the end of MegaTen as we know it

[Felix]

next time they reboot mortal kombat they should add a finishing move called intersectionality

[Felix]

you can impale someone on literal bell hooks

[haley]

the only selling point of this game for me was that it’s the first megaten ive seen with a gender select so the fact that they still fucked it up is a good punchline

[Tuxedo]

There should be some equipment differences between genders, it’s a staple of oldschool Megaten

Usually the girl gets spells but I guess that’s out when she’s the protag

[Raziel]

vit/HP stat is for noobs anyway

[idiot]

so is this any good
and how long is it assuming i get through these things relatively quickly and have smt experience

[villain]

it’s ok. it’s a sidestory and it definitely shows.

i like that they have these wall adapters attached to their arms:

[sleepysmiles]

having watched let’s plays of If… it looks cool and also looks like it gets fucking intolerable to play by the end. but really, what SMT games wouldn’t that describe

[villain]

snes9x’s tool for creating cheats is perfect for when you get frustrated with an SNES SMT game. also made these trying to figure out a way to remove the gender gimp (didn’t come up with anything).

Equipment ignores your gender
00C2D100

Change protagonist’s gender
7E100600 - Male
7E100601 - Female (-5HP for Heroine + Partners)

[villain]

thought this was funny:

Interviewer : Is Kuzunoha Kyouji’s appearance inspired by Lupin the Third?
Kaneko: It’s one of the inspirations, yes. In my mind, Kyouji’s appearance was a mix of the first animated Lupin the Third, the TV version of “Detective Story”, “Ace Ventura Pet Detective” and the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Detective” from “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane”.

Interview : About the arm terminal…The Megaten world has got an unexpectedly technologically advanced society and yet the hardware and the monitor are linked through a cable. Why?
Kaneko : That is in order to avoid electronic jamming. Having a cable will reduce the risks of getting hacked. Apparently PHS and microwaves are bad for the brain…but oh weeell, I didn’t really think about it (laughs).

[sleepysmiles]

i wanna gush about how Nocturne handles random encounters. If you have not played it: you have 2 gauges on the screen when you’re wandering around between encounters

the one in the upper left is the phase of Kagatsuchi, who is a divine sun god that burns at the center of the vortex world that Nocturne takes place in, and is also the final boss of the game. He has 8 phases of brightness that affect various other mechanics (my favorite being that at 8/8 or FULL Kagatsuchi, demons are intoxicated by his blinding light, fighting at full strength and talking/acting like they’re fucking wasted). The phases move from NEW (0/8) to FULL every 20 or so steps you take.

the one in the lower right is your compass, but the pulsing light within displays various colors depending on how close you are to getting in a battle. when it’s blue there’s 0% chance of being attacked, from green to yellow there’s a low-moderate chance, and when it’s red you have a high chance of being attacked.

This normally increases with every step, but! you also gain access to spells and items that either raise or lower the encounter rate. Lowering it forces the encounter gauge to be green/yellow most of the time, and will even jump back from red danger to green-yellow. Raising it means you are yellow-red most of the time, and get into encounters every couple steps. These spells/items are timed by Kagutsuchi’s phases; they reset at each NEW Kagutsuchi. so you have a very clear picture of when you’re either safe, or wildly less safe

On top of this: there’s a chance that extra groups of enemies will attack within a single battle after you destroy the first wave (this is a thing in Megaten and afaik is unique among JRPGs). When the encounter rate is up, your chance of fighting extra waves also goes up

SO it’s both very easy to limit your encounters in Nocturne (which is often helpful because the natural encounter rate is pretty high), and easy to grind for experience/money as well as find more demons to contract. AND you can set the duration of the encounter effect to your comfort because of how predictable the Kagutsuchi phases are.

very extremely good game

[villain]

https://twitter.com/RetroTranslator/status/1070877055636582400

[villain]

Majin Tensei II: Spiral Nemesis

[villain]

the protagonist looks like bill pullman.

i wish your units didn’t all look exactly the same on the screen, though.

This guy has some collar.

I love the battle screens.

[villain]

also, majin tensei ii’s box art is definitely among the raddest of box arts.

[villain]

this isn’t going to be useful to 99% of people, but i wanted to give myself a specific item in the 3DS version of Soul Hackers, and there was only a code to give you every item. I didn’t want every item, I wanted just one specific item. So, I decided to make the code, but in the process of trying to get the item I wanted, I wound up logging the value of every item in the game, so here are patch codes for every item in the 3DS version of Soul Hackers in case you’re emulating the game in Citra and want an item.

i also discovered several items had name changes. the Ruger P95DC became just “9mm Pistol”, Benelli M1590 became “12-gauge Semi”, Mossberg became “12-gauge Pump”, SPAS15 became “12-gauge Combat”, Ingram M10 became “.45 Auto Pistol”, Nambu Type 100 became “8mm SMG”, et cetera. Changing them is understandable, but it’s kind of disappointing they didn’t come up with parody names.

“Jabar Foot” probably should’ve been “Jabbar Foot”.

[anothersphere]

You’ve made me want to go back and finish Soul Hackers through this and the screenshots thread but there’s just so much older MegaTen I’ve yet to exp. The third or fourth sequence where you switch to the secondary crew I got sidetracked.

Really leaning towards SMT II, never touched it.

[villain]

2 didn’t stick out as much to me as 1 and then 3 did. But you’ll understand some of the references littered throughout the later games, especially 3, if you did. It plays smoother than 1, but it doesn’t have that suburban cyberpunk feel like 1 and 3 do. it has the best Chaos and disco themes in the entire franchise, though. and the orchestral arrange album that came out when the game did somehow turned out very good and is worth listening to even if you wind up not liking the game’s OST (just leave it on in the background sometime). also, beth is one of my favorite character designs (PSX version / SNES version / Blue and Green (Should Not Be Seen (At Least Not Together)) Concept version) in the franchise. she looks so rad.

soul hackers is rad, though. i love playing a game about hackers with weird science-style hacking scenes but without having to actually do any hacking. also, difficulty-wise, if shin megami tensei are marlboro reds (or camel turkish royals), and persona are marlboro lights (or camel turkish silvers), then this would be marlboro mediums (or camel turkish golds).

[villain]

also:

fuuuck yeah.

[idiot]

soul hackers is the most vaporwave game, love the soundtrack

not into smt2, it reminded me of msx metal gear 2 in that there’s an enormous amount of backtracking around the same two or three areas before you do anything interesting and i always drop off halfway through