Shin Megami Tensei V review

Shin Megami Tensei V feels like Persona 5’s bolder and less sociable younger brother, even though Persona started out as a spin-off of the series. Both branches of the family share much of their cast of highly customizable demons, such as mythological Pokémon that you smash to make others even more powerful. They have similar excellent turn-based combat systems that encourage you to fish for your opponents weaknesses and make smart use of all the resources available to you. What’s missing from the Persona formula here is much of his heart, but Shin Megami Tensei V still rises to be successful in most other ways.

Most of the action takes place in four open and expansive areas of the Underworld – an alternate reality that reflects a post-apocalyptic Tokyo riddled with mythological beasts and heroes. They range from the sun-drenched desert expanse of Minato to the murky blood-red wastelands of Shinagawa, each echoing an area of ​​real-world Tokyo with ruined buildings and important monuments jutting out of the wastelands. They all have a very different vibe, diverging from a central theme of surreal and techno-religious weirdness. While you’ll fight a lot of intense battles within them, these strange cityscapes also encourage exploration and even involve some tricky platforming to find all the hidden Miman – little red dudes who give you a coin that you can use in miraculous bonuses for all of you. group. or customize the protagonist.

And customization is the main pillar of SMT5. Since there are no human members of the party to stay with you throughout the adventure, you will build a rotating team of three demons that have their own strengths, weaknesses, and special tricks. Merging two or more demons into stronger ones is critical to your progression, but you can also accumulate items called grimoires that allow you to continue activating a specific pair of demons that you want to keep with you in the long run, which I really appreciate. Obtaining new demons involves a bargaining system that requires learning each demon’s personality and what kind of responses will please them, which certainly seemed too random at times. But it could also be quite funny when I chose what seemed like the perfect answer only to have an unexpected objection knock the rug out from under me, like a vainglorious fairy who runs away if you call her beautiful because she’s too shy to handle such a thing. a compliment, or a deranged horse demon that he only likes if he repeatedly insults him.

ESSENTIAL ESSENCE

However, things get really interesting when you consider the essence system, which allows you to teach abilities from a different demon than an existing one, and even inherit its elemental resistances and weaknesses. Between fusion, miracles and essences, it is possible to create some absurdly powerful and specialized equipment that can take on almost any challenge. The way these systems interact is not very well explained, but I really enjoyed the gradual path of mastering them myself through trial and error. The hunger to experiment is a great asset in this underworld.

And mastery is basically a necessity unless you want to play on the easiest difficulty. Shin Megami Tensei has a reputation for being brutally difficult as a series, and I could see why, even in its Normal mode. Only using the strongest demons that I came across naturally, they would often chew and spit on me quite quickly, especially against certain bosses and in the last quarter of the story. But that was only until I realized that the real challenge was meticulously creating the perfect team for every area and sometimes even every fight. All the tools are there, and if you know how to use them, you can defeat enemies that once seemed unbeatable. But you can’t find mercy if you don’t, so it is imperative to enter with the right mindset.

There is also a bit of effort involved if you want to keep up with the challenges ahead, which is not so unexpected for a JRPG. It definitely drags on at times when you may have to fight the same group of enemies 10, 15, or even 20 times in the same area to level up. Some kind of random battle mod just to turn things around every now and then would have been really welcome. Again, I think of Showtime’s attacks and added unstable shadows in the Royal version of Persona 5 as examples of how Atlus has successfully tackled this issue in the past. You can skip a certain amount of grinding by cleverly exploiting a specific enemy type that you will have to discover for yourself, but you can’t completely avoid it, especially towards the end.

When you’re not exploring and fighting through the wastelands, you’ll have a few short interludes in the non-apocalyptic version of Tokyo, which felt like an unnecessary minigame. You move a small pawn around a tight urban landscape where there really isn’t much to do or interact with, but these segments usually end before you know it. Each chapter also concludes with a substantial mega dungeon, though only one of the three, an infernal fortress complete with challenging jumping puzzles, felt significantly different from the rest of the adventure. The other two are mostly monster-filled corridors. Half of the final dungeon tries to introduce some interesting new mechanics with doors that start and stop time when you go through them, but it ends up being less of a puzzle and more of a way of forcing you to turn back. The solutions were too simple to feel like you had accomplished anything.

Why can not we Be Friends?

The other area where SMT5 always fell short for me was writing. It takes more than 20 hours to find any personal motivation beyond survival and figure out what’s going on, and the accompanying characters are also very underdeveloped. You can’t spend enough time with most of them for one thing, as they usually don’t join you in battle or don’t even have their own side stories. You bump into them for a few minutes during cut scenes after many hours of adventure, and none of them seem to have deep backgrounds or even much of a character arc. They exist primarily as decoration in a story that cares more about big concepts than people.

The main story is definitely interesting at least, and not just another replay of God versus Satan for control of humanity’s destiny. While I’m not going to spoil anything, the three possible endings are a bit more nuanced than that. However, their decisions up to the point where he “hangs” on a path don’t seem to affect them at all, and things get pretty tricky in the end. It introduces a whole new metaphysical concept through an expository dialogue dump basically at the last possible moment, which seems meant to recontextualize the whole situation, but then doesn’t really explain how it works or even what exactly happened to it after the final battle. This left the last hour feeling like a somewhat cold and confusing conclusion to an epic 80-hour endeavor that I otherwise enjoyed.

At least the art is exceptional. It is as visually elegant as any other Atlus game, and I love the design of the main character. The demons, both new and familiar to veterans of the series, look and sound incredible, and have fantastic unique attack animations. However, there are definitely some frame rate issues in certain areas, and details like grass that only appears when you’re very close can be distracting. Atlus really tried to push the limits of Switch hardware, and it’s a worthwhile gamble in some places and not others. On the other hand, moody music is pretty good too, even if it’s never quite as emotional or memorable as Persona’s iconic vocal tracks.