Review: Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey

Buy Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on Amazon.com

Another review, another SMT title. ... Hey, wait, where are you guys going!?  I can justify this binge in exactly nine words, or more correctly, four hyphenates and an acronym: first-person dungeon-crawling sci-fi turn-based RPG.

While many of the main themes of the franchise are intact and it recycles some core elements from past games in the series (first-person dungeon-crawling being a staple of the series since the pre-PS2 days), the game stands on its own as greater than the sum of its parts.  Allow me to explain.

Story

A massive black hole opens up over Antarctica and is slowly engulfing the entire planet.  This void is home to demons and elder gods that are attempting to reclaim the planet from humans who have soiled and desecrated Mother Earth.  Soon the United Nations forms a team of soldiers and researchers from across the globe to go poke around in it and see whether or not Earth is screwed.  You are [insert name here], a soldier on the Red Sprite ship, who saves the fucking day.  Or lets Heaven take over.  Or lets the demon world engulf the planet.  Your call bro.

For the record, my Main Character's name?  Bonesaw McGrady.

Gameplay

A list of franchise staples that make a reappearance:

- Demon summoning, in the form of negotiation to have them join your party
- Demon fusion, wherein (mostly) more powerful demons are born from combining two (or more) others
- Greater depth in fusions than the Persona spinoffs
- Strength/weakness-based tactics
- Dungeon crawling.  Oh god there is so much dungeon crawling.
- Law/Neutral/Chaos paths where your opinions and actions affect the plot and final ending (and more)
- Hard-as-nails boss fights until you figure out what you're doing or just grind a little bit

Fusions in this game retain the Element fusions wherein you can upgrade your demons directly to the next step up in its race (see: Devil Survivor) and the Mitama system where you can upgrade particular stats on an existing demon (also on Devil Survivor) but adds a spin.  When you fight demons, you gain Analysis points that eventually help you by letting you see all of a demon's strengths and weaknesses each time you see them.  Fully analyzed demons also give you Sources once you level them up and their Analysis is full.  These Sources beget some of their skills which you can use in fusions of other demons to give them skills they normally wouldn't have.  For example, by the final boss battle I was using Sources to grant Repel-, Null- and Void- skills to demons that wouldn't normally have them just to cover up any exploits (but feel free to divine your own solutions!).  Also a boon is the Password system, where you can convert your demons to a string of letters, numbers and symbols to share with other players or to keep for yourself in case you really want to exploit the Source system (say, a team of demons with all the same skills but not enough Sources to go around).

The dungeon-crawling portions offer numerous obstacles, and is built off the Etrian Odyssey engine, so if you've played those you should have some expectation of what you're up against.  Trap floors, one-way doors, conveyor belts, warp panels, false walls, and even false floors are pretty common, with the last dungeon using a lot of everything.  While in the dungeon you can find treasures like money or items, or Forma which are consumables you use to forge new equipment or software upgrades to your Demonica (battle suit) that will help you get to places you couldn't previously.

In combat, your Law/Neutral/Chaos alignment also has an effect.  Similar to All-Out Attacks in the Persona series, when you exploit an enemy's weakness, all the demons on your team with the same alignment join up for an extra attack.  There are of course times when it's best to have a team of varying alignments, but the game does a great job of making sure the alignment system has more of an effect than what ending you get.  It was all too late, for example, that I found out I locked myself out of one of the better items in the game because I was (for story purposes) set on a contrary alignment.

Graphics/Sound

It's a DS game.

That said, most of the character sprites are actually pretty clean and crisp, but some of the demon sprites are recycled from older titles, which is painfully obvious when it's a demon that hasn't been used in the series in a long time.  While I understand that the game has 55-65 hours in the first playthrough and easily over 100 when you go through the two other paths and optional boss fights, this is an oversight that's easy to correct.


The sound effects are unique and iconic, evocative of the sci-fi-meets-Hell-on-Earth setting.  Dramatic soaring opera scores beset by tribal drumming and Gregorian chanting fits perfectly, though I'm not sure this is the type of game that leaves songs in your head for weeks (see: The World Ends with You for a DS example).

Overall

My playthrough was about 58 hours with minimal grinding.  I'm more anal than most about making sure my final team is optimal because final bosses in SMT are hard enough without a laziness handicap.  Even then this game's boss took about eight tries before A and I worked out a strategy that was just right.  All said I do plan on replaying it in the future to get good use out of New Game+ and see what the other alignments have in store.  If it was good enough to get me to stop playing Pokemon HeartGold, well, that says something.  I bet my Gengar misses me. :(

- E

Review: Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army (PS2)

This game has it all. Rasputin? Check. Terminators? Check. Demons? Check. Gundams? Check. Copious amounts of WTF? Check check check.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game. I'm so mad at myself for not playing it earlier. I remember very vividly buying it and Tales of the Abyss on the same day back in October 2006. I ended up beating Tales of the Abyss, but not touching this one until 2007 or so and only for about 20 minutes. Clearly, I made a mistake in not giving this a good solid play until this week.

Story
This game has everything I could ever want in a detective story. It starts with a dame (ho ho ho vintage talk!). Lots.

The titular character is a descendant of a long line of devil summoners (the 14th in fact), and is charged with protecting the Capital from evil demony bad guys -- basically a one-man Ghostbuster. As such you join up with the local fuzz, the Narumi Detective Agency, in order to run the beat and solve a mystery that begins to unfold the first day on the job: a young woman named Kaya Daidouji is abducted by robots dressed as soldiers. By the end of the game, you've fought Rasputin, walked straight into a bathhouse and punched a Yakuza leader, and square off against a battleship possessed by some ancient demon god.

Suck it, Holmes.

Gameplay

Unlike most games in the Shin Megami Tensei series (which are turn-based), Devil Summoner utilizes a system that is very much Resident Evil meets Pokemon: you have an action RPG way of fighting and you control various demons that you capture in tubes (read: elongated pokeballs). As your demons level up they get special attacks/moves that can help out a ton in battle. Some nullify particular elements, others do amazing attacks that can cause a significant amount of damage. Boss fights, like other SMT games, do require a lot of thought/strategy/skill; no button mashing here. I thoroughly enjoyed every boss fight, even the occasional one that made me throw my controller onto the floor several times. But I'll tell you what: never have I felt so satisfied in beating a boss as I do when it's one in an SMT game that I have had problems with. Most if not all of your problems come from a lack of planning vs. a lack of grinding.

Graphics/Sound

The character designs and the whole feel of the game are very unique and gorgeous. Kazuma Kaneko's back as the main designer and the whole game shows off his art style, which I personally don't mind. I was a little disappointed with Persona 3 and Persona 4 simply because the characters didn't have Kaneko's signature look. The whole period feel is very authentic - the game looks and feels very 1920s - and even the dialogue is spattered with little vintage phrases here and there. The soundtrack is a very good listen. It captures the vintage setting of the game well but still fits in very well with modern music. Honestly, if I still had an iPod, I'd probably buy the OST and transfer it to that just so I could listen to it every now and then.

Overall

This game was just the console game I needed to get my ass in gear on reviews. It had great detective elements (and everyone knows I love detectives....), a thrilling plot, lots of humor and was just fun to play. I've already started on the 2nd one in the series (which just came out last May!). I hope this ride with Devil Summoner Raidou Kuzunoha is just as good as the last. If you don't own this game, buy it immediately (eBay~) and if you own it and haven't played it, go do it now! What are you waiting for!?

- A

Review: SMT Devil Survivor

Devil Survivor is yet another game in the Shin Megami Tensei series, the first entry for the DS (but not the last -- cannot wait for Strange Journey next month). The guy with the purple hair is the Main Character, and he and his merry band of party members get locked down in Tokyo when demons start showing up and attacking humans. While inside the humans eventually discover that they only have seven days to find a way out of the lockdown, though the circumstances differ based on your actions through the week. The game is a spin on traditional tactical/strategy RPGs in that it also features Dragon Quest-esque first-person turn-based battles. Let me explain:

Gameplay

When your characters are outside of battle, the majority of your time is spent either exploring the city for a route of escape, talking to civilians and finding clues, and general maintenance. Each member of your party, max four, owns a device called a COMP which is used to summon and control demons. Each party member has the ability to control up to two demons at a time, which you can arrange, fuse, and manipulate outside of battle so as to prepare yourself for combat.

When in combat, each party member moves on a grid independent of each other, same as your enemies, and when two opposing units get within attack range, the active unit gets the opportunity to engage. Once engaged, each side gets one turn to take an action before that round of combat ends; additional turns are granted by using moves that exploit weaknesses, similar to the Press Turn system that has become a staple of SMT. Between the six types of moves (Phys, Fire, Ice, Force, Elec, Mystical), different abilities of demons (determined by the demon's race), support skills that let you do things like move further in the grid or float over objects, the major emphasis is on preparation: if you build your teams right, a given combat scenario is over before it begins. Furthermore combat is initiated as part of the plot or by various "Free Battles", but you always have to decide to choose that event, so there's no random battles.

An example of the grid vs. the first-person view. Image courtesy of Destructoid.

As you go about your day, events take up time in the day, meaning you progress through the plot through a series of encounters, meetings, and exploration. You can do any amount of maintenance without using up time, as well as grind in Free Battles for cash or to crack skills without progressing the storyline. New demons are unlocked as you progress the story, and you purchase them with Macca, the game's currency, from the Demon Auction, which is basically like eBay for demons. Another SMT staple, you can fuse demons to make more powerful demons, etc. etc. etc.

Story

With this particular game, it's best I stop at the synopsis in the opening paragraph. Just to reiterate, there are a number of different endings, and the actions you take throughout the days determine your outcome, who your party members are, and what locations you see. The ending you receive has less to do with the strict "good/bad" mentalities as seen in games like Fable, Infamous, and Mass Effect, and more to do with your perspective on matters. The gravity of your choices, however, run deeps, to the point that your party members can (and sometimes do) leave you because they can't accept your actions.

Graphics/Sound

Ultimately the graphics and sound of this game do not use the DS to its fullest, especially as the game has no touch screen controls whatsoever, but for what they are they're very well-done. The hand-drawn character portraits are crisp, the music is fitting and catchy, but there's absolutely no voice acting. To me this shows Atlus's general mentality about production qualities: make a new IP that's clean and polished, but isn't exactly a filet mignon. Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army, a late-generation PS2 title, is absolutely absent of voice acting as well.

Overall

Devil Survivor has a very delicate and very intelligent balance of complexity, strategy and difficulty to make any fan of RPGs, SRPGs or games-that-make-you-think pick it up at least once, if not the five times required for all of the endings*. On that note, the game does feature a New Game+ mode, and you simply won't complete all of the maintenance one can do in your first playthrough without doing in on purpose -- I mean, sure, you could go ahead and get all your characters to level 100 or whatever but you still wouldn't have access to the ending-specific demons that are unlocked with each ending path, crack every skill, etc. etc. Ultimately the grind is pointless until you need a couple extra Macca to mess around in fusions some more, so don't be too concerned that the game will become a gigantic time sink.

If you're looking for a bit more challenge for your DS and are a fan of any kind of strategy game (hell, I'd count checkers as qualifying here), track down a copy of this game and fire it up.

- E

* This number is probably wrong, it's somewhere in the 4 - 6 range though.

Review: SMT Persona 3 FES

This is going to be really, really, really long. Kind of like the game itself.


I realized last night that I never got around to completing the boss fight for this game, even though I started it about a year ago. I figured it was worth trying to finish a game I had sunk 90 hours into, right?

The premise of the game is the same as the rest of the Persona series: you and a group of people end up with the ability to summon personae, which are like aspects of ones' personality turned into summons. You are special (for reasons not spoiled here) in that you can use many different types of persona, which forms most of the strategy: being well-equipped with a versatile set of persona is more valuable at times than what equipment you're wearing. These basically act as summon spells, except each persona can have up to eight different moves at a time.

The key feature to the game and most post-PS2 era SMT games is a variant on the Press Turn system, which uses elemental strengths and weaknesses to grant extra turns. For example, if I use Wind magic against an enemy weak to Wind, I knock it down and get another turn right there and then. There are different variations on what does and doesn't work, but that's the basic idea. Since persona can have various movesets, the more versatile each persona has (for example, hybrid ice/wind uses are more effective than one guy with four different flavors of fire moves) the more useful they end up being.

Another feature is persona fusion, wherein you can use two or more persona to make new persona. This is a feature that becomes indispensible during the last sections of the game, as sometimes going nuts with fusions for a little bit can yield better results than grinding specific persona. Furthermore you can inherit skills from the fused persona, meaning you can end up with persona that have abilities they wouldn't naturally learn, which is actually what ended up helping me finish the last boss fight.

Finally there are Social Links, where this game usually ends up having a split in the audience. Persona 3 was the first in the series to add interaction with friends and party members in exchange for a boost in fusion powers. Each persona is grouped into one of the 20 major arcana of tarot, with a respective friend/team member representing an aspect of that tarot. One of the first people you end up teaming with, Yukari, is associated with the Lovers arcana. So by going to the movies with her on a day off, you can level up your Lovers arcana (all the way up to level 10), resulting in boosted experience when you fuse persona of the Lovers arcana. Again, the ability to get multiple free levels out of a fusion could mean the difference between spending your time grinding and spending your time winning.

One major complaint among fans is that some of your contacts are female, so the social aspect of the game at times plays like a dating sim. My defense is it's one way for you to establish relationships with other characters, and the idea of making a main character asexual is something that got thrown out of character-driven RPGs a long, long, long, long time ago. Furthermore, the PSP remake of this game will feature a female protagonist, meaning you can get yo mack on with boys if that sort of thing appeals to you.

The other major complaint of the series is that this is the first and only SMT title where you do not control your party members. You can issue general commands, but otherwise they pick their own moves as based on a pretty sophisticated AI. It isn't perfect in that it's not telepathic, but that's kind of the point: the central theme of the game is friendship and trust, and simply put, being able to fully control your party would take away a part of what makes the game special.

I haven't even discussed the story yet, because I want to leave this as spoiler-free as possible, but the basic idea is this: There is a mysterious 25th hour called the Dark Hour that most people can't see: in fact, most of them temporarily transform into the shape of a coffin. The protagonist and the team of persona users named SEES are the only ones immune to this effect, and therefore are charged with figuring out what the hey is going on. Also there's the weird part about how your high school turns into Tartarus, a 200+ floor tower, aka the game's only dungeon. It may seem tedious, but the game takes place over the course of ten months so you'll have plenty of time to get to the top.

Speaking of which: each significant action takes up a set amount of time, meaning you have to budget between raising your personality stats, raising your Social Links, and crawling through Tartarus.

I have written way too much. Let's go to the summaries:

Gameplay: 5

The intricate balance of plot, combat, and friendship is pitch-perfect and shy of the upgrades to the basic systems Persona 4 brought (and ultimately Persona 3 PSP will bring), I would change nothing.

Story: 4

Again, without revealing too much, the game is far more character-driven than story-driven. What central driving plot there is is told well, and is paced in a way that just makes sense. My only problem is that some choice elements weren't as fleshed out as they could be, though those particular plot points weren't in the first release, and were added in for the FES release.

Graphics: 5

All of the character models are detailed perfectly, the personas all look awesome, the settings and structures are evocative of modern-day Japan, and the cinematic sequences are gorgeous without being too anime.

Sound: 5

This is another point where the crowds are split. The music for the most part ends up sounding like a hip-hop/jazz/pop hybrid with lots of Japanese vocals, which will not appeal to everyone. That there's a large variety of battle music, every setting has its own theme, and all of them are memorable more than counteracts that. The soundtrack is not 100% in that it will appeal to everyone, but that it fits what the game is doing.

Oh yeah, and the sound effects are well-done.

Overall: 5

This game took me almost a year and over 90 hours to complete. The reason for the time gap was that I found the final boss battle too difficult at the time, being as this was my first SMT game. I sat the game down, played Persona 4 and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor during my break, picked it back up, and messed with some fusions and ground about three or four levels. I ended up beating the final boss on my first go.

This is a game that requires you fight smart, not strong. There will be fights you have to sit back and heal while you let your team do the damage. There will be fights where you switch to one persona for elemental coverage and then only attack physically because it has an ice affinity and won't learn fire moves. You will die repeatedly. Essentially this game is for people who have worn out the X button, and only the X button, on several controllers. This game is for people who would like having a greater influence on major plot points, say who the main character ends up fooling around with or whether you want to be a dick to everyone you see. This game is for people who would like a challenge, both in the game itself and of their own abilities as players.

Beating that final boss after a year and 90 hours is one of the most rewarding experiences of my gaming history, and I can't wait to load up a New Game+ file.

Final Score: 5 (classic)

- E

re: new releases

+ The goal of this project is to ultimately complete every game in our collection. Normally adding more to the collection would seem counter-intuitive, but considering the volume of new releases vs. the volume of games that have come out over our gaming lifetimes, I think we'll simply have to reach completion by sheer inevitability. So that said, I want to go ahead and post a couple of the titles I'm pretty stoked about for next year:

- Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (DS)
- SMT: Persona 3 (PSP)
- Okamiden (DS)
- Pokemon HeartGold (DS)*
- The Last Guardian (PS3)
- Lost in Shadow (Wii :( )
- Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon (Wii :(( )
- Monster Hunter 3 (-tri) (Wii :((( )

... though that last one, being a console MMO, is outside the scope of this project.

I'm going to have to make Ico and Shadow of the Colossus a priority before June so that The Last Guardian will be feasible. I think I'll take those two on in the months prior, to play them as sort of a trilogy/marathon.

+ Apparently we need a Wii, esp. since we have things on that system that are out and need to play, but aren't on our list since we don't own them yet (the list is short: No More Heroes and Zelda: Twilight Princess are about it).

- E

* A will be getting SoulSilver.