Playing this game on Hard was quite the experience. It is impressively balanced for that mode, and though the sheer amount of constant thinking took its toll on me in the endgame, I had a great experience overall. The game truly makes you think and use your resources constantly both in boss fights and in normal battles, and the Magatsuhi mechanic is expertly implemented into the Press-Turn system (particularly in comparison to the utterly broken Smirk mechanic from IV/A). I do wish the Magatsuhi skills were more equally useful than they wound up being, but the ones that were useful were great additions to the player's tactical options. I also really wish the Magatsuhi gauge were visible outside of battle in any way. When you want to walk into almost every boss fight with a full gauge, it sucks that you have to willingly walk into a random normal battle just to check/fill your gauge instead of just looking at the menu or HUD and going into battles as needed.
Fusion and applying new essences to your protagonist and demons is a consistent and expected thing, and the game encourages the player never to hoard or stockpile their resources thanks to item limits and ever-changing boss designs. There's little need for grinding until the very end of the game, at which point the game throws several beyond-normal-levels sidequests. Before then, I only found myself having to grind 2-3 levels for a few bosses in the first half of the game. One should note, though, that the game (at least on Hard) expects the player to complete any and all sidequests and optional areas before going to a given boss, only letting go of that design philosophy in the end of endgame.
The 3D platforming is a joy in general, though the lack of momentum with jumping disappointed me. Still, the actual design of the areas in the game is filled with fun verticality and platforming puzzles which take little away from the pacing of it all. Another little issue is that demon hitboxes are a bit wonky, and their attack animations don't really line up with their actual hitbox ranges and thus make it a bit difficult to get around them even if you're careful. This isn't a huge issue, but just one I noticed in the various choke points the game throws at the player.
There's lots of good to be said about this game, but the main quest's writing and worldbuilding leaves a lot to be desired (as I'm sure many others have already said). While I didn't expect anything stellar because mainline SMT rarely has interesting main narratives, I had a bit of a problem with some of the aspects that I'd have expected more out of. The game puts almost zero effort at all into explaining or showing any sense of alignment, which is something I'd consider a pretty integral part of an SMT game. Having little to no interesting story is par for the course for mainline, but part of what those bare bones ought to have is at least some indication of what your ending could be. This game instead puts the player just on a fairly uninteresting main story track for 3/4 of its runtime, then has the actual effectual parts of the plot kick in right at the end in a simultaneously bloated and thin fashion. This was probably the most damning thing about the game: it takes the 'SMT is a gameplay game' concept nearly to its logical extreme and forgets about some parts of the series' identity.
Another writing point of note is that I adored the non-main-quest dialogue. Between sidequests, negotiation dialogue, and NPC dialogue, everything's always a joy to read and I loved following demons on their little adventures and mishaps. There is one particularly annoying follower demon you're kinda pushed into keeping with you at several points of the game, too, but I assume that it was intentional so I guess it could be worse. In any case, having actual continuous questlines throughout the game that have meaningful choices is awesome. Some of the sidequests serve as a few of the only times the game actually tries tackling alignments, too, and I found they generally hit the mark pretty well. There's always lots to see and discover, which is something that I thought was sometimes lacking from IV/A (though them being smaller handheld titles lessens that criticism). It added quite a lot to the experience to think "Huh, I wonder which demons' troubles I can help with in this new area!" every time I moved forward. I found myself not really caring about the quests at the very very end of the game as they were where the interesting writing ended, but at least those provided challenging boss fights (at least out of the ones I fought).
Now, after all this I think the second most damning issue with this game is the fact that it runs pretty badly. All throughout my experience the game never once had a stable and good framerate outside of battle, though I'd consider myself impressed that the zoomed-out camera option didn't really make the framerate much worse. Still, the game being on the Switch felt like it held it back, which was quite disappointing. Hopefully we'll get a PC port to rectify that (and hell, modding could be really cool at that point too!).
Anyway, I bought this game pretty much on a whim because someone else bought it at the same time as me. I frankly had ended my time caring about Atlus right around when Persona 5 dropped, but now that it seems like they're trying to divert that game's fans' attention over to their other games - mainline or Persona, at least - I've found myself getting a bit more hopeful again. I enjoyed the P4G PC port despite it having Denuvo, and while the Nocturne remaster was a bit flaccid I've been having a good time with it too. Capping that off is SMT5, which pleasantly surprised me possibly more than anything else that came out this year. They made a damn good game, and I'm hoping they'll keep staying on the up and up as we move past the initial hype train behind their true breakout title (at least in the West). Maybe next time they'll even put together a game that gets over this one's biggest flaws and give us the most well-rounded SMT experience yet! Here's hoping.
Fusion and applying new essences to your protagonist and demons is a consistent and expected thing, and the game encourages the player never to hoard or stockpile their resources thanks to item limits and ever-changing boss designs. There's little need for grinding until the very end of the game, at which point the game throws several beyond-normal-levels sidequests. Before then, I only found myself having to grind 2-3 levels for a few bosses in the first half of the game. One should note, though, that the game (at least on Hard) expects the player to complete any and all sidequests and optional areas before going to a given boss, only letting go of that design philosophy in the end of endgame.
The 3D platforming is a joy in general, though the lack of momentum with jumping disappointed me. Still, the actual design of the areas in the game is filled with fun verticality and platforming puzzles which take little away from the pacing of it all. Another little issue is that demon hitboxes are a bit wonky, and their attack animations don't really line up with their actual hitbox ranges and thus make it a bit difficult to get around them even if you're careful. This isn't a huge issue, but just one I noticed in the various choke points the game throws at the player.
There's lots of good to be said about this game, but the main quest's writing and worldbuilding leaves a lot to be desired (as I'm sure many others have already said). While I didn't expect anything stellar because mainline SMT rarely has interesting main narratives, I had a bit of a problem with some of the aspects that I'd have expected more out of. The game puts almost zero effort at all into explaining or showing any sense of alignment, which is something I'd consider a pretty integral part of an SMT game. Having little to no interesting story is par for the course for mainline, but part of what those bare bones ought to have is at least some indication of what your ending could be. This game instead puts the player just on a fairly uninteresting main story track for 3/4 of its runtime, then has the actual effectual parts of the plot kick in right at the end in a simultaneously bloated and thin fashion. This was probably the most damning thing about the game: it takes the 'SMT is a gameplay game' concept nearly to its logical extreme and forgets about some parts of the series' identity.
Another writing point of note is that I adored the non-main-quest dialogue. Between sidequests, negotiation dialogue, and NPC dialogue, everything's always a joy to read and I loved following demons on their little adventures and mishaps. There is one particularly annoying follower demon you're kinda pushed into keeping with you at several points of the game, too, but I assume that it was intentional so I guess it could be worse. In any case, having actual continuous questlines throughout the game that have meaningful choices is awesome. Some of the sidequests serve as a few of the only times the game actually tries tackling alignments, too, and I found they generally hit the mark pretty well. There's always lots to see and discover, which is something that I thought was sometimes lacking from IV/A (though them being smaller handheld titles lessens that criticism). It added quite a lot to the experience to think "Huh, I wonder which demons' troubles I can help with in this new area!" every time I moved forward. I found myself not really caring about the quests at the very very end of the game as they were where the interesting writing ended, but at least those provided challenging boss fights (at least out of the ones I fought).
Now, after all this I think the second most damning issue with this game is the fact that it runs pretty badly. All throughout my experience the game never once had a stable and good framerate outside of battle, though I'd consider myself impressed that the zoomed-out camera option didn't really make the framerate much worse. Still, the game being on the Switch felt like it held it back, which was quite disappointing. Hopefully we'll get a PC port to rectify that (and hell, modding could be really cool at that point too!).
Anyway, I bought this game pretty much on a whim because someone else bought it at the same time as me. I frankly had ended my time caring about Atlus right around when Persona 5 dropped, but now that it seems like they're trying to divert that game's fans' attention over to their other games - mainline or Persona, at least - I've found myself getting a bit more hopeful again. I enjoyed the P4G PC port despite it having Denuvo, and while the Nocturne remaster was a bit flaccid I've been having a good time with it too. Capping that off is SMT5, which pleasantly surprised me possibly more than anything else that came out this year. They made a damn good game, and I'm hoping they'll keep staying on the up and up as we move past the initial hype train behind their true breakout title (at least in the West). Maybe next time they'll even put together a game that gets over this one's biggest flaws and give us the most well-rounded SMT experience yet! Here's hoping.
Lynxelot
2 years ago