It’s crazy to think Atlus has been making RPGs for more than 30 years. The original Shin Megami Tensei is as old as I am. And it’s crazier to think that this series with so many spin-offs that also spawn their own spin-offs (see Persona) yet there’s only five numbered games.
(Shin Megami Tensei itself can be considered a spin-off series born out of the Megami Tensei series. The history of this franchise runs deep.)
Shin Megami Tensei V is back with a vengeance with this enhanced edition, available on multiple platforms for the first time. To the many folks like who have missed out on this gold standard of a JRPG, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance has been refined to nigh perfection. Though it is still an acquired taste.
Presentation
SMT V: Vengeance is a game where art style is favoured over graphical fidelity. The game was originally designed for the Switch, so to expect a powerhouse display of graphics from this title is foolish.
But there is an established 3D art style which the many Atlus RPGs share- plenty of asset reuse as well in the way of the 270+ demons that acts as the game’s enemies and potential party members.
There’s new demons in this release, over 20+ of them, but not all of them are new-to-SMT. Some were ported over from Soul Hackers 2, for instance. It’s like cars in long-running racing game series, these demons.
The environments are interesting. On one hand, the overworld maps are massive fullied of nooks and crannies to explore. On the other, a lot of them are just so samey. This game’s interpretation of a post-apocalypse wasteland is a familiar one: desert ruins. And as such there’s so much sand. Too much. At least the devs have somewhat realised this. The new overworld map added in this release has a very different colour tone- the game has too much yellow/gold scenery as it is.
The UI is rather quaint. Don’t expect Persona-like pizzaz here in SMT V: Vengeance. In this regard, the UI remain traditionally messy, and it feels messier thanks to the busy background. There’s moving ley lines and sparkling stars that makes the game feel a bit uneasy, probably by design. At least the button presses are snappy.
The PC version does not have that much graphical settings to tinker with, but you don’t need to. On an old gaming laptop (Intel Core i7 9th gen, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060, 16GB RAM) the game runs silky smooth above 60 FPS. There are a few stutters when you load in a new save, and textures on character models sometimes pops up a bit late, a known quirk among games running on Unreal Engine 4.
There is voice acting in SMT V: Vengeance, but not full voice acting. The demons not getting full voices is fine. But there are also story moments that are deemed less important to not be voiced in full. It’s one of the quirks that you usually see mostly in RPGs made in Japan, which is fine. The awful lip sync on the English voiceovers is very noticeable though.
I find the English voice acting to be serviceable. The voice actors don’t ham it up anime-style as much, given the tone of the game. And the drier delivery of most characters fits here.
The music is amazing in that it refuses to be boxed into any specific genre. In a minute you have wailing guitars, and then wicked synth riffs comes in the next, and when you level up you hear what I like to call as “trap-infused gamelan beat”. The mish-mash of instruments and genre really gives this a chaotic vibe yet it’s very easy to listen to. The soundtrack still feels like the wild days of the late 90’s where video game original soundtracks were experimental. In that way, SMT V’s soundtrack is very much like SMTs of old.
With Vengeance, there’s even more music being added, some tied to the new content it comes with. Some songs just play for one side quest you might have missed and the game’s fine with that. If you happen to purchase one of the two new DLC subquests, you’re in for a long, long fight to the tune of some upbeat breakbeat that only play for just this one fight.
You’ll love the new battle theme tied to the Canon Of Vengeance story route. The music for the usual battles still waits on you to deal the first blow before the music pops off (such a nice touch- love it), and then it starts with the one same note of the original battle music but then veers off into something else.
You’ll be stuck with that one song for the normal battles throughout the whole playthrough. And yet, I never felt tired of listening to it. Brave of the team to stick to having only one song for the generic battle in the overworld (there are different music for boss and mini-boss fights).
The way the overworld music fades in and out seamlessly as you go through the different zones of a map (all without a loading screen in sight) is also a nice touch. It’s so subtle the way the game gently mixes in a new song, you’ll never get tired of the music choice.
SMT V: Vengeance isn’t scoring that high in the presentation aspect, but that also means that it has preserved a specific charm which long-time fans should find inviting. Don’t expect lavish AAA presentation. But do approach the music with open ears- its eclectic spread of a soundtrack can be groovy, haunting, and sometimes both. And most importantly, there are all unquestionably bangers.
Gameplay
Shin Megami Tensei V is a standalone story where its main premise is more or less similar to all the numbered titles: a post-apocalypse Tokyo brought upon by demons.
In SMT V, you are a high school student in Tokyo that suddenly found himself in a barren wasteland. And then he merged with a being called Aogami to wield the powers of a Nahobino. What was a near-death decision leads the player character into a conflict where angels and demons clash which he will play a significant part of it to shape the world.
That is, if you follow the Canon Of Creation, that is. SMT V: Vengeance has two seperate story routes now: the original Canon Of Creation and the new Canon Of Vengeance.
The game makes it really clear how to select these route early on, and you are free to play which one first, assuming you didn’t play the Switch original. Canon Of Vengeance is designed to replace the original story- you’ll still find value in playing the Vengeance route first and then go back to the original Canon Of Creation on another playthrough.
Though the bulk of the new content is exclusively in the Canon Of Vengeance. At first, the new story plays out almost similarly bar the addition of one new character, Yoko Hiromine. So the early game will see new scenes being spliced into the original story ala Persona 4 Golden, Persona 5 Royal and even Catherine Full Body. It will then slowly diverge from Canon Of Creation’s established canon around the 10-hour mark by the 20-30 hour mark, it’s a entirely new storyline.
SMT V: Vengeance is a turn-based RPG where you fight demons, and your party members are mostly the demons you convinced to join your side.
(In Canon Of Vengeance, several human characters will fight alongside you as a guest party member, a new feature in this release.)
SMT is the game series your local religious figure may have warned you about one time, when they claim that Pokemon is a blasphemous game with all the devils and whatnot. In SMT and its various sub-series games, you’re collecting demons from various faiths, lore and mythologies across the world. From Jack Frost to Shiva, and from Odin to Mananaggal. and from… Mad Gasser to… Turbo Granny? Even more recent myths are fair game too.
Demons come with a variety of stats, elemental strengths/weaknesses and skill (with a limited amount of skill slots). To grow stronger as a team, you’ll likely be replacing the team with new demons that you acquire either through demon negotiations or through demon fusions. Just like the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei games.
With Vengeance, the demons are also covering myths from Africa (going beyond the widely known Egyptian gods) and Eastern Europe. It’s still missing a lot of Southeast Asia myths though, which is ripe with ancient lore. By SMT’s definition, the Malay historical/possibly mythical figures of Puteri Gunung Ledang and Hang Tuah could be recruitable demons, if the developers ever wish to expand the already expanse list of demons featured in this series.
That said, there is Mananaggal in the game as, to my knowledge, the sole SEA demon representation and that’s cool (and by cool I mean “good god it looks even more horrific than the playground rumours I’ve heard about this”).
The collection of demons and you assemble your party is imperative to not just success in SMT V: Vengeance. It’s a requirement to survive even the simplest normal battle. One wrong move or a failure to cover for a particular weakness and that’s game over.
I hope you remember to save often, because the game is designed to not have autosaves. Instead of putting guardrails to hinder players from falling over a metaphorical cliff of a bad time, the game puts danger signs warning players that there is indeed a metaphorical cliff that you can fall off if you’re not careful. Thankfully, Vengeance allows you to save at any time, just a d-pad press away from safety. And they rather add that than an autosave, hardcore.
The game’s Press Turn system is also a brilliant expression of its hardcore nature. One character in each party has one Press Turn to do their actions. Exploit a weakness or nail a critical hit, you get one extra turn per action. Miss or have the attack nulled/reflected/absorbed and you lost one additional turn. So ideally, you want a full party that can keep exploiting an enemy’s weaknesses to extend that turn and press the advantage. A well-oiled party can decimate opponents in one turn.
The enemy also operates under the same rules more or less, so if they can exploit a weakness, they too can possibly wipe you into a game over in one turn.
So mostly, how it pans out is that battles are snappy and high stakes. Even the simplest encounter against lower-level demons can be your doom if you’re not careful. And the tide of battle can easily swing one side or the other. Think you got a hold on that boss fight? Uh-oh, they pulled out a special move that you didn’t expect and it crits and all a sudden everyone but the Nahobino is wiped. And it all comes from you not mitigating an upcoming big attack that was clearly telegraphed the previous turn.
Almost every attack has its hard-counter, and it’s up to you to figure out what that is and have it ready or be punished severely. Keep getting hammered by a Mabufu because a party member is weak to Ice? Swap them out. They are too important to not fight against this enemy? Add another party member that resists Ice damage so it cancels out the Press Turn advantage the enemy gain from exploiting a weakness. An enemy relentlessly attacking you? Why not add the Counter passive which enables one counter-attack. An enemy keeps counter attacking? There’s a spell and item that can reflect physical attacks for one turn. Or maybe just use magic.
This oppressed-or-be-oppressed Press Turn system rewards players that spend the time building their team just right, and paying attention throughout what otherwise would be a procession of pressing the same buttons over and over. And it will absolutely punishes you for any sloppy play. You can never be too prepared, and with so many demon combinations at your disposal you will be spending hours upon hours just collecting and fusing them to fit the current situation at hand.
And you will be doing this on the regular. Demons can’t keep up with your leveling pace and once they’ve learned all their skills, their potential is for the most part have been maxed out. With so many demons becoming available as you grow higher in level, you’ll be swapping out that one dream team build you have sooner or later, as they’ll be lagging in experience for the tougher fights ahead, and should be fused into stronger, higher-level demons with access to more potent skills. Though there are minor rewards for holding on to a demon past its prime, as they can instead get random stats and skills that they would not regularly get otherwise, and you can beefed them up via items.
And Atlus has made one good reason to keep hold of otherwise weaker demons. There are new Magatsuhi skills that can only activate if you have the right selection of demons in the active party. It would be weird in the OG SMT to hold on Cait Sith and Neko Shogun until the mid-game where you get Nekomata just to make an all-feline demon party. But in SMT V: Vengeance, you’re incentivised to do so as they have a special move that can turn the tide of battle. It breaks a bit of that SMT convention of tossing away old demons at the earliest convenience, and while I couldn’t worked around to make use of this, I’m glad that there is an attempt to diversify the demon party builds you can make that are viable in later stages of the game.
And for the min-maxing nutters, the new innate skills offers another dimension to party building, as these are very specific passives that trigger by specific conditions, like having a demon of specific race being summoned in and out of the active party during battle. For most players, they’re inconsequential, but you’re attempting the new boss rush challenges, you’ll need every advantage you can get.
Exploring the overworld, i.e. the netherworld i.e. Da’at, is surprisingly fun. Rather than just hours and hours of dungeon crawling, you’ll be spending a good chunk of time exploring the wide expanses that is the Tokyo wasteland, littered with demons and secrets. Demons that you can fight or run away from are all on the map, no random battles. There’s a good number of collectibles to collect to entice exploration. And the platforming aspects is fun, the jump has the right amount of floatiness that makes navigating across platforms and climbing ledges a breeze.
New to SMT V: Vengeance are a number of quality of life additions that I didn’t know was new if I haven’t looked it up but absolute game-changers. There’s a satellite view that points the camera up top, useful to check if a collectible is on a higher elevation or a path can be accessed or not. There’s also Magatsuhi Rails which are shortcuts to skip through the vast overworld. (Players had to run around all the time in the original game outside of fast travelling to save spots? Oof.)
The only little jankiness I spot is when the Nahobino runs too close to a sloped edge. You can’t Skyrim-style-jump repeatedly on a sloped edge to force your way up a mountain, but things get a bit janky if you edge close to a sloped edge as instead of letting you run normally it will force the character to slide down an edge. Otherwise, the traversal is good. The jump has a good amount of air control and floatiness to the little platforming bits you do to be fun, or at the very least, bearable.
The overworld maps are huge, but there are cleverly separated into noticeable chunks. This way the game stops you from feeling overwhelmed with the sheer size of the world and also avoids the world having too many empty spaces like a typical open world game would suffer from.
And it’s also a nifty way to hide streaming/loading as the entire overworld isn’t separated by loading screens. I can see why the game can struggle a bit performance-wise on the Switch. Though genuinely I think the technical limitations makes for a better level design. Scouring the various Da’at regions for those little Miman and those glowy Amalgams in such a tightly designed overworld map feels more like good fun and less like busy work.
I find it hard to pinpoint a flaw in SMT V: Vengeance’s game design, as I feel like the package has now been refined to address many of the original’s shortcomings. For a turn-based RPG, it successfully executes every idea it has.
And I do ponder what parts of the game are supposed to be “outdated” and what are “traditional”. Can the demon fusing makes more sense in letting players visualise what demon group can fused with another demon group other than guessing, making their own spreadsheet or pull up a guide online? Maybe. But would that be ripping a part of the Shin Megami Tensei experience that fans grow to love?
While other RPG series chase new trends and make drastic changes to the formula (see Final Fantasy), SMT is sticking to their guns with Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. They have evolved the exploration aspects which is a good call- typical dungeon crawling isn’t as fun anymore I’d argue. But the core gameplay has been more or less the same.
What elements should be kept sacred and what needs evolving, is something I shall leave the developers, and its core fanbase, to decide. As a first-time SMT player who played only the recent Persona games, I come to respect the traditional aspects the game adheres to. Though I don’t know how many people out there are like me that can brave enough to stomach this massive meal of game with all its quirks and metaphorical cliffs.
Content
SMT V: Vengeance is one girthy game. Atlus’ claims of an 80-hour playthrough for each story route checks out. This is a 160-hour game, even more if you decided to do multiple playthroughs to see the different endings on either story routes. The original Canon Of Creation alone has three (plus one) endings. And Canon Of Vengeance seems to possibly have multiple endings as well. That’s way too much time needed to completely consume this game.
And how does the game manage to get this long runtime? That’s from the many, many fights you’ll take part of to level up. The game isn’t grindy in that sense. Rather, the occasion where you need to rethink your party lineup due to the revelations of new demons spotted on the field in the demon fusing menu is what’s going to consume your time. The many side quests, the lengths you need to go to collect all the demons, and the slow drip of story is what stretches this meaty package.
SMT V Vengeance comes included with all the previous SMT V DLC in the base game. That means you can experience the horrors of fighting Matador and recruit Demi-Fiend from Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne as well as two other DLC subquests that unlocks new demons from the get-go.
There is, however, two more new DLCs for SMT V: Vengeance that’s not part of the base game. I can say that one of them is fun just for that special boss fight music alone, but you’re not missing out that much if you didn’t get them- there’s already plenty of demons and subsquests in the base game already.
Thankfully, there’s more variety that’s been added to Vengeance. New side quests where you get to control demons provides a nice change of pace, as each of these has some fun little gimmick to take the edge of the usual grind. There’s also new side quests in general.
This version of the game has over 270+ demons (probably 272, as I hit the 50% in the demon compendium after collecting 136 demons). I’ve spotted at least 29 of them, so most of the new demons are being front-loaded in the early game.
You can hang out with the demons in the demon haunt where you can gleam more into their different mannerisms (the female demons do be flirty), and during demon negotiations, there’s more variety of questions need answering, including one that’s basically a “Who’s That Pokemon?” trivia question where you have to guess a demon based on their silhouette. Good luck discerning between Jack Frost and Black Frost.
And as mentioned earlier, the Canon Of Vengeance route really is an entirely new campaign with so many new things to see that it’s worth a replay for those that played the original. It takes the baseline story and twisted into a new, fascinating direction that I argue is more compelling than the Canon Of Creation one, which from what I understand, has its fare share of non-fans.
If you can stomach the typical turn-based RPG gameplay loop, you’ll just see the hours fly like it’s nothing. And it’s perfect in that way. But for more casual players who may not be as clued in to this subgenre, or have many real-life commitments, it is definitely intimidating.
If you’re a player that looks for bang-for-buck, which is a weird way to treat a video game given that shorter games can just be as memorable and worthwhile, well, lucky you. You can play SMT V: Vengeance for hundreds of hours.
Personal Enjoyment
Admittedly, I approach this review as a fan of JRPGs that have never touched the mainline SMT games. Not even Nocturne (featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series).
As a kid I was a craven. All of the game ads and promo art involving an Atlus game scared me- that one art of Maya from Persona 2 Eternal Punishment on the North American box was the stuff of nightmares for me. I only started exploring Atlus’ line of RPGs in my adult years, starting from Persona 4, and then Persona 5, which I adore.
The idea of playing a Persona game with the high school simulator aspect stripped out was unappealing at first, but now that I’ve played SMT V: Vengeance, I think I’d rather have it this way. The plot unfolds relatively faster, and due to its themes, it’s asking some big philosophical questions that fascinates me and may rattle the belief of a person of faith that never gets confronted by such questions. Less anime-style companionship journey, more ramblings how the world should be governed and how each sides of the law versus chaos scale can be good and evil.
The gameplay loop, after falling over the metaphorical cliff by not heeding the warning signs the game puts out, is addicting. Slowly but surely, numbers will go up. And you’ll be making tough decisions of whether to let go of a demon that has served you well, or keep holding on at the expense of not unlocking that new demon with the bigger numbers. Yes, this game scratch the same itch I usually scratch with looter-shooters, of all things. It is weird but somehow it all makes sense, RPGs are usually defined by how you grow stronger over time, and that is usually expressed by seeing the digits soar ever more slightly higher.
I enjoy my time with SMT V: Vengeance. I would have enjoy it more if I have enough time to consume this game in full, but in this line of work, 80 hours is far too long to spend on one game alone. I hope I can squeeze in some time off work just to complete the demon compendium and actually see an ending.
That said, I do feel bad to the 1 million or so players who bought the original SMT V on Switch and having to double dip to play the superior version. This could’ve been an expansion DLC on Switch, where the original owners get rewarded for their loyalty by paying a little less for the new content added with Vengeance. It’s so weird to see Atlus still doing these enhanced re-releases on the same platform generation in the day of age where such content could be delivered in other means.
Having a standalone release, especially in physical form, is good on the aspects of preservation- who knows when such DLCs and expansions suddenly get delisted. But I don’t like the idea of early adopters being punished and forced to double dip to experience the better game created thanks to their feedback of the original, now inferior, release.
Verdict
Shin Megami Tensei V has been reborn, manifesting its true form with Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. The new story route is expansive and worth playing, even for those that have played the original release. The many quality of life additions makes it more playable and accessible, while still retain the rough aspects that gives the series its charm.
It’s not too late to jump into SMT V, though it’s a shame that for those that jumped in early, they have to pay more to get the superior, enhanced release.
Still, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance upholds the gold standard of a traditional turn-based RPG, and this enhanced release has refined it to be the best form it can possibly be.
Played on PC. Review copy provided by the publisher.
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance upholds the gold standard of a traditional turn-based RPG, and this enhanced release has refined it to be the best form it can possibly be.
- Presentation 7
- Gameplay 9
- Content 9.5
- Personal Enjoyment 8.5