Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance – The definitive way to experience JRPG on Foreplay

I’m not ashamed to say that the level of performance that the Nintendo Switch offers often makes me forget about certain games on the platform. Whether it’s a shooter, a fighter, or even a sprawling JRPG, I’ll often avoid playing certain games on the platform, and sometimes even avoid them altogether if there’s no additional place to experience them. This has been the exact reason I didn’t flock to Shin Megami Tensei V when it debuted, as frankly I’d rather watch paint dry than explore another graphically barren world that’s only made that way because of the power of the entity it summons home.

February this year saw the Nintendo Direct, when Sega revealed that they’ve been working on a PlayStation, Xbox and PC port of this latest game, with improved performance, better graphics and even a whole host of new content to ensure that those who have already experienced the game also have a reason to be excited. I naturally jumped at the chance to go to London to play through a couple of hours of the game to see how it’s progressing.

This is an advertisement:

For those who played the original Switch version, most of what you’ll find in this new edition is pretty much the same. The same story, with the same locations, the same characters, the same demons, the game is preserved in its entirety. But like updated editions of games like Persona 5 Royal, there are also a number of new things to check out.

Not only can you look forward to new demons (over 240 in total now), new places to explore, a new transportation system that makes it easier to get around each level, but you’ll also find a whole new story. Essentially, there are now two main stories to follow; Canon of Creation and Canon of Vengeance. One is Shin Megami Tensei V that you already knew, and the other, Canon of Vengeance (as the game has been titled), gives us a new way to enjoy the game with a narrative that focuses on a character named Yoko Hiromine. I’m not going to say it’s a notch better than the original story, because there doesn’t seem to be much that separates the two in practice. They are both complex and strange stories where you have to be heavily invested in the series in general to really enjoy and appreciate them. If you’re not, well…they’ll probably just come across as a weird story about angels and demons.

This logic can be applied to a lot of the new content in SMTV: Vengeance, because while the new locations are interesting to explore, with new secrets to find, enemies to face, and tons of extra side quests to overcome, they also have a lot of the same the problems that the original sites had. They’re quite stiff and don’t exactly make you want to explore off the beaten track, especially considering the movements are quite stiff with limited maneuverability, and even more so because you never know what kind of fight you’re going to end up in, as enemy levels and information never appears before entering battle. This was a lesson I had to learn pretty early on after taking on a massively powerful Mara demon (which to anyone who has never played a Shin Megami game before basically looks like a penis in a wheelchair…).

This is an advertisement:

Fortunately, Atlus has added a feature in this Vengeance edition that can best be described as a complete game changer. You can now save whenever you want. Yep, you don’t have to wait and use predetermined points in each level, you can save simply by pressing a hot button on the D-pad, and yes, this makes the game both much less demanding and frustrating. When you add the new content to this save improvement, and the fact that the game plays at a silky smooth frame rate with more detailed and higher resolution graphics, there’s no doubt that this is it definitive and best way to play Shin Megami Tensei V right now.

You can still tell that this is a game primarily made for the Switch, as the levels lack a degree of detail and depth that we see in JRPGs made for platforms other than the Switch. Additionally, the UI and menus are often unnecessarily complicated, which is likely due to there simply being too many demons to collect and then level (despite only having a limited party size). But all in all, this is a much better and higher quality version of Shin Megami Tensei V, one that returning players should check out for its new additions, and new players should tend to predominantly as it’s simply better at almost everything ways.