Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance

A delightfully devilish refresh

Beginning in the back of a Tokyo school classroom, you meet your classmates before heading home to your dorm, navigating an overworld of urban streets as a revolving cursor pointer. It’s comfortable bread-and-butter for the series, if wheat were Persona and milk old-school SMT. It’s a cheeky setup that positions things just right for a picnic blanket rug-pull, sending that sandwich flying and opening up those slices to a whole new realm: SMT goes open world. And it’s really good.

Everything breaks bad when a detour home under an old bridge hurls you through the veil barely holding your reality together. You come outside into an unfamiliar Tokyo, with ruined skyscrapers, sand dunes rolling over the streets, and demons frolicking amid the destruction. The only way you’ll survive is by joining hands with a strange being that takes the form of a handsome older man, Aogami, to fuse into one being: a Nahobino.

THRONING UP

The setup remains the same in both of the stories here, the Canon Of Creation (the original storyline, first released on Switch), and the Canon Of Vengeance. Either way, while your allies, enemies, and even the maps you explore change, they all revolve around your mere existence. The Nahobino is an ancient symbol of divinity, one who simply by existing has the right to sit on the throne – empty after an off-screen, apocalyptic assassination – and reshape the world. It’s up to you to navigate the battle to claim it, as pantheons clash.

As is often the case in SMT, you ally with demons as much as you smush them into next week, fusing them together and levelling them up to reach new devilish heights. Usually you’d also be doing abstract overworld exploration and grindy, corridor-heavy dungeon crawling – but not in SMT V, which reinvents exploration, enlarging its scope.