sage

i haven't played the base shin megami tensei v in ~2.5 years, but i honestly loved it.

this game definitely offers reasons for a returning player to come back and explore the worlds and fight/create its demons.

the new storyline "canon of vengeance" (COV) is cool, but i've seen some people hail it as "fixing" all of smtv's base story ("canon of creation", COC) problems. i don't agree with this.

early on the COV storyline does a better job of endearing you to the four human characters, but the story kinda falls off in the last quarter of the game, much like in the base game.

and this is all at a cost. it's not like COV builds directly on top of COC, it's that it replaces 1 of the 4 open world zones and 1 of the dungeons, while also replacing almost every single boss and most cutscenes and dialog. so there's definitely limits on what they were capable of adding in.

combat is still a delight, though i find it a bit easy this time around. maybe it's because i already know how to play smtv and i'm used to crafting good builds. maybe it's all because they changed the level scaling to not punish overleveled parties as much as they used to (level difference is used as part of damage calculation; the effect was reduced). or maybe it's because vengeance has the "mitama DLC" from the base game enabled by default. thanks to this, i never grinded at all. i just caught the demons i wanted to catch, then used any of the copious "level up" items to get myself to the next level i wanted to reach in order to craft a new demon.

the music fucking rules btw. the original 6 hour soundtrack is better in my opinion, but the 4 hours of new music fucking rule. wish we could easily buy that in the US, but i was able to find a japanese digital music shop and purchase the soundtrack from there in high quality.

the new music goes for a bit of a different vibe, which is honestly really cool for changing the tone.

also, the qadistu are fucking cool. i wish they had stayed more relevant, because i liked their whole shtick. kinda felt like a cool evolution of what the base game had going with lahmu. they are my "goth IHOP girlies" forever. eisheth number one.

the main story problem i had was that there's at least a couple moments that feel like if you didn't play the base game / COC storyline you'd be like "???" about what just happened.

anyways, i love this game. i don't love it as much as the first time i played it, but it's still great. banging music, cool exploration, incredible combat, decent story, and 2 mediocre dungeons. oh, and the side quests are largely fun and well written.

ALSO PC port works flawlessly at 4k and high framerate. i didnt test the mouse and keyboard controls though.