I finally did it, my first mainline SMT game. And it was..... decent? Good even. I'd hesitate to say more than that but Its obviously not a bad game by any means (besides one thing but we'll get to that). I want to preface this by saying I dont really care for turn based combat, and for the most part I play games for character and story. Surprisingly, the gameplay was pretty enjoyable in this. I played on the lowest difficulty setting because again, not really a fan of turn based but it was honestly quite enjoyable putting 90% of my points into strength and just blasting through everything with high critical hit phys moves. The UI is really clean, no problems there beyond my usual bleh turnbased qualms. The semi-open world is a great idea, and seeing the monsters in the overworld made the game a lot more enjoyable than a bunch of random encounters. Exploring was really fun for the most part and whenever Nahobino does his little slide down a slope thing that always made me do an internal fist pump. It's the best part of the game I think. The map is awful though, I had a better time ignoring it outside of the general waypoint direction and just wandering around on my own. The map is a lot more useful in the two (thankfully few) dungeons but those areas are mostly just copy paste textures everywhere and the least enjoyable parts of the game easily. Part of the reason the exploration was as enjoyable is going back to what I said earlier, the overworld sprites. The demon designs, which yes a lot are from previous games, are just really fucking sick. Almost all of them are certified dope and SMTV is honestly the best looking game ive played on switch so that only enhanced everything. I hope the next games build off that. Then theres the music. The second half of the game the music is pretty great, and the credits music is awesome as well. But I really hated it for the first two areas, idk what was up but it honestly was hurting my ears and i had to play with the sound off outside of battle for some parts. Now that settles everything, yep nothing else to discuss. Pretty good game....... Nope.

I cant

the story sucks balls

The section in the school, and the meeting between the gods. Those were the only two moments in the game where the story was interesting. Aogami was a decent character, everyone else besides design wise is entirely uninteresting and lack anything beyond surface level depth. They're not likeable, you wont care about them. Depending on your ending you'll kill some of them and you wont feel a damn thing. The first half of this game is focused on an enemy that has basically nothing to do with the rest of the story and by the time it gets intriguing its basically already over. The endings themselves are also really anticlimatic. Theres no real sense of accomplishment and it just kinda ends with a dissapointing fizzle. I heard a lot about the allignment stuff from the rest of the series, but the only choice you make that even matters is at the very end. The story is just really bad, not atrocious necessarily but theres just really not much to enjoy there and it took away from the fun of playing to know I was heading towards a lackluster story with an uninteresting conclusion.
Overall. The story is not worth a second thought and I dont think the game as a whole is very memorable, that being said they really got a good thing going with the environments and exploration.

Time Played - 33 hours 23 Minutes
Final Level - 81
Nancymeter - 73/100
Game Completion #37 of 2022
April Completion #6