Topic: Shin Megami Tensei V Thread

I know there's lots of chat about sales, the difficulty, the graphics among other things. But I'm honestly just grateful that it's finally out!

Even the weaker games in the series are still pretty good, waiting for the next installment is the real challenge.

@Snaplocket In the UK, or worldwide?

Stories 2 hit 1mil in a couple of days, so this seems like good momentum for SMT V, if true.

Anyway, yeah, the sense of reward to exploration is fantastic. SO much better than previous SMT games in that regard, and most JRPGs in general. This is a new approach for Atlus, but they knocked it out of the park.

All I know is, my brother didn't play much Nintendo in the Wii U and 3DS generation. Very sparingly.

But he always used to go on and on about SMTIV being the best game on 3DS. I liked it but I was new to RPGs at the time and got destroyed in the first encounter lol. Did come back to it years later but it never hooked me before setting it down again.

This game here though? Oh its hooked me. It's definitely hooked me. I have an overwhelming desire to collect all the demons and see their designs. It finally makes me understand Pokémon, and the appeal of collecting them. Except this game makes me want to collect far more than Pokemon ever did, and tbh, more than MH Stories 2 even (though I love my MH and collecting them in Stories 2 is a blast).

New favorite Atlus game. Now. Where's Stella Glow 2?

Still attempting to beat the first boss on Hard. Have tried all sorts of things ranging from Dormina abuse to just whaling on it with ice attacks and even hitting the critical raising power thing a few times. It has ginormous HP. Managed to get it down to red once though so its definitely doable. Might buy some fire dampeners and try going that method. Hard but fair.

As someone whose experience to Atlus has been reserved to SMT and Catherine, I appreciate the 3D puzzle-platforming of the latter being exhibited in Shin Megami Tensei V.
Though of course Catherine itself is an SMT game (it’s in the universe, look it up), searching for various items, upgrades and currency in the vast plane in between enemy encounters keeps the game fresh for those who don’t like to just plow through 2D maps with high encounter rates like the early SMT and Persona games.
The semi-open world is akin to Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE and other SMT games but the vast, variable environments present a needed challenge to keep all parts of the game (dialogue, party management, combat and navigation) at a high level like it is in SMT V. This game is another solid entry in Atlus’ catalogue. They really have one of the highest levels of quality assurances from any publisher.

Yeah, even the mini-bosses are just complete sponges. You can speed things up with hitting weaknesses, but versus the health pools on normal enemies, it feels like you’re suddenly doing chip damage even if they are of the same level. This is sort of what I was talking about before but I won’t go into it again and get told off, haha.

I also like the ability to pay money, to add in any monster you’ve encountered - even those not on your party - to make fusions. I am pretty sure this wasn’t in Nocturne. It really opens up your options in a big way.

My biggest complaint is still the way they've nerfed buffs. Granted, maybe it was a bit unbalanced in Nocturne, where it was simple to completely trivialize every boss by destroy their accuracy and buffing your own, but I'm hardly noticing a difference now when I max out the debuffs on a boss' accuracy. I guess I'd probably see a big difference if I fully buffed my party's own accuracy, but given the way they only target individual party members now, that's not really feasible. I know this'll probably be rectified late game somewhat by the addition of spells that that buff everyone at once, but it's still annoying.

If Nocturne was about privileging agility above vitality, then this game is the opposite. You get far more mileage out of reducing an enemy's attack here.

I’ve been rotating between normal through to safety to ride out the difficulty spikes and try and make the game feel somewhat even. While this has made the game significantly more enjoyable for me, I do think it also somewhat breaks the game. It seems pretty clear you aren’t supposed to be able to make constant progression forwards, because I am starting to fall absurdly far behind on levels (I am level 37, some quests are awarding me level 44 demons and I am finding 50 plus demons in the wild). It does seem pretty clear they expect you to kinda grind it out before leaving each zone, which hasn’t really been necessary for me. This creates a deathloop of a sort, because you can either try and go back to other zones and grind it back out or you can just keep lowering the difficulty to try and close the divide between levels through a far more favourable difficulty, but either option does somewhat take away the agency the difficulty options otherwise allow. I am so, so, glad this agency exists, however, I think I would have long given up if not for the freedom to move my difficulty up and down to ride out when the game does the same.

Sounds like SMTV had a better opening week in the UK than Tales of Arise, and notably better than Bravely Default 2 and Monster Hunter Stories 2.

I still think UK is an extremely tiny market to use for gaging success, but it is Nintendo's weakest market and can show relative and comparative trends.

@JaxonH Atlus has a way stronger presence in the U.S. and Japan. If it's doing that well in the U.K., then it's probably doing even better worldwide.

Guaranteed best-selling entry in the series. Hopefully it's by a fairly large margin, though.

I am aiming to get the game in December. I'm doing well to avoid spoilers, since I didn't watch any of the trailers before release.

@Ralizah
For sure. It's gotta break 1m sold. Even Bravely Default did that in 6 months, and MH Stories 2 did it in like, a week? Granted, it had a PC release too. Not sure how the numbers were split.

Still. If SMTIV can do 650k on 3DS when nobody payed attention to handheld games besides us who are diehard into gaming, it's an easy 1m on Switch. I figured that much beforehand though.

What I'd really like to see, is 2m lifetime. Not overnight. Not even in a yr. But when everything is said and done, this game deserves to top 2m. I know Persona has more "mass market" material with sim elements and heavy story, while SMT is more hard-core and as such won't attact the same JRPG normies, but still. I'll feel personally ashamed on behalf of Switch gamers if this doesn't break 2m by the end of the generation.

The more I play the more I love it. Had a lot to do today, and had to get my exercise in and errands to run. But I still squeezed in an hour of SMT. Made it to a new save point, right next to an Abcess. Did another fusion, a side quest, some exploring, and ready to take on the Abcess first thing next time I fire it up. Ughh... it's so much fun.

After I finish this game, hopefully by year's end, I did want to get back to KOTOR, but I'm having thoughts of going back to SMTIV, or maybe even Persona. But I really don't wanna play Persona on PS5 stuck on one screen. I feel like I've waited this long, may as well hold off a few more years and see if it pops up on Switch. Or at least Steam. With the Deck shipping next year I'd gladly play it hybrid on the Deck and PC at home. If it's not on Switch or Steam by the time I get the Deck, I'm just going back to Persona 4 Golden.

I'm curious how much of a difference it'll be playing SMTIV (and subsequently, SMTIV Apocalypse) after SMTV though. This is a radical evolution of the series, similar to Zelda BotW and MH World.

@JaxonH 2 mil for a previously really niche series like this as an exclusive would be an amazing accomplishment. It would also signal to Atlus that Switch owners are hungry for big, ambitious JRPGs. Switch needs this win, considering I'm pretty sure a lot of their ports like Catherine and TMS haven't sold particularly well.

At least Nocturne HD did. Nocturne HD did at least 500k so far, from what I read. Now, that was a multiplat, but I think we both know that the majority of those copies sold on Switch. It was a good sign if a low-effort, expensive remaster of a PS2 game could almost sell as well as the previous best-selling entry in the series.

This is definitely a different sort of beast from previous games in terms of the minute-to-minute gameplay, but the addictiveness of the demon-collecting gameplay is similar enough. The big difference is that exploration feels much more Xenoblade-esque now, which was a great change of pace for the series.

I'm about 25 hours in and mid-way through the game's second enormous landmass, and still having a blast.

I am about 17ish hours in and I think the arc style of the storytelling is an interesting approach. The opening arc was very Nocturne, but then it becomes almost like a Jujutsu Kaisen/Persona story for it’s second arc, before then looping around to something much grander in the 3rd arc. It feels very much like I am playing through several seasons of a shounen battle anime and I am digging it.

@CactusMan
or will be Switch Hidden gem YouTube click bait 7 years from now

Lol

That Lahmu fight is ridiculous, lol. Whoever says this game isn't as hard as Nocturne or below is full of it. On equivalent difficulty settings, it's one of the hardest games in the series. I didn't have this much trouble with any of SMT I or Nocturne's bosses.

This is on normal difficulty, mind you. Pretty glad I dialed it down from hard mode at this point.

So, SMTV is 100% sold out on Best Buy, both the steelbook and standard editions. It's also sold out on Target, or at least, I can't find it in a search besides the digital version.

It's also sold out on Amazon, or the steelbook version is anyways. The standard edition is still being sold.

This bodes very well coming a few days after launch, and just weeks before Black Friday. Seems the game is seeing higher demand than expected. That's good. That's very good.

@Ralizah
I watched a review from an SMT dedicated channel, where all they talk about is SMT, and he said it was the hardest game in the series. Others said it wasn't, but I figure he's the expert so he would know.

@JaxonH So, it's lacking in some of the artificial difficulty that plagued earlier entries, and there are certain mechanics that seem like they should make the game much easier. But, in practice, it's very, very challenging anyway, which I'm happy for. People who don't want that can play on safety or whatever, but, for me, it's not a proper SMT experience unless I'm getting my ass kicked on occasion.

That fight I mentioned earlier was proper fun. That boss trounced me a few times, but I screenshotted its information, fused about half of my demons together into entirely new ones, and built a strategy around defeating it. And it worked brilliantly. A few of my demons still ended up dead, but I won, and that's all that matters.

And yeah, relieved to hear this is selling well. Who knew putting an ambitious game on a popular, in-demand system and advertising the hell out of it would lead to healthy sales!

This also seems to have been a very successful worldwide launch. Atlus is popular enough at this point that its games need to start launching day and date around the world. No more waiting a year or more for the American branch to localize the games.

@Ralizah
Yup. Atlus global launches. Falcom now needs global launches, and that needs to include Switch

I'm excited to see the new Trails games for Switch with Falcom at the helm.

I'm learning to love the difficulty of SMT. I like the, "figure it out and survive by any means necessary" approach. It makes me really strategize and think long and hard about what demons I have for a particular battle. Also keep 3 of every element as a shard and those things that block attacks, just in case.

I do think I got a bit of a boost from the DLC though. I had the Mitoma for EXP, Gold and Glory set to Increase, as it was enabled by default. Didn't realize it and turn them off until I'd killed like 6 of them and gotten some fat stacks of XP from it.

@JaxonH I don't have the dlc, but I'm already encountering a lot of those mitamas in the wild via Amanozako's random item pulls. They must be everywhere with the dlc enabled.

Atlus made the smart choice to impose a low cap on the number of elemental gems you can carry at any given time, which means I'm using them in battles pretty frequently instead of hording them. But they're also replenishing quickly via exploration rewards and rewards from Gustave for finding Miman. It's very well-balanced. Kinda reminds me of the constant ebb and flow of equipment in BotW.

And yeah, I keep at least one of each of the dampeners on me at all times. They're useful, and almost required, in certain boss fights.

Difficult JRPGs are usually annoying, because it often means they're designed to encourage constant grinding, but unless you're playing on hard mode, SMT almost never requires much in the way of grinding (unless you're rushing it and avoiding battles, I guess). It requires tactical thinking, planning, etc., which is why I find its challenges so engaging. Boss battles are like a puzzle you have to figure out, and once you know how to complete it, you go from getting your face smashed in to ruthlessly annihilating your foes with prejudice.