Losing is part of the experience, and at times it can feel unfair or obtusely designed, especially when it’s held up against its contemporaries. You’re powerless to stop them as you make observations of what moves they execute and exactly how you might go about countering them. The majority of battles are imbued with a profound aura of anxiety as you’re blissfully unaware if the cavalcade of monsters before you will dish out an attack that wipes your entire team in a single round of turns. This happens a lot, so it’s essential to save your progress and heal your growing party of demons whenever you stumble across a save point in the open world. Shin Megami Tensei 5 is punishingly difficult, abiding by the old school rules of booting you back to the main menu whenever Nahobino falls in battle. I’m smitten with this game, even if it keeps kicking my ass. It comes out swinging, making its mission statement clear in the opening moments as it takes hold of you and refuses to let go. It knows it inspired the likes of Persona, and now exists in a medium where it has long been surpassed in terms of popularity and cultural impact. Shin Megami Tensei 5 makes a distinctive first impression. You were once defenseless, but now you’re ready to fight back against a place that threatens to swallow you whole at every turn. Fortunately, a mysterious figure known as Nahobino decides to crash the party and fuse with our protagonist, resulting in a powerful figure capable of commanding creatures and dishing out lethal spells while wielding a fluorescent blade that sprouts from their hand. You emerge in this foreign place awaiting your death, with demons immediately descending upon you. The world hasn’t just ended in the blink of an eye, there are reasons behind its demise that you’ll soon come to discover.
It’s immediately striking, compounded with a sense of mystery that I’m unable to delve into as part of this preview, but I will say that the circumstances of this world are far deeper than you think. The apocalypse has come and gone, with a new ecosystem thriving amidst the rusted husks of vehicles and the decaying foundations of skyscrapers that continue to crumble into the scorching sands below. Tokyo is destroyed, everyone is dead, and there’s seemingly nothing you can do to prevent it. Here, the world is in ruins, occupied by angels and demons with only minute specks of humanity surviving amidst the chaos. Then one day a tunnel collapses atop of you and your fellow students, transporting you to a parallel dimension. Related: Is Your Favourite Pokemon Game Always Your First? You weave through crowds of faceless people on their way to work and school, residing on a plane of existence where individuality feels meaningless.
The opening scenes are reminiscent of this metropolitan existence. You play as a silent protagonist in a similar vein to Persona 5’s Joker, a high school student seemingly content with his life as a young man in modern day Tokyo. The beloved SMT 3: Nocturne turned our protagonist into a demon as he’s forced to explore Tokyo as it crumbles to oblivion, and the fifth installment pursues a similar thematic goal, albeit on a much larger scale.
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While other games will seek to showcase small slivers of hope alongside a bustling personality from the ruins of destruction, Atlus’ JRPG series is transfixed on misery in a morbidly fascinating way. Nothing depicts the end of the world quite like Shin Megami Tensei.
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