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Music and stuff

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Still dreaming that one day namco/monolithsoft will drop a *massive* game remaking/completing the Xenosaga vision as the 6-episode epic originally envisioned by the series' authors.

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Global Warming through GameFAQs Polls of the Day

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Dragon Quest II

Well, it's been a while since I wrote a review on something. I've played a number of games in the meantime, but none of them really gave me anything I felt was worth talking about or that hasn't been talked about before, so I just keep them in the backburner of my mind for possible future reference.

However, I feel like current circumstances make for a good time to dig up one of the games I wanted to share my thoughts on for a long time, and that I had beaten before even writing the first review I've ever "published". That game is Dragon Quest II.

Part of the reason why I held off on it for so long is that I don't think my review of the first game is all that great, and another part is that, again, I don't feel like I've bunched up enough good stuff to say, even though I really wanted to talk about it ever since I played it.

But hey, by far and wide my post popular post is technically related to Dragon Quest II, so why not cut to the chase and do it, right?

Anyway, to say that the first game took off in popularity is an understatement, it being the seminal harbinger of an entire genre of gaming that would soon take the world by storm. You would think that means this would be the time-old tale of "runaway success game making company executives pressure developers into slaving away at a sequel with suffocating deadlines". However, planning for DQII apparently began before DQI was released. 1986 was a different time, I guess. A time when the industry was fledgling enough that it wasn't that much more than a group of dudes banding together to bring an idea to life, and then - not a moment of hesitation after that idea comes to fruition - immediately start brainstorming ways in which they can build on it to give birth to new, more complex explorations of the concepts they had just tackled.

I believe this is why it's good to go back and play these games in their original versions, in chronological release order. Nowadays, it's virtually impossible to innovate. Back then, almost every big-time franchise was always finding ways to breathe fresh air into the structure of their games. Though Dragon Quest isn't the most innovative when compared to the likes of Final Fantasy, they were still making great strides into the codification of the type of game they had pioneered. With that knowledge in mind, one can really appreciate the evolution by going back and exploring these things as they grew with the times. And hey, Final Fantasy still wasn't around by the time DQII came out, so once again, they had to rely on ideas from western RPGs they liked.

In my opinion, II is the first jRPG that actually feels good to play, if you can put yourself into the mindset of an 80's gamer. The designers felt the 1v1 battles of the first title were boring - a sentiment which I share - and put in different groups of enemies as well as extra party members for you to find. One thing that some of these old RPGs that only let you target a group of enemies does is drawing only one enemy sprite on-screen to represent the entire group. Surprisingly, this game does not do that, even though it predates all the ones that do. It draws every enemy on-screen, which doesn't seem like much nowadays, but it's very appreciated nonetheless. Sure, it came at the cost of battle backgrounds (all fights in this game are set against pure blackness), but they did the right thing. The party itself follows what would become a typical archetype of 3-person groups: One character who is a jack-of-all-stats, balanced between physical prowess and magic, one who is focused on physical combat (in this game, this character actually has no magic capabilities whatsoever), and one who is a pure mage. Perhaps surprisingly, because these structures hadn't become tropes yet, the main character is the physical one, and he's also pretty much the most reliable party member by a reasonable margin, even though all he can do is attack normally. Balance issues aside (we'll talk about that later), I honestly sort of dig this arrangement. It's a little bit of a breath of fresh air to see the main character in an RPG rely completely on his weapons, and in the future, in any DQ title that has a reasonable degree of character customization, I always try to make the protagonist a physical powerhouse, to match the one from this game. It hardly ever works, but hey, it just goes for show that I enjoyed it while playing. Given that the other party members join you as you progress through the game at specific points, that also means the complexity of magic spells is added to your arsenal slowly, getting you used to it without feeling overwhelming. Sure, the game is simple enough that it wouldn't be overwhelming regardless of how they had set up the pacing, but I never felt like any of the times I struggled were because of insufficient knowledge of the game mechanics. So, the battles are fun enough, and they feel just right in terms of complexity vs. focus. The strategies to win are simple - really, the whole game is very simple - but it does its job well, and it allowed the developers to have near-perfect control of the game's difficulty curve. As a result, it is also - almost up to the end of the game - pretty nice, even if the whole thing is on the challenging end of things. At the end, it gets... A little special. We'll get to that later.

Let's take a step back and look at the gameplay outside battles. First of all, the story is... sparse, to say the least. Not as much as the one in the first game, and supplemented in the international version by a frankly kick-ass introduction that gives the experience a certain tone and atmosphere I appreciate a lot, but still, it's 1987. jRPGs were... not so much about the story back then, if you can believe that. In fact, they were more like an extension of a point-and-click adventure game. DQII is, essentially, a big fetch quest. In a different story, one that has enough plot points that you can sense a type of underlying narrative progression, I would not enjoy having the game interrupted by a blatant collectathon. However, the fetch quest aspect is basically the soul of this entire game. The extremely loose story paves the way for an experience that boils down to pure exploration and combat, with light elements of puzzle-solving woven in, using the fetch quest premise simply as a background to leave the developers with fertile soil to plant their little tricks and enigmas without worrying too much about how it would all connect rationally. And here, we witness an aspect of old games that could only spring about as a byproduct of limited graphics, ill-defined representations of the setting's reality, and a healthy disregard for common sense, things that were the style at the time. The puzzles, and sometimes just the exploration, violate logic quite heavily. Traversing through a monster-infested castle to get to a point that is technically outside the castle, but you can't just walk around it because most of the outside grass tiles are exit tiles that warp you back to the world map? Sure, why not? Having dedicated "teleport-room" maps that only serve the explicit purpose of housing a teleporter to another part of the world, except for one which also houses a chest with an essential item if you walk along the right border of the map, but not the identical-looking left one? Mario 2 hid a goal post inside a secret too, so yeah! Throw that in! Stairs down in a brick islet surrounded by water which brings you to a room that's... Also at water level? We hardly have enough tiles to go around, let alone a set to represent underwater or underground rooms, so whatever! Nobody cares! And, honestly, I truly don't care, either. If a game is up to, let's say, willfully forgo a bit of logic in order to formulate a creative puzzle to play around with your expectations, then all the more power to it. I honestly feel like puzzles nowadays are too sectioned-off, contained within a single room in a single dungeon, ready for the player to walk in, solve it, move on to the next point in the flowchart and never think about it twice. When puzzles are woven in so closely with the world, requiring the player to think outside the box at all times, as they're out there exploring, it makes the whole game feel like it's working together to make a point, and helps reduce that feeling one gets when playing RPGs where there are very separate elements of gameplay that... Don't really connect to each other very well. Sure, you're blatantly aware you're playing a videogame at all times, and it's not super great for immersion, but this was a time when there just... wasn't enough memory for immersion. It was a constraint that naturally gave way to challenges that capitalized on its own limitations, and therefore, created a type of immersion of its own, where the player is completely sucked into their own thoughts, holding a notebook with a rough sketch of the world map in their hand (yeah, I might have done that), taking notes and thinking where in the world could that last crest possibly be?! I think DQII hit that sweet spot of looseness vs. clarity in the narrative that helped these wild, nonsensical elements flourish. I really don't know how other people react to this sort of thing, but I don't care. I had a good time with it, and soon after this game, everything RPG started to become more focused on story. That's definitely not a bad thing, but I felt a kind of clear, developer-to-player kind of communication from these small bits of wrongness that made me more aware of the time, effort and creativity put into it by the people who were making it. I realized that, were I in the shoes of the dude who was making all this crazy stuff, I'd be stoked to see my friends trying to solve them. I'm not trying to be sentimental, that's how I honestly felt while playing that part with the teleporter and the chest. In any case, I appreciated it.

Then you get to the road to Rhone.

Though, apparently, the game was not pressured into deadlines by higher-ups, I did read something about one of the guys in the team offhandedly setting a deadline that turned out to be just that little bit too tight, requiring it to be delayed from November 1986 to January 1987. This, along with the fact that, at the time, the second title in a franchise had the habit of being designed for people who were hardcore fans of the first game in that series, might go a little ways into explaining why everything starting from the road to Rhone is absolutely fucking brutal. Every element of the game that, previously, was a tad questionable, leaving that little itch of worry in the back of your head, returns here with the express intent to make your life miserable. I have a high tolerance for difficulty, one that is even higher for RPGs where, for the most part, there are always ways to slightly circumvent it and make your life easier. The simplicity of design in DQII means that this is not the case here, and from this point on you're expected to not only have the skill and familiarity you've accrued while playing, but also a very healthy amount of luck to go with you, otherwise you will die. And rest assured, you WILL die. In fact, due to the specific way in which the player's mortality rate skyrockets in Rhone, it's almost not even a matter of the game being "hard" in the traditional sense, because it doesn't exactly require you to be strong enough or smart enough anymore, it just requires you to be patient enough to slowly trudge through the mountain of corpses of your former attempts until you figure out how to minimize your risks to the lowest degree they possibly can be minimized, then hitting that sweet spot of luck and control that finally allows you to reach the end of the game. This particular way of handling things means that, after you hit about level 30 with the main character, further leveling will only render you negligibly less likely to die, and the effects are not strong enough from level to level to even be clearly noticed. But what exactly makes it so hard? The answer is primarily RNG. When you reach the end, you will begin to notice just how much RNG there is through the whole game. Starting off, the turn order is entirely random. There is an agility stat, but I never found any evidence of it actually factoring into who goes first in battle (instead, it's a carryover from DQI that calculates your base defense). If there are more than three enemies, you're at a disadvantage, but even if there aren't, a stray run of bad luck - which is guaranteed to happen given the density of random encounters - means you're gonna have to scramble with enemy attacks, and they are perfectly capable of leaving you in such a state that it would take a miracle to put yourself back in shape, if they don't just wipe you out instantly. Now, remember, two of your three characters have magic. However, at this point in the game, enemies have a large amount of magic resistance to all kinds of different spells, and magic resistance in this game means that there is a chance the spell simply won't work. If it does, it deals full damage. If it doesn't, it deals none at all. I don't know about you, but I almost never take my chances with low-accuracy, gimmicky stuff in other games. This one renders all spells like that given enough time. If you decide to rely on physical strength, the main character is the only one who will bring you any significant results. The pure mage at this point in the game is far more efficient at support casting than direct damage, and the balanced character is - memetically, at this point - incompetent at both, and also sucks as a physical fighter, so once again, you're boned on that front. All of a sudden, running away becomes an alluring strategy. However, once again, there is an ever-prevalent random factor to it, so the pressure is on in all fronts. The game becomes a challenge of carefully planning out how to simply survive each encounter. Do you take the chance and run? If you fail, you'll be wailed on by the full force of the enemy party, and will likely be too weak to attempt mounting a resistance. Do you take the bait and unleash the full force of your attacks? What if they all target different enemies in the group? You won't deal enough damage to kill one of them, so you'll suffer heavy retaliation and waste precious MP that could be spent on healing spells. Did you win or escape successfully? You've only lost about 20% of your health, but some encounters can relieve you of the remaining 80% before you can even act, so do you spend MP healing or do you trudge on because you already don't have that many to go around? If you make the wrong decision at any of these break points - and rest assured, there won't be a shortage of them - you'll either die or get so close to death it will be almost irrelevant to keep going. And then, it's back to the last save point. Rinse and repeat many times until you clear the road and get to Rhone proper, for one final save point and one last, grueling stretch of game before the final boss. Here, the game introduces enemies that have, no joke, a move that kills your entire party and has 100% accuracy. Typing it out, it sounds like hyperbole, like i'm salty that I died so much and am exaggerating the things the game does in order to trick myself into believing that it was super impossible times infinity, but no, it's true. To be fair, there isn't a high chance the enemy will perform this move, but when they do, there's absolutely nothing you can do to save yourself. Just reset the game when the screen turns red. Other than that, the rest of the lovely cast of enemies rounding up the final waves are more than capable of just killing you the regular way, so keep your wits about you like you did back in the cave and grind yourself up until the stat bonuses start getting negligible, because now, you need to face five bosses in a row. Right, okay, technically you can go back and heal yourself right before the last one, but I didn't know that, so if you're an idiot like me, try to get ahold of a Wizard Ring, as well. It's the only way to heal MP, and can be used multiple times until - you guessed it - it randomly decides to break. After that, you just have to contend with two bosses that use a move that heals all their HP when it gets low, so you also have to roughly keep track of their state in your mind so you can unleash a full round of attack before they can get in that heal. Unless your spell doesn't hit them, of course. Or they happen to go first. Or you just barely miss the threshold of HP that will actually kill them. Oh, and be careful! One of the other bosses also knows the instant death move. He won't use it often, but 30 or so attempts in, you're likely to see it once or twice.

Then, the final boss can randomly spawn with a number of hit points between 75% and 100% of his assigned value (every enemy does that), and you're gonna deal an average of about 15% damage per turn to it. Sounds easy at first, but he will take you out in either one or two moves, and...

...Here's the motherload...

...He has a 1 in 16 chance of casting the full heal move at any point in the battle. And he WILL do that the first 2 or 3 times you get to him, sucking you dry of resources and smashing your face all the way back to the save point to try the 5 bosses again, so it's back to grinding attempts until you have another mostly hopeless shot at him.

But when you get him, man...

When you do it...

*sigh*

Anyway, this was a long, rambling, focus-shifting tangent just to correctly capture the degree of luck and randomness that constitutes the final stretch of Dragon Quest II. How does it impact the rest of the game? Well, I still appreciate it for what it did right, and there's a small, strange part of me that actually thinks the insane difficulty perfectly fits the stakes that the game set up, but it is, nevertheless, very hard. And once again, it's the kind of hard that is virtually impossible to circumvent. For any average, non-god-tier player, there is no alternate way of tackling the simple-looking, but highly controlled challenges in this game that trivializes it. You can't change your party, you can't buy extra spells, you can't really use stat-up items to change stat configurations in any significant way. You just have to keep trying and hope it works, and for the first few dozen times, it won't, so you'll just have to deal with it.

Still, it shows, even up to the end, that the DQ team has a certain grasp of consistency in design that will slowly grow and adapt as the series embraces new complexities through the years. DQII stands as somewhat of a black sheep in the series (as the second titles of old franchises often do), but I think it has its place, and it's surely a wild ride. Also, if you can get yourself into the mindset of late 80's design, I can assure you it won't ever be boring. Maddening, sure, but not boring. It's more fun in the midgame, in my opinion, as for someone who is very used to RPGs, it can be exceesingly simplistic at the start and too hopelessly uncontrollable at the end, but I feel it deserves a score of 7 out of 10. It's pure gameplay, and, for what it's worth, you WILL get an intense experience. Just be ready to shake, a lot. And pad your walls.

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They are SO supportive of my budding career as a composer.

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Robots are the only friends I need. They support me and say I’m great.

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Phantasy Star

Back in the late 1980′s, the market for console jRPGs in America was all but nonexistent. Though Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Fire Emblem, and a slew of other franchises were beginning to flourish in the East, it wouldn’t be until 89 that Dragon Quest I was released internationally, followed shortly after by Final Fantasy in 1990.

While nowadays we tend to internalize these NES games as being the true pioneers of the jRPG, this wouldn’t be the reality of a gamer in the west at the time, because - to my surprise when I finally got around to playing it this month - Sega’s Phantasy Star, as you can see from the title screen picture, had them all beat in the international market by at least one year. Even Phantasy Star II, on the Genesis, was released before Final Fantasy I in the US, which is really surprising, but that’s beside the point.

With that said, If I were around at ‘88 and didn’t know any better, I’d likely use Phantasy Star as a yardstick to measure future RPGs against, technology and quality-wise. So, let’s do that now, in 2019 where it’s almost completely irrelevant because I’m sure standard reviews of a classic like this are already a dime a dozen everywhere you look!

As soon as you start the game, you can already bear witness to some quite impressive graphical capabilities, showcased in a Ninja Gaiden-esque opening that starts by panning by outer space until it gets to the outer atmosphere of Palma, the first planet. Through Phantasy Star alone, I can deduce that the Master System was at least reasonably more powerful than the NES, as you can plainly see more liberties being taken with the artwork (more complex shading, less restrictive palettes, etc.). I imagine it might have come as a disappointment to some players when, years later, Final Fantasy would have a simplistic text crawl against a blue background leading straight into gameplay. I can’t really blame it for being developed for a system that was less graphically powerful, though, but I can say that Phantasy Star is, at times, delightful to behold.

I say at times because, to me, the art direction doesn’t always work. As the opening ends, you find yourself in Camineet, the first town, and... I don’t know, it doesn’t look - or play - too great. The houses are tiny and they look like weird domes straight out of a 50′s movie about the future (which is, perhaps, part of the charm, but it’s not too interesting to look at anyhow), the trees are tiny, the townspeople are just event-triggering tiles with superfluous graphics, so they just stand there completely frozen until you walk into the relevant tile (plus, since most regular houses are also just event triggers to give you some information, there is absolutely zero difference between talking to a person on the street and walking into a house), and you can’t walk on the grass for some reason. In comparison, though Dragon Quest doesn’t even feature house exteriors until later in the series, both it and Final Fantasy have much more immersive and future-proof town design. People walk around, you can walk anywhere that seems sensible for someone to walk in, and in the case of Final Fantasy, the buildings actually look pretty good, with mostly correct proportions that give off a better sense of scale. Not to mention, due to the strangely streamlined design of PS, most of the time you need to go into buildings and such to find relevant story events, so the overall feel of walking around a city is strangely plastic and artificial. It weirds me out.

Once you leave town, things start to look up. The Master System allows for a more diverse palette, and PS takes enough advantage of it to make the standard old school RPG overworld spiel look lush and vibrant. There are beaches with an animated water line, great care was taken to not make the tiles look like a bunch of squares, there are all sorts of rocks and small details, and overall, the overworld feels more natural than in FF and DQ, where there was a strange cartooniness to them, like you were walking through a bunch of icons (particularly so in DQ’s case).

The actual design of the overworld is about what you’d expect from a game in the ‘80s. It’s a breed of design that resonates with me somewhat. Going to each new place implies walking around little obstacles that feel less like a Skyrim-type open-world experience and more something akin to Dark Souls, where each thing is like a mini-level. Sometimes, you have to walk through the coastline, sometimes you need to delve into a narrow valley corridor, surrounded by mountains on each side, sometimes you need to go into underground passageways to emerge on the other side of a river, and so on. Enough care was put into each of the game’s three world maps to make traversing through them feel satisfying, though the first one is, in my opinion, by far the best one.

If I do have one criticism, though, is that, if you actually look at t picture of the full maps, they’re really tiny. I’m not sure if the actual tile count is smaller than the one in DQ1, but it feels much smaller. This isn’t really a problem per se, as there are, as I said, three world maps, but it can sometimes give the design tunnel vision and a strange form of linearity. Most of the game revolves around going places and finding items to use in other places that give you more items to use in even more places, so on and so forth. Usually what happens in these RPGs is that when you get something new, like a key or a vehicle, a whole new world of possibilities opens up to you, as you’re able to use them in all sorts of crazy ways to access tons of new locations. Not so much in Phantasy Star, as the diminutiveness of the maps makes it so that even a new vehicle will give you about one or two new places to explore at best, and they’re just kind of another piece of the comparatively linear item chain you need until you get to the end. That’s not to say the game is entirely linear, but the reductive, segmented nature of exploration, while satisfactory at times, renders some of its ideas somewhat token. Sure, I’m not gonna be impressed by the functionalities of a key, but a hovercraft? Damn, that’s cool, man! Yet, all you do is use it in specific points to go places you know well beforehand you should enter, then move on without a second thought.

Once you get to the overworld, naturally, fights start to happen. Once again, showcasing the Master System’s graphical superiority, they look great. It really can’t be understated how good the fights look. Like early Megami Tensei games, there’s only ever one group of enemies in each battle, but they look awesome and, most importantly, they animate! Sometimes, the enemies even have two animations for different abilities they might possess. Also, there are slash animations for the party’s attacks, which sometimes change, but that’s not as impressive because Final Fantasy has the characters wielding different little weapons too. Furthermore, when you’re not in a dungeon, there are some great looking backgrounds that change depending on which tile you’re standing on when the battle is triggered.

Due to the generous nature of the game’s visual presentation, text in battles is reduced to a minimum, showing up only when deemed necessary, such as to indicate a status effect or when a character dodges an attack (though, arguably, that one doesn’t need text either). This helps the pace of the fights significantly and, even though there’s no auto-battle option, it still feels about as brisk, which is great. Unfortunately, that’s bogged down by the fact that instead of just giving you money no strings attached, each and every opponent drops a treasure chest at the end of the fight, which you can choose to open or leave be. Sometimes, the chests are trapped, too, so it’s not entirely superfluous, but it’s really annoying.

Also, unfortunately, the actual gameplay involved in fights isn’t great. The overwhelming majority can be won by spamming attack, and the scarcity of MP means that you’ll just be attacking most of the time anyway, even if you can go faster with magic. In long treks through dungeons, you’ll most likely be running from all but the simplest of battles. There’s actually a spell that makes it more likely for you to run away, but that costs MP and you have to go through more menus than just running normally, so I found myself just hitting run and hoping for the best, even though that meant I walked back a step... Oh, right.

All dungeons are first-person crawls in this game. They all look the same, too, this brick wall thing you see there, with the only change being in the color. They’re even like that if you’re in a natural cave, which makes no sense whatsoever. There is one series of dungeons late in the game (really just part of one big dungeon) that makes the floor and ceiling black, but it’s not even the final one (that one’s yellow). I don’t know why I’m talking so much about this, it’s just kind of odd. There are no maps whatsoever, so make sure you bring a sheet of graph paper or, if you’re stubborn and impatient like me, just stumble around enough that you happen to find where you’re supposed to go by pure luck. They’re not as complex as you would expect from something like this, and you can save anywhere you want, even in dungeons, so it’s not too bad, in my opinion. I just wish they’d have some different architecture once in a while, but I understand how difficult and painstaking that is on a 2D engine.

The plot is a straightforward revenge one that doesn’t change much and serves mostly as a farfetched objective excuse to string setpieces together, as you would expect. Of course, its claim to fame is that it has a female protagonist, and that it does. Given it’s a really old game, there’s not a lot of characterization to go by, but for what it’s worth, Alis doesn’t display any traits considered stereotypically feminine - perhaps as the very consequence of the system’s limitations - which I think we can all agree is very mature on the developers’ part. Instead, she’s revenge-driven and headstrong, but valiant and compassionate, like a typical hero. A somewhat clichéd personality type now, but hey, again, given the context, that’s pretty amazing. I mean, look at what they turned Samus Aran into just recently.

Anyhow, I would say the story is not as interesting as the one in Final Fantasy, but it’s comparable to the ones in early Dragon Quest, so take that for what it’s worth. However, the simplicity of this game’s battles take away from the tension which Dragon Quest endgames’ teeth-clenching difficulty elevates quite a bit on a visceral level, so I would still say it loses to DQ as well. Heck, I could even argue that this raw feeling transmitted to the player through gameplay is even more important than any emotion that stays within the confines of the game’s universe, so perhaps it loses in the most important way.

Oh, also, it’s in space. Most of it, aside from the few towns that have that zeerust 50s future feeling, doesn’t really need it to be set in space, but there are enough thematic choices to justify it, and I think it’d be a mess to organize the world map if it was all in just one planet, so it’s somewhat justified, at least. And hey, it opens the way for future franchise titles to expand upon the space aspect of it, so it was a smart choice, in my opinion. I almost wonder if they did it because of the first few Ultima games or something.

Overall, Phantasy Star is a straightforward RPG with beautiful presentation and enough freshness of ideas to make it well deserving of its status as a classic. I found the experience to be, frankly, less gripping and immersive than Final Fantasy I or early Dragon Quest, especially III, due to its artificial towns, downsized maps, uninvolving battles and a soundtrack that feels a bit all over the place and unfocused, but it has enough things going for it to make it a no-brainer recommendation to people who like games of that era. And I do, so, yeah, I enjoyed it. I’m growing a bit distant from grading games numerically because there’s so much context and stuff going on that sometimes it might make number choices incongruent with past grades I’ve given to games, but... Eh, sure, 6.4. Go play it if you like.

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Smash Up from Majin Tensei Ii might be one of the best SNES track I've ever listened to. Great progression, pass and drums, and fits the mood of the game (and the series) perfectly. Any thoughts?

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Shin Megami Tensei If...

(Part 8 of the MegaTen thing)

So, the previous main title in the franchise managed to close off its continuity in an effective, satisfactory, appropriately big manner. We wouldn't be looking at a new mainline game for 8 years this time around, so during that time a slew of spin-offs were released, the first of which being Shin Megami Tensei If...

Given these conditions, I can only speculate the designers gave themselves significant amounts of leeway as far as actually designing new stuff was concerned. Aside from 2 or 3 new pieces, all the music is recycled from SMT 1 and 2. The ones from 2 now have an actual melodic line, something that was strangely absent in their game of origin, so technically there's something new in them. Regardless, having just finished SMT2 prior to starting this game, two whole games with the exact same battle tracks was pretty grating to me.

Random art has also been borrowed from 2 in places. Most of the demons look the same, naturally, but some character art has also been lifted and modified slightly. Again, having just gone through 2, this feels like a weird milking of 2's material, as if they had stuff left over from its development and, in a Roger Corman-esque move, decided to just throw a new game together with it while they still had time. "If..." came out the same year as SMT2 as well, so good on them for being efficient with their assets...?

The gameplay, however, has undergone some changes. Most of them, I would say, actually make the battles more involving and fun. In SMT2, there were two "rows" of character boxes, but it made little to no difference in actual gameplay. Now, the party members in the back row can't use melee attacks, having to resort instead to either special skills or their gun. Furthermore, enemies won't be able to reach your back row guys with melee attacks, and they WILL target them a lot, so you can get some use out of it as well.

Ammunition is finally not just a piece of equipment anymore, and there's actually a counter representing how many bullets you have left (there's still no magazines or reload command, though, you're only limited by the standard max item stack size of 99). Sometimes, it can be annoying to keep restocking ammo and buying it in bulk, but I liked the potential the idea has of making you have to use your special ammo sparingly. This is something that could have solved SMT1's problem of overpowered status effect bullets, for example. It's underutilized here, however, and for the most part you can just buy regular bullets and call it a day.

Magic is a lot more effective this time, but the MP costs for spells are now very steep, so you'll still want to just stick to the support classics (tarukaja, rakunda, mediama, etc.) Instead of using attack magic. I would like to see magic being more useful in the future, though, and again, the potential has been opened and, with further tweaks, things can start heading toward great places.

With these changes, one again feeling like a contrarian, this game was harder to me than 1 and 2 were. Not a lot harder, mind you, but hard enough to demand some attention. In practice, though, this just meant that it took longer for me to properly set up all the essentials for having a breezy time with SMT games. Once it was ready, it was back to auto-battle time, but not always, though. I had to stop and change my moves quite a bit, especially as it was getting close to the end. The final dungeon throws enemies at you that are much beyond the level of one just playing the game normally without grinding, and things got pretty intense up there, forcing me to go back and readjust my demons and strategies a few times. Overall, I liked the raw battle aspect of it a lot more than I had previosuly with the franchise. It was more complex and involving, and felt like the systems were maturing. They're still juvenile here, but many cool things have begun to take shape, and I appreciate SMT If... for being their herald.

However, the unfortunate truth begins to creep in as I reflect about what it was all in service of. Bluntly put: The story and level design both suck. The plot is simplistic and inexorable; what would have been an arc in a game with a bigger scope is the whole game's plot here. There's no escalation and no surprises. The game sets things up, sends you jumping through pointless hoops on a meandering journey with the barest of juicy interactions, then quickly wraps things up and sends you on your way without so much as a second thought on its own events. Sure, there are multiple paths decided by who you partner up with at the beginning of the game, but outside of a superficial character study regarding the main villain, nothing of much intellect is contributed to a player's brain that hasn't been gathered in countless other, more involving RPGs before.

The hoops you have to jump through are simplistic mini-arcs surrounding sectioned off dungeon exploration. It reminds me of the very first game of the series, it's just a collection of errands with minimal interconnectivity. They're kind of short, too, and it results in the game feeling boring and repetitive at the same time it seems reductive and minimal in hindsight.

I suppose I have to talk about the Domain of Sloth, because it's the most baffling part of the entire game. The object here is to waste time. Several people are digging different holes in the walls, and there's either 7 or 8 "steps" between their start and end points. Each person digs a step further once the moon rotates fully, and each phase of the moon takes roughly, let's be generous here, 16 steps to move one sixteenth of a full rotation. Got that?

Well, if you javen't figured it out, the object of this "dungeon" is to directionlessly walk at least 2048 steps (16x16x8) until everyone is done digging their tunnels so you can go and see what's at the end of each. It's honestly elusive to me why they would think this was a good idea for a "puzzle". Did anybody ever playtest this? If they did, I have to assume at least someone was like "this is really boring and stupid, guys, shouldn't we change this puzzle around? Make the player have some agency over its progression?" and was quickly shut down by the higher-ups because they had deadlines to meet or something.

Regardless, other than that, I kind of dig the dungeon design of the other areas. Eventually they get pretty confusing and make liberal use of darkness tiles, teleport tiles, multiple stairways, holes that drop you to a floor below, and whatever tricks the dungeon design has accrued through the franchise's history. To some, it might be rage-inducing beyond the point where they can reasonably be expected to soldier on, and I can understand that, but I like it when the game doesn't pull any punches and is not afraid of using all aspects of its design. In my mind, it they really feel like sticking with the first person pseudo 3D bull honkey all the way through 1994, they might as well use the possibilities that such a manner of constructing levels gives them. For what it's worth, in the scope of dungeon crawls, it's not nearly as bad as it could be. I managed to clear the whole game with no outside help whatsoever, while in a game like Wizardry, I can barely get past the first floor with extensive hints as to what I could do to make life easier.

SMT If... does have things going for it. The battle gameplay is better than ever, a host of new, interesting ideas were being experimented with, and the level design, in a raw kind of fashion, showcased some bits that I personally found more captivating than dungeons in SMT1 and SMT2. However, the essence of a game like this is the story glue holding it all together, and this game falls flat on its face with its reductive, meandering, fruitless narrative. It fails to give the good aspects of the game any context, and turns it into a borefest. It has nothing over SMT2 besides being a little harder, and while it sows interesting seeds for future franchise titles to harvest, in itself, it fails to rise much above the previous entries in regards to interest. The experience of actually playing Shin Megami Tensei If... is one of disappointment and frustration at seeing the design milestones that, given the scope of the SMT series, the game fails to capitalize upon. My score for it is 4.4 out of 10, which is extremely harsh considering I technically had so much good to say about it, but this is not a game that's more than the sum of its parts. It's kind of like eating raw eggs, then gulping down some flour, chewing on a block of butter, and finally, sniffing sugar off the table. Could have been a yummy cake with some care, skill and preparation, but instead it's just a catastrophic mess to your taste buds.

[morshtalon]

Shin Megami Tensei II

(Part 7 of the MegaTen thing)

WARNING: This review contains some moderate spoilers for SMT1 and 2! Read at your own risk!

At last! After two years and three games of questionable quality under their belt, Atlus finally decided to stop fooling around and got its shit together to develop a proper sequel to SMT1. Honestly, the time frame between Majin Tensei and SMT2 means they were probably developed concurrently. There were likely several teams working on these games and Majin Tensei just happened to have been finished first or something like that. Regardless, as one playing through the series in order, I was pleased after Majin Tensei was over, first because it was over, and second because the next title in line was Shin Megami Tensei II.

I was really looking forward to SMT2 at the time. I remember I was in my dentist grandfather’s home about 80 miles away from mine because a tooth restoration had gone somewhat awry and I needed a root canal. During the final moments of Majin Tensei, I had to deal with severe tooth pain, which only heightened the distress of the whole situation, but now - I thought - maybe my gaming experience of the day will alleviate the pain instead of making things worse.

As you boot up the game, you’re treated to a “no relation to real life persons” screen, which I found kind of funny. SMT2 is, in general, much less close to real life than SMT1 was, and no game so far concerned itself with the disclaimer, so I wonder what could have happened behind the scenes to warrant it here. I guess it was because of the intense religious symbolism and inspiration, much bigger than in any other game of the series so far, but I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, I found it interesting.

Anyway, once you get past that, some introductory exposition begins. The game takes place after the Neutral ending of SMT1, and during this cutscene, you are informed that a city, Tokyo Millenium, was built on the site of the ruins of the final dungeon in that game by member of the Messian church, the Law faction representatives of the series.

Of course, this means that the grip of the Messians reaches far in SMT2. Huge chunks of the plot are dedicated to things related to them, their methods, and their relation with Millenium itself. It’s pretty surreal to see a game from this franchise embrace such an overbearing anti-Law philosophy for major, obligatory bullet points in the script, and the whole time I kept thinking “the axis is still there, right? What could the Law path possibly even be about?” and thinking back to how this dynamic existed in SMT1. As I said in my review of that game, on some levels it was a bit arbitrary to select which side you wanted to join, and there were a lot of parallels between them that made the choices feel like they were just giving me an illusion of control. I’m really glad they decided to mature from that and offer a narrative that seems to directly challenge the notion of parallelism that was built in the first installment. Well, spoiler alert, even the Law path is a tad antiestablishment this time around - there’s really no way it couldn’t have been, given the ambitions of the story - and goes against the unrighteousness of the Messians behind Millenium’s stranger, more questionable happenings.

I will say though, it still doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of basic difference between law and chaos, but for different reasons this time around. There is definitely no parallels as to story significance here, but the goals of all alignment paths end up feeling pretty similar. I think the best way to illustrate my point is to note that SMT1 had 3 ways the final part of the game could go, depending on your alignment, but they were basically 2 mirrors of each other and you could either go one way for Law, the other way for Chaos, or both ways for Neutral. In this game, the conditions at which you reach the final point are pretty different (though Neutral feels extremely close to Chaos all the way through SMT2 and the end is no exception), but the final boss is always the same for all three alignments. It makes things a bit of an interesting experience and a definite change of pace from SMT1, but I can’t help but feel, way in the back of my mind, that this story… wasn’t supposed to have the SMT axis, you know? As I said, Neutral and Chaos are very similar and kind of work the same, while Law is basically the game coming up with excuses as to why the player engages in the same activities as the other two, but with different intentions. Frankly, I don’t really need alignment, particularly. I never thought it was an essential element of the series, so it didn’t truly bother me at all, and I mostly thought about this after having already finished playing. For those who might be expecting a more exciting, more philosophical clash of visions and well-developed ideologies, however, I’m afraid SMT2 still falls short of that. But hey, it’s still a commendable effort for 1994, and it feels a lot more adult than its peers at the time.

The plot itself, as is, is very enjoyable. Whereas 1 had a more episodic structure with clear events separating one part of the game from the next, 2 opts for a more continuous progression. There are still momentous events that break up the game and result in major landscape changes, but they’re not as prominent as the ones from the first game. Everything has a bit of a surreal tone to it, and it borrows far more from classic cyberpunk tropes than 1 did. While 1 eventually engages in a post-apocalyptic scenario, it’s more just an excuse to start putting in motion its more outlandish plot points regarding demons and the rising relevance of its fictional figures. 2 fully embraces its setting and extrapolates quite a lot on stuff that had been set up, tackling themes of classism and social discrimination through the tried-and-true methods of a city that’s divided into multiple sectors with a different quality of life and purpose for each of them, as well as several slum-like locales where you come across the people that fell victim to the injustice and cruelty of the governmental powers that be. It also expands quite a bit on the personalities of the different demon races. A new axis was properly established, Light vs. Dark, the axis of virtue, which for now doesn’t serve much of a gameplay purpose but possibly helped the devs more clearly visualize the roles of all the dozens of demon subfactions that exist in the game. Though there is still no shortage of human character-based interaction, a significant amount of time was dedicated to giving the demons themselves more of a persnality and inner quarrels between one another. These elements I described kind of interact with each other; there are some correlations between them and sometimes you have to use items acquired in a certain arc to progress in a different, mostly unrelated arc later on, but I feel like the interconnectivity of the game as a big picture thing could have been deeper.

On that note, we can go on to say that, while I felt like the characters in 1 had more permanence overall, sticking around for longer periods of time before something made the relevant cast rotate around, 2 feels more cyclical with them, making you stumble upon each of the relevant ones at a larger number of points in the storyline but keeping their appearances shorter in comparison. In my opinion, it’s preferrable that way, because old games like these tended to not really develop characters too much while they were with you, instead choosing to further their role in the story at select few moments, so with a larger number of them, a greater amount of interesting developments can occur. However, by the same note, it also feels like they were juggling more separate plot threads of their own as the player’s involvement switches between each faster than they did in 1, which mostly had a central focus for each of its “episodes”.

Even the protagonist himself, while still silent, receives some plot development of his own, perhaps a lesson learned from Last Bible 2 and Majin Tensei. His particular role and how it relates to the other relevant characters is actually one of the highlights of the plot, but I find it doesn’t pay off much in regards to the third act, besides possibly explaining his ability to take down hordes of powerful demons. It’s still interesting to witness though.

Speaking of hordes of demons, I find the game to be as easy as ever. This time, magic effect ammunition has been significantly nerfed, but now it kind of seems like most the time the enemies are just… not really threatening. The first proper arc of the game managed to kill me twice because it’s the beginning and the game has greater control of the circumstances before the huge amount of levels starts piling on and making build possibilities ever more variable. After that, though, the rest is a cakewalk. I’m not a particularly diligent demon recruiter, I didn’t go out of my way to farm for valuable equipment, I never found any sword fusion candidates worth my time, yet I still managed to blaze through the entire game with no problems whatsoever. I wish it had been more difficult, because SMT2 starts losing control of itself again and tossing ridiculosuly powerful - in lore terms - demons at you as you get close to the end. However, the simplicity and repeatability of attack strategies which prove reliable through the entire game means that, for the fifth time, that auto-battle option was put under quite a bit of use, even for these powerful guys. It took out some of the visceral, immersive quality that a properly set up, difficult enemy can have.

Still, I feel like this time, the interesting, juicy plot and the exploration factor kept me from being really bothered by the lack of difficulty. Things are much more streamlined than they were in 1 now. I will admit, conceptually I don’t appreciate the layout and presentation of the world map. As in SMT1, you’re represented by a blue spinning pointer thing, but everything around you is, as mentioned previously, sectioned off, and each section consists of a relatively short, linear walk through a bland, bluish cityscape with token building decorations that feel like you’re dragging your finger through a board game or a chalk drawing on the ground acting like that stands in for movement. It’s very artificial, and when you enter a battle in the world map, you can actually catch a glimpse of what the city looks like, with what seems to be some verticality and layers and quite a dense skyline. It’s the first glimpse in the entire series of a truly awe-inspiring, immersive setting. I wish it were like that all the way through.

Furthermore, first-person areas are as labyrinthine as ever, with maze-like designs with no regard for how it would actually translate to any real place, and a repeated texture that prevents the addition of decoration, flavor or personality. By 1994, it has started to get on my nerves, and it feels unbecoming of a story that, in my opinion, oozes personality on its own. They’re not boring, per se, as they interact nicely with the world map and with their own setpiece trigger tiles (a series staple at this point) to create a raw gameplay experience that feels stimulating as you work through to your next destination. There’s some enjoyment to be had in going really far in one direction, going out into the world map, then into a new area, then out through another exit, then into some other place and so on, progressing with no save point in sight and an ever dwindling supply of resources, getting more and more uncertain you’re even going the right way, until the game gives you some cutscene that confirms that you were doing the right thing all along. I’m glad that, even though there’s a new system in place that basically tells you whete you need to go, it’s still used in a way that leaves the player guessing the internal elements of the journey, and the game balances short bursts of activity and long treks in a satisfying way that kept things interesting from a gameplay perspective. There is an arc where you’re directly going after McGuffins, but I think it’s pulled of with some grace here; there’s a point to it, and once again the ways in which you collect them are an excuse for the designers to get a little cuter with their level design.

Speaking of which, one of the biggest draws for me is that SMT2 starts getting really quirky. Copyright protected versions of Beetlejuice and Michael Jackson make an appearance, there’s a silly reference to Berserk, you barge in on Belphegor sitting in his toilet and kill him while he takes a dump, some demons ask you if you’re gonna turn them into a bundle of experience points, you have to enter a dance contest and steal chameleon-esque robes from a nymph while she takes a shower… A lot of crazy, quirky, funny things happen that help elevate the game and the series’s personality quite a bit, and I feel like there’s a level of confidence and playfulness on the part of the designers, having put in so many things that can go against the somber tone of the narrative, that I can truly appreciate. It’s sort of the same balance of silly and mature/horrifying that would exist in Shadow Hearts a few years down the line, but I feel like SMT2 is much more careful and restrained about it, mostly relegating the silliness to short setpieces to spice up the progression, and it ends up better for it.

When I first heard about the Shin Megami Tensei series, working my way back from Persona 3 and researching some fundamental aspects of the mythos, as well as hearing about how good it all was, I formed a certain image in my mind. It wasn’t very tangible, but it was a high-expectations fueled idealization of what a game with this kind of potential could be like. So far, games in the series haven’t really been able to deliver on that so much. Shin Megami Tensei II is, I believe, the first one to take steps in the direction of this idealization. It plays a lot more with its tropes, it isn’t afraid of utilizing whichever established figure it had througout the series to make a little bit more of a philosophical point this time around, there’s development by the hands of the human characters, and by the end, it feels grand and satisfying. My rating for this game is a very appreciative 7.6 out of 10. Though the gameplay still needs work, I had a blast playing it and enjoying its wackiness and its more somber points on human relationships. They’re simplistic, yes, nothing compared to literary works presenting the same kinds of fundamental points, but in those, you can’t pump the devil’s face full of lead after a chinese turtle god cast tarukaja on you several times in a row so that your bullets come out with the world’s vengeance on their shoulders. If you’re a fan of old-school games, and would like to try out a more complete, more fully visualized old MegaTen story, I really think you should try this game. I liked it quite a bit.

[morshtalon]

rlly don’t mean to be mean but would you mind using a read more for your megaten posts?

I don't see why such a request would be mean. I didn't know this was a feature! Thanks for bringing it to my attention

[morshtalon]

Majin Tensei

(Part 6 of the MegaTen thing)

Welp, Majin Tensei was a thing, wasn't it? Not a lot of people have played it, almost no one remembers it, there isn't a page on it on tvtropes, and the SMT wiki itself just has a few short articles here and there, but it sure did exist! It even spawned a sequel that, to my knowledge, gathered a bit more notoriety.

But why is it that the game flew under the radar like that? Well... Probably because the fan translation patch only came out in 2018, but I feel a little more comfort knowing about the game's obscurity, even compared to other titles in early SMT history, and imagining it to be the byproduct of the effect the game's quality had on the few people that actually did play it.

I say that, of course, because Majin Tensei was quite a miserable experience for me. It's a tactical RPG spinoff that translates series conventions into a strategy game format (Yes, another spinoff, but at this point I'd like to think MegaTen is kind of an all-encompassing thing with no true mainline games and spinoffs, just a whole bunch of products with baseline thematic/gameplay similarities organized under different banners representing closer similarities). Now, I have no problem with tactical RPGs at all, and some of the most fun I had back in 2017-2018 was when I started to work through the Fire Emblem series, but playing tames like Majin Tensei really helps one visualize exactly how all the elements piece themselves together to create a stimulating sRPG experience in a Fire Emblem title, and when these elements are not well-balanced, sometimes even at a level that you wouldn't realize at first, much frustration can ensue.

Naturally, the reason I say that is because Majin Tensei takes a lot of inspiration from Fire Emblem. The maps are similarly structured top-down boards, there's different types of terrain affecting movement one way or the other, there's a bunch of "classes" (a nice opportunity to make the demon races a little more distinguishable from each other), the attacks consist of the attacker striking then the opponent countering, your units are blue while enemies are red, and in general it just seems to operate through the same rough guidelines as an FE title

However, just as much as it takes mechanics from FE, it also changes around a lot of other stuff and introduces quite a few quirks that help distinguish it and make it a unique (said in a not particularly favorable or unfavorable way) experience. Let's make a rundown and compare them to how it would be in Fire Emblem!

Stats work much more like they do in MegaTen. On level-ups, you can select which stat you wish to increase; HP goes up to 999 instead of the mid-to-high double digits; levels go up to 99 instead of 20 or so; demons don't level up, but they can sort of pseudo-level up and acquire skills which can be passed on to demons made with them through fusion (I realize now, I think this is where the skill inheritance comes from. Huh...) and it plays a lot more like a translated regular RPG than something specifically tailored for the format it's using. I don't think I need to point out the likelihood of something that borrows mechanics from a different subgenre being better than something that was originally crafted for use in an sRPG (it's pretty minimal), but regardless, the point is, the attack/damage formulas and correlations of Majin Tensei are very difficult to pin down. In an RPG, it's completely fine to play around with unpredictability, but in a tactical game, you need to give the player agency and control over the game's minutiae to better allow them to piece a plan together. In Fire Emblem, the numbers are very low, and formulas are simplistic enough that the player can do some basic math and map out a course of action several moves in advance. Not so much here, as the eluding nature of the relations between strength, defense and damage means that you'll be going into most fights guesstimating what their result will be. That being as it is, the game's design isn't too concerned about tightly creating stages and enemies to take advantage of the player's exposure to this degree of information, and most maps feel much less involved than anything an FE title can offer. I'm not saying Fire Emblem is perfect or anything, but it does provide good insight into how to approach the RPG elements of something like this, while Majin Tensei, aiming to simulate the inner workings of more normal franchise titles, sacrifices immersion and makes a lot of maps dull because of that.

Oh, and rest assured, there's no shortage of them. While most FE titles hover around 25 maps, Majin Tensei has a staggering 59 scenarios, some of which far bigger and more filled with enemies than an average level in FE. I'm not exactly sure how long the game is, because it doesn't keep track of playtime, but it felt like an eternity. I was hoping the game would end at scenario 25, because it seems like it's at a point where it reasonably could stop the plot, but nope, it only stops after more than double that amount.

But if you thought only some vague notion of stat design is what made me deem the stages uninteresting, boy, you've got another thing coming. First of all, there's only one set of tracks (player phase, enemy phase, neutral phase) through the entire game, with the rare exception of boss maps, which use a single track that's shared between all of them (for all phases), and the final boss which also gets a unique track of its own. For comparison, Mystery of the Emblem has 3 sets of tracks and 24 stages, and Genealogy of the Holy War, though it is 2 years younger, has a unique set of tracks for every one of its 12 chapters. I will say, the music in Majin Tensei is quite good. It has a nice collection of samples, some enjoyable, prominent basslines, and encapsulates the chaotic setting and tone quite beautifully without having to resort to power rock stuff like SMT 1 did (I like the music in SMT 1, by the way, I just think the soundtrack here is a bit more matured). I actually think the tracks themselves are superior to the ones in all Fire Emblem titles for the Super Famicom. But man, listening to Flame Up Fragment's intro for several turns through 52 or so stages really starts to get under my skin.

Secondly, many stages are wide open fields, and the game tends to make enemies haul ass towards you whenever it can. This means that, optimally, you're just gonna bunch up somewhere narrow and relatively safe-ish and wait for the main wave of enemies to come toward you instead of doing anything yourself. Later maps have generators that basically serve the same function reinforcements do in FE, so you're gonna have to move to block the generators at some point. It can't help but feel arbitrary, though. You're not moving because you have to, or because enemies are trying to lure you to then, or because of a natural reason like that. You're moving because the game put some generator on the opposite end of the board, and even though the enemies the generator produces are hilariously underpowered compared to you, the stage requires you to defeat all enemies, and before you can kill a wave of generator guys, another one is produced, so you have no choice but to block it. I realized through Majin Tensei that destroy all enemies is a very risky thing to make your baseline objective for scenarios. It's kind of like if you were forced to kill reinforcements on a Fire Emblem map.

Point is, there's a lot of waiting involved, way more than in FE, so you'd at least expect them to include ways to expedite the process, right? Well, if there are any, I sure haven't found them, and you can bet your ass I tried, a lot. There's no way to speed up or skip enemy phases, and scenarios can have up to a maximum of 30 enemies in them. Furthermore, the AI takes a fraction of a second to decide where each enemy will move to, and that fraction of a second adds up pretty fast. There's a scenario late in the game that I swear was designed to annoy the player into ultimate frustration. Throughout the map, there are 30 level 3 kobolds spread out randomly. However, there are generators at key points, and whenever you kill a kobold, the generators immediately spawn another one until there's 30 in the map once again. Since at that point you are omnipotently stronger than this type of enemy, you're not really gonna bother summoning a lot of your demons, because it's just gonna be a waste of money and magnetite, so you just choose 3 of the good ones and leave it at that. So, each turn, the AI takes upwards of 2 and a half minutes to move all its units, then you move yours closer to the generators for five seconds, rinse and repeat. Heaven forbid you actually get surrounded by a bunch of them, because the combat "animations" (really just a barely animating sprite of the target getting struck by a generic RPG slash effect) also can't be skipped. It got to a point where I was so bored and frustrated, I did something I've never done before in any game in my life: I used emulator tools to fast-forward through enemy phases. Being a borderline OCD player who abhors the use of tools and even sometimes forgoes using mechanics in remakes that didn't exist in the original versions of the games, you can see how miserable I was.

I guess I should take some time to say, the artwork in the animations is very detailed and big compared to other games so far in the franchise. The demons look pretty good, but I feel like sometimes they're drawn a little weird, like Orthrus having some weird proportions and Maya looking unintentionally hilarious. There's also very rampant palette swapping, to the point where it can sometimes kill the excitement of seeing a new demon on the map because you know they're gonna look the same as 3 others. The most egregious example I could find was Empousa looking the same as Abaddon, of all things, which I found extremely odd when you compare it to any other game in the series. Some of the fairies and catwomen look really sexy, drawn with no clothes, and have a flirtatious personality, but I can't see anything other than a group of middle aged japanese men getting all hot and bothered writing the lines for these demons.

Overall, the game is, again, pretty easy. Not because of anything the player will feel is their own credit, but because periodically, neutral demons will show up. While enemies have a variable chance of even beginning conversation with you (from 0% to 80% depending on the phase of the moon, which changes at the beginning of each player phase), these demons will pretty much always talk to you (the game says 80%, but I never had it fail) and have no level restrictions to enter your party, unlike demons you can make through fusion and enemies you can convert. Most of the time, these neutral demons are massively overpowered, far stronger than anything else you'll have for several maps, and when you do get to the maps that have similar enemies, your own troops will all be at the maximum pseudo-level, so they'll still curbstomp the enemies into oblivion. Only at the tail end of the story do you ever have to really start taking relationships between demon races seriously into account and use your minions cleverly, but still, all you have to do is watch the effectiveness indicator at the bottom left. If you still find it too challenging, you can save at the beginning of every turn, which... Never really goes well for these types of games in terns of presenting the player with a reasonable, well put together challenge. Since you can fix mistakes at a moment's notice by save scumming, being careful is hardly ever necessary, and since demons aren't unique, there's nothing preventing you from sacrificing a few for the greater good, so it's very, very rare that you'll have to use your brain much. This is a strategy game, and you can just blast through most things!

The only stage I found truly challenging was scenario 45, I believe. It's actually the same premise as the kobold level from earlier, except when you kill an enemy (and you will, because they suicide on you), the generators, which are far out of the way and are only accessible by flying units, replace them with level 50 leviathans instead. The whole level turns into a race as you have to use your fliers to quickly cover the generators while trying your best to delay the onslaught of leviathans as much as possible, then carefully manipulate positioning and backup troops to minimize the damage that the leviathans that inevitably start pouring out after a while deal to you. It's a rage-inducing level at first glance, but it was pretty much the only time Majin Tensei actually delivered a well thought-out stage that has its concept introduced earlier then turns it into a game of using your units for purposes that require out-of-the-box thinking (like using your fairies as meat shields because they can't kill level 3 enemies in one hit). I would have appreciated the game so much more if it were just 18 or so stages of clever stuff like this. It would have been harder, sure, but damn man, this genre is basically made to offer a more thinking experience for the player, and Majin Tensei does have a lot of mechanical complexity with all the correlations between things, so why does it only use it in extremely rare occasions like this?

As it stands though, Majin Tensei was loathsome to me. All the things I appreciate about it are for the vast majority of the game in service of a dull, neutered tactical experience that offers little over passively going through the motions 59 times in a row until you get to the end. There's a plot, but it's hardly even worth talking about. It's a spinoff, so the game feels it can just do the same shit over again, and it's basically one long trek through Tokyo, then the underworld, then it ends. There's nothing stimulating about it other than some questions the demons ask the hero pertaining to the reasons why he's fighting or something, but it's so underdeveloped, nothing substantial comes from it. There are multiple endings, but it has nothing to do with law or chaos, it's just standard good/normal/bad endings. Maybe the good one offers some more closure, but it's still an overly simple plot spread as thin as possible among the game's sheer bloated girth. It's exhausting just to think about it.

Given that, this game is a 2.9 out of 10 for me. Yeah, that's pretty low, and I considered giving it a higher score based on its sort of complex mechanics and enjoyable interactions, but while playing I felt nothing but boredom and irritation, and while it felt like an eternity had passed while I was playing it, now that it's over, it feels like it came and went in a nanosecond. I'm actually starting to think it was just some weird fever dream I had, and thinking about it definitely brings me images of being sick, so take that for what it's worth.

[morshtalon]

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible II

(Part 5 of the MegaTen thing)

It's hard to start talking about this game without comparing it to its predecessor, especially since it has so little impact on the franchise by itself, so get ready to learn some stuff about Last Bible 1 that I didn't include in the previous review!

Well, anyway, technically, this was the game that was released immediately after LB1, and it's really funny to imagine that, back in 1993, and excluding the discarded continuity, there was one mature RPG carrying the series's banner forward and one more child-friendly spinoff cutting corners in regards to game mechanics, and they chose to continue the spinoff. I guess those creative juices weren't flowing SMTII's way quite yet.

Maybe becuase of that, for this title, the devs tried their best to either approximate the mechanics to what SMT was capable of giving us a year prior or just otherwise improve them. Moon phases are back, conversations have more of an SMT flow to them, the stats have been reworked to function in a way that makes the player feel their influence more clearly, and even moving around is better, which only happened because moving around was awful in LB1 and you kept overshooting stuff and walking one more tile than you wanted to before switching direction, but hey, they fixed it for this one so now it's too late for me to complain about it!

Further exploring the themes of approximation, but contrasting the ones from the game mechanics, somehow LB2 plays even more like a traditional RPG than before. The sort of classical age architecture has been excised in favor of nondescript medievalish tiles, which have no charm and, to my eyes, actually have more outdated looking tilesets than the ones in Last Bible 1. The plot now centers around an evil kingdom going around spreading havoc and the repercussions it has on a few characters. There was a certain mysticism to the previous games' plot. A lot of it was about the effects of the universe's version of magic, and the villains were just a band of really powerful guys that were there as stand-ins for the more well known demons. Now it's just kind of like... I don't know... Guys? It's hard to even tell which of them are more villainous and which are anti-heroes or whatever, and the plot meanders so much, sending you to all sorts of places doing some unrelated grunt work for one reason or another, that things feel really unfocused. It was very hard for me to tell what significance my actions had for a big chunk of the game and honestly, short of defeating the final boss, I don't think they ever did. I guess, in theory, it's a more developed narrative than the previous one, but a simple game, in my opinion, benefits more from focus and clear goals, and in practice it just feels like the story goes all over the place to pad out the gameplay, which makes it very hard to care about what's happening. And, embarrassingly enough for me, I sort of didn't, and I'm having a hard time with the recap because I can't for the life of me remember what the villains wanted. Or most of what happened...

But hey, the gameplay's better, right? Well, while I have no complaints about the improvements made in demon conversation and such, and I do think that's better than before, the stats themselves went from not making much sense at all to sort of making sense but now there is very clearly an optimal build. You see, for the first time in the franchise, levels, Hit Points and Endurance (also known as Vitality or Stamina) are directly related, which means that, on each level up, you gain an amount of HP equal to your Endurance stat. This is not applied retroactively, and most of the other stats still offer the usual pitiful rewards that you'd expect from a MegaTen game. So, basically what I'm saying is pump everyone full of Endurance early on so you don't get the shaft in HP and let equipment take care of the rest until you have about 20 points in it. It's surreal to see a game with this particular disposition of character-building allow the possibility for two copies of the same party member at the same level with the same stats in two different playthroughs to have a massively different level of efficiency depending on what was prioritized early on. I didn't pay attention to Endurance, so I got pissed about it when it came back to bite me, but it's just kind of funny nonetheless. Intelligence also affects MP in a mroe direct way (though the formula is a little more complicated), so I guess for mages you'd want some of that, too, but even at the low end of MP gains, you're probably still gonna have enough.

That's not to say the game is difficult. For the most part, it's pretty easy. They removed the ability to save inside dungeons, so now I guess they didn't feel the obligation to make every battle potentially life-threatening, so if there is still an enemy advantage in terms of damage, I didn't notice it. I guess this might have influenced my boredom while playing it, but it's not as easy as the SFC games (keep in mind I played the Super Famicom remake of the priginal MegaTen duology), so there is some stimulation from that end. However, once you get to the endgame, the difficulty ramps up considerably, and the final boss is even tougher than the one in LB1, but for bullshit reasons this time around.

You see, as you near the endgame, all of a sudden it throws a curveball your way and makes you control five human characters. That's all fine and good, since they're probably much stronger than any monsters you would have at that point playing the game normally, but firstly that means the experience from fights is gonna be split five ways (Yeah, it's one of the games that does that), suppressing your ability to level up comfortably, and second, the reason the game gives them to you is so that you can make use of a spell that needs two people to cast. This spell, along with another one that takes four turns to charge up, are the only reliable ways to deal damage to the final boss, as it has absurdly high defenses and immunity to most types of normal magic. This makes the battle much more reliant on factors the game decides you should work with at the last second (unless you go grind for a long time and search for hidden optional stuff), and neuters the player's agency over the development of their team, favoring instead clairvoyant builds that prepared themselves for when these factors become relevant (the 20 ASAP points in Endurance). It's an even weightier iteration of the thing from MTII where they just give you stuff to face the final boss with. All because they could't help but inject a truckload of stats into it instead of trying to make it a more clever battle.

Well, whatever, this is a game that got worse as I played through it, going from mild excitement to boredom to irritation. It's better than MTI I think, so I kind of regret giving a 4 to it because of context and stuff, so, um, I guess 4.1 out of 10 for this one? I'm tempted to give it an even lower score, because it wasn't a great experience at all, but it's not MISERABLE, per se. Just dull and slightly irritating at the end, though mostly that was because I was not prepared and the game plants some devious traps for you at the final dungeon. Anyway, the next game in line is NOT a Last Bible title, so yay, finally a breath of fresh air! I wonder how that will turn out! It couldn't possibly be like this one in terms of the feelings I got while playing it, now, could it?

[morshtalon]

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible

A.K.A. Revelations: The Demon Slayer

(Part 4 on a series of posts covering as many games in the MegaTen franchise as I can actually play)

Having successfully established a new canon with Shin Megami Tensei, things were going along smoothly, and the soil for new MegaTen titles was as fertile as it had ever been. However, SMT's ending was, in many ways, terminal for a lot of what was established therein. The situation of things kept changing drastically through the entire game and, by the end, things were pretty catastrophic. It would be a little while before they though up of some good material to serve as a base for SMT II, and, in the meantime, to keep fresh products coming out (and probably to keep the money coming in), Atlus chose to develop a spin-off series.

Last Bible was released for the Game Boy the same year as SMT, and recontextualized the core distinctions of the series into something more like what you'd expect from a jRPG in 1992. Gone are the first person dungeons, and instead we have a normal tile-based top-down RPG with DQ-esque character sprites walking around. Gone is the moral axis and branching story, and now things are as linear as they could, with only one path leading to one conclusion. Features like the demon summoning and recruitment have been majorly simplified, and in general, the game plays a lot more traditionally than anything the series has outed so far. There's no guns and no phases of the moon. That's not to say it doesn't still have its own quirks, but it's interesting to observe the transition from SNES to GB and all the compression and simplification that entails.

Furthermore, the setting was also moved to a more traditional, medieval fantasy-ish place, and demons aren't really demons anymore, just nondescript monsters with an in-game origin. You can still summon them, but it's done through a vague "sort" menu instead of the COMP for obvious reasons. You can also still talk to them, but they don't have any particular race or alignment to dictate their rough personality, so the questions are more or less random (there seems to be a repeatable pattern, but the actual text makes no logical sense in terms of a conversation) and whether or not you'll recruit them at the end of the conversation is effectively a crapshoot.

All of this obviously makes Last Bible miss a lot of what makes the series unique, and if you didn't know it was part of the MegaTen brand, you'd probably just take it for a generic RPG adventure clogging up the GB's library and pick up Final Fantasy Legend 2 instead. Honestly, if you did, you probably wouldn't be missing much, anyway.

It's not that the game is bad, per se. It has a decent, harmless little plot; some of the recontextualizations (such as the series' iconic powerful demons having been reworked into what are essentially powerful mage dudes) are funny; the aesthetics have an odd classical age vibe to them which is kind of interesting, with a lot of greek and egyptian inspirations; the music is above average for an early GB game (and the final boss in my opinion has a really kickass theme with one of the finest basslines the system can throw at you); and series traditions regarding demon handling have been simplified, but still function in roughly the same way, allowing you to experience the insane level of customization MegaTen usually offers, just in a different kind of place.

But, for a series that evolved its experimentation with storytelling into the character-based, uniquely moral narrative offered by SMT, with so much room for growth and potential to extrapolate and expand on previously established themes, Last Bible feels like a big step down. You can tell, while playing, that it was a much easier game to make than SMT, not only in terms of technical stuff, but also as far as challenging the developers' creativity goes. Consequently, this is mirrored in the fact that the game doesn't really have any poignancy of its own. I understand that the fact it was made for the Game Boy, a system designed for kids to just pick up some more simplistic, breezy adventures and enjoy them on their way to school and etc. means that Last Bible does its job nicely and there's really no point in me trying to compare it to mainline SMT since it's not trying to be SMT, so it isn't like I get angry with the game or chastise the developers and think they're slacking sacks of crap or whatever. But hey, still, if I'm looking at the game analytically, it has to be said it doesn't bring much new to the table.

One thing it does have over SMT 1, technically, is that there can be two enemy groups per battle now. There WERE a few scripted encounters in SMT 1 against two groups of enemies, but now, they can happen in any run-of-the-mill random encounter (unless the enemy sprite is too big), so that's nice. Also, the protagonist can use magic, which is a bit surreal in MegaTen terms. Furthermore, anyone can talk to monsters, even other monsters, and that means you won't have to go through the tedious generic yes/no conversations, so that's a good option to expedite the process, though I believe you need to select the right monster for the job or something, I have no idea. It'd be cool to see demons interacting with each other in mainline SMT games...

I think this is where I start to realize I may be a bit of a subconscious contrarian in some aspects, but despite the rest of the internet saying otherwise, I found this game to be really hard. Enemies were constantly able to kick my ass with two or three hits, it never felt like I had built my characters correctly and it always felt like I was at risk. A little ways into the game, I discovered, through the fact a monster attacked one of my own monsters of the same kind as them, that enemies actually get a significant boost in the damage they deal to you, which is Last Bible's iteration of old game design bullshit. Luckily, dungeons are really short throughout the entirety of the game, and you can save anywhere you want (except in-battle), even in the dungeons themselves right in front of the boss's face (because you wouldn't want to lose your progress when the school bus arrives and you're forced to put the Game Boy away, you know), so I guess when it all comes down to it, it was "easy", but damn. I'm not sure if I get bothered by the fact the dungeons are so short and have nothing to separate themselves from each other or if I'm glad they are like that because it meant my sorry ass could actually clear them. Maybe the high damage and stuff was once again done like that to be congruent with the portable nature of the system, so even battles needed to go by quickly one way or the other, but I don't know.

Anyway, Last Bible is not a very interesting game, but it did manage to entertain me somewhat, and the difficulty meant that there was at least something stimulating happening most of the time. It had a very Dragon Quest 2 vibe to it, and I think that's not exactly a bad thing (I only wish there were more puzzles and interactions with rhe world to make overworld exploration as interesting as it was in DQ2). I believe it deserves a 5 out of 10, smack-dab in the middle of the scale just like any game where my main conclusion is that nothing was really gained from playing it, but nothing was lost either. And hey, now that they got that out of their system, the developers can jump right back on track and start work on another actually intellectually charged, passionate project, right?

[morshtalon]

Shin Megami Tensei

(Definitely part 3 of a series of posts on the entire franchise)

For the end of MegaTen II, Atlus pulled out all the stops in terms of who you'd meet and what their importance to the lore was. While the ending arguably did leave some room for further escalation, by choosing to continue the story as it was, they'd be agreeing to keep being derivative works in relation to the books that originated their backstory. Sure, it was hardly the case anymore, what with the extreme departures MegaTen II took from the novels, but still. I guess the relative corner the writers got themselves backed into, combined with the clamor to have a more independent franchise on their hands, prompted them to scrap their established continuity and kick off a new one of their own. Whatever the real case was, it was definitely a smart choice, and thus was born Shin Megami Tensei, a way for them to keep their profitable series going. Also probably a much better game than a MegaTen III would have been.

Anyway, with a new continuity, possibilities were endless. They could better retread grounds they had already covered in the previous two games (well, really just MTII, since the first one barely even had anything going on), and expand upon ongoing themes while not having to worry about the usual expectation for a sequel in terms of magnitude and impact. Given that, it's unsurprising that, in comparison to MTII, this game dials things down a notch, relegating most of the more classical power fantasy stuff to the third act and preferring to engage in more character-driven events while leading up to it. None of the final enemies in SMT are as powerful as the ones in MTI and II (in story terms, actual battle stats notwithstanding) and the influence of cosmic forces that would have been enemies fought directly in the titles so far takes on a distant, more psychological approach (for the most part), unable to be challenged by the player. This helps build them as respectable overarching threats, and keeps the setting more subdued and the stakes higher, since it feels like characters are acting under the banner of things so powerful the player shouldn't even think themselves able to scratch them. It's good not to stat things sometimes, and it's quite impressive that they exercised this restraint way back in 1992.

For the demons that ARE fought, though, the artists really put their all into it this time. Even compared to games in the series's near future, I think this is the best looking they would be for a while. I mean, sure, Majin Tensei later on would have more detailed graphics, but I feel the art itself was worse there, with some weird proportions and a lot of palette swaps, while this game keeps things more consistently good overall.

Naturally, one longstanding tradition of the franchise introduced in SMT was the philosophical axis of Law vs. Chaos and the branching story that allowed the player to sit in any one point of the spectrum, with a modified final act depending on your decisions up to a certain point and where in the axis they would leave you once this point is reached. This system was partly a logical progression of the two endings from MTII and partly a way to integrate gameplay significance into what was already the grand point of SMT's storyline. While a good idea on paper and certainly innovative for its time and context, the warring faction-based story meant that as far as the plot is concerned, Law vs. Chaos pertains more to which of the factions you're appeasing with your decisions rather than any particularly lawful or chaotic behavior. There are some things that shift your alignment that have to do with being lawful or chaotic, but those lie mostly outside of the plot, in small actions that only serve to bring things one way or the other on infinitesimal increments and are meant more as an extra level of thought put into the system to label certain actions that were always there. The parallelisms between one faction and the other (i.e. temples that are identical in functionality; quests that consist of killing the other faction's quest-giver or vice-versa), together with certain easily exploitable ways to shift the alignment variable any way you want (so that you can play the game being entirely chaotic up to the crucial point where your alignment is locked, then right before that, exploit the mechanics to bring yourself to Law without having done anything lawful throughout the rest of the game), make the whole alignment system feel arbitrary, or at least the actual coded-in gameplay layer of it. I feel like maybe having only the unrepeatable story decisions actually affect alignment could help mitigate this somewhat. Then again, as I said, the story stuff doesn't feel much like the player being lawful or chaotic, so... I don't know.

Regardless of which path you take, you are going to get into a lot of fights. The game plays basically exactly like MTII, with an overhead top-down overworld and first-person dungeon crawling once you enter an area. This time around, very few areas are safe from enemy encounters, which makes sense since you're mostly just walking around Tokyo and a lot of first-person areas are just sections of the city that are populated (and besides, all of Tokyo is under threat from the demons). It made me realize that it's actually the typical RPG that opts to be nonsensical about the no-monsters-in-towns rule, but I'd be damned if that's not a smart choice on the part of the typical RPG. There are so many random encounters in this game, it's a common occurence for you to get several 1-step fights in a row. When I play an RPG, there's usually a point where I get really bored of always fighting enemies, then I finally escape the dungeon I'm in or go into a town and it's a big relief, like I can finally walk around and talk to people without having to stop dead in my tracks to fight the same enemy I already proved I can beat five hundred times before. Not so much in this game, and you'll definitely be crying out for an Estoma or a Fuma Bell most of the time. If you even know these two things act like repels in Pokémon and realize how useful they are.

If you don't know, however, you're going to need a lot of patience, because once again the game is very easy. Aside from, once again, a difficult earlygame, especially if you didn't put the right stat points into your protagonist (read: vitality and speed), the same basic problems from the previous two games' core concept of walking around and fighting dudes can be found here, but this time guns have ammo. Ammo doesn't actually count how many bullets you have left, it's just an extra thing you can equip that gives your gun attack an extra property such as more damage or a status effect. Thing is, status effects have an absurdly high hit rate in this game, work on most bosses, and there's a type of ammo that causes the "enthralled" status effect, which makes the target attack their own allies. Once you've got your hands on it, the game has been effectively turned into an interactive movie, even easier than the NES ones. Even without it, magic always seems to go before physical attacks, and both lightning and ice spells can stop an enemy for the current turn, so you'll likely always find a way to trivialize encounters within your disposal if you're just playing the game normally, even if you didn't realize it. With good speed, lightning or ice spells at your disposal and some status effect ammo, nothing will ever be able to stop you, no matter how hard they try. Once again, it's a preparations game, and that auto-battle button will get an intense workout this time around. I actually cleared the entire final dungeon under the effect of consecutive Fuma Bells, because of the combined effect a high encounter rate and the knowledge that the bosses could not stop me had on my brain. It's all about knowing which things are actually useful and which aren't, so it's actually just about struggling until the point you figure it out, then blazing through the game's fights half-asleep.

Still, battles notwithstanding, I think the exploration is more masterful than ever this time around. There isn't any significant portion of the game where you're clearly going after McGuffins, the whole story is pretty tightly paced and the balance between open-endedness and plot progression is well kept. There is a clearly evolving status quo for the entire setting of the game, and each time a major change happens new areas are made available while others are locked away. You can feel the effect the events of the narrative are having on the whole scenario, and the progression creates a bit of a disorienting effect as you attempt to find your way to the next significant location (which can and very well may cause you to get hopelessly lost on occasion, but that's part of the experience, I think). It's a pretty admirable blend of elements working together to create a continuous experience. This bleeds over into the characters themselves, who have evolving arcs and, for the most part, continue to be relevant and to have all sorts of crazy things happen to them through the course of the game. Consider it a much more mature attempt to do the sort of character-based revolving scheme that Final Fantasy IV also tried to do.

Overall, this is a game that further plays around with story concept brought over from MTII, experiments somewhat with new ways to go through some of its story beats, and creates a character-based narrative that goes through admirable amounts of change, to the point you can feel the whole cast working through their arcs as things escalate and reach a fever pitch. The gameplay is significantly less refined, though, and, admittedly, even the respectable things in SMT have struggled to stand the test of time, especially when you consider what later SMTs and SMT spinoffs would go on to do. I think this earns the original a 6.5 out of 10, my first non-integer score. It's damn respectable and admirable for 1992, but it has so many outdated things in it that it's hard to actually get oneself into the proper mentality to admire it unless you actually make the conscious decision to play the series in chronological release order. But who would be masochistic enough to do that, right?

[morshtalon]

With the amount of notoriety that this tumblr has (read: none), my closest online friends are these bots that try to scam really small, gullible profiles looking for that big break. Maybe I should start talking to them, it seems like they really want to be friends...

(I wonder if this happens to well-known people too)