Slightly unpopular opinion, but I think this might be my personal favorite SMT game. The story is a bit whatever and unrealized which sucks, but it was able to at least keep me intrigued before disappointing me. However, the minimalist story makes it easy to ignore, as 90% of your playtime will be in the game itself, and oh boy, its fucking peak. The accumulation of small changes to press turn over time all culminate together in my personal favorite JRPG battle system of all time, coupled with difficulty that requires you to push it to its maximum potential. No other game will have me contemplating and googling fusions for hours just to create my perfect little demon squad to tear down everything in my way after a little planning and strategy, and I never got bored of it at all during my time. The only minor complaint I can give is regular enemy strength is a little too high imo which caused me to skip a lot of them. If you like turn based RPGs, this is a must play.

Reviewed on Mar 22, 2024


5 Comments


1 month ago

What's the difficulty? Is it harder than III, IV, IVF? I'm an ultimate veteran, and I'm debating whether I should play it on hard or normal first go. The first is always the most important, so I want to feel the challenge of battling real gods.

1 month ago

Can't comment in terms of 3, but I would say the combat is an evolution of IVF, and I would compare it to around War in that game. Since you're a veteran, I don't think you would have too much trouble on hard. One thing I would say though is that being slightly underleveled vs the boss's level made the fights way more fun, as most of the time when I ended up even in level it felt like a cakewalk.

1 month ago

For clarification, do you mean the SMTV normal difficulty is comparable to IVF's War difficulty?

1 month ago

SMTV Hard is comparable to War I would say

1 month ago

Though I think it was more challenging than anything SMT4F had at some points, so its like >=