GENRE: Role-Playing
PLATFORM: Nintendo 3DS
CREDITS: 2013 Atlus
Composers: Ryota Koduka, Kenichi Tsuchiya, Toshiki Konishi
Images: Art from RPGFan, panoramic view from Amazon.com. (Other photos I took manually with a Samsung Galaxy Note cam.)
Amazon.com Description:
The Eastern Kingdom of Mikado is a city of the chosen, sitting on high and protected all around by towering walls. Yet its people are at risk from an ongoing demon threat that the player as a newly appointed Samurai are duty-bound to fight against. Throughout the player's journey, they must choose their own path. The choices will affect them, other NPCs, and the overall outcome of the story. Decisions players make throughout the course of the story will have lasting repercussions, as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
A third-person RPG epic, Shin Megami Tensei IV is the latest addition to the main Shin Megami Tensei series. Developed by the award-winning ATLUS team, Shin Megami Tensei IV features powerful new demons, expansive dungeons, epic story arcs with branching plot lines, game-altering decision making, and more. Built specifically for the Nintendo 3DS system with optimized graphics, 3-D dungeons, voiced dialogue, and StreetPass functionality, Shin Megami Tensei IV is a premium title that should grace every RPG fan's collection.
A decade since the last release, the latest Shin Megami Tensei game introduces new features such as the digital demon lending, brought to life by the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass function. Use the 3DS' game coins to buy the ability of resurrection, allowing players to jump right back into the game without fear that the previous hours of hard work will go to waste. Taking advantage of the autosave and autoload functions will also save the player from encountering future problems.
Clap clap clap. >>> by skysenshi
Before everything else, I'd like to note that this game came with a Prima Strategy Guide (with design and art) and a soundtrack disc. I love Atlus for being consistent with their physical copy bonuses.
As for the game itself...
THE GOOD:
A turn-based RPG that feels both old and new. Literally and figuratively. The newer Shin Megami Tensei games in general have proven to effectively combine 2D and 3D so perfectly. Once you're immersed in the SMTIV world, however, you'll see that even the setting feels old and new. I can't really talk much without spoiling it for you but you will start off in seemingly Feudal Japan but then you have that computerized gauntlet. Finishing the first 5 hours of the tutorial session will bring you to a bigger world and with many other techie things to do. Besides that, I appreciated that the whole 3D environment did not make me dizzy like most 3D games do. I'm not sure if it's because I had a 3rd person avatar during exploration but switch to 1st person upon engaging in combat. Whatever formula it is they used, it worked. After the first 5 hours, the proverbial glove finally fit and I was able to weave my way through most dungeons with very little difficulty. (The operative words are "most dungeons", but we'll talk about that later.)
Smirking. Though the concept of stat distribution isn't really new in the SMT series, I went really weird with my build. I checked forums and saw that people were creating either Strength or Magic builds. I created a Luck build (with Dex and Agi stats being secondary) after noticing that doing critical hits make you smirk, a state which gains you extra advantages like increased critical hits and evasion. If, for instance, your entire party smirks, you can even regain half your HP and MP. This made it easy for me to breeze through regular and boss battles because I was always doing critical attacks, dodging deadly attacks/spells, and instantly killing off enemies. (I only ever used two swords for a long time and both of them have insta-KO effects.) Basically, this concept of "smirking" allows players to think out of the box with stat distribution and this gives each player a unique experience.
Demon conversations. One of the things I loved in Shin Megami Tensei games (and this disappeared in the last two Persona games, 3 and 4) is the fact that you can talk to demons. You can recruit them, extort money/items from them, even trade. Your party wouldn't be composed of human members, but demons. Your human friends only accompany you and they'll be controlled by AI. I find SMTIV's demon summoning system easier than the last SMT game I played (Soul Hackers) because in SMTIV, it doesn't cost anything to summon a demon. You don't lose any points for walking with them either, so you just walk, fight and summon at will. They also don't have attitude adjustment issues (unlike Soul Hackers demons). You can even buy "apps" (wow, so 2013!) that will allow you to gain more money and experience points when you talk to demons. Anyone who has ever missed the demon conversations in the newer Persona games will definitely appreciate this feature.
Androgyny. I love how I sometimes can't figure out whether my demons are male, female or a little of both. I mean, I've seen the same demons over and over in other SMT games but there's something about their voices here... Also, I noticed that the protagonist, though male, is also androgynous. If I localized this game in my mother language, the protagonist could be male or female (because we don't have gender distinctions in my language) and it was easy for me to forget his default gender because of how he looks. He could be just one tough-looking girl, like Lady Oscar of the manga Rose of Versailles.
The only female demon here is on the rightmost. The middle ones I am not sure of.
You can toggle difficulty. This game has a 5-hour tutorial period wherein you die many times before you actually get the hang of things. But see, if you don't reset whenever you die and just let the game take its course, your second death will open up the "Prentice" (Easy) mode. I found this feature very useful because there were many times I'd end up lost in an enormous map and find myself in boss domains far above my party's levels (sometimes even 10 levels above mine). Switching to "Prentice" mode makes it easy for you to get out of a sticky situation, and then you can easily switch to "Master" mode when you want to go back to not being a pansy. It's also handy when you've become dizzy and tired from all the dungeon teleporters. While it won't delete the nasty teleporters, it at least makes the tedious battles less tedious. You can simply switch back to "Master" mode when you've finally found the dungeon's boss.
Moral dilemmas. Like other Shin Megami Tensei core games, SMTIV has alignments that make you choose: Law, Chaos, Neutral and Nihilist. Thing is, SMTIV makes you think really hard about your own values as a person and not just as a gamer. "Law" makes me think of words like good, clean, orderly, and peaceful. Unfortunately, in this game, I also got the impression that non-monastery people who read books are to be considered filth. As an academic, I find this thought offensive. So then I turned to listen to the "Chaos" side, which talked of bringing about change. It still comes with a hefty in-game moral price tag, though. SMTIV basically makes you weigh what you'd value and it isn't always black or white. Conclusion: you have to think things through.
Some quirky characters. The first character I noticed was a bartender who looked like an older Kurt Russell in Escape from New York. His name also happened to be K. Next, I noticed that one of my favorite characters, Isabeau, is a manga addict and I highly suspect that she was reading Rose of Versailles (based on how she described the manga's protagonist). Isabeau, to me, is a breath of fresh air in a very dark game that has no shame in kicking you in the gut on your first real mission out of the tutorial dungeon. They can't make her too quirky, though, or she'd be in a Persona game instead of being in the core series.
Now tell me he doesn't look like Kurt Russell.
THE BAD
The map outside of your starting kingdom is confusing. Again, I can't spoil this for you but there's an area in this game that's exactly like an existing city. Unfortunately, the game is figuratively and LITERALLY dark. The guide that came with the game was hardly any help at all and I had to grab my geography books just to stare at said city's map. Swamps, rivers, and tracks are just about the same somber color that it was difficult to tell where I was or if I had gone beyond the destination. I felt like I was always clawing my way from one area to the next even though there were machines that let you travel from one area to another quickly. All that running around on inane errands in a super confusing map was exhausting!
Too many side quests. In connection to the horrible map problem, there will be side quests that ask you to run back to some areas that you absolutely cannot remember how you got into. Since the map exhausted me, there came a point (I think, on my 30th hour) that I decided to skip the side quests altogether. Unfortunately, if you wanted an ending that didn't make you feel like a disgusting person, you'd have to go through some required side quests. I neither had the time nor energy to bother so I left many of the last ones unresolved. I was dying to know the outcome of my choices so I thought the quests were in the way.
On the bright side, these quests will only bother you if they trigger your OC completionist side. If you're just in there to have a fun experience, then you can skip them entirely.
If you think the mini-map will be a great help, you're in for a surprise.
Image credits to JohneAwesome's YouTube channel because I couldn't get a clearer shot of the map.
The endings. Remember what I said about moral dilemma being good? Well, experiencing some cognitive dissonance will help keep you on a sane path. After some time, I realized that the choices being presented to me were becoming less and less reasonable and there were boss battles that questioned your ethics. I wanted to disagree with the options presented but disagreeing meant that the boss would get stronger.
Basically, you have three friends that represent an alignment each. This will be pretty obvious in the intro of your game. Walter with the spiky hair is Chaos, Jonathan with the afro is Law, and Isabeau is Neutral. Isabeau's path is the hardest to get because then you'd have to think carefully about your decisions and also do more side quests than you'd care to accomplish. I have a suspicion that most busy people would be so tired of the side missions that they'd rather go to YouTube and watch the other endings than go through more side quests.
So this was how I knew that I didn't like where I was headed...
SPOILER ALERT (highlight white text at your own risk): [Chaos path. I chose to go with Walter instead of Jonathan because Jonathan sounded like an overzealous religious fool, who would rather follow orders than question the current state of their world. Unfortunately, the deeper I got into Walter's path, the more psycho he became. Later, I was forced to forget Jonathan in order to win a boss battle. Then I found myself with Lucifer on my side, which wouldn't be so bad if he had not brutally eaten Walter in order to become stronger. WTF. I'm with Lucifer. And he ate my friend!!! As if things couldn't get more horrible, Isabeau, my favorite character, decided that I was going bonkers -- hell yeah, she was right! So I had to fight her -- except that at the end of the battle, she slit her own throat so that I wouldn't have to taint my hands with her death.] SPOILER END.
So I'm going to put Isabeau here because she hates spoilers.
A non-spoiler summary: Yep. It felt like I just killed a litter of puppies. I heard that choosing the opposite direction isn't any better. (Except for the fact that no one ate anyone so it wasn't bloody.) In any case, the feeling did not last because...
Damn dungeon warps. What is it with SMT games and their obsession for teleporter-filled final dungeons? Can't think of anything new? See how Wild ARMS did it. Though SMTIV's final dungeon isn't as bad as Soul Hacker's, it's still pretty annoying to be running around in circles and not knowing where you're headed next. That grief I felt after a major alignment decision? Gone. Replaced by sheer annoyance at the dungeon teleporters.
Still, I suppose this only affects the replay value of the game to me. I love SMTIV but I might not replay it. (Then again, I said the same thing about Persona 4 and in the end, I had to stop myself from replaying it a third time so I can move on to the next game.)
THE UGLY.
None. Shin Megami Tensei IV is a gorgeous game through and through. Sure, I had some disappointments, like they could've let me wallow in self-pity longer, but even then, you'd still notice the thought, hard work, and craftsmanship that went into this package. The gameplay is solid, the graphics and the music are beyond expectations. I think those things more than made up for my bitter ending and the annoying side quests. For all I know, the devs were just as tired and more than ready to move on to the next project. Or it could just be me having a hectic December that I've become The Grinch. I must say, SMTIV is still one of the best new games to come into our shelves and highly recommended for people who have longer breaks/vacation.
PLATFORM: Nintendo 3DS
CREDITS: 2013 Atlus
Composers: Ryota Koduka, Kenichi Tsuchiya, Toshiki Konishi
Images: Art from RPGFan, panoramic view from Amazon.com. (Other photos I took manually with a Samsung Galaxy Note cam.)
SHOPPING: |
| Artbooks and Manga SMTIV game and merchandise Everything Shin Megami Tensei |
The Eastern Kingdom of Mikado is a city of the chosen, sitting on high and protected all around by towering walls. Yet its people are at risk from an ongoing demon threat that the player as a newly appointed Samurai are duty-bound to fight against. Throughout the player's journey, they must choose their own path. The choices will affect them, other NPCs, and the overall outcome of the story. Decisions players make throughout the course of the story will have lasting repercussions, as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
A third-person RPG epic, Shin Megami Tensei IV is the latest addition to the main Shin Megami Tensei series. Developed by the award-winning ATLUS team, Shin Megami Tensei IV features powerful new demons, expansive dungeons, epic story arcs with branching plot lines, game-altering decision making, and more. Built specifically for the Nintendo 3DS system with optimized graphics, 3-D dungeons, voiced dialogue, and StreetPass functionality, Shin Megami Tensei IV is a premium title that should grace every RPG fan's collection.
A decade since the last release, the latest Shin Megami Tensei game introduces new features such as the digital demon lending, brought to life by the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass function. Use the 3DS' game coins to buy the ability of resurrection, allowing players to jump right back into the game without fear that the previous hours of hard work will go to waste. Taking advantage of the autosave and autoload functions will also save the player from encountering future problems.
Clap clap clap. >>> by skysenshi Before everything else, I'd like to note that this game came with a Prima Strategy Guide (with design and art) and a soundtrack disc. I love Atlus for being consistent with their physical copy bonuses.
As for the game itself...
THE GOOD:
A turn-based RPG that feels both old and new. Literally and figuratively. The newer Shin Megami Tensei games in general have proven to effectively combine 2D and 3D so perfectly. Once you're immersed in the SMTIV world, however, you'll see that even the setting feels old and new. I can't really talk much without spoiling it for you but you will start off in seemingly Feudal Japan but then you have that computerized gauntlet. Finishing the first 5 hours of the tutorial session will bring you to a bigger world and with many other techie things to do. Besides that, I appreciated that the whole 3D environment did not make me dizzy like most 3D games do. I'm not sure if it's because I had a 3rd person avatar during exploration but switch to 1st person upon engaging in combat. Whatever formula it is they used, it worked. After the first 5 hours, the proverbial glove finally fit and I was able to weave my way through most dungeons with very little difficulty. (The operative words are "most dungeons", but we'll talk about that later.)
Smirking. Though the concept of stat distribution isn't really new in the SMT series, I went really weird with my build. I checked forums and saw that people were creating either Strength or Magic builds. I created a Luck build (with Dex and Agi stats being secondary) after noticing that doing critical hits make you smirk, a state which gains you extra advantages like increased critical hits and evasion. If, for instance, your entire party smirks, you can even regain half your HP and MP. This made it easy for me to breeze through regular and boss battles because I was always doing critical attacks, dodging deadly attacks/spells, and instantly killing off enemies. (I only ever used two swords for a long time and both of them have insta-KO effects.) Basically, this concept of "smirking" allows players to think out of the box with stat distribution and this gives each player a unique experience.
Demon conversations. One of the things I loved in Shin Megami Tensei games (and this disappeared in the last two Persona games, 3 and 4) is the fact that you can talk to demons. You can recruit them, extort money/items from them, even trade. Your party wouldn't be composed of human members, but demons. Your human friends only accompany you and they'll be controlled by AI. I find SMTIV's demon summoning system easier than the last SMT game I played (Soul Hackers) because in SMTIV, it doesn't cost anything to summon a demon. You don't lose any points for walking with them either, so you just walk, fight and summon at will. They also don't have attitude adjustment issues (unlike Soul Hackers demons). You can even buy "apps" (wow, so 2013!) that will allow you to gain more money and experience points when you talk to demons. Anyone who has ever missed the demon conversations in the newer Persona games will definitely appreciate this feature.
Androgyny. I love how I sometimes can't figure out whether my demons are male, female or a little of both. I mean, I've seen the same demons over and over in other SMT games but there's something about their voices here... Also, I noticed that the protagonist, though male, is also androgynous. If I localized this game in my mother language, the protagonist could be male or female (because we don't have gender distinctions in my language) and it was easy for me to forget his default gender because of how he looks. He could be just one tough-looking girl, like Lady Oscar of the manga Rose of Versailles.
You can toggle difficulty. This game has a 5-hour tutorial period wherein you die many times before you actually get the hang of things. But see, if you don't reset whenever you die and just let the game take its course, your second death will open up the "Prentice" (Easy) mode. I found this feature very useful because there were many times I'd end up lost in an enormous map and find myself in boss domains far above my party's levels (sometimes even 10 levels above mine). Switching to "Prentice" mode makes it easy for you to get out of a sticky situation, and then you can easily switch to "Master" mode when you want to go back to not being a pansy. It's also handy when you've become dizzy and tired from all the dungeon teleporters. While it won't delete the nasty teleporters, it at least makes the tedious battles less tedious. You can simply switch back to "Master" mode when you've finally found the dungeon's boss.
Moral dilemmas. Like other Shin Megami Tensei core games, SMTIV has alignments that make you choose: Law, Chaos, Neutral and Nihilist. Thing is, SMTIV makes you think really hard about your own values as a person and not just as a gamer. "Law" makes me think of words like good, clean, orderly, and peaceful. Unfortunately, in this game, I also got the impression that non-monastery people who read books are to be considered filth. As an academic, I find this thought offensive. So then I turned to listen to the "Chaos" side, which talked of bringing about change. It still comes with a hefty in-game moral price tag, though. SMTIV basically makes you weigh what you'd value and it isn't always black or white. Conclusion: you have to think things through.
Some quirky characters. The first character I noticed was a bartender who looked like an older Kurt Russell in Escape from New York. His name also happened to be K. Next, I noticed that one of my favorite characters, Isabeau, is a manga addict and I highly suspect that she was reading Rose of Versailles (based on how she described the manga's protagonist). Isabeau, to me, is a breath of fresh air in a very dark game that has no shame in kicking you in the gut on your first real mission out of the tutorial dungeon. They can't make her too quirky, though, or she'd be in a Persona game instead of being in the core series.
THE BAD
The map outside of your starting kingdom is confusing. Again, I can't spoil this for you but there's an area in this game that's exactly like an existing city. Unfortunately, the game is figuratively and LITERALLY dark. The guide that came with the game was hardly any help at all and I had to grab my geography books just to stare at said city's map. Swamps, rivers, and tracks are just about the same somber color that it was difficult to tell where I was or if I had gone beyond the destination. I felt like I was always clawing my way from one area to the next even though there were machines that let you travel from one area to another quickly. All that running around on inane errands in a super confusing map was exhausting!
Too many side quests. In connection to the horrible map problem, there will be side quests that ask you to run back to some areas that you absolutely cannot remember how you got into. Since the map exhausted me, there came a point (I think, on my 30th hour) that I decided to skip the side quests altogether. Unfortunately, if you wanted an ending that didn't make you feel like a disgusting person, you'd have to go through some required side quests. I neither had the time nor energy to bother so I left many of the last ones unresolved. I was dying to know the outcome of my choices so I thought the quests were in the way.
On the bright side, these quests will only bother you if they trigger your OC completionist side. If you're just in there to have a fun experience, then you can skip them entirely.
Image credits to JohneAwesome's YouTube channel because I couldn't get a clearer shot of the map.
The endings. Remember what I said about moral dilemma being good? Well, experiencing some cognitive dissonance will help keep you on a sane path. After some time, I realized that the choices being presented to me were becoming less and less reasonable and there were boss battles that questioned your ethics. I wanted to disagree with the options presented but disagreeing meant that the boss would get stronger.
Basically, you have three friends that represent an alignment each. This will be pretty obvious in the intro of your game. Walter with the spiky hair is Chaos, Jonathan with the afro is Law, and Isabeau is Neutral. Isabeau's path is the hardest to get because then you'd have to think carefully about your decisions and also do more side quests than you'd care to accomplish. I have a suspicion that most busy people would be so tired of the side missions that they'd rather go to YouTube and watch the other endings than go through more side quests.
So this was how I knew that I didn't like where I was headed...
SPOILER ALERT (highlight white text at your own risk): [Chaos path. I chose to go with Walter instead of Jonathan because Jonathan sounded like an overzealous religious fool, who would rather follow orders than question the current state of their world. Unfortunately, the deeper I got into Walter's path, the more psycho he became. Later, I was forced to forget Jonathan in order to win a boss battle. Then I found myself with Lucifer on my side, which wouldn't be so bad if he had not brutally eaten Walter in order to become stronger. WTF. I'm with Lucifer. And he ate my friend!!! As if things couldn't get more horrible, Isabeau, my favorite character, decided that I was going bonkers -- hell yeah, she was right! So I had to fight her -- except that at the end of the battle, she slit her own throat so that I wouldn't have to taint my hands with her death.] SPOILER END.
A non-spoiler summary: Yep. It felt like I just killed a litter of puppies. I heard that choosing the opposite direction isn't any better. (Except for the fact that no one ate anyone so it wasn't bloody.) In any case, the feeling did not last because...
Damn dungeon warps. What is it with SMT games and their obsession for teleporter-filled final dungeons? Can't think of anything new? See how Wild ARMS did it. Though SMTIV's final dungeon isn't as bad as Soul Hacker's, it's still pretty annoying to be running around in circles and not knowing where you're headed next. That grief I felt after a major alignment decision? Gone. Replaced by sheer annoyance at the dungeon teleporters.
Still, I suppose this only affects the replay value of the game to me. I love SMTIV but I might not replay it. (Then again, I said the same thing about Persona 4 and in the end, I had to stop myself from replaying it a third time so I can move on to the next game.)
THE UGLY.
None. Shin Megami Tensei IV is a gorgeous game through and through. Sure, I had some disappointments, like they could've let me wallow in self-pity longer, but even then, you'd still notice the thought, hard work, and craftsmanship that went into this package. The gameplay is solid, the graphics and the music are beyond expectations. I think those things more than made up for my bitter ending and the annoying side quests. For all I know, the devs were just as tired and more than ready to move on to the next project. Or it could just be me having a hectic December that I've become The Grinch. I must say, SMTIV is still one of the best new games to come into our shelves and highly recommended for people who have longer breaks/vacation.
PLAYER STATUS:
DIFFICULTY: Easy to Difficult
COMPLETION TIME: 55 hours and 59 minutes (including NG+)
HIGHEST LEVEL ACHIEVED: Level 61 for both protagonist and Nemissa
RATINGS: Gameplay 9; Battle 10; Story 9; Visuals 10; Characters 8; Sounds 9; Replay Value 5
DIFFICULTY: Easy to Difficult
COMPLETION TIME: 55 hours and 59 minutes (including NG+)
HIGHEST LEVEL ACHIEVED: Level 61 for both protagonist and Nemissa
RATINGS: Gameplay 9; Battle 10; Story 9; Visuals 10; Characters 8; Sounds 9; Replay Value 5
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