Atlus Shin Megami Tensei V - It's been hurting my OCD.

[Silva]

Never played 4 but Nocturne didn't incentivized demon swapping the way 5 does.

 

[Jermu]

catgode I think you can buy Essences from the skeleton shop?

Something interesting I noticed that's (apparently) new for the series: you're supposed to use your full roster and not just the main lineup. The function to swap demons now cost just half an action making it viable to put the demons warming the bench to work. This is making me plan my roster in function of roles: 3 magic attackers, 2 phys/tankers, 2 healers, etc. and swap them in and out during fights. It also makes for less dependency on Chakra drops.

Anybody else notice this?

Did all fights with 4 chars which I picked from 4-8 options. Buffing is kinda mandatory for harder fights and since roaster chars dont get buffs it is quite annoying. Game is very generous end game with mp items at least I had maxed every item before optional fights. there is also npc which trades mp items

Two questions:
1. did anyone actually have a demon run off with their shit in negotations? I found demons in my playthrough to be weirdly agreeable and whenever I get to the gifting part, negotation is as good as done in all fairness.
2. what do people think of acquring the essences? I had the impression that the demons themselves would be more involved in the process, kind of how in Strange Journey, if I recall correctly, you'd get demon sources when you maxed out analyze level of a demon. Here, technically you might get an essence as a drop from a fight or as a level up gift, but generally you get most of them from... random containers in the middle of bumfuck nowhere?

1. Only if u refuse. End game I refused all macca / good item options and probably only 20% of negotations got fucked because of refusing 1 or 2 offers. End game single demon can ask around 40k macca so I rather give like 3 life stones and elec shard
2. Demons give them randomly. I would say that 98% of essences can be found from containers even the top 1%

 

[Gastrick]

The intro to the first Shin Megami Tensei has a better atmosphere than all of SMT V put together.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

For those who are around end game areas - did Kaneko's Angel return as high level demon as it was in Apocalypse?

 

[Thac0]

20 Hours in:

Pros:
- Combat overall is excellent
- Elemental affinities are in
- Magatsuhi is way better than Smirk
- Status ailments are good for the first time

- Build variety is high for demons
- Many interesting new skills, like poison+rakunda or physical attacks with elemental affinity
- A lot of demons learn very good skills after a few levels, so I am fusing a lot
- QoL changes make fusing the entire compendium very easy

- Collect a thon gameplay is fun
- Maps are well designed, fun to traverse and a lot to explore
- Loot from traversing the maps is very good, due to essences and glory making great rare loot
- Sidequests are surprisingly competent, I love the frequent choices between a law and a chaos demon

- Music is insanely good, there are some haunting otherworldly tunes
- Graphics are surprisingly decent for a Switch title, good art direction

- Return to classical save point system (thank YHVH)
- Difficulty feels roughly equivalent but slightly below Nocturne, playing both on hard. Less cheap oneshots, but stronger bosses. Feels harder than IV/IVA.

- This games equivalent to Magatama/App Points in Glory and Essences is the best system out of the three.

Cons:
- Almost no dungeons, less than 10% of the gameplay time is spent in a dungeon
- Bossfights are a bit too grindy, everything has a billion HP
- Mana efficiency is very important
- Due to massive QoL upgrades and a very strong Nahobino the game feels less threatening than Nocturne
- Money is useless except for consumables and summoning, as you gain enough essences just by playing
- For the Nahobino itself in combat build variety is low. Melee Nahobinos get an amazing skill very early and will just spam that until kingdom come, magic Nahobinos are more interesting but also shafted

Overall the list of pros for me is a lot longer than the list of cons. This is a good one, and I will continue playing it every chance I get.
Collect-A-Thoning vs dungeon crawling is the greatest difference this game makes to the formula, and will decide wether it ranks low or high for you.
I for one like collect a thon elements in my jrpgs.

 

[Hobo Elf]

- Difficulty feels roughly equivalent but slightly below Nocturne, playing both on hard. Less cheap oneshots, but stronger bosses. Feels harder than IV/IVA.

I thought IVA is way harder than Nocturne. I played both back-to-back and that was the conclusion I got to. IVA was the hardest SMT but SMT5 is a bit harder now due to the nerfs to buffs/debuffs to make it, dare I say it, more Persona-esque (along with the boss HP bloat and tighter MP economy which are elements lifted from Persona).

 

[Thac0]

- Difficulty feels roughly equivalent but slightly below Nocturne, playing both on hard. Less cheap oneshots, but stronger bosses. Feels harder than IV/IVA.

I thought IVA is way harder than Nocturne. I played both back-to-back and that was the conclusion I got to. IVA was the hardest SMT but SMT5 is a bit harder now due to the nerfs to buffs/debuffs to make it, dare I say it, more Persona-esque (along with the boss HP bloat and tighter MP economy which are elements lifted from Persona).

I played Nocturne fairly recently aswell, random skill inheritance, high amount of ambushes, the fiends who all have no weaknesses and a much squishier demifiend compared to the Nahobino make it measurably harder imo. Not necessarily in the bosses, but in Nocturne I get floored by random encounters from time to time. In SMT V that barely every happens, because the Nahobino never gets oneshot, and as everyone has item and healing lore after a certain level you can just smoke bomb with any demon to get out of combat.
I agree that IV A is pretty high aswell, especially as it gets harder late game instead of easing off as SMT usually does, but companions are actually damn usefull in IV A and ease off a lot of difficulty.

 

[Sentinel]

Drake Vasuki: An ancient dragon of Indian myth. Formerly, the gods came up with the idea of making the spirit medicine of immortality, Amrita, by stirring up the chaotic sea of milk, and used the enormous Mount Mandara as a rod and Vasuki as a rope.

 

[Lord of Riva]

20 Hours in:

Pros:
- Combat overall is excellent
- Elemental affinities are in
- Magatsuhi is way better than Smirk
- Status ailments are good for the first time

- Build variety is high for demons
- Many interesting new skills, like poison+rakunda or physical attacks with elemental affinity
- A lot of demons learn very good skills after a few levels, so I am fusing a lot
- QoL changes make fusing the entire compendium very easy

- Collect a thon gameplay is fun
- Maps are well designed, fun to traverse and a lot to explore
- Loot from traversing the maps is very good, due to essences and glory making great rare loot
- Sidequests are surprisingly competent, I love the frequent choices between a law and a chaos demon

- Music is insanely good, there are some haunting otherworldly tunes
- Graphics are surprisingly decent for a Switch title, good art direction

- Return to classical save point system (thank YHVH)
- Difficulty feels roughly equivalent but slightly below Nocturne, playing both on hard. Less cheap oneshots, but stronger bosses. Feels harder than IV/IVA.

- This games equivalent to Magatama/App Points in Glory and Essences is the best system out of the three.

Cons:
- Almost no dungeons, less than 10% of the gameplay time is spent in a dungeon
- Bossfights are a bit too grindy, everything has a billion HP
- Mana efficiency is very important
- Due to massive QoL upgrades and a very strong Nahobino the game feels less threatening than Nocturne
- Money is useless except for consumables and summoning, as you gain enough essences just by playing
- For the Nahobino itself in combat build variety is low. Melee Nahobinos get an amazing skill very early and will just spam that until kingdom come, magic Nahobinos are more interesting but also shafted

Overall the list of pros for me is a lot longer than the list of cons. This is a good one, and I will continue playing it every chance I get.
Collect-A-Thoning vs dungeon crawling is the greatest difference this game makes to the formula, and will decide wether it ranks low or high for you.
I for one like collect a thon elements in my jrpgs.

Not keen on the Music myself but that is basically my impression as well.

Also Mana Efficiency does not seem to matter that much if you can teleport instantaneous for a full heal if need be (money is abundant anyways). Maybe thats a progression thing, even though I tend to conserve MP anyways if possible.

It's a good game and was the reason i bought the switch in the first place (being fabulously optimistic about its release date) and I am happy to have done so.
I am nearing the end of the third Area (of 4? ) and have lost myself in fusing somewhat, because its fun. clocking in at 30 hours.

 

[Puukko]

Hardtype Nocturne is probably the hardest SMT experience there is, still. None of the bosses in V have taken me a dozen attempts so far. Matador in Hardtype took me about 15 attempts and even though my intention was to play completely legit, I had to use a save state afterwards cuz I still had to survive to a save point and there was a very high possibility of death from random encounters.

The difficulty in V is tight for the most part but it does falter oddly at points. Some abscesses have clearly had very little thought put to them and the demons may only have two skills. Sometimes the demons in an area are oddly low level - the very end of the third area had demons who were weak enough to immediately run away. The following dungeon wasn't much better, and then there was a sudden 5 lvl jump in the fourth area.

Also, the riders were implemented really weirdly. They only appear after a cutscene when you beat the boss in the third area who is lvl 49, but the first rider is lvl 42. They could just as well put that cutscene in the beginning of the area. As it is, there is no way to have a real battle against the first two fiends because you'll outlevel them.

 

[Thac0]

Also Mana Efficiency does not seem to matter that much if you can teleport instantaneous for a full heal if need be (money is abundant anyways). Maybe thats a progression thing, even though I tend to conserve MP anyways if possible.

Mana efficiency is more about surviving the boss fight without using a dozen chakra drops.
Still it is progression related aswell, I recently unlocked Magatsuhi overflow and that +10 party wide MP at the start of the turn makes a titanic difference.

Hardtype Nocturne is probably the hardest SMT experience there is, still. None of the bosses in V have taken me a dozen attempts so far. Matador in Hardtype took me about 15 attempts and even though my intention was to play completely legit, I had to use a save state afterwards cuz I still had to survive to a save point and there was a very high possibility of death from random encounters.

If you grind up to 18 Ame no Uzume shits on him pretty hard with null force and media. Still it is one of the very few JRPGs that genuinly got me to grind, as brute forcing him on the level I arrived at him was very very difficult and would have taken longer than the grind.
I agree that from every SMT I played Hardtype Nocturne is the highest, although I did not play Apocalypse on the DLC difficulty where death of the MC also causes a game over, only on the hardest default difficulty so that may actually be harder, if Hobo Elf played that.

 

[Puukko]

IVA on War was also very well balanced and consistently difficult. I'd rate it and SJ on Expert (-OP apps) to be pretty much equivalent. Early game V was probably on that level.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I played Nocturne fairly recently aswell, random skill inheritance, high amount of ambushes, the fiends who all have no weaknesses and a much squishier demifiend compared to the Nahobino make it measurably harder imo. Not necessarily in the bosses, but in Nocturne I get floored by random encounters from time to time. In SMT V that barely every happens, because the Nahobino never gets oneshot, and as everyone has item and healing lore after a certain level you can just smoke bomb with any demon to get out of combat.
I agree that IV A is pretty high aswell, especially as it gets harder late game instead of easing off as SMT usually does, but companions are actually damn usefull in IV A and ease off a lot of difficulty.

It's true that some random ambushes can lead to easy deaths in Nocturne (unlucky ambush Hama/Mudo for one) but the boss fights are so much easier in Nocturne. I don't necessarily agree that Demi-fiend is squishier than Nahobino, but this is especially the case when you debuff enemies by 3 levels and buff yourself by 3 in Nocturne. Most enemies barely graze you then, if they can even hit you, and if they can't Dekunda/Dekaja it's GG. In SMT5 I find the avoidance buff/debuff to be a lot less useful now and pretty much skipped it entirely. It works well if you have a high Agility, but it's not such an I-WIN status anymore. Debuffs and buffs being capped at 2nd level with smaller buff modifiers makes them still valuable, but not as broken as before.

SMT4A doesn't really have difficulty in the way Nocturne does since its dungeon crawling is limited, so the challenge is focused entirely on the boss encounters, which there are an absurdly high amount of. It's purely a combatfag challenge and the bosses are a lot more tuned up in 4A than in Nocturne.

Matador is definitely a hard fight, but his main gimmick is that you are forced to fight him before you have the proper tools available to deal with him and the area before you encounter him gives so shit XP that grinding levels is a demoralizing chore. With other bosses you always have a lot of options available to you for fusion to help trivialize them if you get walled so it becomes less problematic. It's a fun gimmick and they rehashed it in SMT5, although now it's optional (I can't remember how difficult Matador was in 4/A, but he's a very end game boss there).

 

[Dishonoredbr]

catgode I think you can buy Essences from the skeleton shop?

Something interesting I noticed that's (apparently) new for the series: you're supposed to use your full roster and not just the main lineup. The function to swap demons now cost just half an action making it viable to put the demons warming the bench to work. This is making me plan my roster in function of roles: 3 magic attackers, 2 phys/tankers, 2 healers, etc. and swap them in and out during fights. It also makes for less dependency on Chakra drops.

Anybody else notice this?

Also it make come back from losing 2-3 demons much easier.

Yestarday i just fought Not-Raidou and dude was insane , Crit and one-shoting my demons (i had Alice, Idun and a Horus?Sucubus),after the third try they got all fucked by the time he had half HP (Alice going last) but i had enough time to bring Black Frost, Silky and Anubis and still win the fight.

 

[Puukko]

Yakumo's cool as far as nootrals are concerned.

 

[Cromwell]

Are the DLC worth it? I just bought it and bought the return of the true demon with it because its the demifiend, what about the others?

 

[Puukko]

Are the DLC worth it? I just bought it and bought the return of the true demon with it because its the demifiend, what about the others?

I don't know how they are priced, but the fiends are worth it. The other 3 demons may be worth it depending on your fondness for IVA, I got pretty good mileage out of Artemis thanks to her uniques and I suspect the other two will be similar. They're paced through the mid to late game so you won't just get a bunch of high level demons at the end.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I got the DLC bundle just because I wanna support SMT. The Fiend's are really a no brainer: they are excellent boss fights and fun demons to use, as always. If you like the Fiends from before then it's worth it. Cleopatra is a really good demon, I pumped up her affinities and use a grimoire to make her keep up with my level. She's one of my favorites since she was introduced in 4A and I'm happy to see her here again. Mephisto and Artemis look like they have interesting move sets and they also have cool designs, but I didn't use them.

 

[Thac0]

I got the DLC bundle just because I wanna support SMT. The Fiend's are really a no brainer: they are excellent boss fights and fun demons to use, as always. If you like the Fiends from before then it's worth it. Cleopatra is a really good demon, I pumped up her affinities and use a grimoire to make her keep up with my level. She's one of my favorites since she was introduced in 4A and I'm happy to see her here again. Mephisto and Artemis look like they have interesting move sets and they also have cool designs, but I didn't use them.

Hmmh I have boycotted the DLCs currently because day one paid DLC is a really shitty business practise, but with Famitsu sales below 200k physical it may not be the worst idea to show that SMT fans are a bit more dedicated by biting into the sour apple.
Not that 200k is bad for mainline, but that is below Persona spinoffs like Strikers.

 

[Falksi]

Apricate the info chaps. Sounds like one that I'll grab once the "royal" edition is released and in the sale in a year or two.

 

[d1r]

Apricate the info chaps. Sounds like one that I'll grab once the "royal" edition is released and in the sale in a year or two.

Nah. If it comes to PC I will buy you the game for free. And maybe the next four posters too.

 

[Silva]

Apricate the info chaps. Sounds like one that I'll grab once the "royal" edition is released and in the sale in a year or two.

Nah. If it comes to PC I will buy you the game for free. And maybe the next four posters too.

If P5 Royal is any indicative, the SMT5 Royal version will come full of curtcenes and only the difficulty level "Journo" available.

Stay with base game.

 

[Puukko]

Magical girl, 20 new demons and an ending. Oh yeah and buy the DLC again, gaijin.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Welp, finished the game. Honestly kind of anticlimactic given how easily I slapped everything's shit in. Definitely the easiest final boss fight if you don't count pre-Maniax Nocturne without Lucifer. I finished the game at level 83, I have no idea how I'm supposed to get to level 95 so I could fuse Beelzebub. Seems kind of overkill by that point anyway.

 

[Tigranes]

Welp, finished the game. Honestly kind of anticlimactic given how easily I slapped everything's shit in. Definitely the easiest final boss fight if you don't count pre-Maniax Nocturne without Lucifer. I finished the game at level 83, I have no idea how I'm supposed to get to level 95 so I could fuse Beelzebub. Seems kind of overkill by that point anyway.

On Hard, I assume? I'll see where I end up, I do minimal grinding and I kite almost every mob once I've fought them once when possible.

Just fought tentacle boy, did require a couple reloads to learn the pattern but definitely at this point you have a lot of tools available to you to work it out. I mostly relied on Parvati overheal + Kannabi Veil (is this new in SMT? dmg reduction seems fairly significant but dunno the calculation) to tank it through.