Sometimes, the game will surprise you. Shin Goddess Rebirth 5The latest work in the long-term RPG franchise from developer Atlus is such a game that calls you into an interdimensional war between heaven and hell, where the fate of mankind is at stake, but the most humble enemy can still defeat you .
Shin Megami Tensei 5 has the function of RPG and is very powerful at this point. Its combat may be the purest turn-based battle. There is almost nothing to interrupt your team. The enemy’s demons take turns to stab each other with various supernatural abilities. The combat system can be said to be a war of attrition. Both sides are slowly consuming the other’s health, and there are very few powerful abilities that can waste many enemies.
This led to a hell of suffering. If you think that modern RPGs like Dragon Quest 11 and even “Story of Rise” need to steadily advance your level through a large group of enemies, then Shingo Tensei 5 is a higher alliance. The periodic boss of each story beat is a mountain that needs to be climbed to the top. You have to spend hours repeatedly sprinting all the enemies you encountered before, slowly accumulating valuable experience points, so that the boss can’t erase your flicks Take a look at the entire team.
Atlus’ latest RPG actually serves as a collection marathon. When fighting with enemy demons, the protagonist can temporarily stop trading attacks, engage in verbal battles with them, negotiate cautiously, and try to recruit demons to his side. You really have to pay attention to the character of the demons here-if they are lively and optimistic, you may want to recruit them through praise, but if they are willful and too aggressive, you may want to try to put out the fire and puff your chest in the negotiation.
This is an area that has been slightly upgraded since Persona 5. Atlus’s 2017 RPG itself was originally a derivative product of the Goddess Tensei series. It also boasted of negotiations with various demon enemies, but the result is more like a guessing game called the devil and does not really affect how you negotiate. Shin Megami Tensei 5 improves this system. When you talk to the devil, the tone of your answer is actually very important. You will quickly become familiar with some of the more common personality characteristics of the devil.
Collecting new powerful demons is vital to your survival. For example, a boss may be weak against fire elemental attacks, so after being completely defeated by them and quickly retreating, you need to wander in the ruined world of Shin Megami Tensei 5 to find the demon with the aforementioned fire-based attack. Switching demons in your lineup to find the perfect combination to defeat the boss is great. This formula can keep you alert and find ways to stack your team to give you the best chance of survival. No combination of demon allies can leave you unscathed throughout the game, so you must constantly mix and match to get the best results.
As with anything produced in the Atlus RPG factory, there is a shocking soundtrack that weakens the entire experience. Shoji Meguro, who recently left, did not actually lag behind Shin Megami Tensei 5’s score, but came forward Toshiki Konishi and Ryota Kozuka, these two similar Persona and Megami Tensei series veterans. Meguro’s successor did an excellent job of injecting extra vitality into Shin Megami Tensei 5, as the deep bass lines of high-octane guitar notes dotted every battle attack and every cautious creep in the open world. Compared with the vocal-based national anthem of “Persona”, this is an emotional soundtrack, but compared with Atlus’s above series, “emotional” is an appropriate way to describe Shin Megami Tensei.
The battle was brilliant and cruel, then, but it was the rest that Shin Megami Tensei 5 was found to lack, mainly because this game was actually not more. The beginning of the Atlus game puts you in the heart of modern Tokyo, positioning you as a lonely high school student, attending classes quietly and leading a normal life. This will last about 15 minutes, and then you will be teleported to another plane of existence and shoulder the task of saving mankind from the devouring war between heaven and hell.
Before you trek through RPG for about 10 hours, all the settings and description details you get are enough. Shin Megami Tensei 5 provides players with a spoonful of stories in sporadic bits and pieces, and never floods, because it doesn’t actually have a lot of stories to teach. “Go here, save this person and kill this bad guy,” the game will tell you regularly, then push you into the demonic underworld and wave goodbye for the next ten hours or so.
If Goddess Tensei 5 really has a character worth fighting for, it will help. At the beginning of the adventure, you will meet some classmates who are also trapped near hell, or more precisely, you will meet people who can only assume that they are your classmates, because there is no introduction to who these people are. . “I’m Dazai Ichiro!” One of them joked, with a sense of familiarity—I completely lost that feeling because I didn’t even know the little boy. After dozens of hours, I still don’t know who he is, except for a vague cartoon of a struggling student who wants something more meaningful from his life.
I really don’t know any characters in Shin Goddess Tensei 5, which is really a shame. With zero downtime in this adventure, there is no chance to better understand the people you are trying to protect. Yuzuru Attsuta, a student of honors for stoicism in the group, even commented that he hoped to have a chance to meet another character before she was kidnapped by the devil, which unexpectedly perfectly reflected my views on Shin’s role in Goddess Tensei 5. Atlus’ RPG did not make players a vague acquaintance of their allies, so some of the more influential story moments that scared the characters in Shin Megami Tensei 5 were completely lost.
The battle of Shin Megami Tensei 5 is great, punishment and reward are equal, and not too far in one direction. Mixing and matching your demon decks can also bring great fun and prompt you to find allies of all shapes and sizes in every corner of the ruined world. This is everything except for the battle and the crappy soundtrack of Shin Goddess Tensei 5, which contains monophonic characters that you have never had a chance to understand better, and a thin paper plot that feels delayed for dozens of hours. Shin Megami Tensei 5 is an excellent RPG fighting game, but it is not good at other aspects.
Disclaimer: The game has been tested on Nintendo Switch OLED. A copy of the game is provided by the publisher.
