Coming from someone who played SMT V only last year and loved most things about it, the prospect of a rerelease that would fix a lot of its messy bits sounded great. Since V was still pretty recent in my memory, I knew my judgement of this game would entirely come from its improvements/changes from the base game, a game that I already adored, which could make judging this release for what it is a bit of a tricky task.

By far, the biggest gripe people had with the OG was its story. The story's scope and set pieces were cool in my opinion, and the nuanced takes on the traditional Law/Chaos alignments were nice, but it was hard to give a shit when its characters lacked dimension. Here they've found ways to make the already existing characters interesting, like giving Yuzuru and Tao much needed dimension, to the point where I actually cared when Yuzuru died. Dazai's character development suddenly happening when he takes off his hat that says "Sucker" is still incredibly funny but whatever. Yoko practically forces development onto Tao by debating her on ideology every few minutes, which is fun to see, and does what I wish Dazai and Yuzuru did better in OG by being relatable and interesting Law/Chaos reps. Yoko in general is a very fun addition, again building interest in the dynamics of the main characters, whose earnest edginess is funny but still does a decent job at conveying her ideals. I like how there are only two endings here, which definitely defeats the recent problem of there always being some kind of true ending. All in all the story is really great overall and many story beats had me intrigued and surprised.

I already found the base exploration/gameplay loop of the first game to be one of the best in the series, and they really just expounded upon that here. There's obviously more demons, more quests (the demon controlling ones were super fun), more skills, more bosses, another Da'at to explore (incredibly incredibly beautiful map), etc., and all of it is pretty great. The innate skills make trying out different combinations of demons very fun, and in combination with the new Magatsuhi skills can make for really funny antics. The crazy amount of customization perfectly aids the addition of stuff like the virtual trainer, Godborn mode, and the superbosses. Speaking of, I am pretty glad that they made Lucifer's fight after Shiva not a pushover; in the original game, if you could beat Shiva, Lucifer was a walk in the park. Some more notable changes include a massive downplay of level scaling, which was a notable issue in OG, which is obviously a great change. The free skill points you get from the Demon Haunts with Aogami did make the beginning of the game a bit too easy, but being underleveled through the rest of the game made things still interesting, again only thanks to them removing the drastic level scaling. I was worried other small changes would trivialize other things as they did seem to market the amount of QoL changes a lot, but fortunately they didn't change too much. Some nice changes include the inclusion of recommended levels on quests, which made it fun to see how low level I could take on certain quests, as well as the Magatsuhi rails.

I could rave about the music all day, I genuinely think this might be Kozuka's best OST. Again, I really liked his work on the OG, but the new tracks are just incredible. Obviously, boss themes don't disappoint. The jungle on Tiamat's, the somber setting of Yoko's theme in Tehom's, the amalgam of influences in Konohana Sakuya's, there's so much to love here. Kozuka has talked in interviews about how V's music didn't have a specific influence, like IV did with 80s music, so the music feels incredibly natural and inspired by the content itself. While this applies to the OG game as well, it feels especially dominant here; there are so many different genres and influences everywhere, not just used in battle themes either. On the whole it just shows how much love and thought went into this game. The fact that the Nahobeeho sidequest contains three unique songs is a testament to that fact.

Overall, this rerelease brings so much new life and charm to an already brilliant game. The world and characters feel thought out, the story is compelling, the graphics and music are gorgeous, the gameplay is as good as ever, this may be the best Megaten game in a while. I still have gripes with it, like the dungeons being lackluster (Shakan is 0.1% more interesting than the Demon King Castle, and the Metatron one is unchanged and boring), but whatever. I haven't had this much fun playing an RPG in a while, and I feel confident recommending it to anyone.