Shin Megami Tensei V was one of my most anticipated games so far in my short life of 19 years. It was the only reason dust wasn't collected on my rarely used Switch console, for the sole purpose of playing this game. One day, it came, went, and left me with the "pretty alright" impression. Pretty alright as in "could've been worse, could've been lots better".

The story itself is pretty usual. There is a law, chaos and neutral rep. However, unlike other titles, the story here felt more lackluster. Some characters are written with no sense, such as the law rep going from "a quirky guy with a cap who would never hurt a fly", into a "Columbine High School Catastrophy Demonstrator". The chaos rep has no true intention for choosing chaos, yadda yadda yadda. There are some highlights though, such as the neutral reps being written very nicely in contrast to the others. They are a nice refresher to the entire game, and it is a shame that they weren't as featured as the other reps. Basically, if I had to sum up the story, I'd say it works, but you wouldn't be blown away from it.

In terms of gameplay, it also does have it's ups and downs. The free exploration, with jumping and climbing, as well as no random encounters, instead using spawned enemies on the world map, was very nice and refreshing in contrast to the usual dungeon crawling. In addition, the whole concept of essences introduced a new type of gameplay for SMT, with you being able to essentially finetune yourself into a mighty God, finetuning your moves as you wander. As with most RPG, there's also tons of grinding, reliviated by the optional DLC of grimores and that type of stuff from the Mitamas.
The bad parts would be the pacing of the combat in relation to the story, I'll probably continue this later.