Major spoilers forShin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeanceahead.
Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeancedoesn’t have its subtitle for nothing. As this new version ofSMT5brings the game to more platforms than just the Nintendo Switch, it serves as the definitive edition, adding new features such as the Demon Haunt, and allowing players toexperience a new storyline featuring Yoko Hiromine. In what’s called the Canon of Vengeance, fans are allowed to bond with their classmates more than ever before, but they are also left to watch as they lose them one by one; even their Proto-Fiend partner Aogami.
While players may be expecting major twists and turns leading to new endings,Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeanceonly has two new endings in the Canon of Vengeance. It’s understandable considering the other characters, which influence Canon of Creation’s wider variety, all perish during the journey, but not even the final moments of the game avoid splitting up the player’s friend group as they need to choose between Tao’s law and Yoko’s chaos in the end. The choice is left completely up to the player, but out of these two options, Yoko’s seems to be the “true” choice as the Law Ending doesn’t offer much in comparison.
Yoko’s Chaos Ending is So Much More Compared to Tao’s Law Ending
Tao’s Law Ending Isn’t Anything Groundbreaking
As returning players are likely well aware, Tao Isonokami serves as the Goddess of Creation at the end ofShin Megami Tensei 5, and this of course remains unchanged in the Canon of Vengeance. While she may be saved her gruesome fateinVengeancecompared to the originalSMT5story, she’s still left to lead the Nahobino toward restoring the world however he sees fit. If the players choose to side with Tao, they essentially recreate the world and preserve the God of Law’s rules, combining two original endings in the process.
Siding with Tao allows fans to fight Tiamat and the unique boss Tehom, as well as a fight with Lucifer (which plays out the same as the true neutral ending in Canon of Creation) to free the new world from the Mandala system. While there are manynew features to experience inShin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance, the only thing that changes in the Law Ending is the after-credits scene players get. It seems to say that Tao and the protagonist watch from afar as reset versions of themselves live out their lives in a hopeful world where none of their “wishes” will ever be denied.
How Yoko’s Chaos Ending is a Brand-New Ending for Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance
Yoko’s ending, however, throws out the system that’s led to theneverending cycle that only the Nahobino can break, allowing them both destroy the world to remake it anew as they see fit. Here, players can still fight Tiamat, but also archangel Mastema to claim what may be a better reward: an entirely new ending. This ending, in comparison to Tao’s, is bleak as it discusses how the new world will lead to a dark void that engulfs the world and every other world that was or will be along with it.
It seems that these two endings serve an important purpose as they represent two distinct sides: optimism and pessimism. If one manages to make it through thetough challengesShin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeancethrows at them, then they are either rewarded by Tao’s hopeful ending that looks towards the future or Yoko’s delight in the destruction of the world in which she’s felt plenty of suffering.
Siding with Yoko may be what players are expected to do, hence the subtitle ‘Vengeance’ and the way her side of the story is the only true new one in the Canon of Vengeance. Tao’s ending does in fact balance out the bleak nature of Yoko’s ending as optimism often does, which may make the choice hard, but it poignantly points out how both are necessary in their own right.
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance
WHERE TO PLAY
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance consists of two complete story paths: experience a brand-new route, the “Canon of Vengeance” – a dramatic tale of revenge by the fallen, centered around new characters and an enigmatic cohort of demons, the Qadištu, who plot their own dark designs apart from the war of those who fight to maintain order and those who seek to defy it. Or explore the original story told in Shin Megami Tensei V, the “Canon of Creation” – an eternal conflict between angels and demons, in which the protagonist fights for the world’s fate.When a grisly murder scene in modern-day Tokyo blocks our protagonist’s walk home, an unplanned detour leaves him buried and unconscious. He awakens in a new Tokyo, a wasteland ravaged by apocalypse now called Da’at… but before bloodthirsty demons can claim his life, a savior emerges, and the two of them unite to become a mighty being, neither human nor demon: a Nahobino.With newfound power, the protagonist ventures through Da’at, an enigmatic realm filled with mythical deities and demonic tyrants in constant conflict for survival. Searching for answers, the protagonist must forge his own path in a battle between angels and demons to dictate the fate of the world.
