Review: ‘Shin Megami Tensei V’ Strands Compelling RPG Ideas in a Sea of Combat

Did you play through the last few Persona games and want for more of their smartly realized turn-based RPG combat but a whole lot less of their wild aesthetic brio, frequently jazzy music, social commentary, time management, and all-around weird humor? If so, then the developers at Atlus have basically created the game just for you.

Indeed, Shin Megami Tensei V is the Persona series’s taciturn conservative dad, enjoying his life in the suburbs and never bothering to look too closely at what his cool kids are doing now that they’ve moved out of the house. It’s a game that excels at letting its various interlocking team-building mechanics create a compelling journey for players, rewarding them for their hard work and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s also as hard and unyielding as a mule, which comes at the cost of personality. It very much seems to have a lot on its mind, but all of that plays second fiddle to all the capital-W work that you have to do.

In Shin Megami Tensei V, your player-named high schooler wanders into a mysterious tunnel on his way home from school and finds himself stranded in a nightmare version of Tokyo, one where Lucifer has killed God and the world is now ruled by demons. That may sound like a grim setup, but the game doesn’t present a Book of Revelations type of apocalypse so much as a Life After People one, where cities have been buried under years of dust and sand. Demons do roam around, and a few of them are suitably freaky for the situation—bosses in particular—but this is almost defiantly not a stop-and-look-around kind of game outside of moments where you’re scavenging for items or sidequests. Your job is largely a matter of survival.

Help comes early in the form of a celestial force called Aogami, who fuses with our hero’s soul to become the Nahobino, a sort of Kamen-Rider-meets-Bayonetta superhero with the power to not just fight the forces of evil but recruit them to his cause. From here, the real game begins, as Shin Megami Tensei V settles into a sort of Pokémon-for-grownups groove where the next checkpoint is right down the road, Aogami’s voice guiding you along the way. But the openness of the world itself strongly encourages you to get lost, fight desperate battles, and grow yourself and the demons you’ve defended up to this point into the best fighting force possible.

The game feels most connected to Persona in the enemies and combat, emphasizing our ability to exploit the elements that baddies are weak against in order to delay their turn as long as possible. Much of this will be like riding a bicycle for anyone who’s put any significant time into a recent Persona title, but the ideas powering Shin Megami Tensei V on the level of gameplay are much less friendly. Ambushing enemies is more difficult, and those enemies hit a lot harder. In fact, it’s almost expected that every boss is going to wipe the floor with your team the first time you encounter them, which means that grinding for experience, mixing and matching abilities, and fusing demons together are crucial skills to hone early on.

All that gameplay is engrossing, and none of the mechanics feel superfluous, even though it’s consistently frustrating that the numbingly drab, wind-blasted world of Shin Megami Tensei V isn’t done any favors by the poor, underpowered Switch struggling to keep a steady framerate. It also doesn’t help that you’ll spend way too much time in menu screens.

There’s a wonderful give and take to figuring out what moves to make and how to maximize abilities and create specialized builds of specific demons to counter every situation, as well as how to extract only the best abilities and traits from those builds. And the meticulous emphasis on exploration makes the grind feel a lot more interesting. But good luck mustering reasons to care about the experience given the larger plot at play in the game.

At one point, we learn that an organization in modern-day Tokyo is well aware of the coming troubles, and various parties are conflicted on what’s the best way to cancel the apocalypse—that is, if humanity deserves to have it cancelled at all. But despite the occasional melodramatic cutscene peppered throughout the campaign, none of the writing or characters are strong enough to make the story sing. Following the game’s first half, the cutscenes and portentous monologues and twee conversations among high schoolers who we’ve only known for five minutes since that incident inside the mysterious tunnel simply start getting in the way of all that’s good about the game. There are excellent RPG gameplay ideas powering Shin Megami Tensei V, but they’re left stranded in search of a worthwhile role to play.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by fortyseven communications.