Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey for DS Review

[ReddMcKnight]

Shin Megami Tensei is a popular series in Japan. While it has a rather large following in Japan, it's not as well known over here in the US as far as I know. Anyway, Atlus recently released Strange Journey, the 4th installment of the series in the US. Here's a review for it.

Story: You play the role of an American (Japanese in the Japanese Version) Soldier who, along with a small army, has been called to investigate the "Schwarzwelt", a Black Area that has engulfed Antarctica. The bad thing about the Schwarzwelt is that it continues to grow, and Demons are appearing from it. Once you and your fellow soldiers enter it, you get stuck in it, and must find a way to escape. What waits inside is not of your world though...

Gameplay: This is an RPG. It's like many other RPGs. You fight, you recruit party members, you level up, but in this, party members don't just join you as you progress. To get party members, the Demons, you must recruit them through conversation while in battle. If the conversation goes well, the Demon you are talking to will join you. Once you have many Demons, you can also fuse them together to create more powerful Demons. Anyway, that about sums up the basic gameplay.

Music: Ugh. This game's music is so boring. The battle music doesn't even sound like battle music. The tunes in this game are fairly quiet, and don't stay loud for very long. If you'd like to hear samples, go check Youtube. You might like the music, but I don't.

Final Word: This game is okay, but it's also really hard, and not for the impatient. It also revolves around religion, and may offend some people. On the plus side, it DOES have 4 different endings. Granted, one of them is a Game Over, but still...

Score: 7/10
Time Spent: Not yet beaten. I am at the end of the game though.

[skyknight]

Well, I do consider myself a new follower to the SMT series, only after I got Persona 4, Devil Survivor, Persona 1 (psp) Persona 3: FES, Strange Journey, and pre-ordered Persona 3 Portable in this order.

The series isn't for everyone, as at times it deals with gray areas, and you do have to grind in some areas. But it is worth a look for all RPG fans.

[MrPopo]

I thought it was nice that the game has an interesting game over screen, like how when you fall against Lavos in Chrono Trigger. The game seems to use the same engine as Etrian Odyssey, though you cannot fill in your own map; it fills it in as you step on squares. You'll discover many hidden pathes that you cannot necessarily access at the start; you need to gain abilities as you go along to be able to open up old areas. There's also been some changes to the fusion system. In older SMT games fusing two demons would generate a new skill set using probabilities of inheritence of the parent demon's skills. So if you didn't like what you got you could cancel and restart the fusion. In Strange Journey the skills inherited is very deterministic. You can get the details from GameFAQs but to put it simply it makes an ordered list of the two parents' skillls and then takes the top X to generate the final skillset. You do still have the ability to change this, thanks to the Source system. When a demon you own levels up after having been in your party a while you will gain a demon source. This will contain two or more skills from the demon. A few are set per demon and the others are based on the skills the demon currently has. You can use these sources when you are fusing to throw a monkeywrench into the fusion set. Now it compiles a list of the two parents' skills plus the source skills and then randomly picks (with equal probability) X to generate the final skillset. This makes it a bit easier to create your perfect demons for the endgame.