Fun, but not memorable. I would have passed it by without a final word if I hadn’t heard recently that Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance was coming out. I thought it would be a spin-off like SMTIV: Apocalypse, but no, they just added more content and re-released it. Which is like RRGGGH, I just bought this thing and now there’s a better one out already, grr. This usually doesn’t happen to me, because my laziness and large backlog means I take ages to buy a game in the first place, but publishers are re-releasting and remaking anything and everything these days, so it was inevitable that something like this would occur.

That said, it’s just a minor annoyance but hardly the end of the world. Of course I’d want to get the best bang for my buck when I buy a game, but once I play something, that’s the definitive version of the game as far as I’m concerned. For example, I hear there’s Persona 3 Reloaded coming out soon, but in my opinion, there were no other Persona 3s after Persona 3 FES. FF7 Remake part 2 came out, but I have FF7 at home in my Playstation X, so we’re cool.

Back to the topic of Shin Megami Tensei V. I think I explained my thoughts about it quite thoroughly in earlier posts, so today I will just do a quick summary of the pros and cons, say something about the story and the ending I got and call it a day.

PROS

Collecting and fusing demons, like I said already. You won’t find me playing a lot of (or, indeed, any) Pokémon on this blog because I have Pokémon at home in the form of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series. That’s not to say I dislike Pokémon, but after playing one or two of them, I’ve had enough. And I honestly feel like I’ve had enough of SMT as well after this mediocre offering, but we’ll see how I feel if/when SMT VI comes out.

Not having any party members. Technically the demons you summon are your party members, but you know what I mean. So many JRPGs with whiny party members with long tedious backstories and trauma to overcome, so you have to sit through a lot of talking and arguments etc etc blah blah, I’m getting too old for that stuff. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t work, I want to rip my hair out.

You can simply choose the route you want to be on. No need to play three times for separate routes, though you will be penalized if your past behavior doesn’t align with your final route. That’s pretty handy.

Decent number of sidequests. I like sidequests, especially when they’re not too tedious. I could have used another 100 of, especially of the “kill this monster” type, but I was satisfied with what I got.

CONS

Horrible map so I kept getting lost. Again I complained about this already so I won’t start.

Soundtrack was crap. I had a lot of work recently, so I was listening to game soundtracks to pass the time, and I couldn’t make it through more than a few tracks of SMT V‘s. It was just noise.

Slow start with wasted hours in the beginning. I started a New Game+ out of inertia but was so annoyed by the memory that I quit.

The other characters were either annoying or hardly present. You barely know them anyway, so you don’t feel anything about all the pathos they’re going through. Like whatever, can you send me to a new area so I can catch new demons now? Dishonorable mention goes to the whole school arc which was just an excuse to kill some girl whose name I’ve forgotten. What was the point of that arc anyway? In the end everybody died. If they had asked me nicely, I would have offed them all in five minutes so we could get back to the real action.

Story and Neutral ending

Um, I already forgot most of it. Something about the “God” of the Bible actually usurped a world throne somewhere and declared himself God? Where did the throne even come from… anyway, Satan wasn’t really bad but they were all demons or whatever and “God” kicked them all out or whatever. But later Lucifer killed him??? But didn’t take over the throne himself??? So it’s open to whoever, and at some point Tokyo was destroyed by demons and replaced by God… I AM SO LOST.

IIRC the Law route has the angels pretending Lucifer didn’t kill God and… umm, IDK. I didn’t do that route. The Chaos route was all about saving Tokyo. IIRC one of my classmates and the president of Japan want to take over the world’s throne so they can restore Japan. In fact, not even Japan, but Tokyo. That one flew clear over my head because it was so “Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo,” like “Screw anyone who’s not from Tokyo,” right? It would be too reasonable if they wanted to save the whole world while they were at it, so Atlus made sure to exclude 99.9% of the world from their grand plan.

So, the Neutral route… and the Neutral ending I got… Nope, barely remember a thing either. IIRC I had to fight both the Law and Chaos representatives, who had turned into demons because why not. Then instead of assuming the throne and shaping the world, I chose to destroy it. Which, apparently, changed very little. Demons still kept attacking Tokyo, and angels and demons kept fighting for lack of anything better to do, and I’m just up in some ethereal plane watching them. Yeah, aight, whatevs.

Presumably, the true ending to everything will be revealed by beating the True Neutral route on New Game Plus (or your first playthrough if you can be bothered to grind to level 94 and beat the secret boss). I don’t even care enough to YouTube it.

TL;DR

I wish I had written this a little earlier when Shin Megami Tensei V was still fresh in my mind. SMT V isn’t particularly memorable, and I kind of want my money back but I’m glad I played it. Despite the lukewarm comments above, I did enjoy roaming around doing my own thing for the most part. If I weren’t so lazy, I would look into more Last Ranker-style games where you don’t have to deal with party members at all, not even demons or created ones.

Currently playing: Epic Seven and Love Nikki, my surviving gacha games. On the Switch I’m playing a puzzle game called Voxelgram. I’m almost done with all the puzzles, then I’ll either play Oninaki or start Persona 5 Royal. On the PC I accidentally re-started Atelier Lulua the other day. No time for any console games this week though, too much work to do. Long live gacha games!