SMT V is a game that lives to be serene, beautiful and delicate. One of my favorite games and probably the SMT game that I'm most fond of. It enriches the trajectory of the saga with it's excellent approach to area exploration and 3D models/enviroments (Remember when in SMT III you could see the glowing eyes of the demons in the title screen and it was so amazing? Now the whole game is like this!).

I'm not a big Zelda BoTW fan myself but it was groundbreaking and I love to grasp that influence in games released after it. SMT V looks like it was one of those games, since it has several aspects that follows it's style of design. I would say those are exploration, scenario aproach and enviroment building.

Scenario aproach is deffinetly it's most controversial point. It's true that the writen aspects of the game might come off as bland considering previous entries (hell, you can even consider it minimal if you look at games with as much “cutscenes” like SMT IV), but I wouldn't say that's a bad characteristic of it. It doesn't risk much in the way it handles the usual SMT dichotomies but it is also not “laking” in intentions either. It relies heavily in you (the player), in your knowledge of series lore (most relations in the game are subtext based on japanese mythology, following the descendants of Izanami and Izanagi) and in the level of implication you want to have with it's primary interest: map completion and sidequests. Those two aspects are what makes it a great game. How it handles demons, what things are bothering them, where do they live and how, and ultimately how you, as the Nahobino (the divine being that allows them to live or die) in your ascension, are going to interact with them, what causes will you aid, what enemies will you make... Even in the task of searching for the Mimans are rewards! Sometimes they will give the Nahobino progressiond advice or cheeky remarks, but they will also tell you in other cases stories about different areas in Tokyo that are vital to the understanding of the themes of this game.

Soundtrack is also something important to mention, not only because is amazing, but because mood and enviroment building is heavily dependent on it. It's not just good background music for areas or fights like I feel it was in SMT IV (it's the same sound team for both games), it has the particularity of being an “interactive” soundtrack of sorts, that builds up and sometimes even evolves when mixed with different playthrough sound effects (like demon moans or screams) in perfect harmony. Every time I play I am impressed by this feature!

The combat system is great as well. Ever since SMT III we've had this mechanical progression that has been improving with every new installment, but SMT V really takes the cake. Every area and it's potential fights are very well thought and it's overall challenging but also easy to understand and aproach. It makes you formulate strategies outside the straightforward “weakness exploit” system and in hard difficulty things get pretty crazy (in a good way!!). It also encourages you to try different play modes and to do fights with recurrent demon changes.
There's a lot of love and care put into the battle animations too!


In a way, SMTV made me remember when I was a kid and used to play Kingdom Hearts 2. It was the only game that I had at the time, so after I beated it, I used to wander around the scenery, looking at different background/landscape elements and imagining conversations between Sora and other NPCs like I was playing with dolls. In SMTV there exists bonds between characters that precede the narrative, but also in the game's present time, new bonds are forged. They all have unspoken progressions and there's a lot of observations to be made about them even though they're oftenly more implied that “shown”.
So I love to run around in the colorful and glittery grounds of Da'at, between the collapsing buildings and highways, searching for knowledge, learning the demon's ways of life and imagining hundreds of conversations the protagonist and Aogami could be having inside that mystical body of theirs.