Ys.. now in 3D!! Try frantically to track your foe while staring at super meters at the bottom of the screen and navigating your spastic hoverblading cursor-person out of harm's way.

Unnaturally high def ground textures also make a return- experience grass fields that will cut your eyes just by looking at it!

An intricate and original storyline that begins with Adol accidentally walking in on a woman bathing in a stream, who flinches and drops her towel! (Wait, where did she even find a towel.. oh who the hell cares.)

Can Adol solve the mysteries of the island and defeat most powerful adversary- the camera- yet?

Will ZEELLO ever get his forty dollars back?

Find out in Wise Eight!

this is gonna be good

Edit: this is really fuckin good

Edit 2: Aight it's not THAT good

Wanted to talk more about my problems rather than praises since I feel like I have more to comment on. I'll just say the regular SMT stuff like fusion, demon collecting/negotiation, and press turn have been refined to a tee here. Played on Hard and it's probably one of the most balanced games in the franchise. The biggest change is the exploration and environmental design and it's mostly great. The semi-open world maps are laid out in an almost 3D platformer way and there's ton of stuff to collect and find and figuring out HOW to get to them is part of the fun. There's two more traditional dungeons in the game that are an attempt to spice things up but I just found them kinda pace breaking, so much so that I dropped the game for months when I got to the Demon King's Castle. The soundtrack is also a highlight, banger after banger. I'll never prefer Doi over Kaneko but I think he's proved himself here because the art direction and designs are pretty on point this time. The obvious Doi bias when it comes to demon choices disappoints me a little though. I honestly couldn't care less about the story and characters being garbage. They're completely unintrusive and that's exactly how I'd want it in a game like this if the story isn't gonna be good anyway. That Dazai scene is some of the funniest shit in the series.

I said "mostly" earlier because man, these areas have the most bland and repetitive visual design ever. All 4 of these maps have same basic visual template except they change the color each time. The same rundown buildings and rubble, the same sand, the same vending machines, the same shitty cars. Yea I get it's a post-apocalyptic setting but there's no variety here at all. Nocturne proved you could pull off a range of aesthetics even with a setting like this. Hell even the IV duology and SNES games have more going on. If I wasn't so fond of actually traversing these locations I would've been sick of looking at the game by the 2nd area.

Magatsuhi is certainly better than Smirk but all the skills are not made equal. Never found myself using anything other than the initial critical one except for a few situations like using the Luck skill to grind towards the end. Also a little annoying that you can't see the meter outside of battle.

Perhaps my biggest issue is the way levels work. In no sensibly designed SMT game should levels matter this much and scale damage the way they do. This one scenario I got myself into exemplifies this problem at its worst: My level 48 Alice with 60 Magic fought the same Nigi Mitama as my level 60 [REDACTED] with 62 Magic and did infinitely less damage with a stronger base skill. I don't remember the exact number but it was probably a 1000 damage in difference. This one design decision seriously kills an aspect of the series I loved. I've always told people you shouldn't have to grind in SMT (to get through the main story at least) and I'd be right until SMTV. There's endless strategies and creative builds for each fight which should be the determining factor. Yeah obviously that applies here too but not as much as levels of course! So much for people doing cool low level challenge runs and the like. What are even the point of balms and incenses when Grimoires and Gospels are the real winners. They make it easy for demons to catch up since Grimoires are plentiful I suppose but that still doesn't excuse it, plus the MC's level needs to be prioritized first and Gospels are far more rare. To be fair, this isn't very noticeable early game when your levels with enemies are more on par, but you start to feel it more as the game progresses and it sucks.

SMTV feels like it's riding on the coattails of Nocturne pretty damn hard. Constant references and similarities everywhere. Nocturne was almost 2 decades ago and I'm not sure why this game feels the need to emulate it so much. It's not even fanservice really it's just derivative. This doesn't bother me too much in the end but I was hoping for something more fresh I guess.

Performance is pretty whack, my emulator issues aside. From all the footage I've seen and what I've heard from friends this game is just poorly optimized. Nothing game ruining by any means but constant enough to take issue with. Get this shit off the switch. Technical hiccups aside I just feel like SMTV is innately slower than Nocturne and like any Megaten game SMTIV and onward. Not really fair to compare a 2D handheld game to a 3D console one but even Nocturne and Persona 5 are way snappier when it comes to menus and battle speed. SMTV isn't slow by any means and being able to skip animations in battle is great, still there's definitely a noticeable speed difference. Also I'm not sure if this was an emulator issue on my end but loading times were awful when fast traveling to different maps and when loading back in from a game over.

Despite me dunking on SMTV so much I still did enjoy my time with it. It's hard for me to not like Megaten especially when all the regular elements are here and accounted for and arguably at their best. It's not soulless (like Tales of Arise) but the more subtle design choices that bother me add up, and the lack of anything original or innovative that I haven't seen before in the series keep it from being amazing.