She’s gotten all three of the moves separately but never more than two at the same time. Also the same combinations keep showing up which makes me think certain combos don’t happen? Or maybe she’s really really unlucky. Either way this is super depressing and she refuses to give up
the way it works is higher tier skills are less likely to be inherited in general, so if you’re trying to get a bunch of ‘difficult’ to pass along skills you’ll find yourself getting a shitload of really bad skills more often than not. like Analyze.
one of the great joys of the speedrun is when it’s fusing time and very specific skills are needed and he just mashes for like 10 minutes straight because it won’t give him what he wants
and it’s still worth it
there are in fact no fixed combinations and it’s possible to get all three moves you want as long as none of them are blocked b/c of claw stuff as mentioned
it just takes forever and isn’t worth fighting the RNG
my personal rule is that I’ll only re-roll to satisfy “I want these two for sure and any one of these other three,” anything else is too dumb
Yeah picking what skills demons inherit in IV/Final was a major boon. However the idea of not being able to entirely manipulate for an ideal result is still fine with me, as long as you could have some influence. I’ve rerolled some mixes for like 15-20 minutes. I think there are some strict limitations and rules for certain skill passings (aside from physical trait, maybe class or family) but I don’t recall what, maybe it is just a super low % for those higher tier skills.
Well after 20 minutes she finally got the combo she wanted. But it’s helpful to know how that works in the future. Definitely does not seem worth it to fight the rng for three exact moves
Man I want to play this again but I spent so much time getting the true demon ending 7-8 years ago that the thought of starting a new game seems just too daunting.
i beat matador you guys 
by turning the game off
1 Like
if you want to fuse a demon with specific skills playing around with mitamas and elementals is usually the easiest way
I was getting frustrated with kabukicho THEN I went and fused matador and the rest went prettttty quick
[details=words melting together, repeating themselves ]smt fusion being arbitrary and frustrating and spoiler heavy both fulfill occultist mystique and the eventual effectiveness of technology automating the process. a friend of mine dropped out of Strange Journey over it (well, also how low enemy danger becomes in most smt outside of Nocturne and the Devil Survivors, ).
things started budging around Strange Journey (altered-demon passwords, only game to actually acknowledge fusion at all in-plot), got actually usable around Devil Survivor (two three-slot selectable options with a few mostly-unignorable presets, reversed Fusion search interface, requiring larger groups of demons), exploded in IV (eight skills with no slot limitations), and most recently tried to band-aid that in IV Apocalypse (per-demon per-skill-family mp use affinities).
in Nocturne this was treated much more video-game-ily, with stuff like having to dungeon delve for Pierce and invisible rules for possible inheritance, plus had even more difficulty finding things due to the half-sized roster that couldn’t spam the old art assets as the portable games eventually did. in exchange it actually has style and tone in its writing, and also it’s less crucially optimal to rotate out every demon over and over and over. where the hell is an actually playable SMT fangame made by people without stockholm syndrome.[/details]
2 Likes
i really love how obscure and overcomplicated fusion is in Nocturne, and how many neat little easter eggs it has (see a post of mine in the recent “obscure rpg mechanics” thread), and don’t even mind the frustration of re-rolling for skills. It fits that later games simplified and streamlined those mechanics, and it makes them go down smoother as gaming experiences, but i think in a way Nocturne’s style of fusion – and its other punishing mechanics like magatama and MC death = game over and its variable talk options and etc. – these are crucial to Nocturne, the type of atmosphere it’s presenting and what kind of game it wants to be. SMT used to a deliberately hard-to-grasp and resolutely niche series; SMT3 was the last scion of that approach, and on balance, certainly the best.
The funny thing is that it’s also a weirdo outlier for a main SMT – DDS1 and 2 are honestly closer to it than SMT4 or any of the (S)NES games, and they’re pretty different in key ways of their own. The SMT old guard used to talk about embracing a “punk” spirit and trying to buck trends in other RPGs, and in doing that most confidently within their own series, they captured lightning in a bottle.
2 Likes
I’m actually starting to feel powerful at this point, I wonder what the game will do to me next
kishin have been extremely good to me
i gave the matador fight a couple more shots because lol
his target-all force attack can wipe my lvl 18 demifiend from full health, even with the hifumi magatama equipped
cool
yeah maybe hard was a bad idea, I definitely got past that fight at ~16.
my biggest problem with this game is my same complaint about all PS2 RPGs, the level geometry isn’t really interesting enough to justify not being 2D and the behind the shoulder camera is a step down from PS1 stuff BUT the game isn’t so slow that it really bothers me.
and they do create some really interesting framing just often enough, like in nihilo
i’ve been up for 27 hours video games are so stupid i’m going to bed
oh good now I have a daisoujou
He’s awesome, and tends to get an extended party pass cuz of those SKILLS and innates resists/reflects/etc. Damn I love dem fiends.
2 Likes
This literally can’t be happening – Hifumi blocks all force damage. You might be mixing it up w/ his sword attack?
i think you should put the game down for a week and restart on normal, he’s tough enough on that difficulty and this game should not be such a pain in the ass to play (like im sure mothmans right and it levels off over time, but if youre not enjoying yourself now who gives a crap). Either way i can give u some PROTIPS just LMK
2 Likes
had to refuse it later in the game for debilitate but this last playthrough i used daisoujou all the way to the tde boss
highly recommend getting the black frost from the third kalpa, it’ll join for free regardless of your level and has a fuckin’ ton of resistances, you can wait until you’re high enough level to fuse mitamas to it for some Good Skills (i.e debilitate) but even if you don’t it’ll still be a useful press turn sponge
white rider is kicking my ass