The structure of Shin Megami Tensei V is similar to something like an Etrian Odyssey game or perhaps Final Fantasy XII -- the real point of the game is exploring the game space and mastering the combat, and so the game offers only as much narrative as is necessary to justify that. (Unsuprisingly, given the presence of EO veteran Shigeo Komori in the director's chair.) You can play for literally tens of hours just fighting demons, exploring the world, running quests, searching for treasure and Mimans, and tinkering with fusion without ever even coming near a plot-important cutscene. But you can see traces of a more involved plot in there that was pared down at some point. My read is that the game's plot was originally more Persona-esque, with several individual arcs each featuring their own villain and focusing on particular members of the human cast. Then, once you'd gotten to know all the principal players and learned why and how they believed what they did, the endgame would occur and you would choose which you would side with and which you'd have to put down. That decision would be all the more meaningful knowing that these were people you'd fought beside and whose struggles you'd shared.
As it is, though, you get basically one arc structured like that (the second one), then you move directly into the final battle between order and chaos. I suspect that at some point in development, they realized that if they did it the way they'd planned, they were looking at a 300-hour game with dozens of additional demons and environments to design and model. Since the game's gameplay flow and structure was less malleable, the extraneous plot threads were chopped down and we were left with the very spare, accelerated version that we got in the final game. The characters are all painfully static, with the exceptions of Abdiel and Dazai (and even they are baby's first character arc). It's difficult to imagine a Megaten game struggling more with the tension between wanting to characterize the protagonist as a blank slate who can be all things to all players (both within and without the game) and the singular force who must decide the fate of the world based on his own beliefs than this one does. When even the quote-unquote "chaos" route requires you to just blandly go along with what your boss tells you to do, we might be having some issues with plotting here.
The game's narrative has some good bones, but they don't cohere into a skeleton. Megaten is narratively at its most interesting when it really examines the effects of the mythological world of the demons colliding with the secular, modern human world. SMTV has some elements of this... Bethel, in principle, is a pretty interesting plot element. The gods of various pantheons realizing that in their weakened state they can best defend themselves by working together is a very cool idea that is underutilized. In the final game, Bethel is be represented solely by the angels for 90% of the game's run time, even during the so-called "joint offensive" during the third arc. I also appreciate it when the series makes some effort to indicate that a demon's mythological history is not the sum total of their character, and that they are still attempting to move forward and accomplish goals even in the present day, and SMTV does offer some nods at this. Abdiel's race changing from Herald to Fallen after disobeying the Creator's will, Khonsu's romance with a human causing him to refrain from trying to become a Nahobino, the conspicuous absence of the Amatsu race, even the blink-and-you'll-miss it suggestion that the previous holder of Zeus's Knowledge was Alexander the Great all do a good job of grounding the mythological aspects of the characters in the world of the story. It's easy to pluck out a god or monster from your mythology textbook and plop them down as a generic quest-giver or boss battle (and make no mistake, SMTV does that plenty as well), but it's significantly harder and more interesting if you give the impression that these eons-old entities are trying to understand and adapt to the modern world and the events they find themselves entangled in.
That said, I don't really think modern-day, undestroyed Tokyo was at all necessary for this game. My read was, again, that it was originally intended to be your home base between missions, but when the missions got axed, it became a vestigal remnant of that concept. I honestly feel it's included only so that they can use the traditional Megaten world map. The whole game should have taken place in Da'at. Even the world is fully post-apocalyptic and humanity and its works are done as a relevant force, as in Nocturne, or it's not, as in the other Megaten games. Trying to combine the two visions of the end of the world so inexpertly was a mistake.
Lucifer's angle in this game is pretty fascinating, and slots into his previous appearances in a compelling and unexpected way. It's about time we get to see what becomes of him after he finally catches the car, instead of rolling credits right after it happens as all the other Megaten games do.
As for the gameplay, the world design and overall movement is excellent. Between Persona 5 and SMTV, Atlus is lapping the field in terms of making just moving around in an RPG feel great. It'll feel terrible going back to RPG systems where your overworld actions are limited to moving around while nailed to the floor and using the action button to examine things and speak to people after these two games demonstrate how much more is possible even within the framework of a turn-based RPG. The feeling of seeing somewhere you want to go and wondering "how do I even get there?" is much more reminiscent of Mario or Zelda than your typical JRPG. The maps could have maybe used some work, though -- it's frequently difficult to determine elevation from the 2-D image, and elevation is vastly more important in this game than it usually is. (Ironically, the map wouldn't have been a problem if the game was less fun to control in general.)
As for the combat... eh. I think I'm kind of over Press Turn by now? We've had seven games that used this exact same system, plus variants in Persona, Devil Survivor, and Tokyo Mirage Sessions, and I feel like I've seen just about everything it can do. The combat in SMTV is technically competent, but I was rarely surprised by it. There are very few gimmick encounters that force you to reconsider how the whole thing works, demons rarely have good elemental coverage (since they're restricted to eight possible moves at all times), and they seem to have extremely low turn counts in general (rarely more than two for a boss, plus an additional one for each flunky). (The big innovation this time around, the Magatsuhi skills, would matter more if the absolute strongest one wasn't the one you started with that every single demon can use, which is also the only one the enemies ever use.) Even early in the game it's quite easy to build setups where bosses have no choice but to blow their Press Turns ineffectively. Succeeding at the system feels less like you've overcome a difficult obstacle and more like you've broken the game's AI. Even the superboss can be defeated pretty straightforwardly by insulating yourself against its strongest moves and then letting its adds hang around and waste its Press Turns. I gather Press Turn is basically synonymous with the series at this point, and it's difficult to picture them not making any more games in this engine after they spent five-plus years working on it, but I'm hoping that the next Megaten game builds a battle system that is as much a series-defining revelation as Press Turn was the first time.
Honestly, I feel like part of the reason the battle system felt a little limp this time around was that some of the user-friendly conveniences served to defang it. I have extremely mixed feelings about the Spyglass item -- while feeling out enemy weaknesses at random was never more than an irritation in older Megaten games, making it easy to determine not only an enemy's elemental affinities but also its full array of attacks makes encounters extremely predictable. It's easier than ever to make a suicide run to determine what a boss can do and then return with a party you know it can't possibly defeat. And that feels good a few times... but every single time? It's great that the game has a lot of optional content, but doing all or even some of it rapidly breaks the level curve (in a game with unforgiving level-scaling) and turns a bunch of would-be difficult bosses into pussycats. Probably the worst aspect is that the endurance/resource-management is completely gone. As long as the Nahobino is standing, no random encounter is more than a Smoke Ball away from being over, and a full heal is never more than a press of L away. You're basically completely done with hoping you can stretch your SP long enough to reach the next save point the moment Goko hands you the Return Pillar, and it was an element I honestly missed even as I was fast-traveling willy-nilly all over the map. In isolation it's tough to argue that any of these additions were a bad inclusion, but in concert they tend to sand down the edge.
So I dunno. I devoured this game, did as much as is possible in a single playthrough, and while I was playing it I was thinking "easy GOTY, no problem, just don't go in expecting a great narrative" but after I finished it and let it digest I found more to be skeptical about, even on the gameplay side. Weirdly I think it's easier to recommend the fewer previous SMT games you've played, which is a strange place to be three decades into a franchise.