Shin Megami Tensei is hard. Always has been. Amongst RPG fans, it’s a series infamous for its difficulty. Whether it’s the bastard Matador skill-check in Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne, or the Minotaur boss that gated so many people into the starting area of SMT4 on the 3DS, the series has become totemic of difficulty in RPGs – especially as the genre has become a little more dilute and more mainstream-friendly (here’s looking at you, FF16).
The original Shin Megami Tensei 5 – a Switch exclusive, until now – deviated from this rock-hard formula a little bit. If you spent time fusing demons, grinding out random encounters in the wastelands of a ruined Tokyo, and learning what the legions of demons in the game were weak to, you could rather effortlessly meander through the story without too much resistance. It was fun, don’t get me wrong – it just didn’t feel very MegaTen.
But Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance reassess that balance. It wants to make you suffer. It wants to make you earn your victories, eke through its encounters by the skin of your teeth. Bring the grit in you out. I’ve only played about three hours of the game at a preview event hosted by publisher Sega and developer Atlus, but already I can feel that the waters here are darker, deeper, and deadlier than they were in the vanilla outing of the game.
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