Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance review: A slick, smart way to grind away the hours of your life

What do we want, when we sit down to a full-length, deliberately massive role-playing video game in 2024? (And when we say “role-playing game” here, we’re referring specifically to that branch of the vast genre usually described as “Japanese” or “Eastern” RPGs, those that derive most of their design from the traditions of games like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest: Turn-based combat, pre-made characters, and a focus on more linear, less free-wheeling storylines.) The classic examples of the form, when viewed through modern eyes, often feel like elaborate machines for turning hours of human existence into a vague sense of satisfaction: Lazy afternoons holding a controller go in, a story and a series of “You win!” messages, played over exploding monsters, come out, as character abilities steadily rise the longer the player grinds.

And while Final Fantasy itself has largely retreated from the challenge of making this style of game work—having instead made tracks for the far more accessible shores of action-RPG hybrids—Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei series has continued to try to crack the formula. Most successfully with its Persona games, which marry the series’ traditional “summon demons, make them fight for you” gameplay to the tone and narrative responsiveness of Japanese visual novels—to the point that Persona has largely eclipsed the core SMT franchise in the public eye. So it’s not wholly surprising that Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, the new re-release/re-master/re-branding etc. of 2021 Switch exclusive SMT V, has added a couple of tiny tricks from the Persona games to its roster as it moves to a much wider series of platforms, spackling over some of the almost deliberate narrative coldness of the original game with a slightly more human touch. But the core remains: An uncompromisingly brutal ode to the art of RPG combat—and the strategy and planning required to truly make it sing—more or less for its own sake.

The game’s basic plot remains roughly similar, whether you’re playing through the original storyline, or the “Vengeance” path added for the re-release. (The game’s directors have noted that either path works as a starting point for new players; we don’t disagree, having played through Vengeance and gotten a complete, satisfying story in the process.) You’re a non-descript Japanese high school student who suddenly gets thrust into a massive war between gods, angels, and demons, each trying to fight it out for control of a post-apocalyptic, sand-strewn wasteland. (Yes, you’re living in modern Japan and duking it out in the wastes; go with it.) After a chance encounter with a helpful demon, your regular Joe fuses into a powerful being called a Nahobino—at which point, you and your suddenly incredibly lustrous hair begin kicking the shit out of pretty much every religious pantheon in the history of humanity, with your own crew of carefully assembled demons at your side.

Your time with Vengeance, then, will be largely separated into two buckets: Walking, and fighting. (Talking comes in at a distant third; while Vengeance puts slightly more emphasis on its human-ish characters’ feelings, even allowing some of them to join your party at various junctures, this is still nearly the opposite of a Persona game when it comes to the amount of time you’ll spend getting to know folks.) The fights are good in the ways Shin Megami Tensei fights have been good for years: Very few enemies, even regular cannon fodder can be dealt with with sheer brute force, instead forcing you to exploit elemental weaknesses and buffs so that your team can dispatch them efficiently. Boss fights, where your opponents can field moves that feel blatantly unfair at first (before you start thinking through how to crack them), can be especially thrilling; some of our favorite moments of the entire game involved getting the shit kicked out of us in a big battle, fusing together a new team of demons to counter our enemies’ tricks, and then coming back for a little, well, Vengeance.

The walking around is… rougher. SMT V (and, thus, Vengeance) verges on being an open-world game, with massive maps mostly covered in ruined buildings, dead cars, and, yes, sand. Exploring each of the game’s four massive maps can take hours—our eventual playcount topped out somewhere in the 80-hour range—especially if you’re stopping to do all the sidequests, extra missions, and occasional outright chores that the demons of the wastes are perfectly happy to assign you in exchange for some meager reward. (Similarly, the world is strewn with collectibles just good enough to make tracking them down feel necessary.) Every now and then, one of these missions will have an interesting twist, or a decision point that allows the game’s characters to comment on your choices in modestly meaningful ways. But more often than not, it’s busywork, and the feel of the grind got to be pretty over-powering pretty early into our time with the game. Combat with the hundreds of demons dotting the wasteland was fairly easy to avoid, but then the thought lurks in the back of your brain: “Am I cutting myself off from the power that I’ll need for the next big, nasty fight?” SMT V: Vengeance has built a better grind, undeniably. But it’s still a grinder, all the same.

(And here’s as good a place as any to note that Vengeance, as a re-release, does do a few things to even out some of these rough patches, including adding new demons, making combat faster to get through, and including all of the original game’s DLC in the new package. Oh, and you can save anywhere, which is incredibly welcome in a game so willing to kill you out of the blue as this one.)

All of which, though, is to say that Vengeance is still, fundamentally, exactly the descendent of the games we laid out back at the top of this review: An elaborate machine for turning hours of human existence into a vague sense of satisfaction—albeit one that’s often smarter and slicker in its execution. When you’re putting together a truly nasty team of demons, or you’re deep in a fight that you’re set to win by the skin of your various teeth, claws, and tentacles, the game can be incredibly thrilling. (Also, it’s gorgeous: This is the best that the franchise’s various mythological creatures have ever looked: gory, alluring, or, frequently, both.) It’s just that those thrilling parts only made up about 10 percent of our playtime, while the other 90 was running across the wastelands, filling out shopping lists for minor deities, or trying to find the most efficient ways to burn through the hordes. If you need that kind of time disposed of, it’s a very satisfying way to do it; if you’re looking for something that’ll keep you engaged for a larger percentage of the hefty number of hours you’re spending with it, then Vengeance isn’t the fix you’re looking for.