Shin Megami Tensei V

Genre: Turn-Based Monster Collecting JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Shin Megami Tensei V is a Turn-Based Monster Collecting JRPG released on the Nintendo Switch in 2021. For those unfamiliar with the Shin Megami Tensei series (from here on referred to by its initials, SMT), this franchise is probably better known these days for its spinoff series, Persona, which tends to be more stylish, contemporary, and at least somewhat more accessible. The core SMT series, on the other hand, tends to focus on a demon-infested post-apocalyptic Tokyo, and tends to feature an epic plot where the stakes are the fate of reality and the survival of all of mankind, and SMT V is no exception to that.

If you’re new to the franchise, don’t worry – this game does not, as far as I can tell, have any connections to the plot of any of the other SMT or Persona games, so you don’t need to have played any of those games to get the full experience here. Having said that, fans of the SMT series will find a lot of its familiar fixtures in place, including its unusual horde of demonic monsters, its Tokyo-centric location, its high school student protagonist, and a multitude of thematic and gameplay elements.

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A New World, or Demonic Deja Vu?

That’s not to say that nothing has changed here. The closest point of comparison here would probably be SMT III, as that game had a remastered re-release on Nintendo Switch earlier in the same year SMT V came out, meaning that SMT III will likely be fresh on players’ minds. And using that point as a reference, quite a lot has changed.

Firstly, the map size here is absolutely massive. While SMT V is not an open world, its map will have players seamlessly moving through areas, trying to find a path through the ruins of Tokyo. Players will have a greater degree of movement here as well, with the ability to jump to help navigate through uneven terrain and wreckage. In addition to this, enemies now move around in the world, and players can avoid them or attack them freely to gain an advantage when the game transitions to the turn-based combat.

As far as that combat goes, the mechanics are going to be pretty similar to past entries, albeit with some tweaks and additions. Players still engage enemies in elemental-focused turn-based battles that will remind players a bit of the Pokemon games. However, the elemental part of combat takes on a much greater importance here thanks to a system that rewards players extra attacks when you hit an elemental weak point or land a critical hit. That is on top of the extra damage these hits deliver, of course. However, the opposite is true too – you lose attacks when you whiff or use an elemental attack your enemy is strong against. All of this is true for enemies as well – when they nail your weakness, the game gives them more turns to drive it home, and if they fail in an attack, you’ll find your turn starting sooner than usual.

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Creepy Demon-Thing, I Choose You!

Much as in prior SMT games, at any time during combat with normal enemies, players can opt to talk to a monster to try to coerce them into joining your side. This often takes the form of a nonsensical multiple-choice question you’ll have to guess at based on the monster’s personality, followed by a requested donation of money, health, or an item in your inventory. Sometimes, monsters will be in a good mood (based on an in-game lunar cycle), letting you skip the Q&A and possibly giving you a discount on their hiring fee.

However, while all of this may sound somewhat familiar to SMT series fans, one of the best things that SMT V does is to streamline this process and make it easier to get into. Answer the Q&A questions wrong and there’s a good chance you’ll get another shot next time your character’s turn comes around in combat. Succeed in recruiting the monster, and combat will conclude, rewarding you as usual for whatever enemies you killed prior to the recruitment. If you already have the monster in your party, they’ll automatically recognize their buddy is with you and end the combat. This ends up being a good (if a bit cheap) way to kill a few enemies quickly and end combat before the other side can even get a hit in.

As SMT fans will know, this isn’t a game where you’ll be housing a massive menagerie of captured critters – SMT V only lets you hold on to a small handful of demons, with three in your primary party and a few extras to swap out with. You can expand your backup roster ever so slightly as the game progresses, but you’ll still be extremely limited in this regard. Yet, you’ll still be doing quite a bit of recruiting during the game, and that’s because of the way you build your team – where in Pokemon players evolve Pokemon into stronger forms, in SMT V, players will essentially smash two of their demons together to form a new species, with different combinations usually leading to different results. What’s more, the new species inherits many of the skills of its two donors, and even after a demon is created it can have the “soul” of another demon mixed into its metaphorical DNA to provide new abilities, giving players some ability to custom-create their own team not just by capturing the right monsters, but by combining the right ones too.

While this isn’t necessarily a new idea, SMT V streamlines this process as well, allowing players to compare and contrast the new and old monsters’ stats and abilities, as well as letting players look up these combinations based on a monster you’re looking to combine, the monster you’re looking to get, or what you can make based on your current roster.

This system gives players a great amount of freedom to build their own custom team, but it also has the clever side-effect of encouraging players to keep revisiting previous areas (made easy via regular fast travel points, which also double as item shops and save points) once you see that a monster you just caught turns into something even better when you combine it with a monster you saw in an area hours ago. And maybe while you’re back in that old area, you’ll do a bit more exploring now that you’ve grown your team to the point where you no longer need to worry about the monsters roaming the area.

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Demonic Difficulty

On that note, it bears mention that SMT V is a difficult game. Players are given a lot of freedom to build their own custom powerhouse team, and the game has mechanics in combat that can be abused to absolutely trounce your opponents, but the game also expects you to make full use of the options it throws at you, and punishes players heavily when they neglect to make use of every tool at their disposal.

While enemies that appear in the world can be attacked preemptively or avoided, there are naturally battles that cannot be avoided, that will gate one area of from the next. In addition to this, players will regularly encounter strange living structures on the map that need to be eliminated by attacking a powerful monster or team of monsters that structure represents. While these battles are technically optional, you’ll want to make it a point to take these out as soon as your capabilities allow for it, as your abilities are unlocked via completing these tasks, as well as your ability to see the map area surrounding these structures. On top of that, there are occasional monsters hanging out in areas that are so overpowered that they’re clearly intended for players to challenge only after they have gone much, much farther into the game and decided to return back to these challenges well after first encountering them and giving them a wide berth.

I mention these major fights because I died the first few times I tried to take down one of those structures I mentioned, and I died many, many, many times fighting the first actual boss in the game before I landed on the right combination of monsters and the right battle strategy to take that boss down (for the record, a combination of suitable elemental attacks and well-timed use of attacks with a sleep status effect). And even ten hours into the game, I still was only barely able to leave a scratch on the first completely-optional overpowered monster I had to walk around

And this was all after a fair amount of grinding. Now, to be clear, I never found myself needing to do boring, repetitive grinding for hours on end in this game. Grinding in SMT was always done with a purpose on top of leveling up my crew. Namely, unlocking all of a monster’s abilities before combining it with another monster so I had the full range to choose from when transferring abilities over. In addition, you’ll encounter quests to partake in and areas to explore that will naturally have you wading through enemy-infested territory, and unless you’re trying to avoid all combat, you’ll be fighting a lot anyway.

To the game’s credit, even fighting normal enemies remains fairly challenging and engaging, at least up until you’ve levelled sufficiently to ride over enemies in an area, at which point there’s an auto-fight command that can fast-forward through combat. And there is a difficulty option that can be adjusted at any time, as well. However, even with this being the case, know that Shin Megami Tensei is a tough RPG, and anyone who ignores the game’s mechanics just to repeatedly hit the “fight” button does so at their own peril here.

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Is the Presentation Earth-Shattering or Hellish?

When it comes to the presentation, Shin Megami Tensei V doesn’t look terrible, but it doesn’t look great either. As mentioned before, the game features massive, wide-open areas, which definitely gives an impressive sense of scale, and there are nice details like shimmering sand and nice-looking water. However, on the other side of things, the Nintendo Switch’s hardware limitations are on full display here, with tons of pop-in, texture pop-in, shadow pop-in, aliasing, often empty and featureless environments, extremely choppy animations when characters get just a short distance from you, huge framerate drops in the first few seconds when you fast-travel to an area… it seems like a lot of sacrifices were made to get this game working on the Nintendo Switch, and it’s not a game that’s visually stunning enough to really justify these cuts.

Beyond the game’s technical side, there’s also the issue of SMT V’s artistic design, which isn’t going to appeal to everyone. On the one hand, the characters in this game are highly-detailed, very well-animated, and extremely unique and expressive. The apocalyptic Tokyo they wander in is both wondrous and disquieting, a landscape of ruined skyscrapers toppled into mounds of sand that covers everything, with a sky filled with strange and almost alien geometry. However, while the visuals here show off a lot of imagination, they’re not exactly pleasant to look at – enemies are often grotesque in appearance, and the entire world seems covered in a sand-colored haze that washes out everything and makes it feel extremely samey. The end result is a game that looks conceptually interesting, but its technical issues keep it from being especially impressive, and the sameyness makes it somewhat tiresome.

This is all backed by a soundtrack seemingly designed to highlight the eerily otherworldly nature of the game’s locale, with sounds that are discordant and unsettling just as often as they are melodic. That is, save for when you’re in battle, at which time the electric guitars kick in. I can’t say I love this game’s soundtrack, but it does at least do a good job working with the visual presentation to present a world that feels extremely unsettling.

Oh, I should also mention that this game has some voice acting throughout as well. This voice acting is once again good at underlining the odd nature of the residents of this strange world – with demons speaking in tones that seem far too amused or enthusiastic about their situation, or at times speaking as if suffering some sort of mental deficiency or even simply growling and making creature noises. It’s hard to judge this voice acting when so much of it seems clearly intended to sound unnatural or “off”, but overall it seems to have the intended effect of continuing to build the world’s unsettling nature.

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So… Should You Make a Deal With a Devil (or Two)?

While it’s far from perfect, Shin Megami Tensei V is a magnificent JRPG, if you’re the sort of player who can enjoy what’s on offer here. This is absolutely not going to be a game for everyone – its presentation is intentionally off-putting, its challenge level is high, and you really need to invest in this game’s mechanics to be effective. However, there is so much variety, and so much ability to custom-build your own team, that if this game does click with you, it’ll be one of the most refreshing and enjoyable JRPGs you can find on the Nintendo Switch. I’ve seen people jokingly refer to this game as “Pokemon for adults”, and this is true and not true, in that mechanically it plays very different than Pokemon, yet at its core it really is a more mature approach to the same genre, even if it is one that more casual players aren’t likely to latch on to.

tl;dr – Shin Megami Tensei V is a Turn-Based Monster-Collecting JRPG where players build up a team of demonic creatures to fight their way through a post-apocalyptic Tokyo. No prior experience with the series is needed, but do know that this is a very tough game with a somewhat off-putting presentation, and as such it isn’t going to be for everyone. However, the amount of freedom players are given here to explore and build their own team of monsters is absolutely wonderful, with some deep combat mechanics as well. And series fans will be delighted at how this game streamlines elements of prior games while adding additional depth. While this is a somewhat niche game, it fills that niche extraordinarily well, and if you like complexity and challenge in your RPGs, you should absolutely get this game.

Grade: A-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Winner:

Best RPG – My selection for Best RPG this year ultimately came down to Shin Megami Tensei V and Bravely Default II. Bravely Default plays things fairly safe within the genre, but does what it does extremely well, presenting a quality traditional JRPG experience. Meanwhile, Shin Megami Tensei V streamlines its series’ offbeat take on the monster-collecting genre, and I feel like doing so resulted in a game that is not only extremely compelling, but wildly original.

Runner-Up: Game of the Year, The “Wow, this game was way better than I expected!” Award

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