I couldn't get very far with this game before getting absolutely fatigued with it but I think it utterly fails at capturing the aspect of ff7 I really like the most.

Other than the fact that the original is one of the most earnestly introspective games, had commentaries on nearly every archetype presented in the game, is chock full of content and plot with perfect pace, and manages to utterly demasculate and break down the shounen jrpg hero figure, the original final fantasy VII bucked the tone of the action hero fantasy by both playing up the heroism and swashbuckling with a thick, palpable layer of melancholic and innocent irony.

Irony is often something cynical, something too adult or hardened. A way of coping with the world. But the irony in ff7 was pure, a kind of return to the true nature of what people are. It's not judgmental, it doesn't have expectations, and it's not cynical or bitter. It's simply a sense of peace, with life, oneself, loss, defeat, heroics, struggle, hardship, passion, all the products of friction between a human being and the world around them.

The remake simply lacks that tonally. For the best possible example I can think, watch the moment in the original game near the beginning after the first bombing mission, where every exit of the screen Cloud tries to exit through, he gets cut off by troops and the player is presented with the choice of running or fighting at each turn. It's a straight swashbuckling scene, the hero is cornered at every turn and the choices are weighed against him over and over, and like some of those great heroic stories and films, the hero's not really in any danger; we've seen cloud oneshot those goons earlier with ease, it's purely an aesthetic situation. Yet, the music is utterly at conflict with the scene. It's somber, it's innocent, it's complicated, and very, very subtle. There's something amiss. The scene begs the player to expect a deconstruction, a demasculation, and the undoing of what people know and expect from the game without overtly stating it. It acts as the prelude for the game later changing its own writing and having the player reevaluate what it stands for.

I don't care about nomura ghosts, action combat, new scenes, or any other changes as long as the game gets that one aspect right. That one tone that only the original ever had. I couldn't detect it, so I gave up. I could be wrong, and maybe find that core spirit somewhere else in the game if I come back to it. Or maybe the remake just plain goes for something else, and maybe that's worth it in the end. Still, I feel something's missing.

Also a few other notes, the sidequests Suck ass. Going from ff14 ARR to 7r felt like I was moonlighting one job for an even shittier one. Not recommended!

All else said, that combat system is like the complete evolution of what kingdom hearts started on the ps2. I'm happy it's gotten this far. Mechanically this game plays like everything I wanted when I was 12.

Final fantasy has always been a game about putting all your ideas and the sum total of everything you have to say about a theme and design into one game. Every game in the series is both the first and final game in its own franchise. Those designs and ideas could have anything, any kinds of gameplay systems or plot ideas as long as it grandly tells a story with roleplaying and mechanics. I welcome the real time combat, as it's the series trying to understand and remix what else is out there and put its own spin on things by creating a newly aestheticized experience of combat. Final fantasy 20 might have no combat it in at all. Be ready for it!

pretty good gameplay
decent exploration
no existent story
does not feature naruto
looks like a bad video game to me

This hurts to do, but I'm dropping it. It's not that it's bad, just so bland. It is, in essence, a sequel to Nocturne and while I like the idea of a follow up, this just builds on the bones of the world that game created. The problem is this was Nocturne's weakest element.

When I go to Nocturne it's not really for that sense of world, it's primarily for the world established through combat. Nocturne is at its core a really good boss rush. The world is minimal to accentuate the atmosphere given by the difficult combat and resource management. The general overworld is just generic demons who exist in this world, but don't inhabit it. SMT IV, despite the gameplay changes, made it a point to have an interesting and lived in world that was worth exploring. V just brings over the boring overworld of Nocturne without any of the interesting aspects of it.

The magatsuhi system, while novel, also doesn't really expand on the gameplay established in IV:A. That game is contentious for some very legitimate reasons, but the one thing I will absolutely defend is the way they improved and fleshed out smirk. Decreasing the rng and making it a choice in combat added another layer to press turn that, to me, makes that game have the best combat in the entire series. Magatsuhi is an attempt to carry it over while integrating some overworld elements. Only thing is, it wasn't broken. They fixed it once already, trying to slap more stuff on top of press turn at this point just feels like floundering.

You can always create a unique and fleshed out aspect of your game. Strange journey, even with its gameplay regression, proved all you need is a cool world. IV reaffirmed that. Simply taking that excellent gameplay from IV:A and putting it into an interesting new world would have been enough. Instead we have a game that lacks an identity of its own. Content to continue the series, but not expand on it.

so i feel like i have to justify my rating to this game because everyone always questions it.

so breath of the wild. "the definitive open world experience."

so some positives before i shit all over this game. the art style is nice, looking at the large empty fields of this game is made more tolerable by the nice artstyle. you have a lot of choices in how you approach situations, which is always great. anyway,

the fact that you have this option means nothing when the most viable option is almost ALWAYS to do it normally. sure, there's a lot of imagination you can have but the problem with not building scenarios out of imagination itself rather than leaving them open, is that you really don't encourage people to take the time to do something interesting when it's always a blank slate with the most convenient option is to do the same exact shit every time. i see people compare this game to mgs V all the time and i dont really think thats fair, because in mgs V the worst option is almost always the most convenient and easy to think of one, actively making you think "ok how could i creatively do this faster."

the open world is extremely empty, with the only real things filling it being meaningless side quests, stupid korok puzzles and boring shrines. lets talk about side quests first.

so the thing about the side quests is that minus the one where you build a town they're all boring fetch quests where you get extremely subpar rewards. you aren't encouraged to do them because there aren't any real upgrades you can get from them. often time the reward is just ruppees or something else stupid. so you never really feel encouraged to do any of them.

the korok seeds basically all boil down to "oooooo out of place rock?!??!!??!" i dont feel like i need to explain myself here because i feel like this is something most people already know.

the shrines are probably the most defendable parts of the game. there are plenty of interesting ones, like the twin shrines, or the ones with really elaborate, out of the box puzzles. however most of the shrines aren't like this, and are either "duplicate shrine of another shrine but HARDER" or "puzzles where you use one of your abilities twice." rarely do you actually have to use your brain for these puzzles because they're all so obvious on how to solve them.

so if the world is empty, the engagements are uncreative, what about the main story?

well, the main story is probably one of the worst parts about the game. actually doing the quests before the divine beast you're currently going for can be interesting. however, the divine beasts themselves are literally the same dungeon repeated 4 times with the same art style as every other shrine in the game. the story itself is bland and forgettable, especially compared to the wild creativity of other Zelda games. actually beating the game gives you nothing. the ending is weak and pathetic.

i hope ive given a somewhat decent summary on why i despise this game. anyway if you disagree with me you're wrong and fuuuck you.

Breath of the Wild is a game I absolutely adore the direction of. I will sing nothing but praises for its ideas, for its impact on the gaming landscape, for rejuvenating a franchise that had long past worn out its formula. But... I feel Breath of the Wild is reputed at a surface level. People praise what it is, rather than how it is.

The first 5 to 10-hours of BotW are magical. Open-world games have long since been content to copy-paste the same 5 activities across the whole map, with the most surface-level gameplay imaginable (the Ubisoft standard). Breath of the Wild eschews this by making the moment to moment gameplay of interacting with the world itself engaging. When you set a patch of grass ablaze the first time, you wonder why every game doesn't work this way. Why every game doesn't have a robust, believable chemistry system. Why almost every game only uses complicated physics for show, rather than gameplay possibilities like BotW. Why every game isn't this open. It's in those first hours that Breath of the Wild genuinely feels like a masterpiece.

But then those 10-hours come and pass. Another 10 are added. Then another 10. It wasn't until 50-hours in, after completing all content related to the main story, I tackled Ganon. During the time (somewhere 10 to 20-hours in) BotW transitioned from a breath of fresh air to a complete drag. After enough playtime, one learns the inner workings of the mechanics. One has ample equipment to tackle any challenge the game affords. Too cold? Put on your winter gear. A storm? Unequip your metal weapons so you don't get blasted by lighting. What was once novel & interesting becomes trite, more of the same. At that point what is one left with?

A boring, underdeveloped world. Where most of the notable content is shrines, the most uninspired thing that could fill the land. Where biomes, rather than have their own bespoke enemy types, use the same palette swapped pool of enemies from the other side of the map. Where even the main quest reuses the same general structure 4-times.
Link walks into place with environmental hazard. Meets ancestor of long-dead warrior. Completes quest to prove he's worthy. Assault sequence with ancestor. Rummages through divine beast. Get power-up. Done. Repeat 3-more times. That is the main quest of Breath of the Wild.

Ultimately, after the novelty and beauty of BotW's mechanical and chemistry systems wear off, you're left with a world bereft of wanderlust. Where you don't want to explore those mountains, because you already know what awaits. The same that was in the coppices. The same that was in the marshlands. The same handful of enemy types. The same simple puzzle shrines. Long stretches of vaguely similar content, to the point where the monotony borders on insanity. It all blends together after a while, because there's too little too few distinguishable traits strewn about. It's all the same.

Here's hoping BotW 2 takes the excellent framework established here and becomes the masterpiece I wish BotW 1 was.

Breath of the Wild is a game of absolute extremes. It shows total understanding and mastery over the craft, but it also shows fundamental misunderstandings of them at the same time. It gives you so much and then tells you to put what it gave you aside. It is a struggle between game designs.

Zelda has always been a series of exploration. It has always known how to make you feel wanderlust even when you're exploring relatively linear worlds, but in most cases, that feeling was more aesthetic than actual, which is fine, of course, but Breath of the Wild sought to be able to give the most authentic sense of wanderlust a game can give someone. Now let's talk about how it goes about accomplishing that goal, the flow of the game, the gameplay loop.

In a word: contradictory. And not the fun kind. Self-sabotaging may be a better word for it, but Breath of the Wild portrays a very simple gameplay loop on its surface. You explore, you find something, you explore. But when that "something" is a shrine or dungeon, which it is most of the time, you run into issues. The biggest issue of Breath of the Wild. The dungeons, the second half to any Zelda equation, are horrid. There are 120 shrines dotted all around Hyrule and they usually hold one puzzle idea in each of them. Or they don't and you just have to fight something, or you just don't have to do anything, and the puzzle was getting to the shrine itself. This is awful and shows a basic misunderstanding of what dungeons do in Zelda games. Dungeons are never about a puzzle, it's about the puzzle of puzzles. Dungeons in Zelda are a collection of interlocking puzzles that in themselves form one puzzle. It is tedious and ruins game flow to be exploring the gorgeous open world only to be rewarded for that by being taken out of that open world into one of many homogeneous boring rooms to do a puzzle that is completely disconnected from everything else. What makes dungeons in Zelda so fantastic is how they work with the overworld. When I was going through Faron Woods in Skyward Sword, I was excited to see how this location's most pivotal point, its dungeon would be integrated with it, and Skyview Temple feels like something that I was exploring for. It feels like an ancient ruin deep in Faron Woods, it feels like part of the overworld. The shrines and even the divine beasts don't. They all look the same, and trust me, while it does look nice, seeing the same exact aesthetic over and over and over again with no major changes to it gets really grating when there's such a beautiful and diverse overworld I could be exploring instead. And when I overcome a shrine or a divine beast, I don't feel like I accomplished much. Instead of giving you an item half way through a dungeon, divine beasts give you control over one aspect of the beast once you get the map. This is so under developed and the dungeons aren't even that intricately designed that you ever need to use those controls in inventive or unique ways. And after you defeat the divine beast, instead of having a new tool that you could use to access more of the overworld like in most zelda games, you're given a spell that is either completely useless, barely noticeable, or a huge convenience that makes the other three spells look actively terrible in contrast. (I'm talking about Revali's Gale of course. In a game about exploration, the one spell that explicitly helps you do that is so obviously better than the two that are focused entirely on combat, and one that is just a recharging fairy.)

Oddly enough, these problems could be solved easily. Just have typical dungeon structure. Have around 9 dungeons sprinkled around the map and have them be traditional Zelda dungeons. When you first get to Lurelin village, have the locals tell you of the old abandoned temple that's on an island off the coast. Have a dilapidated old mine in Eldin where the Goron chieftain's father went to combat a great monster decades ago and never came back from, just anything that feels like it's part of the world and not some weird abstracted separate realm where nothing you do in it feels like you're exploring a part of the world you want to explore. They don't even need items in them or mini bosses or a map and compass like most Zelda games. Just a location in the world that feels like it fits where it is and isn't just home to the same reused assets over and over again. And have the puzzles have meaning. Have each puzzle in the dungeon come one step closer to unraveling the whole puzzlebox. I have no motivation to solve Breath of the Wild's puzzles. They mean nothing to me after I get my stamina maxed out, which is usually fairly early into the game for me, I might add. They don't mean anything if all they do is give you a heart piece. Heart pieces that have two loading screens you need to sit through in order to get it. They don't help unravel one big puzzle, they don't feel rewarding after you get all the useful stuff from them, and they all look the same and have no individual personality to them.

Now you may say that that's because the dungeons aren't meant to be as important as they were in previous Zelda games. I'd then ask why then they're absolutely everywhere. You can't go thirty minutes without finding one, and that's due to another of Breath of the Wild's contradictions.

I want to get lost in Hyrule. Nintendo wants me to get lost in Hyrule. It is then really annoying when they drag me out to make me climb a Ubisoft Tower. These towers are there to give you a mission when you enter a new region. They are huge, you can see it from all over the region it gives you the map of, which goes against the wanderlust of the rest of the exploration. When I wander, I want to wander. I don't want a giant glowing beacon to tell me that I need to get to it. This is baffling to me. Design wise it goes against exploration. You do not explore to find the Ubisoft Tower, you can see them from across the map. I think either you should fill out the map of where you've been, or there should be map merchants like in Majora's Mask wandering around Hyrule or at inns. They would then sell you a map, and the closer to where you currently are, the more expensive the map is. Or the map of each region should just be hidden somewhere in that region, and thorough exploration of the region would then be rewarded with the map. In a game about the whimsical mystique of exploring the worst thing you can do is give the players a map too early. And this leads us back to the shrines. The contradiction of Breath of the Wild I mentioned before that led to the shrines being absolutely everywhere is that they are your fast travel.

Having so many fast travel points in your game is baffling to me when the point of the game is to explore. It's saying that you don't think your world is good enough for people to want to see it a second time, which by the way isn't true. It's just another way this game's mechanics completely undermine its open world at times. You already have the stables, and they are all located in perfect locations to be your fast travel. Also I think fast travel should cost something. In a game where the main gameplay is exploring, getting to skip some of it should cost some currency. Which you can only make by exploring, so exploring, and exploring well, lets you skip some of it later down the line. I'm thinking carriages that take you to and from any stable in the game that is accessible at any stable.

But when this game lets you explore, it is breathtaking. I adore running through woods, stopping along the way to checkout a small cave, or a small abandoned shack in it. I love having to survive by hunting and gathering, I love having to constantly be scrounging up weapons, and I love when I discover something big. Be that a town or an old temple or a giant waterfall, it's all so masterfully crafted and truly does give me genuine wanderlust, it doesn't just imitate it. I love going to a stable, and hearing someone talk about a mythical horse roaming the nearby area, or have someone ask me to show them proof of the Great Fairy Fountain. But that's where the third part of the Zelda formula comes in. The sidequests.

Zelda games typically flesh out their world by having great sidequests. While most Zelda games don't have too many of them, they all have at least one quest in them that's remembered as one of the best in the series. Breath of the Wild has many sidequests. Many many more than Majora's mask even, which is THE sidequest Zelda game, but they're all so lackluster. There's no heart in most of them. This isn't helped by the game's equally lackluster cast. There is no Groose or Linebeck or Midna in this game. The closest is Sidon, who doesn't get enough screentime, and even then still can't match anyone from Skyward Sword. Or Majora's Mask. Or Twilight Princess. Or Windwaker. Or Link's Awakening. You get the picture.

The sidequests used to be what gave the overworld its life back in Ocarina of Time. When you first got to Kakariko in Ocarina of Time and saw cuccos running around and find their owner distraught over their escape it made the village feel like more than just seven polygonal houses and a windmill. It made it feel like people really lived in this village. Granted, those people never moved from their designated spots, but still.

Breath of the Wild doesn't need that. I don't need a sidequest for the game to tell me that people really live in Hateno Village, that's just self-evident from how they move around town and the town feels like it could really exist as a town, and not just an area for you to explore in a video game. But when I actually talk to people and do their sidequest and its all robotic and nobody feels like a real person, I am quickly reminded that I am not actually in a village with real people, but rather I am in an area that I'm supposed to explore because I'm playing a video game. Which wouldn't be so bad if that isn't what the game wants me to do, and likewise isn't what I want to have happen. Also like, the quests themselves aren't usually even that fun even if you are just treating it like a checklist item to do in a video game. Most of them just involve getting x number of items and giving it to the person that asked.

This game is very combat focused. Which is interesting, and the combat is very fun. The flow of it is basically the same as its been since Ocarina of Time, but with enemies that actually support the combat system like in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. It's fun enough, but whenever I'd have to fight a lot in quick succession, I'd end up very tired of the combat. It works best when you've been exploring for a while and come across a group of enemies attacking a fellow traveler, or get ambushed by a yiga clan assassin, which is good because it means that it's a mechanic that actually positively flows into the games main mechanic of exploration.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the exploration. And only the exploration of this game. Ignore the things in the game that work against it and give it its proper due, because I am truly in awe of it. Breath of the Wild's world is one that I want to get lost in, I want to wander. I see so many different adventures in the distance and get excited to have them. I love stumbling upon a secret hidden treasure chest, I love that when I get lost I am rewarded. I am rewarded with treasure and beauty and the thrill of adventure. I love finding a town and buying new equipment at its shop and spending a night at its inn and then going on my way off to another adventure. I love gathering up local ingredients and sitting down to cook them all into what I think would be the best combination of dishes. I love seeing the destroyed world of Hyrule and the history it tells without any text boxes, it is truly a masterpiece.

Just not one that you get to experience to its fullest.

New mainline entry in the long running series about fighting, recruiting, and creating demons to help you fight in and possibly prevent an angel and demon filled apocalypse by following different competing ideologies on how the world should be remade. The worst of all the main entries and easily one of the worst games in the franchise (SMT, Persona, Devil Survivor, Devil Summoner, Soul Hackers, if..., Last Bible, Digital Devil Saga, Majin Tensei, etc, etc, etc).

Turn based battles with some good varied animations for different demons some having their own attack animations, item use animations, and idle animations. Still one of the rare series to make buffing, debuffing, and using status effects very important. More ability customization options with you being able to acquire a demon essence to learn theirs skills or weakness/resistances, some being easily swappable at save points as long as you have or can pay for more of them. Series still doesn't tell you what skills do or how things work, no details on what proficiency effects, differences between skill damages (where some don't even align with the type of strength it implies), what it means to increase or decrease by ranks for buff and debuff skills, if side effects of certain attacks are buffed or if chances are increased by proficiency, what all the luck stat actually does, etc and some descriptions lead you to believe some skills work in a different way than they really do. The series is back to having game over at MC defeat, so if you happen to get targeted multiple times it can lead to sudden cheap game. There is the usual problem with the game with the way that skills work, for people that know how the series functions the hit everything moves are typically never worse keeping as they cost too much, do less damage, and can hit enemies that are strong against their element, skills that hit multiple times are better than one hit but stronger moves, then there are the usual just completely useful skills that waste limited slots like the small HP and small MP gain after battle skills. The game has a good but very limited selection of music during combat.

There is a poorly done area of combat, which is the magatsuhi skills. You fill a meter through combat actions and can then make use of a powerful skill, you have one different types of demons have one and through an unlock you can use your demons skills. The first one you get that makes all attacks crit for your sides turn doing more damage and giving bonus actions, another that gives everyone max proficiency in everything so they do much more damage at a lower cost, and then one that does huge amount of almighty damage based on your level are so much better than everything else that none of the other skills matter.

You will get access to a large selection of demons that get a bit more personality through some of the new animations. There are more unique skills helping to make each demon stand out more. Some odd unique skill choices though, like not giving anything to ones you would think would have them or giving great skills to demons who have natural stats and stat growth rates that make them a poor choice for the skill. When it comes to having conversations with demons to recruit or to try to get something from them the game has some entertaining conversations both with demons and between demons if you have one in your group with a special conversation, but a lot remains the same fairly nonsensical and constantly repeated (even between extremally different types of demons) options. It's extremely luck based and often nonsensical with what works and doesn't, and if you fail one time and try again nothing about the first talk is remembered. Recruiting by talking is an extremely inefficient way to get new demons as always as their stats will be low and skills selection poor, which means that leads to worse options when fusing them for other demons. They also demand items or more often ridiculous amounts of money that could have just been used to fuse them in a much better and more useful form.

It would have been nice to see the conversation system finally expanded on, maybe brining in demon types to help or to create new types of discussions like in Persona 2 rather than just always seeing "what kind of demon are you", "they are trying to lead", "come closer", "look into my eyes", etc, or by having conversations be more beneficial, or allowing you to directly choose the options you want more often if you wanted to try to get money or items out of them. If I wipe out three enemies and bring the fourth down to .2% of its total health, maybe it should go into the automatic conversation where it asks me to spare it in return for something, or at the very least when I initiate a conversation maybe the verge of death, 20 levels lower than me, fairy type demon shouldn't be telling me that it will destroy a weakling like me. It's really getting old that they can't do anything remotely interesting with the conversation system and that they haven't even tried to in the over 20 years since Persona 2.

Demon fusion has a very easy to use system that with a fairly good UI. You can easily sort through all the demons that you have the ability to fuse or that you know about that are over your current level and can be shown all viable combinations from the demons you currently have or that you have registered. The section where you can use the essence of a demon you give yourself or one of your demons new skills is poorly done as you can't just search for a skill type or quickly cycle through your acquired essences to see what skills each has.

The new 3D environments don't really look good, are fairly bland and can have a lot of similar features, and they can be confusing to navigate in some areas. Can't say that I really like hopping and Naruto running around in a SMT game either. This all made worse by the areas just getting less and less interesting as the game goes on. There can be severe framerate issues, sometimes in battle but almost constantly during traversal for a really dull and empty looking game. Not as embarrassing as it was in Deadly Premonition 2 but still inexcusably bad. There are basically four main areas and three dungeons in the entire game. The large areas will have you running back and fourth to complete fetch and kill quests while you progress to different sections of them. The first dungeon takes place in a school that is very straightforward except there can be some students to rescue and demons that might ask you for help and can be telling the truth or tricking you, it is the most interesting concept of what happens in them but your choices or if you rescue everyone effects nothing. The second is a demon prince palace that has fans that blow you around to different areas, annoying, nonsensical given your power and demons, and a time wasting tacked on element made even worse by them forcing you to drop back down to lower areas to lose progress in order to collect some of the items. The final dungeon is the end game area that feels like they wanted to make a maze but then realized that your map just shows you everything so they just gave up trying to implement it in a way that makes sense, terrible map design but terrible design I am very thankful for. The more open environments also lead to strange enemy placement, where you might be around level 30 getting warned about strong opponents who might be level 30, 40, or 70. You might run into an enemy in the first area, 4% of the way into the game, to be told that it is strong and you should come back later (but no idea how strong) and then finally you might find a quest to fight that enemy about 85% of the way through the game.

Battles are no longer random, which I like, but the way they put demons on the map is poorly thought out. Despite the large number of demons to summon, there isn't that much when it comes to enemy variety in each area and they all tend to just be spawned on the map together walking around in groups. If you hit one with your sword (Persona 3-5 style) while they aren't alerted you and your demons go first (speed no longer effects turn order once the fight starts just your hit and dodge chance, so one side goes then the other). If you hit an alerted enemy, run into them, or they hit you then who goes first is based somehow on your speed stat (maybe theirs as well, maybe your luck, who knows it's a Japanese RPG the only way you are going to know how it works is if someone datamines it). It tends to look bad and be poorly handled, but at least you won't run into 20 random battles while trying to turn in a fetch quest or when you get lost in the new environments trying to find a small hidden path. Odd thing the game still does is give some demons the skill that prevents battles for a little while, not sure why they would force waste skill slots when you can just walk or run around enemies very easily. Some enemies will be charging at you or advancing in formation with other enemy groups, you might think this can effect the battles or lead to large or chain battles, nope, does nothing.

Terrible story, with uninteresting ideologies at their most boring forms. You get the usual support the fascist murder happy order side (who of course, try to kill you multiple times before you even side against them), though this time being represented even more poorly than before as God is dead when the game starts and the two representing that faction are two of the dumbest people in the entire series and one being the dumbest looking, near the end even going beyond the already questionable reason to support the order side with God being dead already by having both characters becoming physical appearance wise and action wise cartoonishly evil. You can choose two versions of a status quo ending where you basically just save Tokyo but keep everyone locked in conflict, with one ending also removing the thing the stronger characters are fighting over while probably not saving Tokyo but I think the rest of the world is fine. The true ending seems to be a mass genocide route with ending text that implies that things won't stay the way you made it anyway (probably a good idea for sequels). No one cares about you or anyone else, with characters not even mentioning other barely utilized pointless characters that are supposed to be important to them even while dying, and even the most pointless characters you randomly know as students all living in Tokyo all happen to have inherited the most powerful beings forbidden knowledge that they now want. You spend almost no time with the game's characters or factions, almost no time in the world that humans still occupy, and the majority of the demon side quests you get are simple item fetch quests to exchange for other items.

The only decent side quest that ends up also being a series of quests is one involving the side character Miyazu (who basically has no reason to exist for the first 90% of the game, or if you miss these quests, or if you chose to kill Khonsu before knowing these quests exist) and the demon Khonsu. You are pushed towards certain alignments behind the scenes based on mostly meaningless choices you make that don't really feel at all connected to the games ending (being nice means you are siding with the insane murder happy cackling order side) and being on the opposite path of an ending you want can cause you to need to spend 666,000 macca (a lot of money) or be unable to unlock bonuses attached to your ending for New Game+. Some side quests give you fake choices that you can't actually pick and that don't effect anything, and the few side quests that feel like they should have effects on the ending or later parts of the game, or at the very least, some of conversations you have do nothing at all.

It feels like a rushed or hacked up plot with poor characters you rarely even see, poor examination of ideologies, poor world building, and a poor setting. The large open but dull lifeless environments, some of the cutscene design that might show off some cool demon design but mostly just involve everyone standing around as your character looks on blankly as things talk without moving their mouths, the small number of areas and limited character interaction, poor framerate, and the better combat animations next to a lot of more generic ones can make it feel like they thought they were going to have a much bigger budget or time to design the game but didn't get it and had to cut a lot.

The main SMT style endings have always been a bit more limiting choice wise when compared to something like the Devil Survivor games where you get a lot more options, have things hidden from you, have paths that kill people before the end game, you have the ability to change the mind of some characters by brining up how their ideas contradict themselves or by realize characters are only trying to do what might look best at the time, and those characters seem to have actual reasons to do or believe in what they are doing. You really just have three main side characters whose motivations are, "Demons killed by family they all need to die." "I want to save Tokyo." "I'm a helpless loser and want to live my life being told what to do, wait no, not by any of you by the person who told me what to do first and wants to kill my friend."

The gameplay can hold it up to be an alright game but I'd just recommend almost everything in the franchise before this. Adds nothing new that is positive and any changes made feel rushed or half assed. Play translations of the originals two (and the GBA version), play the remaster of three, play 4 and its sequel Apocalypse, Soul Hackers, Devil Summoner 2 Raidou Kuzunoha vs King Abaddon, definitely play the 3DS versions of the Devil Survivor games, the Digital Devil Saga games, and the Persona series because they are all better than this.

This also has the usual paid day one DLC that this series has fallen in love with since the 3DS games. The DLC gets you more boss fights, new demon additions (the ones from the boss fights), as well as ways to make the game require less grinding. Most of it involving fighting and unlocking the bosses from SMT 3 and then fighting the main character in the game's most difficult battle.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1474978339177725952

In the days of early PC gaming, the oft repeated query whether you had a powerful rig was "Can it run Crysis?"

Well the year is 2021, nearly 2022, and Nintendo is a few years in to its beautiful marriage of portable and home consoles, the Nintendo Switch. Now we must ask yourself: "Can your Switch Run SMTV?" The answer at the moment, is no.

SMTV Pros:
-Awesome Demon Design
-Cool TMS#FE UI

SMTV Cons:
-Horrendous Performance: Frame drops, odd blurs, defiantly ugly movement
-Camera Control: This was horrendous in the open world
-Atrocious Platforming
-Drab and Boring Open Worlds: Each zone, unlike Nocturne, is a tremendously sized zone-segmented (near) open world that requires traversal to accomplish objectives. It's a needless and lifeless touch to a series that had some awesome success in dungeon design in SMTIII. Enemies fill this open world ad nauseum and make even moving around or trying to find the next place to go an absolute rage inducing nightmare.
-Levelling: I fought every single enemy I saw en route to the first boss, I was still five levels down and was decimated.
-Horrible Maze Design: Just like SMTIII, SMTV returned with some maze/labyrinth action, and just like in Nocturne it is absolutely infuriating and overstays its welcome.
-Underwhelming OST: Given this is SMT and Atlus, I thought the OST would again be something to remember as it had been in Persona and in Nocturne. Unfortunately it was largely forgettable and added little to the overall game.
-Story and Characters: These were rather underwhelming as many other reviewers have said.

All in all, this was just a less exciting or unique experience as SMTIII was. SMTV is much less exciting and adds many frustrating gameplay elements to the between the lore segments, and the lore is largely unfulfilling. Of course this game is hard, and many players look forward to that in SMT, but to me this felt a little too much in the unrewarding sense. I didn't feel rewarded for the grinding I had done or party I had put together as I had in Nocturne.

I try not to regret purchases, but I cannot recommend this game.