Yeah as I was saying yesterday in an earlier post, at this point I’m basically playing SMTV as a boss rush game. I pop Estoma, get to the next abscess, quickly explore and get all the collectibles I can find, see who the next boss is then make any changes necessary to my party to defeat it.
I think it’s been like 10-15 hours or so since the last time I got into a battle encounter I purposefully didn’t want to. Not counting the battles that pop up on the exclamation spots of course, but even with those, I just either use Trafuri or a smoke bomb if I’m not interested (if it didn’t spawn a mitama basically).
I feel I’m playing this way because after 50 hours of the repetitive core exploration in repetitive environments I’m getting tired of it and want to get over it as soon as possible. But maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing, because I’m finding this a extremely fresh approach for a jRPG. Since battle and all its adjacent systems are hands down my favorite aspects of the game, and the game has given me access to the tools to focus on that, why not take it and have an all protein no empty calories experience with it? I’m pretty sure this is not the intended design but it certainly is a viable way to play it, specially if you do side content, which I’m doing because some of the best/most interesting battles are unlocked that way.
All things considered, I’m having a great time! Even if slightly disappointed by how the pseudo open world turned out to be.