Topic: Shin Megami Tensei V Thread

Can you not just purchase it from the Eshop? Or do you want a physical copy?

Haha! Give it some time and this will most likely happen. Day one for me.

Can I dress like the Sean Connery version in that....?

Isn't that basically what Final Fantasy X is?

Apparently physical versions of this on Amazon are getting delayed left and right. I just got an email telling me my special edition wouldn't arrive until the 16th. :/

@Ralizah That’s bad to hear. In the U.K. both Amazon and Nintendo Store said I won’t get my standard edition until the 17th or something throughout the preorder period. I held off preordering hoping it would improve. I’ve been letting myself get my hopes up that it might arrive on Friday or Saturday. But this keeps my expectations in check. I went with the Nintendo Store in the end. They emailed at least asking I check I have funds available so you would think they are getting ready?

We’ve waited this long, and a better situation in Europe than before, but it’s frustrating as I’m just treading water until it’s finally here. I’m not sure what’s causing these delays for this release specifically.

Also I have been trying to avoid spoilers, but I’m not sure if the soundtrack counts so I might give it a listen. It’s very tempting and most SMT games I’ve heard the soundtrack before playing the game (Nocturne especially). But it would be cool if I experience the battle theme etc in game at launch. I’ve not played an SMT game at launch before to have this experience, as Strange Journey Redux and Persona Q2 hardly count.

Can anyone tell me what the combat is like in Shin Megami games? I’ve never played one but I love JRPG’s but only when they are turn based.

@DomGC thanks!

Went ahead and put in an order for this. I'm a bit nervous due to the expected difficulty, however I do like a good JRPG & this does look cool (it'll be my first SMT).

From my experience with Nocturne, the Normal difficulty can be brutal, not generally but just because things can snowball so violently, even against trash enemies because of the push mechanic in combat. I do believe V includes two easy modes, whereas Nocturne only had one, so if Normal isn’t fun, you can turn that puppy down.

I do think the divide between Merciful and Normal was a little too large in Nocturne, it was either a constant risk of a curbstomp or a mode that meant you barely needed to engage with the mechanics at all. There really should have been a difficulty between those two extremes and I am hoping V offers that.

I heard SMT isn't really hard, with it only feeling like it is if you come at it at an angle as if it were a normal JRPG, refusing to learn the systems the game puts in place.

I mean only you can really judge difficulty. Any time a game/franchise has a reputation of being difficult/challenging etc there is always some people who come out of the woodwork and say that it isn’t hard at all and you just need to get good etc etc

Even I, who usually hates hard games, didn’t find Nocturne too difficult from the moment to moment. I just didn’t like the fact that mostly down to RNG, my party could be wiped out in an instant, from out of nowhere, with no warning/way to counter/recover etc Like some people may enjoy that constant sense of danger, but I certainly didn’t. However, I did find it a shame that the next difficulty down didn’t really ask me to directly engage with the game’s mechanics at all, so I hope V addresses that.

I'd think that SMT is the middle ground of RPG combat systems. You don't get anything like as much tactical freedom as with something like Fire Emblem, where the positioning and the order of movement of your units is entirely within your grasp, but there's still a heck of a lot more nuance to it than a system like the early FF games where you're mostly just picking the default option from a list until you've defeated your opponents.

At least, if terms like pierce, weakness, resistance and reflect mean anything to you, you'll do all right with it, and shouldn't need to grind too much or rely on the RNG gods.

Failing that, it's got a casual mode where you should be able to win most of the fights with sub-optimal builds and tactics.

OK, screw it, I'm getting the digital version as well. Not waiting 4+ more days after launch to play this.

@VoidofLight I broadly agree with that assessment. Harder difficulties are, indeed, hard no matter how you tackle them, mostly due to unfairly punishing multipliers for XP, damage, etc., but if you learn the mechanics and apply your knowledge most of them are pretty approachable. Nocturne is remembered as being a super hardcore JRPG partially because nothing else in the genre really played that way before, I imagine. You really have to play and consider your team builds carefully.

It's basically like if Pokemon made the gym leaders actual challenges you had to build new teams around, and if the game was built around having a diverse assortment of Pokemon in your party and any one time with multiple skills and resistances to effectively tackle enemy trainers/wild Pokemon, and you needed to rotate new monsters in and out of your party as you went along.

Actually, that sounds amazingly fun. I'll never understand why Pokemon games don't have unlockable hard difficulties with better trainer AI and damage scaling options.

@Pizzamorg The casual difficulty is supposed to be pretty decent in SMT V, since reviews have stated you can't play mindlessly like on Safety mode and still have to engage with the mechanics. The problem with Nocturne is that the game wasn't balanced around multiple difficulty settings: the original only had Normal and Hard, and you, frankly, had to be a glutton for punishment to play on Hard. Recent Atlus games like SMT IV: Apocalypse and Etrian Odyssey V have scaled better on multiple difficulties.

When you talk about dying due to RNG, are you talking about getting wiped because of surprise encounters? Because, if so, there'll be a lot less of that in SMT V, since there are no random encounters. I suppose you could get jumped by an enemy who comes from behind or time an attack in the overworld poorly, but I wouldn't call that RNG.

@RR529 You'll be fine, since you can drop the difficulty down to casual at any time if you need to. Definitely hit us up with questions if you have them.

I've just started playing it but I think I'm going to wait for the Japanese voice DLC on launch day. Shame it's not built in. Anyway, talking of difficulty, it's got one of those difficulty settings where you can only pick Hard at first; if you start on Normal or Casual you can switch between them, but not Hard. It's always risky with that kind of thing because you don't want to get to a point where it's just tediously difficult but your only choice is to restart. It says Normal is "for those familiar with SMT," but I don't know about that. It's not like it's that complicated or anything, the battle system is simple; it's more about learning to fuse, and you can (and pretty much have to until you're familiar with it) use guides for that.

Anyway, excited to play more when the Japanese voice DLC comes out. I still remember getting SMT3 many years ago and wondering when I'd meet Dante.

@Matroska how did you get early access? And what do you mean about the language packs, is that a separate DLC in the Eshop that will only go live when the game goes live?

@Ralizah I mean RNG in the sense that really, an enemy only needed to exploit a weakness/land a crit or you miss for it to be game over. The snowballing that would chain out from that, there was basically just no recovery, counter or defence. Just game over. Out of nowhere. No warning.

Everything else about the normal difficulty felt well balanced and enjoyable, but every time this just happened out of nowhere it was so frustrating and miserable, I just gave up on the normal difficulty in the end.

Looks like SMTV physical is delayed in the UK, always get emails a week before launch about preorders made and still haven't received one for SMTV.

@Pizzamorg I'd guess like SEGA's other games this year such as SMT3 HD Remaster, Sonic Colours Ultimate and Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania that the Digital Deluxe Edition has 4 days early access.

@Grumblevolcano @Ralizah I wonder how many copies they will sell twice (digital and physical) because of this - it just feels unnecessary, the game is done.

@JoeDiddley Not too many, I imagine. Most people who are interested can wait. Atlus' challenge is more about getting people to pay for the game once.

@Grumblevolcano The Digital Deluxe Edition releases at the same time as the normal edition for SMT V according to the eshop. Probably because of Nintendo's heavy involvement.