The Shin Megami Everything Thread

[cj iwakura]

I think, tonally, the problem with the two SMT IV:A endings is

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it's either full anime POWER OF FRIENDSHIP or straight up pitch-black "kill everyone and make your waifu your brainwashed slave".

Calling it jarring is a bit of an understatement, especially since either way,

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you either brainwash Dagda, or one of your friends.

Which is sad, because IV:A was great until that point, and they especially dropped the ball on the Divine Powers having an interesting throughline.

[Steven]

Yep, you either get

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The Persona Ending™ or the Edgelord 13-Year-Old's Chuunibyou DeviantArt Fanfiction Ending™.

I see what they were going for, but it's just... not good at all either way lol

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I don't remember exactly, but does Steven condemn your actions during the one time he shows up in Massacre after you murder everyone? I know he shows up and acts totally different from how he normally does, but I don't remember if he's like "FUCK YEAH GENOCIDE~" or "why the fuck did you murder everyone?". I somehow get the feeling that he was going along with it because it was too late even though he thought it was wrong or something like that, but I forgot.

A lot of people were probably very rightfully concerned for SMT V after this. I certainly was, but it turned out that V barely has a story and characters at all, although I'm still uncertain about whether or not that's an improvement.

[cj iwakura]

Yeah, for all of IV's flaws, and they are many, it's Shakespeare compared to V.

Vengeance didn't help much either, it just added MORE problems.

I think Apocalypse could have been fixed if there was a more nuanced third ending where you

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don't brainwash anyone

, without going to either extreme.

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Dagda gets to be himself, you don't murder everyone, but the ending is a bit messier as a result. That's the kind of thing I'd do in an Apocalypse V-2, given the chance.

[Steven]

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Dagda gets to be himself, you don't murder everyone, but the ending is a bit messier as a result. That's the kind of thing I'd do in an Apocalypse V-2, given the chance.

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This could probably work as a Krishna route type of thing if they really wanted to make it, although I don't think a Krishna route would really fit into the existing game too well without feeling forced, so they'd have to rewrite a decent chunk of the game to make it work, most likely. You'd also probably still end up fighting Dagda like immediately upon siding with Krishna, too. The problem is that I don't really see a reason for Danu to not make a new, non-crazy Dagda after that just like Bonds, though. There also isn't really any reason to kill Danu just to prevent her from making a new non-crazy Dagda since she's otherwise just kind of there, so yeah, it would be a mess.

[Blinge]

I deeeed it! finally hahah
jesus F christ

used Shiva, Samael, Demiurge.

samael doping then asahi picking up the heals for me. she lasted the whole fight.
Honestly this last attempt now i was so beefed up, and holding more great chakras.. went pretty smoothly.

The hardest part was managing the death of Flynn et al. like.. you can't just make them disappear instantly, i was hoping they'd die on a turn where the boss didn't smirk and buff himself but he bloody did.
He then wiped out most of my party's health, killed Samael but i managed to get him back in the game in short order,
the rest was history.

At one point my lvl 76 anubis had to come out because he was the only one with Mudo skills
Flynn didn't get me good openings. The boss was never weak to phys or gun. just light dark fire and force. Nanashi and 2 others had force tho, shiva just deckd him lol.

[Steven]

Feels good to finish that last boss, doesn't it? Sometimes it's just going to be easier/harder than other times because weaknesses are random and there is literally nothing you can do about it but get lucky or use something that has Pierce. It would be a lot easier if every demon could do every element like before, but now that MP costs are very high and having a negative affinity for an element makes MP costs even worse, it's not worth wasting skill slots on stuff that demons are terrible at and will only be able to use once or twice before they run out of MP.

So now you get to do it again for the other ending, I guess. Warning if you decide to do Phys/Gun: this game doesn't work the same way that IV does regarding these elements. STR and DEX are now separated and STR only affects Phys skills + your normal attack and DEX only affects your Gun skills + shoot command, so it is probably better to do either Phys or Gun and not both. Not sure if this is better or worse than IV having DEX work for both of them and STR being basically useless. I think your equipped weapons affect Phys and Gun skill damage now too, unlike IV, where they only affected the damage of your attack and shoot commands and not skills, which was really a strange decision. I think Gun build is better than Phys build for Nanashi because of elemental ammo, which Phys doesn't have an equivalent to, and of course the stat split means you can't really do both at the same time very well. Then again maybe I'm forgetting something and DEX Nanashi is actually terrible and STR is the way to go.

[Blinge]

oh hell naw i'm done with the game.

[Steven]

Awful experience, isn't it? I might suffer through it again once I am done with my current playthrough of IV, which I resumed yesterday after having had way more than enough of V. I never got one of the bad endings. I forgot which one, but it has two bad endings. I guess Massacre is bad enough to probably be a bad ending. Bonds is also bad enough to probably be a bad ending. Damn, this game has nothing but bad endings.

[Sima Tuna]

I will never play Apocalypse again.

Next time I get the urge to SMT, I will play Nocturne, DDS, Strange Journey, SMT2, Persona 1, SMT 4 original... Anything but not 4A.

I don't remember if I said SMT V was worse than 4A back when I first played it, but I doubt it is. It can't be. 4A tried to fix the broken gameplay from SMTIV but somehow failed and made it even worse.

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The main broken aspect of gameplay is the fuckstupid bullshit known as Smirk, plus the lack of a defense stat in SMT IV. In 4A, they somewhat fixed the defense stat lack (you don't take a billion damage from everything all the time) but they BUFFED smirks...

[BryanM]

Anything but not 4A.

How about some Majin Tensei? It'd be neat to have someone to talk to about this thing.

"The art's really cool but what's with the rest of this shit?"

Wyvern Knights will always be overpowered, they just can't help themselves. Everyone knows rocks beat the shit out of everything else, what's some paper gonna do to a rock?

[Steven]

How about Ronde? There's always Ronde!

[Blinge]

Awful experience, isn't it? I might suffer through it again once I am done with my current playthrough of IV, which I resumed yesterday after having had way more than enough of V. I never got one of the bad endings. I forgot which one, but it has two bad endings. I guess Massacre is bad enough to probably be a bad ending. Bonds is also bad enough to probably be a bad ending. Damn, this game has nothing but bad endings.

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Eh? everyone went about their happy little lives and were smiling at the end.

[Steven]

Awful experience, isn't it? I might suffer through it again once I am done with my current playthrough of IV, which I resumed yesterday after having had way more than enough of V. I never got one of the bad endings. I forgot which one, but it has two bad endings. I guess Massacre is bad enough to probably be a bad ending. Bonds is also bad enough to probably be a bad ending. Damn, this game has nothing but bad endings.

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Eh? everyone went about their happy little lives and were smiling at the end.

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I know that there are absolutely crazy anti-Persona SMT people that hate this ending because it's "The Persona Ending" or something like that, which is also why they hate all of Nanashi's friends, who they claim don't belong in SMT at all and only deserve to be in Persona. It's kind of super dumb because while this game's original characters that were not in SMT IV largely do admittedly suck aside from Dagda, it was a good idea because this series as a collective whole could honestly use better writing for its characters. See: SMT V.

In-game, isn't YHVH still going to return eventually, therefore meaning that this ending is only a temporary solution and the problem still remains? It's been too long, but I think it was something like that.

[Blinge]

Honestly i don't know but it seemed pretty... Final.

[ryu]

For what it's worth, the annual Atlus survey is up:

https://p-ch.jp/enquete2025_en/ (english)
https://p-ch.jp/enquete2025_jp/ (japanese)

Atlthough this one seems a lot less direct than the last I answered (which asked if users were interested in remakes).