Shin Megami Tensei V - Review

Shin Megami Tensei V is the newest entry into the long lasting, punishing and traditional old school JRPG series. The first main line title since SMT IV was released back in 2013. With 8 years between games, and a 4-year development cycle after a confirmation back in 2017 how does Shin Megami Tensei V shape up against previous titles and comparative to the juggernaut of a game that was Persona?

Let me start by saying that despite the gripes I have with Shin Megami Tensei V, the overall game is fun. It’s got depth, it’ll keep you busy for upwards of 50 hours and there is a huge level of min/max abilities, available for game play. So, let’s talk about the good things firstly and then we’ll get into the nitty gritty.

The combat in the game is incredibly slick, if you are familiar with other Shin Megami Tensei titles or the Persona series, you’ll instantly pick up the similarities in the combat, and how to effectively begin to use it. Recruiting a variety of demons is key to your survival, and in turn effectively building their skills and affinities through essence fusions, is paramount to your success. There is a wildly deeper level of attribute levels available in Shin Megami Tensei V than is typically available in past titles. This level of min/max becomes more and more important as you go up difficulty, with it being tantamount in importance on hard.

The fundamental abilities are still the same, and the typical progression of RPG abilities, throwing more letters onto a word to show its stronger or multi-targeting, is still here and will help you bumble through, until you feel confident in what you are doing. Demon fusions give you the ability to create other demons, but with combined affinities and skills, to allow for stronger spells and it becomes almost instantly something you need to pay attention to. By the end of the first area, you’re going to want to have this understanding of the intricacy of party setup for battles, if you haven’t, the game is going to punish you, and it’s going to punish you heavily.

There is no sugar coating this fact, Shin Megami Tensei V is hard, even on Normal, you’re going to be in for a rough time. Like one-shot abilities from boss encounters, if you’re unprepared or getting wiped by a group of enemies, if you’re not sufficiently equipped, you will need to establish a hit first mentality like putting down at least 1 or 2 enemies in your first turn. There are a lot of battles available to you, and grinding is going to be your best friend/enemy. It is within this grind that you will learn to craft the most efficient team, to enable you to blitz through the enemies in that area with great efficiency. There is a sense of reward in almost being smarter than the area itself, though being smart enough to have a varied enough team, in order to deal with anything that might pop up, yet still but focused enough to burn through tougher enemies and bosses as quickly as possible, is a fine line to manage.

The battle system is deep because the difficulty demands that it be deep, there is an inherent problem here, however, the difficulty is practically artificial. Particularly with boss fights, defeat is often guaranteed on the first attempt, not because of you being underdeveloped or weak, but because you get one shot by an enemy casting a spell you are weak to, without knowing it is a weakness and it feels awful. There should never be an instance where you lose an encounter purely based on not having previous knowledge of what affinity you need to have going into it. Particularly when this one shot can happen at the very depths of the fight.

Even more frustrating, is the fact that if your player avatar dies, that’s it, game over, so saving frequently is something you should get used to doing. While your demons can die, be revived and swapped out on the fly, if you die, that’s it. I understand the reasoning behind this, thanks to an in-game lore explanation as to why this is the case and the demons are only controlled by your player character. Yet this is unnecessarily punishing on top of an already punishing game, especially when the threat of being one shot or ruined by a lucky critical, giving a secondary attack to another opponent, who then destroys you with the second attack, is not uncommon.

Talking about the player character is another point. You are almost completely irrelevant in the greater scheme of the story, what little there is. You are a mute, androgynous character who acts as a vessel for Aogami who has infinitely more influence on the story than you ever do. You are given occasional dialogue responses, that feel useless. They don’t appear to have any real influence of the events of the story. Every other character is far more important to the overall story than you are. The player character feels like a shell there to allow you to experience the story, without ever doing anything particularly interesting.

On top of that, I feel there is an inherent error made with the main character. You are given the ability to name your silent avatar. There was a perfect opportunity here to use gender neutral language. However, despite this visual choice, and the ability of choosing your own name the one character you get addressed by regularly refers to you constantly as “young man.” Which is fine. It is perfectly fine to gender your characters, however. There was a clear design decision here to allow for a gender-neutral player character, that is completely negated from the first time you are addressed directly. Is this a big problem? No. Is it something that could’ve easily been rectified to make for a far easier shell character to pour yourself into? Absolutely.

Further to this, I think the choice of having a silent protagonist in Shin Megami Tensei V is actually a poor decision. Unlike in Persona 5 where Joker has ample personality without ever muttering an actual word, your character in Shin Megami Tensei V is emotionless, without personality and incredibly bland. In a game where the story is already incredibly light and lacking, choosing to make the main character silent and empty is inherently problematic. The story would be much better served by a defined character. Whilst this doesn’t fit the typical modus operandi of Atlus’ RPGs, it would have gone far further in this game than what is currently on offer.

This leads to what would have to be my biggest overall issue with the game. The bare bones, almost non-existent story. In the 50+ hours you’ll play, a total of maybe 2 hours is actually focused on story. There is more exposition in the first 10 hours than there is in the remainder of the game. But in this, the story feels incredibly disjointed. A relatively important seeming character is killed off at one point, and there is hardly an acknowledgement. “Regrettable” is all that is said about it, and then all moves on. This is also a bit of storytelling slapped between two 15hr+ areas. Persona 5 was a game that I dropped nearly 90 hours into and found myself loving every moment of the deeply intricate and woven story. I understand Shin Megami Tensei is far more focused on the combat and demon fusion, but there is a frustrating lack of any real story here. Grinding repetitive battles, in mostly bland and copy paste areas for 95% of the game is bordering on insanity. The combat is fun once you hit a stride but getting to that stride is going to make a lot of people burn out, very quickly.

Shin Megami Tensei V is a punishing and very long game with a deeply intricate combat system. There is some beautiful visuals here when up close, that run at a solid 5 FPS when at a distance. There is the hint of a story here, though that is really light and lacking for the most part, coupled with a complete lack of character development, that makes it hard for any of the characters you meet, feel like they should matter to you. There is plenty of game here if you’re purely after the combat aspect, but a lack of anything substantial beyond that. The game is fundamentally fine, but after the powerhouse performances from Persona 4 and 5, Shin Megami Tensei is going to have to do much better than this, to be considered a must play of the genre.