Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance is beautiful and bland

polygon.com:

The world of Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance can be an unforgiving place.

Tokyo is under siege by demons of all stripes. The throne of heaven sits silent and unoccupied. An extradimensional civil war threatens to rip reality apart. And just to add to insult to injury, Mothman is waiting to shake you down for cash during a random battle, leaving you with no choice but to fork over thousands of bucks and slink away with your tail between your legs despite fielding a team of literal gods because you’re still reeling from the poor choices you made in a previous fight and you don’t want to lose half an hour of progress returning to an earlier save.

Unlike, say, Shin Megami Tensei 4: Apocalypse’s relationship to Shin Megami Tensei 4 on the Nintendo 3DS, Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance acts as more of an expansion than a sequel to the 2021 original. The move from Switch exclusivity to also launching simultaneously on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC means the game looks gorgeous and performs a great deal better on those beefier platforms. More importantly, it also includes a handful of quality-of-life features as well as a reimagined narrative with new characters and story beats. But don’t worry if you skipped Shin Megami Tensei 5 the first time around, as you get to choose between the vanilla and updated plots at the beginning of the game.

Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance, at least on paper, stands tall among even the franchise’s best entries thanks to a mix of compelling gameplay and stylish aesthetics. Every battle, the foundations of which rely on exploiting enemies’ elemental weaknesses to earn yourself more turns for damage-dealing, health-healing, and status-effecting, plays out with the layered strategy of a chess match. Megami Tensei is unlike any of its genre contemporaries, sporting a combat rhythm made more exciting in Shin Megami Tensei 5 and, now, Vengeance thanks to the introduction of a Street Fighter-like special meter