It's incredible how little effort V puts into getting you invested in it. The game chucks some anime characters in your face and promptly plops you into sand world assuming you'll care. This opening feels like someone played the first hour of Nocturne and assumed it boiled down to executing character introductions followed by an apocalypse as fast as possible, but they missed the part where Nocturne sew's the seeds of all it's game-long plot threads as well as both micro and macro goals within that time frame, which is why it works so well at getting you invested. IV's opening lacks Nocturne's tight pacing and density of context, but it eventually manages to get you invested in the world itself which I still found valuable and engaging. V's world does not establish any sense of intrigue or mystery. The nature of the world is nonchalantly revealed later and does not even try to ilicit any kind of suprise or excitement. More importantly, the game lacks a strong sense of place, and this is highlighted by the fact that all facilities are located within the glowing save point nodes, meaning that the shop, cathedral of shadows, save point, and heal station have no place in the world, they're just menu's. What you get from the world instead is standard triple-A trinket bloating; superflous pick-ups to fuel the numerous progression systems and sidequests spread throughout maps that are large and time consuming to traverse with otherwise little substance. Pick a branching path on the map, spend a minute running down the path, pick up your item, then turn around and piss off backwards. This is not a world. This is a list of chores spread across geometry made up of context sensitive jump blocks, invisible walls, and a constant bombardment of a singular aesthetic and asset stock that wears out it's welcome and draws attention to it's artificiality before it gets out of tutorial mode.

The combat related mechanics this time are a mixed bag because I recognize the attempts at trying to make a more balanced system. For example, status effects work on bosses and initial -kaja/-kunda skills are single target now, which seem to me to be a way to incentivise less homogeneous playstyles, however the game forces too many contrived restrictions for this ideology to come to fruition. The skill potential system railroads you into using specific skills for specific demons which is antithetical to the concept of skill tranferring through fusion and just artificially limits demons unless you really want to use a skill at a higher MP cost and weaker effect (you don't). The protagonist is also limited compared to Nocturne and IV. This time you learn skills from single-use demon essences; one of the new trinkets. Each essence is associated with a demon which holds a certain number of skills that demon would normally have. Ultimately, this means that your characters potential is based around stuff that you pick up, which sounds somewhat like Nocturne's magatama system, but each magatama came with stat and affinity changes, as well as several skills learned through leveling, making them indefinitely valuable and gives you plenty of room to shape your character. Their high value and scarcity made them that much more rewarding to find. Personally, I love IV's demon whisper system where your demons will share their skills with you. I feel that this is a much more holistic way to go about the process of protag skills since it ties in so neatly with the core mechanics of recruiting and fusing. By comparison, V's essence system is just shallow and only exists so they have another trinket type to generously litter on the map or hand out for completing a side quest. The new magatsuhi gauge/skills seemed to be a way to force crit abuse but without making it kind of suck like IV's Smirk system. Unfortunately, because the magatsuhi gauge fills automatically turn by turn, this railroads you into a specific playstyle for bosses where stalling and then blowing your load with magatsuhi crit skill in order to get the most bang for your buck becomes the dominant strategy early on since MP is still tight in this game. I'm assuming this is intentional because they have also added guarding which compliments the strategy. These two changes just end up making the game feel slow and contrived. Other magatsuhi skills exist as well, but regardless the stalling apsect remains, and if you actually need a magatsuhi skill that isn't Crit Spam then that means you're still being railroaded into a specific playstyle.

Despite all this, I really wanted to love the game, so I kept going. This was until I reached the point that broke me and in order to fully convey my dissapointment we're going to be diving into somewhat early spoiler territory. I haven't marked this review as having spoilers because I don't recommend it anyway but there's your warning lol

So I beat this boss and find the classmate that we're supposed to be looking for and wonder wide-eyed what's going to happen next. Minutes later we're out of the blue sentai suit and walking around school in straight-up social sim mode. You walk around and talk to classmates that have no facial features as they not-so-subtly comment on the current state of society. Totally just Hanging Out and Vibing to that school bgm y'know. You listen to the woe's of your schools most popular girl on the rooftop and then her friend that's getting bullied ends up summoning a demon out of anger while her eyes glow and she enacts revenge.
Did I mention that the classmate you save is a dorky underdog kind of a loser with blonde spiky hair? The paralells are obvious, forced, and frankly, just sad. When this game was shown at E3, my friend made an off-hand comment about how they might add Persona 5-esque flavouring to the game as a result of that tiles popularity and oh how I laughed it off! Even isolated from the comparison to Persona specifically, I was dissapointed that IV was more "anime" than Nocturne and this game just cranks that dial up to 11. It becomes impossible to even try to take anything about the game's tone or themes seriously when you're surrounded by these shonen stereotype glasses-push-lookin-asses, genki loli hands-on-hips-pouty pixies, uwu Protec-Onee-Chans, straight-faced fan service pandering, and pretty much whatever else you can think of that fits the brand.

Still desperate to want to like the game, I gave it one last push. Your mission now becomes to save this girl from the demon she summoned by traversing a "dungeon". By which I mean a straight line with set enemy encounters in it that superficially resembles a dungeon since anything with more substance than that simply wouldn't be palatable for modern audiences, presumably. The demon runs off with the girl to sand world and you follow. At this point I'd really had enough of sand world and when my navi suggested I should use the save point that was placed literally right in front of me 15 hours into the game I decided I should probably just stop.
I had already accepted that we weren't going to be getting another Nocturne and wanted to love V for what it is but this was too much to bear. I pray the poor creature that cops this off me on Ebay reaches salvation.