Five Tricks to Killing Gods in Shin Megami Tensei V

Shin Megami Tensei V is the latest game in the titular franchise that is known for its soul-crushing difficulty. So, of course, for those who want to minimize their losses and maximize the amount of time they have playing games succeeding, I’ve compiled a handy dandy list of things to ease the slope of the mountainous journey.

Change your weaknesses constantly with Essence Fusion

The Nahobino is innately weak to two elements, wind and dark. And it just so happens that a lucky strike of dark will just completely wipe you out in one hit. Now you could use your three dark dampeners to resist it for three turns, but that’s not going to last, especially since SMTV’s first main area decided to gently persuade you to change your weaknesses by making nearly every boss and miniboss hit with dark or wind attacks. Sometimes even both. If you keep altering it you’ll be able to tank all of those especially nasty hits a boss throws at you, and you can thus avoid putting skill points into vitality.

Spam those Spyglasses

Shin Megami Tensei games have a chunk of their combat that comes down to figuring out enemy weaknesses. But hitting an element the enemy nulls or reflects could spell doom, leading to an act of hesitation before you make a choice of spell.
What to do, what to do….
If this is too stressful, buy Gustave’s entire stock of spyglasses, which will allow you to just check an enemy’s elemental affinities, as well as their moveset and fret no longer.
You can also use them on mitama, rare enemies that drop XP items, money and glory provided you exploit their one random weakness. For only 25 yen a piece, you can make that issue a non-issue.

Hunt down every Miman you can

The Miman collectathon is unlocked very early on and one of your prime sources of Glor and netting you all sorts of rare items from Gustave. The latter is neat, but having glory will make your life so much easier with passive skills like, ‘let your demons use items,’ ‘talk to demons on your demon’s turn,’ or ‘gain a stat boost on a demon when they’re summoned into battle.’ And that isn’t even going into boosting the amount of skills and demons you can hold at once.

If you’re having trouble, each area holds a Cironnup, a little demon you can pay to reveal all of the Miman on each map. It’s worth the fee.

Don’t forget your ailments

Thanks to the infamous matador fight, nocturne drilled into our heads to ‘GET THE BUFFSt. And even if you haven’t played it, you’ll probably know this meme.

But there’s one thing that is much harder to drill in- Ailments. Sleep, confusion, fog, charm, these little friends can make certain major boss fights and absolute breeze.

Nothing beats watching people struggle with early game fights and then rocking up to the same fight with Dormina, putting them to sleep every turn and lording over how that boss that killed your friends in two hits, only got one attack in before you killed it first try.
You might lose some friends out of it, kinda worth it.

Pick your stat spread in advance

Whilst you can find balms randomly to boost your base stats, a hybrid set of both magic and strength will leave you somewhat limited when it counts. I personally went with strength and agility exclusively for cool physical attacks on my first run, and the agility came in clutch many a time. Luck is also good on a physical set for extra critical hits, but has less impact when running a magic set.
You can always leave vitality in the trash. It’s never worth it.

With all those under your belt, you’ll be able to kill nearly anything. Or at least grind until your numbers are so much bigger it doesn’t matter. One of these things just takes a lot longer than the others.

Now good luck attack and dethroning the creator himself.

In case you missed it, check out our review.