Topic: Shin Megami Tensei V Thread

@yegs88 Also, check his level. SMT is more reliant on loadouts and resistances than leveling when it comes to winning fights, but If you're significantly underleveled (5+ lower levels lower than him, for example), that'll impact how much damage you're giving and receiving. You can still win fights while underleveled if you make creative use of the combat system, of course, but it's easier if your characters aren't getting bodied by his attacks. Also, you might want to fuse demons with higher vitality so they can withstand his strong physical attacks.

Oh, and you're going into the fight with a full magatsuhi gauge, right? Starting the battle off with a strong offense is important if you're struggling. The faster you kill him, the less time he has to kill you.

If the enemy notices you (you'll see an exclamation point above their head), then the enemy has the possibility of getting the first strike in, regardless of whether you hit first or not. Although the odds seem to be heavily weighted in your favor if you hit them versus them hitting you.

I'm hearing stories a patch is coming which will reduce the number of wind puzzles in the castle? They were annoying as ***** for sure, but I don't know if they're so annoying they need to be patched out?

I can't wait until I'm done with the second area. The garish red lighting effect is starting to grate on me.

I just finished the second area last night, was fully expecting to be underleveled and destroyed but I got through it with no issues.

...I'm not sure if I'm happy or disappointed about that, but at least I get to see more of Tokyo

@yegs88 i just beat that guy after three failed attempts. He is tough.

I've never been able to hide spoilers on NL, so this is a POTENTIAL SPOILER
Right before you meet the loup-garou, you meet Jack Frost. There's a reason he shows up there. You definitely want him on your team.
END SPOILER

One thing I like about this game, whenever I'm bashing my head against a wall, I backtrack a little bit and find that the game was giving me exactly what I needed to progress.

Is there any way to counteract almighty magic? There's this stupid baboon demon (one of the abscess "mini-bosses") that absolutely wrecks my team with an almighty spell that hits everyone (even able to one shot some of my demons), plus it has the ability to heal itself, so it really just wins on attrition.

I've had more trouble with it than any of the more "proper" bosses in the area so far.

@RR529 I don't think so, I think it's supposed to override any resistances but it costs a lot of MP. You can't block it with Makarakarn if the rules from previous games apply.

It's just a long boss fight, which is a theme in SMT V. Gather up any demons with Mudo and find some Dark Gems, and hope for the best. Pretty sure my team had Loa/Parvati/Forneus for that battle.

Worst case scenario you just skip the fight and return later - pretty sure you can progress without going deep into that area for now.

Just spent the better part of 600,000 macca fusing a ton of demons now that I have the wonderful law-alignment miracle that allows me to fuse above my level. My core team of demons is just hilariously overpowered now.

@RR529 Run in with a strategy to kill him fast. Full magatsuhi gauge before you initiate combat, then roll him with your most powerful attacks.

Alternatively, bring along demons with a high vitality stat, debuff his attack, buff your defense, guard when he's doing his magatsuhi skill, and muscle through.

Alternatively, if you can successfully use mirage/sleep/confusion/etc. on him, that'll be incredibly helpful.

Either way, have mudo on your entire active team.

@Kimyonaakuma, @Ralizah, thanks! After taking some of your input into account I crushed him today.

@RR529 👍

Nothing more satisfying than crushing a tough boss under your heel after some preparation.

So, I've been playing this game a ton through the last three days, and I have about 4 hours in it. Time really flies by, and so far I'm really loving it. The first boss crushed me, but only because I got fairly cocky when I chopped it's heads off, thinking that it'd make the thing weaker.. not understanding it was stronger than before. It didn't even take out any of my demons, but proceeded to take me out instead. I am a bit underleveled, but I did hear from a friend that it didn't matter, as long as I knew what to do during the fight. I had a solid strat too, with me using ice spells to extend my turn, and using darkness dampeners, so that the thing's poison attacks didn't hit. I even had a Magatsuchi built up for the fight, since I didn't use it in the other normal encounters, due to it being fairly easy for me to curbstomp the demons in Da'at's first region.

@VoidofLight Being underleveled actually matters more in this one, because there's damage scaling based on character level, which is, afaik, another change that brings it more in line with Persona, but unfortunately also encourages some amount of grinding.

I was playing with my nephew on a new file, though, and we actually managed to kill the thing when he was lvl 12 by putting it to sleep when it was charging up its Magatsuhi skill. Twice. Although it's harder to trigger successively, so it missed a time or two beforehand.

@Ralizah Ah. My friend managed to kill the thing around level 13, and I'm pretty much the same. If it weren't for me underestimating it, I would've probably beaten it. All I can do next time is effectively dodge, or hope it doesn't attack me the next time.

@RR529 Prioritize casting suku and raku buffs to counter almighty damage then put everyone on guard when the enemy is preparing a magatsuhi turn (as well as making sure Nahobino has full health). It will go down eventually.

Also I cannot stress the importance of learning the miracle that lets your demons use items asap. This is a very important ability. I can't imagine getting through the middle parts of the game without it.

Managed to clear my law route run around 74 hours in, although probably ten or more hours of that was just doing endgame content to unlock as many demons as possible. I think I ended up with 80% or so compendium completion, which isn't bad at all, IMO.

Takeaway? Upper-tier SMT game for me

As a pure monster collector, this is probably the best game in the series to date. All of the demons are so detailed and full of personality. Early SMT games partially spoil the innovative negotiation system by making it a pain to sway demons into joining you, but SMT V's negotiations are some of the best in the series. So much humor in your conversations with these entities, and a wide variety of conversation prompts this time. While there's still a bit of RNG to it, it generally felt like dialogue choices that aligned with a demon's personality would win them over, which I consider to be a big win, considering how random and frustrating negotiations often were in the first three games.

The level design was an interesting change, although the focus on a few gigantic open areas over numerous smaller ones led to a lot of the environments feeling very samey. More problematic was how hard they became to navigate from the third major zone on. I like the focus on verticality and problem-solving when it comes to reach seemingly inaccessible locations, but way too many of the areas in late-game maps were a royal PITA to navigate. Still vastly prefer this sort of level design to the horrible labyrinths in Nocturne, though. And, in general, the exploration was still fun and, combined with a ton of secrets to find, I had a blast collecting stuff throughout the game.

The game had two dungeons, which were of inconsistent quality. I actually really liked the Demon King's Castle, so I'm disappointed to hear that Atlus is going to be simplifying it with a patch.

The Essence system made it very convenient to swap out your character's resistances and skills. Like a much more flexible and user-friendly version of Nocturne's Magatama system. It might have been a bit overpowered, actually, but I'm not generally inclined to complain when a game removes artificial difficulty and gives me more control over character builds.

On that note, though, I'm not sure how I feel about the way stat distribution has changed. It's way harder to cheese the game by pumping all of your stats into magic or strength like in the older titles. On the other hand, this also reduces replayability by giving the player fewer viable builds.

The level scaling going on with damage calculation combined with some points where enemy levels spiked meant I had to do a bit of... pukes... level grinding before I could keep making substantive progress. Not a fan of that design choice at all.

On reflection, I'm not a huge fan of the Magatsuhi gauge gimmick in this game, either. Combined with easily available dampeners and spyglasses, it made boss fights a bit too predictable for my liking.

I don't think I need to mention how big a fan I am of the way enormous demons lumber around the maps. Really hope future Persona games get this level of love put into their presentations.

Music was awesome. Up there with SMT IV's OST for me. Both compositions totally outshine anything Meguro ever contributed to the series, frankly. This current composer might not have a lot of star power, but the quality of his work is pretty plainly evident.

The big let down of this entry is the way the ball was dropped completely with the main narrative. It's totally lacking in the gripping narrative turns that characterized entries like I, IV, and IV: Apocalypse. And, frankly, the way it was constructed, and its lack of a compelling tone means it gets less of a pass for its underdeveloped plot than Nocturne did, which was structured more like a mystery.

The characters were mostly wide of the mark as well. Nuwa and Yakumo were cool cats, but don't do much of anything plot-wise (actually, that's a huge issue with the entire game: the plot just sort of seems to happen around the characters, for the most part). Tao could have been interesting, but, IMO, isn't particularly well-utilized. Miyazu barely even qualifies as a character, and only receives ANY attention in a side-quest. Yuzuru is the most boring character imaginable. Koshimizu is... meh.

Amusingly enough, Ichiro Dazai, the most overlooked character leading up to the game's release, is the only one who enjoys any real development. And I really did think he was an interesting approach to the law-alignment rep. Unfortunately, his arc is kind of undermined when he randomly becomes a fanatical religious edgelord out of the blue. And then again when he just randomly dies near the end of the game.

The game is full of interesting themes and potential subplots that it just never bothers to actually explore, for some reason.

Story development isn't totally bad, though, because a lot of the side-quests are quite good. Better than most of the side content in previous games, frankly. Unlike a game like Xenoblade Chronicles, which is filled with meaningless side content, almost every quest in this game aids with the worldbuilding, and usually ends with you gaining a new demon. I liked how you often had to choose between helping two different parties manage a conflict, too.

So, it was a game of peaks and valley in terms of quality. But the good far outweighs the bad, and, bland narrative elements aside, it's still probably the most fun I've had on my Switch since BotW released in 2017. I'm close to pulling the trigger on a NG+ playthrough, and I almost never replay games right away. Especially lengthy JRPGs. But this game is compulsively playable in a way few others are.

It is funny @Ralizah, if you read our takeaways, a lot of our takeaways are absolutely identical, but you come away calling this an upper tier SMT, whereas I came away saying high 6/low 7. Funny how people can process things differently, but was nonetheless enjoyable to read.

@Pizzamorg I can't find your takeaway post on it. Mind linking me?

Yeah, I could see why some people might not enjoy this as much. Especially people looking for something more story-driven. But, even with the objective flaws the game has, it's mostly an improvement on what came before in key areas, and JRPG design in general. The flaws only become more annoying because of how much it gets right outside of those areas

But I think SMT IV: Apocalypse still sits proudly atop its throne as my favorite modern JRPG.

I had to dig around to find it myself!

Here we go: https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/nintendo-switch/shin_mega...

@Snaplocket That's fair.

I wouldn't have really minded the approach if they had leaned into it a little more. I never remember anyone's name in an Etrian Odyssey game, for example, but there's never an expectation that the story is going to matter in one of those games, either. Your entire party is custom-created, after all. The scope of the experience is clear: none of the people you meet matter. What matters is dungeon-crawling, minmaxing your party builds, creating accurate maps, defeating tough bosses, etc.

But Atlus goes out of its way to show off these characters, make a big deal about the people who are voicing them, etc., so the expectation that they'll be important is reasonable. Why does Miyazu feature at all in the trailers when she's in the game for all of half an hour across its 60+ hour playtime? Why build up expectations about weird lore regarding Proto-Fiend Aogami and his relationship to Koshimizu only to never explore that connection?

Admittedly, it's not the only game to do this. Breath of the Wild got some deserved flak for showing off memories prominently in the advertising, which created the impression that it was more story-driven than it actually turned out to be (that is, almost not at all). But even then, BotW's setup still works better with the minimalism because of the way it's framed.

@Pizzamorg Thanks!