games / Reviews
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance (PS5) Review
Image Credit: Atlus
Loading...I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Shin Megami Tensei V. As I write this review, I still have my original copy of SMT 5: Fall of Man Premium Edition, which came with a bag, a soundtrack, and other nonsense. The problem with that version of the game is that it was Switch exclusive. I distinctly remember playing it and generally being nauseated a bit with the framerate. I mean that literally, I stopped playing somewhere in the second “main” area of the game because the graphics were making me feel queasy. Well, after playing the new port/update on the PS5, I no longer have that issue, thankfully, but a few small gameplay hurdles do exist.
To start with, there are basically two different stories in this Vengeance update. I’ll focus more on the original (Creation) rather than the new one (Vengeance). This is primarily because the game kind of hints you should do Creation first and it does set up the basic gist of what goes on in Vengeance.
The Creation story sees your high school student character whisked away to the future of Tokyo, after an apocalyptic battle between angels and demons. You, and a few school friends are saved, but in particular, your character manages to fuse with an Aogami. I can tell the next question is “What’s an Aogami?”, so I’ll be happy to answer that. An Aogami is a type of manufactured demon made by one of the angelic factions, Bethel. It was designed for combat against Lucifer’s hordes but almost all of them were wiped out in the big battle. One managed to survive, though damaged, and it fuses with your character to create a kind of super-demon killing robot. It really is just basically Blue Beetle. The main crux of the story is to prevent the demons from winning completely and finding a way to restore Tokyo, if possible.
I should note here, that this IS a Shin Megami Tensei game and not a Persona game. While the two franchises are linked with things like common demons, spells, items and such, in other ways they are drastically different. Persona games are a lot more structured with an actual day/night cycle, there is the element of school life/dating sim, having a deep and involved story, and lot of building relationships with your friends and other people.
Shin Megami Tensei doesn’t have any of that. While there are some student characters along with you, they barely factor into the story at all And I think there might only be five school characters, only three of them important, and all of them are forgettable save for the one who becomes a very useful party member later on. There’s no socializing, or going on dates or that stuff. Instead, you are presented with a fairly large open world and told to do what you want.
That isn’t meant to say there isn’t side content though. There are side quests to undertake, demonic essences to uncover, little guys named Miman to track down, etc. My point is that while there actually is a lot of stuff to do in this game, my first playthrough took about 70+ hours, it’s not the typical Persona stuff.
Actually, the best activity to do, at least for me, was just exploring the game world itself. SMT 5 is basically split up into four vast levels, along with a few, smaller, more contained dungeon-type areas. The bigger areas are massive; both in size and scope, and thankfully you have a pretty fast dash move from the start of the game, since trying to traverse these levels and not have it take six months.
One new addition with this version is something called the “Sky View”. You can use this at almost any time and it gives you a birds eye view of your immediate area. You can’t see the whole map with it or anything and it is fairly localized to where you are, but it lets you scope out paths to unlock new areas or to find collectibles. The maps have a lot of verticality to them so this becomes a very useful tool in figuring out how to get on top of a building or to reach a new platform.
The battle system in SMT 5 is a bit of an interesting blend of old and new. On the old front, there is still the idea of hitting an enemies weakness to get an extra turn. You basically get four turns with your team, or at least one turn per party member. You can boost that up to eight though, if you manage to consecutively hit enemy weaknesses. It’s what you would expect, fire demons are usually weak to ice and vice versa, while light demons are weak to dark attacks, and dark demons are weak to light attacks.
You can lose turns though, if you aren’t playing intelligently. If you use a lightning attack against a lightning demon, it’ll likely resist, or even completely absorb the attack and it’ll cost you two turns. This can also happen with your enemies though, if an enemy uses a fire attack against your own fire demon, they will lose out on additional turns until the next round.
A new quirk in this battle system is with different ranks of affinities. You can have an ice demon that has a +3 for ice proficiency. That’ll give it the ability to do more ice damage than a demon with no ranks in ice. It’ll also change the spell from the traditional “Bufu” to “Bufu +3”, to denote the proficiency. This also works in the inverse, trying to give a force skill to a lightning demon, when they are usually opposites, won’t work well since it’ll likely have a negative proficiency. This all means that you have to keep track of not only the usual strengths of spells like Agi, Agilao and Agidyne, for fire spells, but also proficiencies that the demon might have towards the fire school.
You can still do most of the things you do in a regular SMT game though. You recruit demons by talking to them in battle, usually paying them with money, items, or HP/MP to get them on your side. You can fuse demons together to get new demons, which you can use for more fusion material. There is the Moon cycle that governs fusion success or mistakes. There’s a store you can access at travel points that allows for you to spend money on health stuff or battle items, etc.
In my mind, there are only three negative things in this game, and only one of them is a huge problem.
The two smaller issues come pretty late in the game. The first problem is when you hit the third “big” area. SMT 5’s big strength is giving you an open area for you to explore and the third zone, Chiyoda, is pretty awful. It’s a very narrow area, full of valleys and climbable surfaces, but is kind of a huge maze to figure out how to traverse it, even more than the other areas. It really can drag down the fun of the game.
Also, when I hit the fourth area, Taito, there was a pretty abrupt jump in terms of difficulty/levels. I went up against one of the three main bosses you have to take out to progress, and my level 58 group didn’t last too long against the level 72 boss. So I had to do a few hours of grinding to get anywhere near close to the boss.
The big issue is, this game isn’t winning any awards for its story. While the Vengeance route is a little better, the old route is pretty forgettable, all told. It’s not “bad”, but it is missing the personality and charm of the Persona games, or even the Soul Hackers subset.
Vengeance does add a lot to the package though. The “Vengeance” storyline adds in a new character, which actually is interesting, along with some new bad guys, or girls in this case, and gameplay stuff. The biggest helpful thing is letting you save the game anywhere. There’s an “Auto-Skill” option that has the game do battles for you, but letting them use magic attacks, instead of just physical attacks. Finally, there is the Demon Haunt thing.
This is the last thing I’ll talk about and it’s a bit odd. The Demon Haunt is an area you can access at fast travel points in the game and it teleports you to a bit of a social space for you and your demons. The area is based upon what big area you are in, as far as the setting goes. As you keep demons around and use them, they will begin to build trust in you. At the Demon Haunt, you can then talk to them and they occasionally will gift you with an item, an essence, or even just increasing their own stats or gaining a new ability. You can also gift them specific items to increase their trust in you in a quicker fashion.
The relative problem with this idea though is that it seems like kind of a dumb system. I don’t mean in its execution but its philosophy behind it. The thing about SMT/Persona games is that you are usually swapping out or fusing demons a lot, so you don’t tend to keep them around for a long time, especially once you get to a new big area. Think about Pokemon: do you carry your starter Pokemon from the start of the game to the end? Likely not. To be fair to SMT, you do gain trust levels fairly quickly, especially if you use an item, but I don’t think anyone is going to carry a level 12 Obariyon through the whole of the game, simply because they like its bowl cut.
