Honestly I think you guys are exaggerating a bit. Trust me I'll shit on V all day for the tons and tons of things I don't like but VV is a lot more original for the most part, I wouldn't say a couple parallels that you can draw make it overly derivate. It took the game from an utterly dull nocturne rehash without the atmosphere or great designs and gave it a new core that stands on its own as an interesting concept. I'd say the expanding of the scope from "YHVH is the cause of all this" to the greater conflict of the snake and bull archetypes being the reason for everything and yhvh just being another in a long line of those guys abusing the system is probably the single most unique and interesting usage of mythology in any of these games since kaneko left. Saying its more derivative than SMTIV of all slop just because yoko is a vaguely chaos hero archypted character is kind of absurd. Absurd enough to the point you have me here defending VV when I usually shit on it for all the things I don't like about it.