Hey Atlus, Let Us Upgrade To Definitive Editions

The video game industry has habitually repackaged things and put them on store shelves. Remakes and remasters are one side of the conversation, but Atlus, it seems, prefers to release “enhanced editions” like Persona 5 Royal and now Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. These add new content and major quality-of-life overhauls, all for the hefty price of a brand-new game with no way for owners of the original to simply upgrade to the new version at a reduced price. When I got the chance to play through two hours of Vengeance, I was intrigued to get a sense of what Atlus has deemed merited a whole new video game. But I’m wrestling with how I feel about the company’s method of delivery.

Vengeance is undoubtedly the definitive version of the original game. It’s prettier, running on more powerful hardware than the original Switch version (though Vengeance will also come to Nintendo’s system), has a slew of new summonable demons to add to your party, and comes pre-packaged with all of the original game’s DLC and plans to include its own new quests down the line. Vengeance maintains Shin Megami Tensei V’s oppressive atmosphere, stylish character design, and brutal, turn-based challenge. But this time, it’s all wrapped in a new, optional story route that will fundamentally change the game’s latter half.

The alternate route, called the Canon of Vengeance, involves a new character, a transfer student at the player’s school named Yoko Hiromine. While we weren’t given many details about how the events of Yoko’s route would diverge from the original narrative of Shin Megami Tensei V, you make the decision to follow one route or the other early on, and it informs the entirety of the game. In theory, seeing everything Vengeance has to offer will take two playthroughs if you never got around to the first SMTV. The original game was anywhere from around 45 hours to 100 hours, depending on how thorough you were, so a new player who never played Shin Megami Tensei V could get twice that much out of Vengeance. That’s an exciting prospect, but I’m still left wondering if the video game industry should be outgrowing this method of updating old games.

In the pre-online era, definitive editions akin to Vengeance made sense because it was impossible to deliver DLC or patches to a wide audience if you wanted to do a huge overhaul like Persona 3 FES on the PlayStation 2. Nowadays, these kinds of updates can come through digital means for half the price. Even the Persona 3 Reload remake is getting FES’ playable epilogue as DLC rather than forcing a new, full-price package on players. The update to Vengeance is substantial, and a new route is more than enough reason to dive in, but there’s no way for anyone who already owns Shin Megami Tensei V to so much as get a discount on an updated version of a game they already own.

Remasters have gotten better about this, with games like The Last of Us Part II allowing you to pay a small fee to get the PlayStation 5 update if you already own the game on PS4, but with a rework on the scale of Vengeance, a $10 fee doesn’t feel like it scratches the surface. I don’t care to break down, to the dollar, exactly how much I think Vengeance should cost for owners of SMTV, but I think there has to be a more consumer-friendly way of delivering something like it for those who still have a ticket to the ride.

Having played through Atlus’ definitive editions before, I have no doubt Vengeance will be an excellent way to revisit Shin Megami Tensei V, and I’m curious to see how the game’s new route deviates from the original story when it launches on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch on June 14.