seconding strange journey
I never got around to finishing SMT4 (some dayā¦!) but the removal of VIT as a stat seemed to make everyone immediately squishier. Or rather, the player has fewer options to reduce the damage they take/increase their health. Interesting pacing choice.
Yeah iām with mothman on Strange Journey. Itās got a good story (SMT meets The Thing basically) and the progression loop is pitch-perfect, solid dungeon crawling. But it does a lot of little things iām not into, once again in a seeming effort to do things differently from the last game ā unfortunately that last game was Nocturne which did everything right for me.
i am having a great time with SMT4, though it feels kind of shallow. Itās very easy, as said above, and the story and characters arenāt as intriguing as they first seem. It starts to feel a bit rote once alignments really become obvious. Walter is mostly my dude in a big way though, his stance of āthe world is fucked up bad and iām gonna do something about it even if that means tearing it all downā really rings true for me due to uhhh, everything happening in reality right now!!
i loved Persona 4 when i played it 6 years ago, but 26-year-old me is a very different person from 20-year-old me and i have the feeling iād find the squickier aspects of the characterization hard to deal with now (thereās been good discussion of that on this incarnation search for Persona 4 and have a look. Plus thereās a thread for it right now!).
edit: so basically SJ for good dungeon crawling and story, SMT4 for overall satisfying play, P4 for a little bit of both with an extra heap of problematic anime poured on top. Also DDS if you just want Nocturne with no fusion and a Final Fantasy plot/sphere grid.
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fyi, if you intend on emulating strange journey(or most other atlus ds games of that era; i actually quite like devil survivor!), it has the desmume bug which causes textures to be misaligned in software rendering.
i have a (partial) fix for this if you feel like compiling it yourself
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thanks! I did have to build desmume myself at one point because the preexisting debs were really poorly optimized so Iām totally willingā¦
is the bug still present in hardware rendering? b/c Iād assume Iām using that by default
does anyone rep Devil Survivor? i think iām probably just nostalgic for that because itās the first smt game i actually played.
i havenāt played Devil Survivor (really want to!) but i was considering suggesting it to Felix since SMT x tactics RPG sounds like a damn solid combo and iāve never heard a bad word about it. Probably better than any of those other choices TBH.
my first SMT was this!:
It plays really bad (a shitty Dragon Quest knockoff w/ fusions and hyper-simplified negotiation) but a cute little curio. Also the soundtrack is hot as hell.
Between this game and Revelations: Persona it seems like Revelations was briefly kicked around as the English name for Megatens? Which, letās be real, would have been a pretty sick name and probably more relevant to the series cosmology than Shin Megami Tensei is.
DS SRPGs tended to be extremely not great
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probably the exact reason why i liked it so much, i was looking for an srpg for ds and stumbled upon an smt game that sorta fit and was maybe better than anything else in that genre on the console
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actually do not remember but feel like it did still exist.
i will!
the first game, at least. the second one is pure garbage that failed to understand anything that it did right and basically tried to be persona. it had a rad soundtrack from the romancing saga guy though.
as srpgs go itās not especially complicated but you are definitely going to be focusing on party composition as you need to summon quite a lot of demons in SMT fame, and itās fairly difficult as the genre goes.
but the story partās what it does well. you are on a strict time schedule and everything you do, including talk to people or make decisions, passes time and affects the story. characters live or die depending on what you do, and youāre unlikely to save all of them on your first playthrough without spoilers. thereās no alignment but the 7(!) possible ending paths available vary greatly based on your story decisions. the Bad Ending is always available, though.
the characters are very anime but tend to veer towards āwe are all in way over our headsā rather than stoic superheroes.
also Lucifer casts Megidolaondyne because heās an asshole.
Never touched Persona 4 but I honestly feel like 5 to 10 hours of both SJ and SMT4 will be more enjoyable and informative than slogging through either till the end.
I feel that way about most SMT games besides Nocturne I think?
can the strange journey fans elaborate???
@felix theyāre all going to be a letdown after nocturne, iād say iv but itās considerably more anime than nocturne and has weird pacing so iām not sure how youād feel about it
it does have a great soundtrack & the fusion system has no rng and a fancy search function
smt1 is also good but the best english version of it looks like this:
Yeah with SMT1 itās SNES or bust.
The music is terrible in most of the ports and the re-worked graphics generally look gross. The problem with the original is how obtuse the game is with respect to stat management, fusion, demon abilities etc. Even new equipment fails to show stat changes in the ābuyā menu. This was fixed in the ports I think (not sure about Sega CD and PCE though). Plus the ludicrous encounter rate.
Still one of my favorites though.
If you can read basic Japanese the SNES and GBA port are your best bets. I hear the translation patch introduced some bugs that may or may not be game breaking.
i thought the ps1 port of smt1 looked okay personally. personal vote is the gameās kind of hard to play without a speedup key of any sort though.
my favorite thing about smt1 is that thereās a bug where hama resistance is given by any equipment, so if you play naked you can be killed by a thing which supposedly canāt kill humans (the demifiend is not human so he doesnāt count, or maybe heās vulnerable because he canāt wear any equipment beyond his sexy pants)
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wait does the demifiend wear cutoffs in every game
I just assumed that was a weird nocturne thing
the protagonist of each smt game is different, not the same person
theyāre normal humans in the first two smt games and in sj
well, as ānormalā as literal godkillers can be
Yeah the PS1 version doesnāt look too bad but the music suffers.
My main reason for recommending the SNES and GBA are primarily to run in emulators with fast forward keys. Even with auto battle things get out of control pretty quickly. Maybe the GBA port actually changed the encounter rate settings?
the best thing about telling people to play with speedup keys is not telling them about girimehkala
because you will hear them swearing about it most likely at some point
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it did yeah
thatās where i was coming from re: my post that the ios version is the best english release, itās based on the gba port (though has the ps1 music) and has a far lower encounter rate than the snes rom
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Yep I got screwed over by autobattle a number of times. The great thing about the SMT series is how youāre never entirely safe.