If there's one consistent trend you can ding Atlus for, it's their love of enhanced rereleases, with a modest amount of extra content, a healthy level of QoL, a new character or two, and a new price tag. It's certainly consistent enough that even Sega has noted that it's harming their sales. Still, while it's always a bit hit or miss if it's worth picking up and replaying an Atlus RPG when it gets the obligatory enhanced edition and port, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance more than justifies the double dip and is well worth it if you never got it back on Switch.
The mainline SMT games are relatively broad in their overall style and focus compared to the popular Persona branch of the family tree. You can generally assume that a SMT game sticks you in the middle of (or after) the apocalypse, left to fend for yourself by making a party of a handful of human allies and a lot of demons, and generally deals with What Comes Next, often a factional battle for the right to decide which moral alignment or philosophy will create a new world. SMTV sticks in this lane; your student character finds himself in a ruined desert wasteland (the Netherworld) with indications that Tokyo was destroyed in the apocalypse 18 years prior, and the journey peels back what exactly happened and who's jockeying for the right to claim the throne of creation and start the world's next cycle. The actual contours of the lore in SMTV are an interesting take on creation and divine mythologies, even if the game ends up being story light at times, and centers around demigods known as Nahobino, fusions of humans and demons. Your character becomes Nahobino at the start of the game by fusing with Aogami, an artificial deity, and gains both a healthy set of protagonist powers and an absolutely incredible head of hair. From there you explore the Netherworld, fighting and recruiting allies, doing a whole bunch of demon fusion, finding items, and so forth.
One of the main swerves with the Vengeance edition is the presence of an entirely new story campaign, and it's just as big as the original. The original game's story, known as the Canon of Creation, is still there and playable, and focuses primarily on the philosophical and factional conflicts around the recreation of the world. It's interesting enough and functional and if you've never played SMTV, it's still a pretty good baseline for things. The curveball is the brand new Canon of Vengeance route. While there is some overlap of the Creation route, the Vengeance route introduces an entirely new set of adversaries seeking revenge for ancient wrongs, curves the plot quite appreciably, and even places you in entirely new areas for the middle third of the game. Vengeance also introduces a new main character in Yoko Hiromine, a delightful addition to the cast and effective Chaos alignment representative; she's smart, has a dry sense of humor, hates cars, and asks a girl she's known for two minutes if she would be willing to commit murder to stop school bullying. Yoko's great. A new player wouldn't be lost playing the Vengeance route first, but it's definitely a harder experience and in many ways feels like a fun remixed twist on the story and campaign meant to keep you guessing. When so much of the time an enhanced release of an Atlus game throws one or two more moderately sized dungeons at you and calls it a day, an entire new campaign and content supporting it is an impressive level of commitment here and makes it easy to recommend the new release if you liked the original.
Regardless of which route you choose, SMTV follows the same general gameplay trajectory. Instead of being a set of linear dungeons or small areas to explore, V scales up and is mostly set in a few large regions. It's not full open world design, as your path through the regions is still somewhat linear, but there's a ton of secrets and items to find, loopbacks, quests to find and solve, and general freedom to travel where you need. It feels manageable but still rewards diligence. SMTV doesn't lean on random battles, but instead populates these areas with demons for you either to directly engage, ambush, or avoid; it's very possible to fight a relatively small number of normal battles and instead level and power up from the abundant number of boss fights and quests scattered across the game. You'll recruit and fuse demons to flesh out your party and best prepare for the battles ahead using relatively standard franchise conversation processes, and there's hundreds of possible demons to interact with and fight or use. SMTV also follows from other mainline SMT games and gives you full freedom to customize your Nahobino, both in terms of stat allocations but also choosing which skills you want to slot in, which affinities you want to prioritize, and which resistances and weaknesses are most manageable at present. There's a lot of flexibility and replayability here and the sense of growth over time is very well done. The combat system is your standard-at-this-point Press Turn system with a few tweaks but it's accessible yet instantly familiar if you've played SMT, Persona, or Metaphor in the last fifteen years.
The Vengeance release of the game further fleshes things out with a bunch of content and quality of life enhancements across both storylines. There's more demons, more sidequests, more new boss fights, more active and passive skills to learn, and there's new passive 'miracles' to grant your Nahobino and party new capabilities . Every demon in the game has a new inherent passive ability that can have dramatic impacts on battle performance and lead to new party building considerations. There's new key items you can get that unlock the equivalent of the fusion spells from prior games - special abilities that can be used if you have specific sets of demons in your frontline or reserve. Map traversal is easier with a new rail system that grants you point to point shortcuts to new hidden areas and between different parts of the main region maps. You can save anywhere you want now. A new "Demon Haunt" feature lets you chat with your demons and get extra items or power boosts on the side. Overall pretty much every aspect of gameplay has been touched and improved for the better.
Much like the original release, the presentation values are good, if a bit small in scale at times due to the original Switch hardware. Demons look great, animations are good, the maps are a little bit samey but have enough twists to them that it's still pleasant to engage. The voice acting is reasonably solid. The real winner here is the soundtrack, which is just full of wonderful tracks, ranging from peaceful ethereal songs to one of the most diverse sets of high energy combat tracks you'll ever find. The Vengeance campaign adds even more of them and it's definitely a game to keep music volume maxed out for; there's hours of great battle music to just enjoy and it's one of those situations where a really great album happens to come with a cool game on the side.
You can point your finger at some of the pacing issues that SMTV has and retains in this edition, and if you want to take full advantage of the variety of fusions available here you'll probably do a lot of extra relic and treasure hunting over the course of your game. The story can still be a bit light or thin at times. Difficulty can spike unexpectedly at certain points. If you don't like combat heavy RPGs, this definitely won't be for you. All this said though, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is a fantastic game that's worth a look for anyone who likes console flavored RPGs and is even worth a look if you played through the original 2021 release. There's a lot of game here waiting.
