It's not Iceborne levels of expansion but it's a very welcome upgrade to base Rise which felt a bit lacking once you got done with Allmother. The expansion adds a very fun roster of monsters (Espinas is a huge highlight) and the switch skill mechanic is fun to mess around with, it's just a shame that a lot of core design issues in Rise still persist here like weapons getting very disparate features be they in their design itself or their wirebug skills. Hunting Horn still feels horrible specially coming off of Iceborne and while some of the new wirebug skills are very fun, certain moves are so strictly better or in the adverse case make barely any difference that experimentation and skill expression is very dependent on your weapon choice.

Still, the fast paced action that Sunbreak brings to the table is a lot of fun! I still don't think that a lot of monsters were designed around the verticality of the player's mobility which can numb some of the difficulty but I think regardless the game manages to give you the tools to make very flashy plays and it's very satisfying to play (except Hunting Horn). The new monster have pretty fun fights like Malzeno and the new armor skills are pretty neat. I had and have a lot of fun making up different builds and weapon configurations.

I just wish they never pull that Hunting Horn shit again because it pissed me off how bad it felt when I first played this game and I'm still mad about it. I also think the wyvern riding needs a lot of polish cus its always awkward how monsters fight eachother in this game. But idgaf because you can fly around with Gunlance now

This is a review for Canon of Creation, I'll do another one for Vengeance when I get to that

SMT V shines most during early-mid game where your options are so limited that you really feel like you're barely making it on boss fights. But once you realize how essences break the game when making your way to late game any bit of tension, that was already minimal due to only showing up on bosses, deflates completely. Since you can very easily become invincible thru essences, enemies don't pose a threat at all which is why bosses start abusing piercing effects (at which point the game becomes buff wars). Essences make you min-max to a point where mechanically demons become practically homogenous and lose a lot of personality. Assembling a party starts to become less of a challenge on how to best mix and match affinities and devolve into "who got luster candy / debilitate", so at around endgame I just got tremendously bored with the game since even demon fusion options become extremely limited.

This would be fine if the game had anything going for it aside gameplay but level design is a huge step back for the series and oh my god this might be the worst script in a videogame ever. For the former, while the idea is cute the enemies are so passive in the overworld that they're never a threat like random encounters. All of them behave the same aside VERY VERY minor exceptions like Nebiros (who summons other demons) which is what the game should've had MORE of. Enemy encounters are no longer a way of designing tension but rather overworld nuisances you can just sidestep. And the overworld itself never goes beyond broken buildings and filters. You're telling me the game's set up so that the battle for recreating the world is involving international branches of Bethel yet every level is just Destroyed City, Japan? What??!!

I did go into this knowing people don't like the story of this game but I really cannot believe how bad it truly is. Characters are nothing burgers and the only one with an arc (Dazai) just becomes the joker. The idea for an international organization fighting against Chaos is cool but the game is so Tokyo-focused that it never gets to go anywhere interesting. The game making the player character just go along with anything Bethel says for like 30 hours despite being God 2 is sooo stupid, might be the most boring protagonist of all time. When the saint said "we got school tomorrow" after learning they're in the Matrix I laughed so hard. Why are we going to fake school. Also the school setting is stupid, why did they do that