Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance review – reincarnation of Persona (2024)

The latest entry in the franchise that spawned Persona goes multiformat, with significant improvements to the graphics, story, and gameplay.

Remasters and remakes are increasingly commonplace this generation, but they usually involve games that are a decade or more old. If there are particular issues with a newer title than they’re usually address via updates but if the problems run too deep there’s often not much that can be done. The idea of releasing a director’s cut shortly after is almost unknown in the West, and only a little more common in Japan, but it does happen and in this case it’s helped to greatly improve 2021’s Shin Megami Tensei 5.

Shin Megami Tensei 5 was originally released as a Nintendo Switch exclusive. It’s not clear why exactly, but it’s unlikely Nintendo paid all that much for it, as the series is most popular in Japan, where the Switch is the dominate console format, and that’s where the majority of sales would’ve come from anyway.

Despite the peculiar name (it means True Goddess Metempsychosis, not that that helps much) the series is much more approachable than it sounds and the parent franchise of Persona – with which it still has a lot in common, in terms of both gameplay and story elements. Mainline Persona games always have a director’s cut, but Vengeance is far more substantial than even Persona 5 Royal.

The original Switch version of Shin Megami Tensei 5 was an enjoyable game, but it did have a number of obvious flaws. Apart from a shonky frame rate, which is instantly solved by being on PlayStation 5, the game was overly long and needlessly difficult, with too little in the way of plot and characters to justify its 50+ hour running time.

Vengeance doesn’t solve these issues completely – you’d need a totally new game for that – but it is clearly aware of them and tries to compensate as much as possible. It does so primarily via a new story campaign that, while broadly the same in many areas, does try to improve the pacing and allow for more character interaction.

One of the key differences between Shin Megami Tensei (MegaTen to its friends) and Persona is that the parent franchise almost always involves a supernatural apocalypse, often one that occurs in the opening hours of the game. That’s certainly what happens here, as you play as a Japanese high school student who at first seems to be the sole survivor of Armageddon.

While Persona is focused on character interaction and development, with plenty of time for whimsy and interpersonal relationships, MegaTen is generally more serious, with philosophical musings on religion and morality, that often mixes together mythology from several different cultures.

Although the context is slightly different, the combat works very similarly to Persona, in that while your enemies are generically referred to as ‘demons’ many of them aren’t necessarily evil. You can usually interact with them before or during a fight and try to convince them to join your side, like willing pokémon recruits.

In previous games this process relied on a lot of random luck but in Vengeance little mini-games and quizzes are introduced that make it seem a bit more logical – although we still don’t know why they don’t have proper Telltale Games style dialogue trees.

In addition, the pokémon similarities are even more obvious now, as demons have gained innate skills in Vengeance, that are highly varied in function and can help in or out of battle. Plus, as usual for the franchise, you can try to breed the demons and fuse them together to create more powerful forms.

In Vengeance there’s also a new area called the Demon Haunt, where you can take time out from battle in order to chat and improve your relationship with demon or human characters. This can lead to stat bonuses and free items, so it’s worthwhile even while it’s entirely optional.

The turn-based battles are very similar to Persona, except less stylishly presented – although the art design is very good. In the original, combat was monstrously difficult for no obvious reason, with luck often playing an unwelcomely large role in proceedings and even low level enemies able to wipe you out in an instant. Vengeance ameliorates these issues but does not remove them entirely.

New for this version of the game is the concept of guest characters, who can fight alongside you for a time and are summoned like demons (but don’t use up one of their slots). Since they’re humans, they work more like the protagonist, with a much wider range of skills and the ability to use items.

The guest characters already help with the difficulty but there are other positive changes too, including new miracle buffs and more powerful skills, some of which require specific demons to use. There’re also around 40 new demons, some of which are very powerful, which helps to make the game considerably easier than before.

As well as changes to the combat, there are also quality of life additions when exploring the game’s open world environment, with a significantly more useful map, rails you can grind on to use as shortcuts, and the ability to save anywhere you like – which, incredibly, was not possible in the original. You can also instantly teleport to a fast travel point, which helps immensely in limiting the amount of backtracking.

In terms of the story, you can still play the original campaign, but the new one is unquestionably better, even if at times it’s very similar – particularly at the beginning. It involves a new character who’s a trained exorcist and a quartet of new demon antagonists. This helps greatly to improve the pacing, which in the original campaign could see hours of gameplay go by without anything significant happening in terms of the plot.

Rather than a parallel campaign it’s more of an alternative take, which means that if you’ve played the original there’s going to be a lot of déjà vu involved, even if nothing is ever exactly the same. It’s also still extremely long and would’ve greatly benefited from being edited down, but that would’ve created complaints about value for money, so we’re not surprised Atlus hasn’t done that.

Vengeance is an improvement on the original in every way, although you’d have to be a superfan to want to play it again, even with the new campaign. Everything is better but the underlining design is still flawed: the game’s too long, the combat too old-fashioned, and the visuals too low-tech.

However, since that’s tacitly acknowledged by the changes made from the original, there’s now every reason to hope that Shin Megami Tensei 6 will get things right from the start – because there is the potential here, for the series to be every bit as successful as Persona. Vengeance is a clear step forward in that regard and manages to avenge all the flaws of the original, even if it doesn’t fix them entirely.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £54.99
Publisher: Sega/Atlus
Developer: Atlus
Release Date: 14th June 2024
Age Rating: 16

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