Topic: Shin Megami Tensei V Thread

@Pizzamorg It's not bad. Just underdeveloped. Like, the Lahmu arc would have been a lot more impactful if we'd known the girl in question for more than five minutes beforehand.

Although, admittedly, Dazai's hilarious hat scene maybe wasn't the best bit of monologuing I've ever seen.

@Snaplocket There's actually a shocking amount of content in those side-quests that feel more like main story content. I don't necessarily mind the concept of making story development optional, but, like I said, if they wanted to go that route, they should have leaned harder in that direction and avoided having a linear, cutscene-driven main narrative.

And yeah, this is only the second game in the series I've played where there's actually a plot development that justifies the series' name.

Falling a bit behind some others here, but I think I just cleared the second area after about 30 hours of playtime. It took near every force & light shard/gems I had, but I beat Lahmu.

The steelbook launch edition is $37 on GameStop.

That sale is... wow.

@Snaplocket That's why I buy almost nothing aside from Nintendo first-party stuff at launch anymore. Although this got a steep discount shockingly quickly even for an Atlus game. I wonder if that's a bad sign for sales?

Given I cleared 75+ hours before the sale ever went up, though, I don't mind too much, personally. I got my money's worth (or would have if I hadn't also popped for the Fall of Man edition, lol; now if that starts dropping in price, I might cry a little bit).

You just never really know if you should wait or not. I waited a few weeks seeing if Persona Q2 would drop in price a bit, and then the price skyrocketed because it had a low print run.

@AegisPrime Never played SMT before this entry, and I'd say it's a pretty good starting point. There's a pretty massive tutorial teaching people how to play these types of games.

Be ready, SMT V is as brutally hard as any other in the series, but it is a way better entry point than Nocturne was. Nocturne was full of truly antiquated mechanics and a complete lack of any real tutorialisation whatsoever, V tries to bring things into more modern times and does actually try and ease you in and give you the information you need, at least to make a good foundation.

And as far as I know those are your only choices on Switch, unless you want to include Mirage Sessions.

@AegisPrime This is the best starting point on Switch. Far more accessible and user-friendly than Nocturne.

So far, V hasn't been all that hard. Might be since I'm only 9 hours into it and on casual, but it's not that hard. I'd compare it to Octopath without the massive grind.

I guess it depends on your definition of hard.

I guess the moment to moment isn’t necessarily hard, but your whole team can be potentially wiped in one turn and that risk is present with every enemy you face in the game, potentially. You can usually prepare after the first time, but at least early on this made me lose chunks of progress and left me feeling extremely frustrated.

Bosses are more artificially hard I suppose, with them having heaps and heaps of health, just being absolute sponges, forcing you into a war of attrition.

@Pizzamorg Ah. The bosses are the only ones where I got wiped in a single turn really. Most of the other fights so far with standard enemies go by pretty smooth.. and I save after every few battles or every few items I get, all so that I don't end up losing them if I wipe. I did wipe to the snake woman before the end of the desert, but I ended up doing a good job on the second time, after coming up with a proper strategy.

@Pizzamorg Bosses aren't wars of attrition at all with the right party build. I mean, they have sizeable health pools, but they go down quickly enough with proper preparation. That's a better way to characterize Persona bosses, where they have no real weaknesses to exploit and you're basically smacking each-others over and over until someone dies.

@VoidofLight Well, casual is going to be breezier than harder difficulties (when I played on Hard difficulty, random mobs frequently wiped my party if they got the jump on me), and this is also one of the more forgiving games in the series in terms of the sheer amount of freedom you have to customize your demons and mc. And also with stuff like the dampeners blocking party-wide attacks.

But yeah, SMT has never fully deserved its reputation as some insanely difficult series. You just can't powerlevel your way to victory. Party builds matter more than "big number = better," which means it requires more thought than your average JRPG. Also, older games didn't really do much with difficulty settings. You typically had "challenging, but manageable" on normal and then "kick your teeth in" on hard.

Although the way attack damage multipliers scale to levels feels more aggressive here than in older games as well, which makes being underleveled more of a problem than it was in previous games.

@Snaplocket You sure you're using the mechanics to your advantage, with stronger spells on your demons?

Yeah, I dunno what to say, I very much had this issue also. I guess some people just have different expectations about boss health pools so they don’t feel so large, but I thought the health pools just made every boss battle a real slog.

I do also think that speaks of a sort of wider expectation response to the combat system in general. Getting back into Pokemon again and seeing how much criticism people make over the fairly simple Rock Paper Scissors core while disregarding the complexity layered over that is often quite frustrating. But it feels even more frustrating when taken in the context of a game like SMT V, which is widely praised for it’s combat, but uses effectively a Pokemon up to eleven system. Basically, the only way to win, is to absolutely lean into and cheese the absolute life out of the super effective moves. When people say “are you engaging with the mechanics”, that is exactly what they mean. It is just so odd to me that Pokemon gets so much criticism, given the system is just as lopsided there, but also isn’t basically a required “strategy” to clear the game. Every SMT fight is just work out what the enemy is weak to - probably die on the first attempt - go back to add in an attack of that type into your arsenal/party and change your resistances, then go back and spam that one move over and over and hope you have enough MP to see your way through. Yet it is Pokemon which is criticised for having an overly simplistic battle system.

@VoidofLight well you are on casual so ...why do you think casual would be difficult?

Has 1.0.2 been released already? Still no update for me ://

I think I found the game a little difficult at the start, but now I've adjusted to any quirks that SMT V has. Each SMT definitely has different strategies that work better than others.
You can always carry a huge amount of demons early on and stock up on Spyglasses. That takes away a lot of the difficulty.

-no update here either, but I'm not urgently needing it. I'm not far enough into it where I know where or what that dungeon is

@Pizzamorg I've never heard anyone criticize Pokemon's core combat mechanics. The damage multipliers, exp share easily overleveling your party, not really needing to use anything outside of a couple of moves across a few Pokemon over the course of the entire game to wipe your opponents from the map? Sure. The combat itself is fun, and largely the reason why it has such an engaged multiplayer scene.

Anyway, SMT is more about considering hitting weaknesses, considering resistances (and, usually, changing up your demons to that effect), buffing, debuffing, guarding/using dampeners to avoid super moves, etc. It's not super complex or anything, but it is fair and tactical enough to be engaging, and, at least on higher difficulties, running in with a sub-optimal moveset usually means getting destroyed. You can squeeze through a lot of battles just having everyone attack with magic and hoping your MP reserves hold out, but you can also synergize the moves between demons to have a well-oiled machine.

So I wouldn't say one series has terrible combat and the other doesn't. But, in one game, you can run through pretty much the entire single-player campaign with one or two Pokemon and nearly one-shot most enemies the entire time. You can probably get to that level of brokenness in SMT, but it requires a lot of end-game grinding and customizing to achieve (or using Safety difficult, I guess). Pokemon is just broken by default.

Modern Persona is closing in on that level of brokenness with the way it pushes super-attacks every battle and doesn't punish the player when the enemy nulls/drains/repels an element, though.

@CactusMan why? we are not less than Japanese players

Anyone in North America get the update yet? I’m still at 1.01

What do you think about the new Potential skill system? I think it is much more developed than the one in 4.