Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance

Atlus has a habit of shipping its best games twice. Persona 4 got Golden. Persona 5 got Royal. Now Shin Megami Tensei V, the 2021 Switch exclusive that paired the sharpest turn-based combat in the genre with a story that barely bothered to show up, gets Vengeance. The pattern is familiar, and so is the question it raises: is this a completed vision, or a full-price patch?

Mostly the former. Vengeance is the version of SMT V that should have shipped in the first place. The setup is unchanged. A Tokyo high schooler stumbles through a collapsed tunnel into Da’at, a sand-choked ruin of the city where angels and demons fight over the throne of creation. He fuses with a divine being called Aogami to become the Nahobino, a forbidden union of human and god, and spends the next sixty-odd hours deciding what the next world should look like. What changed is everything around that premise. The original campaign, now labeled the Canon of Creation, sits alongside a brand-new Canon of Vengeance that swaps in a new antagonist faction, the Qadištu, four female demons drawn from Lilith’s mythological lineage, and a new companion, Yoko Hiromine, who shows more personality in her opening scene than the original cast managed across an entire route.

Around the two stories, Atlus layered a second pass on the systems. Demons get unique Magatsuhi skills. A Demon Haunt hub lets you talk to your party between fights. Shinjuku joins the roster of open zones. A dash button and a real map fix the two most common complaints about traversal. The Virtual Trainer lets you rehearse boss fights without risking a game over.

Market positioning is blunt. This is the mainline Megami Tensei game for people who find Persona too chatty and too soft. It sells a fraction of what its sibling sells and wears that as a badge. At full retail with no discount or upgrade path for owners of the 2021 release, Atlus is betting that a second campaign and a real PC port justify a second purchase. On PC, that bet lands. On Switch, it is a harder sell. Critics scored the PC version 90 on Metacritic — a number we’d call earned, with caveats.

• Two full campaigns: The Canon of Creation is the 2021 story. The Canon of Vengeance is new, with its own antagonists, companion arcs, boss roster, and ending set. You pick one at the start, they share the early map and beats, then split hard. Each is a 60-to-80-hour run.
• Press-turn combat with Magatsuhi skills: The series’ signature system rewards hitting weaknesses with extra actions and punishes misses by handing turns to the enemy. Vengeance adds per-demon Magatsuhi skills, turning the shared gauge from a single panic button into a real tactical choice.
• 270-plus demons to negotiate, recruit, and fuse: Every enemy is a potential ally. Talk them into joining, fuse them into stronger forms, and strip Essences to rewrite your protagonist’s skill set and elemental affinities.
• Demon Haunts and the Virtual Trainer: A hub where your demons talk, hand over gifts, and raise stats through conversation, plus a practice arena for testing builds against enemies you’ve already met.
• Traversal and difficulty overhaul: Dash and jump navigation, a map that actually marks things, expanded fast travel via leyline founts, the new Shinjuku ward, and a Safety difficulty for players who only want the story.

The Press-Turn Loop

Every party member contributes one turn icon per round. Hit a weakness or land a critical and the action costs only half an icon. Miss, or hit something that nullifies your element, and you lose two. Attack something that reflects or drains and the whole round evaporates. The enemy plays by identical rules. That symmetry is the entire game. Every encounter is an information duel: figure out what the thing in front of you is weak to, exploit it before it exploits you, and never, ever guess.

This is a system built to stay tense at level 8 and stay tense at level 80. Buffs are not optional garnish. Stacking Tarukaja and Rakukaja, and stripping the enemy’s equivalents, is the difference between a clean sweep and watching a boss take eight actions in a row. Vengeance sharpens the loop with per-demon Magatsuhi skills. In the original, the shared gauge almost always went to Omagatoki: Critical, which turns every hit into a crit for one turn. Now the demon you brought determines what the gauge can do, so party composition matters before the fight starts, not just during it. The Qadištu boss fights lean into this. They are aggressive, punish lazy buff-stacking, and demand that you read their patterns instead of brute-forcing them.

Negotiation, Fusion, and the Demon Economy

Talking to demons is a mini-game of questions, demands, and occasional betrayal. A pixie asks for macca. A Jack Frost wants an item. Sometimes they take your money and walk. It is charming, and it is also the intake valve for the game’s real engine, fusion. Combine two demons and a new one emerges with inherited skills. Strip an Essence and pour those skills, plus elemental affinities, into the protagonist. Re-summon anything you’ve owned from the Compendium. The loop is recruit, fuse, outgrow, repeat, and it is as compulsive as any collect-a-thon on the market without a single ounce of cuteness in the way.

Demon Haunts are the quiet standout addition. In the original, your party was furniture. Now demons comment on the plot, hand over gifts, and gain stats through conversation. It is a small system that solves a large problem. New additions like Amabie and Nahobeeho give veterans reasons to rebuild rosters they thought they’d finished.

Two Canons, One Better Story

Here is the uncomfortable truth about the Canon of Creation: it is still thin. Companions vanish for hours. Motivations are stated rather than shown. The ending choice boils down to which philosophy lecture you found least tedious. Atlus did not rewrite it, and it shows.

The Canon of Vengeance is a different animal. Yoko is a real character with a real arc. The Qadištu have a coherent agenda. Mastema, a bit player in the original, becomes genuinely unsettling. Cutscenes are still sparse and the tone is still cold, because this is SMT and not Persona. But it is a story rather than a syllabus. Our recommendation is unambiguous: newcomers should play Vengeance first and treat Creation as an optional second run.

Friction and Onboarding

The early game is a wall. Normal difficulty will kill you at level 5 with an enemy that spams poison, and Hard is for people who enjoy suffering. Systems arrive as walls of text: affinities, Essences, Miracles unlocked by clearing Abscesses, Glory currency from hunting Miman collectibles. The game explains once and assumes you were listening. That onboarding friction is real, and it filters out a chunk of the audience Persona brought to Atlus. Safety mode exists for them, and it works. The Virtual Trainer softens the cliff for everyone else by letting you test a build against a boss you already lost to. It is the most useful quality-of-life addition in the package, and it should have existed in 2021.

Da’at is one of the great JRPG settings. Sun-bleached sand swallows expressway signage, Tokyo Tower leans against the horizon, and the color palette shifts from bone white to bruised violet as you move between wards. Masayuki Doi’s new demon designs sit comfortably next to Kazuma Kaneko’s classic roster. The UI is sharp, angular, high-contrast, and fast, which matters in a game where you will open menus ten thousand times.

Performance is where the versions diverge. The 2021 Switch release targeted 30fps and the hardware struggled to hold it, with dynamic resolution turning Minato into a smear. The PC build is designed for a 60fps target, and a game of this scope is light on modern hardware — the difference is not cosmetic. The press-turn system lives on animation timing and responsiveness, and a steadier framerate serves that rhythm directly. A handful of pre-rendered cutscenes remain at 30, which is noticeable but forgivable. The Switch build of Vengeance carries the same performance profile as the original, constraints included. Ryota Kozuka’s soundtrack deserves its own paragraph. The battle themes are the best in the series and they carry entire hours of grinding.

Steam is the version to own. The 60fps target is realistic on modest hardware, and the game is Steam Deck Verified, which suits its structure of short fights and frequent leyline founts almost perfectly. Mouse and keyboard work, but this is a menu-driven game designed around a controller, and it plays best with one. Ultrawide and unlocked framerate support are limited, which will irritate the PC-first crowd, but the port is otherwise clean.

Nintendo Switch is the version the game was built for, and it is still the weakest one. Handheld play is the argument for it. Sleep mode, fast travel, and bite-sized encounters make it an excellent commuter game. But the Switch hardware is the constraint here — open zones tax it, and the value equation stings most on this platform, because Switch owners are the ones who already paid for the 2021 release. There is no native Switch 2 edition as of this writing, so successor hardware runs the same build through backward compatibility.

Vengeance is the definitive Shin Megami Tensei V, and on PC it ranks among the best turn-based RPGs available. The combat was never the problem. Atlus fixed the problem, which was everything else, by writing a second campaign with actual characters, layering in systems that make your demons feel like a party, and finally shipping the game on hardware built to run it properly. The unresolved sins are the untouched Creation route and a pricing decision that treats loyal 2021 buyers as a second revenue stream. If you have never played it, buy it on Steam and start with Vengeance. If you finished it on Switch three years ago, the new canon alone is worth the return trip, but Atlus should have made that trip cheaper.