Intereviews

This is a disorganized series of thoughts about various media I've tried, largely to give folks an idea of what I like and what I don't like.

Currently it's focused on Megaten video games, as I've marathoned a number with my wife.

• Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II. Quintessential Game in the Series. Atlus is given significantly more free reign to build their ideal JRPG with liberty to ignore the book license. The result is a post apocalyptic RPG that's one part Wasteland (fallout shelter vaults, "devil busters" in lieu of "desert rangers", a shared level of cynicism about modern day society), one part Wizardry combat, with significant influences from GOD SIDER and Western 80s films like Terminator, Gremlins, Friday the 13th and Time Bandits. For better or worse the difficulty is at the level of Final Fantasy III Famicom, so while the game's structure feels ahead of its time, it's quite significantly punishing to play in some stretches of dungeon. To mitigate that, the game allows for infinite revives from the last save in exchange for half your money, a mechanic that many present-day games could stand to still learn from.
• Shin Megami Tensei (Super Famicom). Absolutely incredible pacing, influenced by Japanese horror epics like Kazuo Umezu's The Drifing Classroom, and absolutely pitch perfect with contemporary works like Junji Ito's Uzumaki. Difficulty has been severely nerfed to the point that battles aren't challenging, they largely waste your time. Only an optional late game boss breaks this trend (Gabriel) thanks to a mechanic that forces the player to change tactics. Why only that one boss? Absolutely nothing else new has been introduced to combat from the prior game. This was my first Shin Megami Tensei game which I first played around 2001, I largely enjoyed it. Nowadays the lurking antisemitism (new to this game, unfortunately) keeps me from enjoying it much. Knowing that the game's lead writer is a Japanese nationalist that presently styles themselves after Salvador Dali hasn't improved my opinion. A very Dave Sim situation.
• Shin Megami Tensei II (Super Famicom). The best four word summary of the game's plot I can deliver is Killer Jews in Space, and everything I feel about this game rolls downhill from that. While on paper a number of game mechanics are improved from the prior game, the pacing is terrible, the difficulty is still largely too easy but for a boss rush at the end, and it's trivial to get lost without a clue of where to go next without a walkthrough. Even when I could ignore the Dave Sim situation, I've only been able to play through this game once without my brain shutting off and demanding I do something else roughly halfway through.
• Shin Megami Tensei If... (Super Famicom). A sequel that reuses so much music, graphics, and the overall gameplay engine of the prior two games that it's practically a rom hack. Remember the comparison between the first game's spiral to insanity with The Drifting Classroom? This game's plot is... The Drifting Classroom, but in Hell instead of a post apocalyptic future, and with a bratty nerd as the Big Boss instead of unknowable forces beyond human understanding. Anyway, the adults go crazy, the kids die in horrible ways, just like The Drifting Classroom. The route two quest that's Devilman inspired is more challenging than anything the prior two games had to offer, though it requires playing through this game once. At least there's no killer Jews in this.
• Majin Tensei. A very straightforward fusion of early Super Famicom Fire Emblem with DDS: Megami Tensei II. Incredible soundtrack that drifts with some unusual influences like the horror movie inspired combat theme. While the plot barely matters for most of the game it does pull off some really interesting twists later on. Think "light vs darkness" instead of "law vs chaos" and you'll begin to get the idea. I ended up liking this game's plot much more than any of the "Shin" Megami Tensei games. Other curveballs like the interactive conversation with Balam and the bridge of Ariochs show some real interest in trying new concepts that pay off well. The bits that are less fun often come from vestiges of early Fire Emblem; there's quite a number of infinitely respawning monster generators that make crowd control in some maps a headache.
• Majin Tensei II: Spiral Nemesis. Much more ambitious than the previous game, shipped a year after, made by a core team that went on to do Soul Hackers. I don't like it as much, as some bits could use more polish or don't feel as fun as they could be. There are multiple protagonists, very significant amounts of 90s cyberpunk kitsch, a time-travel story that considers the four axis of law/chaos/light/dark, and more worlds to visit than the first. Unfortunately the most interesting worlds are in the last third of the game, and the first two thirds have some serious issues with asset reuse. Worse, the game's AI does take quite a bit of time to make decisions especially in later maps, you'll probably want to play this game on an environment that lets you artificially speed up the game's ability to think. Another less desirable addition; this game has rewards and exclusive units if you finish quest maps under a fixed turn limit, many times that's only possible if you grind away with your party on each world's designated grind map. As for story, I appreciated that the "dark" route is opted in through good but selfish intentions, and the women of this game are probably some of the more interesting personalities in broader Megaten. The dudes are a bit harder to like.
• Last Bible Special. An original game made by the team that did the Mega CD remake of Shin Megami Tensei, with blatant DDS:MT2 inspirations from beginning to end. It's fun to play a Megaten in a Medieval alchemy-influenced setting within fantasy Jerusalem and a mix of Wizardry rules with generated party members and demons recruited through conversation. There are two incredibly frustrating puzzles that even confused the fellow who streamed this game on Nico Nico Douga and the questionable quality of the translation patch doesn't help by fumbling some of the in-game hints. The game's balance is best described as "balanced high"; enemies hit unusually hard, while your PCs also hit extremely hard, especially as they learn magic. A surprisingly viable late game strategy is to use a magic spell that essentially detonates the user while doing massive damage against a target, then reviving the user of that spell, and repeating this every turn. Delightfully absurd game.
• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne Maniax (PlayStation 2). Most Influential Game in the Series (only if "Persona 3" isn't considered a Megaten game). This is the third "Megaten" game I played, and at the time I thought it was the best looking JRPG as well as the best JRPG on the platform. Nowadays I have to give that nod instead to Tales of the Abyss. There are some things about this game that have not aged well. The biggest issue is that the late game content requires very specific builds. For a "hard" JRPG there's none of the flexibility to craft different types of parties for the late game as a well done Wizardry game allows. Late game map design leans a bit too hard on invisible floor puzzles and other tricks that you can easily get around with a walkthrough or a guide, but then what's the point of playing this game really? I'll give credit to the new to this game "press turn" battle system for making fights interesting again, and being a major inspiration to Persona 3. The soundtrack is good when live guitars are playing and a certain MacInTalk voice is wheezing through lyrics, and substantially not to my liking when the Korg TRITON digital synth is dominating the mix. I guess I don't have the ear for early 2000s Power Mac composed pop-rock music to enjoy it.
• Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner. The first half is better than Nocturne! Clever dungeon design, excellent bosses, good challenges and some great thinking to be done about party composition. The second half needs improvement. Ailment control in random encounters becomes a significant issue, where the one catch-all spell that addresses all but the plot-mandated status ailment requires significant grinding as a late-game achievement if you want to collect it early. The plot is initially interesting, with a premise astonishingly similar to Phantom Dust on the Xbox. Both shipped in the same year in Japan, so I doubt it's intentional. Unfortunately, the plot doesn't do as much with the premise as Phantom Dust (a card collecting action game), choosing not to spend much time on the unforgiving world of memories, preferring instead to give time to the plot-mandated frail, meek Mystery Girl. Maybe I expected too much of the writing in this game?
• Persona 3. Most Influential Game in the Series. This is a rare instance when a game defines exactly what the next nearly twenty years of low-to-mid budget JRPGs will be. It's got a visual novel, school scheduling simulation structure that spices the conventions up with a partially randomized dungeon aspect. I spent 100+ hours playing this game and came to the conclusion that I did not want to play another Persona game in my life. Enjoyable, though the running time leaves me to think that you'll need to be very invested in what this game and its sequels have to offer to see it through to the end.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV. I used to quite like this game, though time has not been friendly to its pacing and difficulty curve. It definitely does take its time to find its stride, it's not until a third act that it becomes especially fantastic with further variations on the setting. Setting outside of that third act is kind of interesting though it does lose most of the charms of DDS:MT2, Majin Tensei and Nocturne before it by rendering the majority of demons hostile. Like Shin Megami Tensei, the game only has a few truly hard bosses, though this time some of them are mandatory. Combat is broken such that more than any game to this point, putting all of your character's points in one stat will make them nearly unbeatable. The early game is unusually punishing even by the standards of this series, but the difficulty curve is essentially logarithmic; once it stops getting tricky, you never really have to think much about combat but for a few bosses. I did like this game's take on Lilith more than Shin Megami Tensei's though, and it's nice to have "Gabby" in a more central role compared to the Dave Sim syndrome games. Kudos for casting Atsuko Tanaka as Gabby in this and future games, she was fantastic in El Shaddai and she's perfect for the role.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV FINAL. A true sequel in the sense that it's blatantly built on the foundations of the former, reusing many of its level designs, textures and game assets in the process, that somehow feels worse to play in every sense. The biggest issue is that turtling is an extremely viable strategy for this entire game, including the much hyped final boss so long as your designated partner for that fight is Asahi. Let me tell you, turtling feels awful in the press turn system, and it makes fights run for far too long. If you happen to walk into a fight at any point without a preferred skill that the game makes little effort to telegraph in advance (i.e. Smile Charge, or the dispel Smirk skill), your best option becomes to tank damage and wait for the Friendship Blaster to charge so that you can cheese fights in the dumbest way possible. In every other sense, combat is still broken in the same ways as Shin Megami Tensei IV. After two games of press turn feeling terrible, it took me until D2 Megaten to eventually come around to the idea that press turn might still be fun. Besides combat, I didn't care for the "alternate universe" plot where everything and nothing at all has consequences, which I suppose is an artifact of Megaten series writing since Nocturne Maniax pulled up the whole "it's a multiverse, so destroying the world shouldn't matter!" trope. A real mess.
• Shin Megami Tensei V. Best Game in the Series. I had low expectations going into this one, which turned out to be entirely undeserved. There's some solid, small changes to fix some of the in-game combat's known exploits. Tantamount to that is an effort to structure each boss as its own puzzle that requires strategies and specific parties around, a philosophy that D2 Megaten ran with for Aura Gate 2, and it works so well here. Through I'm not crazy about the trend towards Breath of the Wild inspired "open world" settings, here it's used for a seamless overworld "dungeon" with the ability to jump, run, and actively seek out collectables in environments that remind me of Majin Tensei's Makai and Majin Tensei II's Paranoia. The background story does try to move beyond the goofy law-neutral-chaos war without end, leading to a set of endings where not everybody can go home happy. For a change, there's no clear "best" ending. Side quests make an effort to make the demons relatable and lovable in their own ways, without angling for a clear moral right-or-wrong. Better writing than I've come to expect by this point. More interesting is that there's a real push to avoid spending too much time on the story in this game, there's a constant effort to get the player into the next overworld setting quickly with fast paced cutscenes and in-game help text to keep players from feeling stuck. Best played on "Hard" difficulty if angling for a challenge like DDS:MT2 and hoping to take advantage of the puzzle bosses, but "Normal" is fine as well.
• Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (Famicom). It's not a good game. This dates back to when Atlus was making The Karate Kid, Jaws and Friday the 13th for the NES on contract to stay financially afloat. The big difference between those three games and DDS:MT1 is that DDS:MT1 had some heart behind it, from the goofy monster designs, the first instance of "devil fusion" in a video game, the mega-dungeon and a great soundtrack. The team behind it had something to prove. That is how your first battle will be with a cute gnome who will not listen to reason as he merrily murders your entire party as you struggle to remember the last time you wrote down the thirty-nine character password to save. While password save for an JRPG is a frightening concept, it inadvertently(?) leads to the best way to play it. Take the suggestion from the official Namco Megami Tensei I・II soundtrack booklet and use the passwords within to either have the best possible party of demons (1UHGE • 046HS • PACUQ • 2QU18 • DHLWX • N3806 • 800K8 • 21WF) or the absolutely broken, impossible to achieve in game, all Krishna party (4F82P • CWKVG • N6Q71 • U98WD • 9LNQ4 • GP2RL • Q0000 • 058X) with level 99 player characters from the start. Don't worry, the final dungeon and boss will still be challenging; even at level 99, the final palace and its wicked puzzles are a massive endeavor to overcome. Most folks should play DDS:MT2 first and skip this curiosity.
• Soul Hackers 2. Despite coming out less than a year after Shin Megami Tensei V, it plays like a game from seventeen years before it. Specifically, Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner; there are even similarities between the final bosses of both games. Put aside that this game feels incredibly out of place for when it released, a time when JRPGs have pivoted to an assortment of action RPG mechanics, MMO inspired combat, and open world fields. This game has the best visual novel-style writing of any Atlus game to date. All of the main characters are written to be sympathetic, each one except for Ringo has their own love story that ties in with the main plot. There are satisfying payoffs to bringing the soul levels of the three human characters to 100 or above, which bring more closure than I was expecting for a franchise game. The "puzzle boss" formula of Shin Megami Tensei V and D2 Megaten's Aura Gate 2 returns here, with just enough resource constraints to push the player to think about how to customize the party. Visually the game's repetitive and the dungeon layouts follow simple gimmicks, that's kind of old hat for anybody used to Atlus' 16 bit and 32 bit eras. It's not a game for everybody, but it's a game that a small audience will really like. Isn't that what a Megaten game should be?

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