GoldenRakshasa wrote: ↑Tue Jan 25, 2022 6:33 am
My bad. I guess I should have put it into an existing thread. I don't really know how to classify this game though. JRPG doesn't seem quite right, but it does share many aspects.
Dungeon Crawler, Blobber, that's what this thread seems to be. You could prob just bring up any niche relatively unknown Japanese titles since I saw you bring up Monark in another thread which was a game I looked into ever since I found out about it through amazon. (I have to buy a new mac charger, but I figure I'll get some games that I can't find in stores like Akibas Trip while I'm at it.)
As for SMTV, I really loved the game, but you're right about that. They just kind of tried to open-world-ify it because that's the fad (I think the only open world game I actually like is Xenoblade X). The few dungeons that were there were almost pointless. I basically played the game mainly fighting only bosses and doing the quests. It was a pretty big contrast to say, Nocturne where managing the party and your MP while going through dungeons was essential.
Not just Nocturne, SMT in general. SMT games started out as Wizardry clones, and it's that adherence to classic style Wizardry (the first 3 games. Later wizardry titles were more like an openworld dungeon crawl similar to Dragon Quest 3.) that I expect from a mainline SMT game. SMT5 is basically a sidegame with the budget of a main game. They were most likely going for another Persona 3, where P3 eventually took over the identity of the entire Persona series. At least with Persona, it never really had a defined identity to begin with until P3. The previous Persona games basically felt like spin-offs of Shin Megami Tensei If, to the point that they're even part of the same timeline.
I'm probably the last remaining remnant of the original SMT internet community whose still barely on internet. (I only post here & at imageboards. I'll sometimes troll a bit on gamefags, which feels like a battle ground between imageboards & resetera.)
Everyone else from the classic SMT community prob just got too old and stopped caring about video games.
Last I heard, they moved over to Arlus, but that's nearly a decade and a half ago. They're just the Atlus official forum regulars though, whom I never got along with at all mainly coz they had their own gatekeepers who have always hated me for some reason.
The official Atlus forum crew were different from the groups that I was a part of.
The SMT community originally came from BBS & other 90s era tech that 90s & early 2000s Megaten constantly makes references to. Especially the SMT IF timeline games which include Devil Summoner, Soul Hackers & the Persona 1, Persona 2 Duology games. Ironically, both Persona 2 games were hinting at the post modernist reality we live in now, where reality is shaped and dictated by rumors & hearsay spread through cellphones & social media. P2 used late 90s tech though, so their form of social media was anonymous bbs bulletins & flipphones, lol.
The SMT fanbase were already in their 40s & 50s by the time Nocturne came out. That's part of the reason why Nocturne flopped. The audience that made SMT popular in Japan to begin with, were just far too old to give a shit about Devil May Cry Dante and all of this other 'modern' (2003era) gaming nonsense. I was still a teen or barely an adult at the time, but even I moved on from SMT shortly after Persona 3 & 4 which were even more 'modernized' than Nocturne, Raido & DDS were.
The OG fanbase focused more on SMT's occultism & mythos far moreso than the modern fanbase does.
The modern fanbase wastes far too much time debating over the completely uninteresting conflict of Law vs Chaos and how Neutral is always the most sensible option.
While I agree that within the context of Megashit games, that Neutrality is the best option. That's more due to god awful writing rather than a choice made through logic & facts. Rather it's a choice that's forced upon you.
I was arguing about this choice with Krizz at the Nintendo thread. Yes his arguments make sense but I disagree with them, because they only make sense when taken from the perspective of SMT5's authors. Who imo, are nowhere near as well-read as Ryutaro Ito from the first two SMT games. Strange Journey is prob the only semi-recent SMT game where the writing quality is almost up to par with the SNES originals but that's due to Strange Journey being the last game that still had remnants of the original SMT crew working on the game. Nocturne actually had a different team altogether who are largely the same people who did SMT5 which is why the games share thematic elements that I just have never liked.
Such as this insistence of Demi Devil Human hybrids. While sure the Nahobino is a resurrected God of sorts (Which Krizz has interpreted as Jesus. I disagree coz Jesus is just a human, deified as a god 400 years after his death.), I feel that these Devil God hybrid protags completely misses the intention of what the classic Megaten games were, where you were just a guy with a gun, paired up with an occultist female who get pulled into a conflict between demons vs angels after a Goddess figurehead gets sacrificed to free up enough energy for these mythical beings to cross over & redigitize themselves on to our physical plane.
This created a sense of urgency, where you must learn how to adapt to your surroundings, in order to survive.
The actual dungeon layouts themselves were alien in nature with the first two games using dungeon design that looked similar to a 1980s interpretation of what futurized computer technology would look like.
One of the few genius things that SMT3 did was to reverse course on the futurism and bring the world back to how the ancients may have viewed their surroundings with dungeons which are completely governed by fractal shapes with half of the dungeons reassembling an Astral plane instead of the Earthly environments that they were supposed to represent.
The classic SMT games had this feeling of you being just a dude with a gun, who had to resort to calling on powers greater than himself which eventually results in you choosing a side between the factions in order to make it to the end. SMT2 even makes it clear to you that the SMT1 protagonist chose Neutrality, which in SMT2 actually resulted in a much more tyrannical world that's completely under the rule of a Catholic-like authority, with a Jewish god ruling dominion over all due to how he's empowered by peoples' belief in his omnipotence.
Whereas SMT3 & 5's Demon/God protags have you functioning more as a God entity yourself who tips the scales of the conflict towards one of the 3 braindead factions that you're given.
This is just the philosophical differences of the SMT games, I'll get to the gameplay part later.
Nes Megaten games basically just followed the outline of the novel. Although they too had a more survival aspect to them. You actually get your entire arm bitten off by a demon during Megami Tensei 2 NES. In the pc game, the lead heroine gets raped & eaten by demons and it's actually shown to you through drawn cutscenes. Or maybe it was the goddess figure since every main SMT game has a goddess figure who gets murdered during the story, even SMT5 had one, except she resurrects as an Angel and joins your party for a bit.
The following quote is something I saw you say in another thread, but it relates more to this thread so I'm posting a reply here.
I'm actully a big megaten fan. I think SMT V is actually great, and if you play it like I did at least, then I think it offers a good challenge. The game has a lot of quality of life changes that people seemed to bitch about it being made easier but I think it actually had decent balance. That said, I played on hard and was always underleveled compared to the bosses. That's key, as for whatever stupid reason levels matter a lot in the game and if you get too high it just becomes piss easy. I think they fucked that up. Game has like no postgame though and I'm not paying for the dlc.
For comparison, I also played Nocturne (on hard) for the first time last year and I think V is harder except for maybe a couple of bosses in Nocturne. It's pretty different though. In V, I basically just fought bosses and rarely did random battles, while in Nocturne, the difficulty came from staying alive through the dungeons where random battles were unavoidable. Both games require strategy in different ways with a different focus to the gameplay.
For V though, I just find the loop of getting to a boss, getting wiped in a turn or two, adjusting your team and then finally overcoming that boss to be extremely satisfying. If you grind levels though, you just ruin it, which is what I imagine most people did (if they even played on hard). I mean, this is a series where I actually use everything they give me as opposed to many games where you won't use items or half the skills you have.
That actually sounds much more like Pokemon than it does a SMT game. In Pokemon games, the entire gameplay flow revolves around bosses that you have to defeat because they impede your path.
You defeat them by collecting or evolving stronger pokemon, and devising pokemon teams to take down rival pokemon teams. The entire Pokemon postgame even revolves around you forging ultimate teams to pit against other human player controlled trainers. You only waste time on random battles to recruit more pokemon or to make them evolve. You don't really need to do any random battles at all, save for the ones who block your path.
This is basically Shin Megami Tensei 5's game structure, it's just an Edgelord version of Pokemon.
Exclusive to a system that sells Pokemon, lol. (That's a death sentence imo. Don't ever go toe to toe with Pokemon on Pokemon's home turf.)
Which is why ancient fans like myself who were playing SMT games since the 90s aren't too fond with the changes.
(I'm still only in my 30s though. The real og SMT fans were playing them since the 80s, and are prob 60s or 70 something yrs old now lol. Those classic games appealed to a much older crowd.)
I don't play SMT games to just walk up to rival gyms and destroy their gym leaders. (I'm using Pokemon terminology to prove a point.) I liked them for that slow descent to insanity that SMT1,2,IF, 3 Nocturne, & Strange Journey all had. Where the dungeons seemingly go on forever and half of the traps make no damn sense at all. You kept preserving though, just to make it to the end. No matter which ending you get.
When I first played Nocturne in Japanese, I got the worst ending, which was also the most boring ending. I didn't get to rebirth the world with a philosophy at all. The final boss even taunted me for being just a stupid reactionary animal who killed off the other factions who actually had goals & dreams.
I was going for the Yuko ending (which is labeled as Neutral, but in reality it's actually the Jesus Christ navigating humanity behind the veil ending.) but I fucked up.
I even fuck up her ending all the time when playing in English, because you walk the fine line of screwing up and getting the worst ending. It's the hardest ending to get imo. Even harder than True Demon Lucifer ending.
May I add, I am not at all a fan of SMT5's true ending where they combine Lucifer & Neutral into the same ending. Yakumo comes off as Gnostic or a Jesus-like figure because he never once believes anything that's told to him. He always searches for the truth veiled behind the lies. We don't finally understand this though until after he's been killed & Nu Wa reveals to you his intention all along. Which shows that he figured a way outside of the False Oppositions that the SMT games always enforce upon you.
Too bad SMT5's writers are so incoherent that they ruin what could've been a decent plot by making Lucifer the Jesus-like figure.
It doesn't help that Lucifer is always playing the role of Sophia in the SMT games. Sophia is the main goal of Gnosticsm, to return to Sophia, a return to Wisdom. Sophia is actually a character in SMT5 but all she does is manage the demon compendium, ayy lmao.
It's as though atlus just randomly picked an entity out of a bag and chose her to do menial tasks when the entire SMT5 plot should've revolved around her or have her suddenly appear to awaken humanity like Lucifer did.
I also like SMT4/Apocalypse whatever it's called, but that game is in some weird middleground where it's halfway modern, halfway classic. Probably why SMT5 is much more popular than 4.)
Haven't played it yet, but looking forward to trying it out. I'm actually still only part way through XB1 which I need to get back onto.
I finally played Xenogears a couple of years ago and holy crap, did it live up to it's reputation. I don't think there's much else out there like it. I also loved XBX. Definitely need to try out Xenosaga too at some point.
I played Xenogears as a kid, and I didn't understand shit about the plot lol. It was actually a post by Krizz that made me finally understand it. I still thought the plot was stupid, but I was finally able to admit that the plot made sense within the context of the game. It wasn't until much later when I played the Xenoblade 2 games that the whole Gnostic theme of the Xeno games finally became much more apparent to me.
(XB2 & Torna are actually two different games with completely different combat systems, but they share some of the same characters and functions as a prequel to XB2.)
Xb2 & Xb1 both take elements from Xenogears but they focused the plot on certain aspects from Xenogears rather than trying to make one large game out of all of its ideas.
XB1 is a generic standard take on Gnosticism. I won't elaborate since you seemed to have not finished that game yet. I'll just say that any plot that follows a basic Gnostic philosophical perspective would hit them just as straightforwardly as Xenoblade 1 did.
XB2 was quite different because that game is saying that the Demiurge doesn't necessarily have to be evil.
It's just the entity that created the world you're standing in, but he is not the All-Creator god.
You never see the All Creator in any Xeno game, or even interact with it.
Except for Xenogears which did have an energy wave of consciousness that described itself as a creator.
XB2 somewhat references that Miang plot line from Xenogears where she engineers human civilization only to later destroy it, and sacrifice it to Deus. I'd elaborate but it's spoiler territory. I hated XB2 up until I got to that part and was like damn I wasn't expecting any of this. Although Xenoblade X's characters (which isn't related to the Xb games yet.) seemed to have come from a similar civilization & setting.
XB2 expanded on the Church plot from Xenogears. A lot of Americans read this as anti-Christian when the games are actually saying that the Church themselves are fake cristturds. There's even a convo that mimics the Palestinian Israeli conflict and I was amazed by how smart Rex's and co's take were on it.
Instead of doing the stupid "American Cuckservative I side with Israel or American LOLberal
I side with Palestine" crap. How the XB2 cast rationalize it, is that they believe it's a conflict that's used & profited off of, by political actors and factions who wish to use the plights of many for their individual gain.
I can't even link to you directly to the cutscene in question coz nobody posted that exact scene. It's the scene that plays when you're about to enter the cathedral.
It appears that most gamers don't really understand the subtext of the conversation lol.
That's some surprisingly smart & astute observations coming from a game that's constantly lambasted as brainless tits & ass, lol.
As I said though, barely nobody actually talks about XB2 at all during XB2 internet conversations.
I even see a lot of people call it a Movie game with no gameplay which is hilarious to me coz I played it for 400 something hours and only about 30 of those hours were story related lol.
I'm not a Gnostic btw. (That's Xed.) It's just my understanding of it from what I played from vidya games, and from what I've read in pdfs.
I can understand that. It is heavy on dialogue scenes which are kinda on a visual novel level. I don't think it's too bad as you go through the dungeons, but the beginning and end of each chapter definitely have a lot of talking.
It's probably like Cyber Sleuth where the story eventually gets much more interesting as the game plays on.
I was bored as fuck by Digimon's story until the Eaters finally show up and its revealed that Digimon aren't man-made computer programs at all. They're actually living beings from another world and that world is slowly eating up our reality, to either merge with ours or replace it.
It would be good to have it on switch to give more people a chance to play it, but I don't know if it's likely to happen.
Have you played Undernauts Labyrinth of Yomi?
That game's plot sounds amazing. It reminds me of the actual temple excursions which go on in Antartica to this very day, where Big Corporations just send in random people to die inside of the temples while searching for whatever the fuck they're searching for.
I love the character creator, it reminds me of a much more advanced version of Laplace No Ma.
I like that the player picked the grizzled protag coz it's who I would've picked too. Either him or the female.
