Yes, not sure what Atlus was thinking by making the picture quests mandatory for it. For those that have yet to share the pleasure, these are initially activated once you enter a random unmarked door midway through the game to get the first quest of that line. The others then have to be individually started only by checking a few other random unmarked doors scattered throughout Tokyo, including those you probably have checked out before. Can you tell beforehand that they are quests? Not really, because other random unmarked doors also can have unnamed NPCs of similar designs saying dialogue remarkably similar to theirs for flavour.
I was missing the last one in Tokyo Station, as likely most people did because it is the most bull-shittiest of locations.
I mean, I’m llkely not return for an NG+ run because it does not respect my time so exclusives can be whatever and I’ll ignore them. Huang Long + Metatron are my party solids (Victory Cry on the former, the polar alignment Almighties + Spirit Drain on the latter), Shiva until they run out of MP for Antichthon and Seth for buffs and debuffs. I haven’t wanted to summon more because the other options resistances aren’t as steadfast + resummons get pricey at this level range. Luciferage was already something on the order of 82k.
We have cut a path through heaven without worry, even on the unexpected two-phase boss though the constant shuffle between floor and ceiling started getting irritating. Hell is roughly the same; I suspect these were areas for the Law/Chaos endings that are levelled lower than the Neutral path and definitely not gated by enemies like literal king-of-shit-pile themself Beelzebub.
Found this these neat little Japanese digest videos of the early SMT games. Just scenes from the game set to arranged tracks:
BONUS Linda^3 and Kowloon (九龍妖魔學園紀)
The reason I even found them actually was because I wanted to know if the new cutscenes they added to the PC Engine version of Shin Megami Tensei 1 could be found anywhere on Youtube and turns out they are! As part of a full playthrough…
Well, in case anyone wants to see them (they’re mostly kind of odd) here are the links with timestamps:
Because it took so long to find again (still looking for that one article that praised Persona 2 Innocent Sin’s ending) I’m just gonna post this very pessimistic take on the future of MegaTen (by looking at what made the old ones special):
Also as a PS from recent Twitter postings, Kazuma Kaneko also has a knack for drawing the Funny Animals:
this is the most recent picture of kazuma kaneko that i can find. it dates from the 2017 25th anniversary smt event, though for some reason here he’s on a panel about the lost child, a thoroughly nothing rpg with lore ties to el shaddai for some reason with which as far as i can tell he had no involvement.
2017 is also the year of the most recent drawing of his i can find, this cover for a historical manga about oda nobunaga
i’m curious about this now, as far as i knew previously the consensus optimal strat was to dump points into speed! wondering if this is a pcengine difference and if there are any more
I always did luck then speed. iirc luck helps with evasion, critical hits, status effects and negotiation. Not to mention making the dungeon full of luck tests a breeze.
I’d say at least give it a shot. Since the first hours of the game are probably some of the most memorable you’ll at least get to experience those and can then stop whenever you get bored of it. There’s a pretty big “event” that occurs and caps off the game’s first section which I’d at least want you to get to.
I also remember it being very easy to grind quickly with the right party and using frameskip if necessary.
Use both these patches:
The first is a bugfixed and slightly retranslated version of the original AG which probably since it was such an early work introduced a lot of bugs. The second is an immense QoL update that let’s you access the map by just pressing L.
I doubt you have a 32-bit compatible iOS device lying around so while you can’t play the official English release of it Atlus still created an English manual for that port with information that still applies to the SFC release which should be an alright primer for its systems:
And if you’re just lost I had the most fun by looking through this scanned Japanese strategy guide for the game which has pictures of all the maps which at least gives you a tiny challenge of trying to decipher where you are:
Also good for weapon and demon stats which the SFC version doesn’t always make clear.
EXTRA PROTIP: There is no indication of this from what I remember but when fusing demons you can actually preview right in the menu what the fusion result will be without it having to load the entire stat page by holding Right+R (or maybe it was Left+L or actually both but they did different things?) when selecting the fusion material. Would have saved me some time if I had known about that one…
Go for it. Music in incredible, it has a very unique style and the combat is actually interesting. As Ymer pointed out, its worth getting to the first big ‘event’ that happens. Those first couple of hours are wild and will stick with you.
I still play this game in occasional spurts. Got back to it when they recently had a SMT2 event that featured a few new demons from it (I got none of them…). Barely referenced the game itself though in the story stuff.
The balance is pretty wack, there’s a lot of grinding by just leaving your phone idle, most new demons they release are pretty busted and have depressingly low drop rates but all of them and their spells just look and sound so cool and the music by the Yakuza sound team is pretty good as well.
