What if everything you knew was a lie? What if you’ve been putting on your socks wrong this entire time? Or maybe you’ve been rinsing your mouth out after brushing your teeth, completely invalidating the point of feverishly polishing your mouth with fluoride?
Now those last two points have nothing to do with developer ATLUS’ and publisher SEGA’s turn-based roleplaying game ‘Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance’, but the first one is key—this former Nintendo Switch exclusive RPG has finally spread out to PC and other consoles, complete with an entirely new route, additional mechanics, and other quality of life changes. More importantly, it means that SMTV can now shine at 60 frames per second (as a couple of gods have intended, surely) and the new story in Vengeance fixes some gripes I had with the original game.
Tying into my first point—Welcome to Da’at: a sandy wasteland filled to the brim with cute, violent, and outright nasty demons. A battle between angels and demons has left the greater Tokyo area (let’s be real, the entire world) in ruins. And this is the place you will call home.
Welcome to the Da’at
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is more than just a port to new platforms. True to ATLUS rereleases, Vengeance builds on the original game and adds improvements alongside more content. Unlike other ATLUS rereleases, however, Vengeance splits off its new route as a choice in the beginning of the game. A girl floating in space and time is fast asleep and the game offers you its blessing as well as warning not to wake her up for the world will change for the worse. If the option scares you for some reason, don’t worry, as the game will give you a giant text box after the fact telling you the kind of choice you’ve made, so don’t fret. And while this dialog box insists that you ought to start with the game’s original route, I’m going to suggest you do otherwise. Bear with me here.
SMTV’s story fills you into the shoes of an nondescript young man whose name you can freely fill in. Strange things are afoot in Tokyo and it doesn’t take you long to figure out why. After a day’s work at Jouin High, things go awry and you and a couple of friends find themselves in a Tokyo that’s been glassed for quite a while now. Angels and demons are everywhere and right as you’re about to become demon feed, a gentleman by the name of Aogami comes to your rescue—fusing with him to become Nahobino. Demons get slapped and you along with Aogami explore the barren wastelands of Japan.
Da’at is not an open-world. It’s more like an “open dungeon” so to speak. There’s way more freedom of control here compared to prior SMT games as Nahobino can clamber specific objects, run ‘n jump fairly high, and has an attack radius of a cat swipe times ten. You’ll need all this to deal with the clusters of demons that hang about each zone throughout along with other bits of exploration. Da’at exploration is necessary as you’ll need to collect as much resources as you can get your hands on to not only deal with baddies but to grow yourself and make money. Makkas are your currency in this game and boy are they extremely scarce this time around—fusioneers, beware! Amanozako, your floating companion, will also be of help, being your main point of finding random collectibles that will be useful for your journey.
For a big dustbowl, Da’at is really pretty. The sands glisten and gleam and the scale of the world is gorgeous at what I can tell is near 4k resolution on the Xbox Series X. 60 frames per second helps a tonne, too, and the frame rate holds up across both Series consoles and any PC with a GPU from 2015. Some of the old Nintendo Switch shortcomings are still present such as the prerendered videos, but I can pardon those. Exploring said dustbowl is also fun at first, there’s a lot of fun sidequests with demons (some serious, some silly), and the zones across areas in Tokyo and Shibuya are big enough that they serve their purpose. And the music that plays across these sandy dunes is simply fantastic. Kozuka, Tsuchiya, and Konishi have done a phenomenal job creating an alien tune that reverberates across Da’at. Don’t even get me started on the combat themes or the new tracks!
Unfortunately exploring Da’at gets a bit tedious later on. Nahobino can jump high but apparently refuses to clamber onto objects that reach chest high unless there’s a solid red flashing line to touch. This means you’ll often have to navigate specific paths to get where you want to go which I feel sorta kills the “freedom” aspect ATLUS might have been going for here. There are also no surprises as anything remotely dangerous will be warned to you in advance either through dialogue or a giant icon walking your minimap. And at some point, you’ll need to rely on your floating rat friend ‘Zako to find shortcuts that will get you access to other parts of the map. This can get tedious as you’ll only find these when her marker shows up on the map while exploring.
Though you’re incentivised to explore, unless you are planning on finding every Miman or collect every item available on the map you can explore just enough to be able to progress. Collecting those Miman nets you rewards from the local shopkeeper Gustav AKA Funny Green Mocap Man, which calls to my collectathon nature regardless of rewards. Obviously you’ll need to put time into map exploration if you plan on getting stronger demons and going for specific endings—but I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me first touch on SMT’s best aspect: its combat system.
You Died
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is a turn-based title where your party members are demons and your foes are nastier demons. At first anyway, because your goal once you start the game is not to beat up baddies. No no, that will get you nowhere. If you want to progress even remotely past Tokyo Tower, you’ll need to befriend these demons. Getting them on your side is key to progression as you’ll have more strategies to work with and most importantly, affinity and elemental attacks.
SMT is a game where exploiting weakness and critical strikes is your best chance at survival. Each turn you are given a set of “press turns” depending on the number of party members you have (and other factors give or take). When you deal a critical strike or damage a foe with an attack they’re weak to, you gain an additional press turn up to a certain maximum. How you use these turns is extremely important, because though you might get high on spamming a strong skill, all it takes is one press turn and bad luck for your HP to zero out and it’s game over. Enemies gain the same bonuses you do on weak and critical strikes—so, expect to die a lot.
Now mind, Vengeance is an easier game than its predecessors. No beating around the bush there, Nocturne and IV will easily shred you to bits without remorse early on, not just because of its combat system but how those games structure their encounters. In comparison, Vengeance is quick to warn you of danger and even has difficulties that go all the way to Casual. Make no mistake though as unlike the recent ‘Persona’ games, the lowest difficulty does not freely revive you on knockout. If anything, an enemy exploiting Nahobino’s weakness even on Casual difficulty is just as deadly as any other difficulty mode. SMTV at the very least expects players to walk into encounters prepared and to its credit, it’s more than happy to help you.
This weakness exploitation system is just as fun as it is in previous games. It is easily the best part of this game especially when you take on a difficult fight with a great strategy. Recruiting demons is just as obnoxious as it always has been however. Remember how I said recruiting is a necessity to progress? During encounters, you’ll be given the option to “talk” to the demon(s). Some conversations will go swell, others will be really annoying. Real talk, none of your options matter. Just pick at random or if something is funny to you, because there’s a good chance that option will work out rather than if you just play the appeaser. Also the cuter the demon, the angrier you’ll get trying to recruit it. Demons might quiz you on another demon’s appearance. This is a new one and I really appreciate it because a successful response guarantees a proper recruit. Thank Lucifer for that.
Recruiting demons is important, but fusing demons is required. This allows you to get new demons that you won’t find roaming the overworld along with passing on powerful skills to other demons that you might want to empower. The fusion system is great because you can basically make your favourite demon take on powerful skills if you really put your mind to it. But as I said earlier, fusion is really heavy on your resources this time around—Da’at exploration is necessary if you plan on fusing more than two times a session.
And while we’re on the subject of demons, there’s now a little playground of sorts that you can enter and talk to your current party as well as those sitting in Stock. Sometimes you’ll get items out of your mates, sometimes they’ll even level up their skills. Aogami in particular gives you free skill points when his event icon pops up, and you’d be a fool not to have a short talk with the absolute god.
Now a feature of this game is the Magatsuhi system. Essentially this bar will fill up during combat and as your exploring the overworld, collecting shiny little orbs that heal you and the like. Once full, you can perform a special attack. There’s a lot of different Magatsuhi skills and even new ones that allow specific demon types to perform a special attack akin to the system available in Persona 3 Reload. Sadly, the best Magatsuhi skill is the very first one they give you: free crits for a set period of time, regardless of attack type. In a game where press turns are so incredibly important, why would I use anything else?
Really covering the combat system and its relation with the demons you can recruit and fuse would take a little while. But what’s important to know is that it’s balanced, can be relentless and even ruthless—but it offers a lot of options and is a lot of fun.
V is for Vengeance
Shin Megami Tensei V’s story is… Boring. All it really feels like it’s doing is offering a setting for me to demon collect and fight. But the characters within it and their lack of agency, no real narrative choices, and some awkward pacing of story beats make the original’s story about as bland as chain store coffee. When I played SMTV on the Switch back then, I ended up skipping cutscenes past a certain hour just to get back to the gameplay. I thought I’d try the original route once more and it didn’t take long for me to regret that choice.
See, the characters you meet and get to know throughout the game—Tao, Atsuta, Dazai—they’re not interesting. They serve as information dumps, never develop their own paths in the story, and notably never actually serve a gameplay function either. Now take for example in Nocturne, where the human characters of the story are confused about the new post-apocalyptic world they find themselves in. But overtime, they develop their own ideals on what they want this new world to be and that influences your alignment throughout the game. The cast of V tries to do the same here, but I ultimately found it hard to care for the characters compared to previous SMT titles
So I dropped the main route and jumped right into the new one. Vengeance brings along a new character for the ride—Yoko is her name. True to every ATLUS rerelease, it’s a new girl in town but this time especially I feel her addition and this new route are much more interesting. The cast can actually join your party this time, being more than just sign posts. Yoko especially breathes life into Tao, who was the biggest victim of static character progression in the original route.
You want my take? Don’t bother with the original route. Go straight for Vengeance. Even in the face of world catastrophe, somehow this new route raises the stakes even higher. While some moments of the original route are enhanced by her presence, I think you’d be better off diving into the new route regardless.
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is a great refresh of a game that I had gripes with back then. Besides the far more interesting Vengeance route, the additional quality-of-life changes, added mechanics, and greatly improved performance make Vengeance easily the best version of a great turn-based RPG. Great for returning players and an even better deal for new ones. ∎
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance
Played on
Windows 11 PC / Xbox Series X
PROS
- Great visual presentation.
- Hee-ho, Ryota Kozuka and Co.'s music is unbelievably amazing.
- New route makes old characters and new have agency within the story and is overall a more interesting story compared to the original.
- Battle system offers plenty of options and a challenge across all three difficulties. Well over a hundred hours of content.
- New negotiation mechanics with demons helps creating your compendium a lot easier.
CONS
- The first Magatsuhi skill you get is the only one you need.
- Original route is very boring—stick to the new one, even for your first playthrough.
- Overworld can be tedious to explore.
