Basically a reverse isekai with truck-kun bringing your corpse back to life in the real world.

• No more of this stupid minimalist story crap like like III and especially V. I, II, IV, and Strange Journey show that you can have an interesting story that's actually there and good enough to pretend to care about. Just don't do another IV Final thing EVER AGAIN. I'll take the nothingness of V over that shameful travesty! Also have the Law/Chaos/Neutral heroes actually be in the damn game next time instead of vanishing for 70% of the game only to suddenly show up in the final dungeon to give some bluntly awkward exposition dump about their philosophy and then try to kill the player.

I swear, Sega took entirely the wrong lessons from SMT III. It was the atmosphere, music, visual style (Kaneko art!) and theming that made SMT III so interesting. The story was pretty... Um... What is a kind word for barebones and obvious? It wasn't so much what happened in SMT III that was cool as the way that SMT III did it. You can't steal a bunch of ideas from SMT III and put them in a Doi game with nu-Persona, nu-SMT game design and it's gonna be a smash hit...

• Keep press turn, but make it not super unbalanced this time. Smirk was ultra broken in IV, but I think the Magatsuhi system in V is actually even more broken! There are only two types of Magatsuhi skills: the game-breaking ones, which are Critical and Accursed Poison, and the useless ones, which are all of the rest. This turns the game into waiting until your meter is full and then either annihilating everything or rendering it helpless so you can annihilate it without risk of taking damage. This needs to go away, partially it's not very interesting at all, but especially because it's completely imbalanced.

• Although I want to keep press turn, it's getting a bit stale. Do something to change it, like maybe adding two more party members, just like how SMT used to be before III came along. Maybe do something with a front row/back row positioning strategy or something, but if you do it make it so that there are always meaningful tradeoffs for putting anything in either the front row or the back row. If you can't figure out how to make positioning both interesting and balanced, don't do it. I can't think of anything specific to make it better, but that's what professional game designers are for. Do something else other than just adding more battle participants if you have something better, but do something!

Nah, I say dump Press Turn. I feel like I have to keep apologizing and point out that I DO like Press Turn in some of the games. But I don't think it's worth keeping around at this point. It's too unbalanced. It plays out like rocket launcher tag even from level 1, in most of these games. You either obliterate the enemy or you get destroyed. It can kinda work when the damage numbers are low enough that neither side can overwhelmingly body the other with a single string of Press Turns... But that's not how most Press Turn SMT games go.

Strange Journey changed this, as did Soul Hackers and Devil Survivor Overclocked. Choosing the correct type to defeat your enemy is still rewarded heavily in all of those games, but not so absurdly as in SMT IV and V.

• Reevaluate and fix character builds/stat allocation. In V, you get enough random stat increases from leveling up that the optimal build is to simply dump every point you get into strength or magic and ignore everything else. Vengeance makes this worse by giving you more points. There is no strategy beyond choosing whether you want physical or magic and dumping all of your points into that one stat.

• Related to the above: can we go back to having equipment please? I don't really care for the simplified no-equipment approach of III and V. Let's not do it like how IV did it, because in IV your sword and gun don't actually increase the damage of your physical or gun skills, which is really weird. This leads to the next point, which is

• Bring back Gun element and elemental ammunition. This brings back an additional layer of strategy, especially for phys/gun builds

• Return Hama/Mudo to how they used to be: chance of instant death, no damage. Add damaging skills of the same elements that don't do instant death. Persona 5 does this properly! Just copy that!

• Have physical skills cost HP again. Strange Journey fucked this up by changing it to MP and IV made it worse by giving physical demons terribly small MP, so they could do like one or two attacks and then become useless for anything other than being there to use items or to be an extra press turn!

Defense stat. #1 change to ALL future games needs to be to increase the importance of defense and special defense stats. Not saying you have to force the player to burn skill points pumping boring defense stats, but give them more equipment, accessories and/or slots on a paperdoll so they can pad out their defenses without sacrificing their build's effectiveness. Defense NEEDS to be a viable part of the game. A defensive tank should be able to take repeated attacks of an element it is weak to without dying. It wouldn't be broken because you'd still get whatever negative penalty was implemented for an enemy using type-advantaged attacks. Whether it's losing your turn like in Persona, or an almighty chase attack like Strange Journey, or having your stats debuffed, whatever. But currently in most SMT games, defense is not a strategy. It either doesn't exist or it's not worth using.

• Everyone will hate this, but too bad: return to first person for the majority of the game, or do it exactly like how IV did it, and I do mean EXACTLY. Yes, I really liked the first person battles and first person story sequences with the text descriptions of what is going on. It gave the game a really cool and intriguing quality that I find hard to describe. Maybe even make it a first person dungeon RPG again! That would be pretty great.

Hard agree. What, do people not think a first-person dungeon crawler can be beautiful to look at? It would cost them less money to make in first-person and they could reallocate money they would have used 3d modeling to build more dungeons and expand out gameplay. Why is it that the best SMT games are all on old or underpowered systems? It's almost as if the technical specs of the machine have no bearing upon the quality of a dungeon crawler series. The SMT games that released during the DS and 3DS life cycle knew how to make the most of a very limited budget and console.

[cj iwakura]

I'm really glad I'm not the only one underwhelmed by Vengeance. The GAMEPLAY and presentation are still top shelf, but the core story is not that interesting, and V-2 is just like, well, here's more of it with a random new insert girl, we guess.

I do dig the Qadistu designs, but their plot doesn't seem much more interesting than V's.

Now if they were, like, a Lilith faction rebelling against Lucifer for their treatment during the Eden debacle, that would be interesting, but I feel this is just another indicator that they really have no direction without Kaneko or Okada.

[Lethe]

SJ's combat gimmick is so bland and uninteractive it just made me feel like these games need even more rocket tag. Press Turn is fun because it can go horribly wrong at any moment.

[Sima Tuna]

SJ's combat gimmick is so bland and uninteractive it just made me feel like these games need even more rocket tag. Press Turn is fun because it can go horribly wrong at any moment.

What did you think of SMT IV, which was exactly that? Lack of any defense stat means you either nullify/reflect or die in one turn.

[cfx]

.

[Lethe]

What did you think of SMT IV, which was exactly that? Lack of any defense stat means you either nullify/reflect or die in one turn.

I've not played it. I don't think I've ever heard a single positive remark about its combat systems so I didn't bother. I wasn't making a serious suggestion anyway. The SJ co-op attacks are smart design because of how they work with party management, they're just boring in what they actually do. Ultimately I think we're arriving at the perennial dilemma of any long-running systems-driven series where small changes aren't enough to keep it interesting, but you can't just replace all the gimmicks without screwing it up, and a proper revision would take risk and intelligence, so that's not going to happen.

Tangent

I was recently reminded of the Stardust Crusaders fangame The 7th Stand User - which is a fucking RPG Maker 2000 game of all things - that also has combat which often lapses into rocket tag but also has fantastic use of status effects. Virtually every attack does something besides raw damage, like physical barrages sending flimsy enemies flying, impressive attacks scaring them, getting occupied by a homing projectile or swarm and not having time to do complex actions, there are half a dozen different damage-over-time effects, combined with more recognizable sleep/confuse/blind/berserk and such. It's a constant part of gameplay, every single party member and enemy has appropriately varying resistances, and I'm pretty sure there's no enemy which is immune to all statuses. This is with an ancient, amateur, cripplingly limited engine - now imagine implementing that with SMT's variety and budget. There's so much potential not just for gameplay, but for the flavor and individuality of every single demon.

The vision, effort and commitment involved in making anything comparable to that happen is the essential principle that's absent from all of gaming's slop.