The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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MX7
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by MX7 »

You got me! Coming from a film studies background, dubs aren't even a thing, totally verboten. But Atlus's dubs are particularly abusive and, in several cases, mandatory.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Blinge »

:cry:
I liked P4's...
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by MX7 »

Honestly, I'm being a prick, loads of people love 4. I've just never got on with dubs.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Mortificator »

The Japanese version is dubbed too. Excepting some FMVs, all video game audio is. It has to be added in post production; with sprites and polygons, there are no real voices to pick up.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by MX7 »

Mortificator wrote:The Japanese version is dubbed too. Excepting some FMVs, all video game audio is. It has to be added in post production; with sprites and polygons, there are no real voices to pick up.
Sure, but we could go even further, given that every element of every audiovisual medium is acontinuously produced and then reassembled to present the illusion of continuity. Even English language films presented in English are dubbed. Footsteps and atmos and colour grading and dialogue and increasingly settings all expertly inserted in postproduction while the consumer suspends their disbelief and believes this experience is flowing out their television unmediated, damnit. My issue with English language voiceovers for ostensibly Japanese characters is precisely related to that suspension of disbelief. The cognitive dissonance of a Japanese character speaking English in an American accent is too much. Again this is pure distinction and preference.

So the protag in 5 is definitely male. Was a bit disappointed but it's pretty cool how ridiculously feminine/andro he is. The hair swishing around is a cool visual flourish. I always disliked the design of the demifiend's tribal tats and pedal pushers, and Flynn's topknot was very Dalston, so this is a refreshing change.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by BryanM »

Yeah, I don't think they'll be able to do an Eternal Punishment thing and have a dedicated female MC ever again. The only other game in the franchise I can even remember doing that is Devil Children: Red Book.

There's this guy on youtube who has tons of long conversations about SMT, Fither, who hates the female MC option in Persona 3 Portable, and is very vocally against having it as an option or having a couple homosexual dating options. Only one MC and one canon per game.

Which would set in stone that a female MC is completely impossible due to revenue reasons, especially for Persona, at least. Those games are extremely aligned with male fantasy - being able to date nearly every single attractive female in the game isn't how it works in real life but he doesn't have any complaints about that, mysteriously.

Atlus even cut a romantic option for Yosuke in Persona 4 during development, the absolute cowards. If they were real men, they'd do the Only I Know The World Is A Game thing and let you date everyone - your bros, the granny, your teacher, the dog at the park, the fish in the pond, whatever.

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.... they're kind of drifting that way anyway......
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by scrilla4rella »

The Shin Megami V hype is real! I don't play JRPGs much nowadays and never found time for Persona 5 but I'll be getting SMT5 on day-one. I had a lot of fun with SMT 4 and Digital Devil Saga on 3DS (need to play SMT IV Apocalypse).
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Reviews are out, it seems there's some performance issues but it's Switch so no surprises there.
https://www.siliconera.com/review-shin- ... ful-smt-v/
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Durandal »

SMT isn't that different from Persona. It's just that instead of making friends it's doing the polar opposite.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by cj iwakura »

V's very much a modern day SMT, for better or for worse.

Lots of QOL changes like quest markers, branching quests, and so on, but it still feels very SMT.

The intro is also very much like Nocturne, it hits the ground running in less than half an hour.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by BulletMagnet »

A couple of SMT5 wallpapers are available for anyone interested.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Sengoku Strider »

MX7 wrote:My issue with English language voiceovers for ostensibly Japanese characters is precisely related to that suspension of disbelief. The cognitive dissonance of a Japanese character speaking English in an American accent is too much. Again this is pure distinction and preference.
As a Japanese speaker I can tell you that these days we get the better end of things in English. Japanese has multiple regional dialects, but in games & anime they tend to restrict themselves to Tokyo dialect, with some Osakan thrown in here & there to mark a character as "different." It's like imagine if the only two regional speaking styles in English language games were generic flat midwestern American and Boston. (The one frequent exception is the elderly person who sounds like a 120 year old country bumpkin).

Their voice acting used to be miles beyond the quality of that in Western games, but I think that pendulum's definitely swung back the other way. It's not that the actors aren't good at what they do, it's that they tend to train toward to a pre-approved list of cliches & vocal tics. Except when they get the dorama actors in for stuff like Yakuza, in which case you get soap opera-ey frequently over the top melodramatic readings.

Like, I cannot emphasize how much translation houses like 8-4 add to their games. They spin those cliches out into unique sentences, add period nuance lacking in the original text, vary characters' speaking styles more distinctly, and frankly just have better writing most of the time. Every once in a while you get a translator freewheeling in a dumb way, or doing unnecessary alterations for the worse, but by & large Western productions have been superior since the PS3 era when companies really started taking that stuff seriously.

I will give SMT credit though, in that the supernatural characters will throw in flourishes equivalent to Elizabethan English here & there. The first time I played an SMT game in Japanese it threw me for a loop because I hadn't encountered any of that before. But I think the translations did it justice perfectly well, as it's largely Western occultism it's trying to evoke anyway.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Blinge »

The regional variations in Dragon Quest 11 absolutely delight me
even if the cockney is hackneyed
:lol: :lol: :lol:

The JP voice acting being sterile and homogenous.. maybe that's a bit similar to the design-by-committee nature of western triple A games lately. sandboxes, filler sidequests, standardised controls.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Durandal »

Sengoku Strider wrote: Their voice acting used to be miles beyond the quality of that in Western games, but I think that pendulum's definitely swung back the other way. It's not that the actors aren't good at what they do, it's that they tend to train toward to a pre-approved list of cliches & vocal tics.
For games, definitely. Anime dubs on the other hand seem to suffer from the same problem, although that one is more due to a small talent pool rather than by-committee direction. However, performances for original Western animation sound waaaay more professional.

I was floored at the difference between the English and Japanese dubs for the Castlevania anime, the one that's originally created and directed in English. In one scene of the English dub, our hero Trevor Belmont is tired, hasn't slept in a good bed for days, has barely eaten, and is walking through a dour forest into a besieged city with no prospects of a good meal or bed, so naturally he's grumbling and bitching under his breath at the misfortune brought upon him. Meanwhile his Japanese counterpart Tureboru Berumondo is reminiscing about the last time he had good room service so loudly that everyone in a mile-wide radius could hear. You know, because most people tend to loudly talk to themselves when walking alone through a (cursed) forest. All the while sounding indistinguishable from any other "30yo burly man" character in anime.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Durandal wrote:I was floored at the difference between the English and Japanese dubs for the Castlevania anime, the one that's originally created and directed in English. In one scene of the English dub, our hero Trevor Belmont is tired, hasn't slept in a good bed for days, has barely eaten, and is walking through a dour forest into a besieged city with no prospects of a good meal or bed, so naturally he's grumbling and bitching under his breath at the misfortune brought upon him.
That guy's brilliant. He makes a character who could easily be dull, 1-dimensional or overbearing into someone flawed and not spotlight-hogging who gives other characters space to breathe while also being someone you can root for.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by cj iwakura »

BulletMagnet wrote:A couple of SMT5 wallpapers are available for anyone interested.
I wish V had half the style that IV's concept art did.

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It feels like V lacks a cohesive vision, possibly due to Kaz's absence.

Don't get me wrong, I love V's gameplay, but the plot elements just aren't there. It doesn't feel unified.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Cata »

BulletMagnet wrote:SMT5 patch incoming.
Not holding my breath but man would it be nice if this increased the performance of the game, even if just a little. The fact that the game prioritizes glistening sand and dynamic/abstractly animated text boxes over having consistent draw distance or texture streaming is a real bummer. Its so weird even going into the cathedral of shadows and seeing textures on the goddamn curtains pop in seconds later let alone all the demons while looking through the compendium.

If anything it just showcases how underpowered the switch is
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by cj iwakura »

Cata wrote:
BulletMagnet wrote:SMT5 patch incoming.
Not holding my breath but man would it be nice if this increased the performance of the game, even if just a little. The fact that the game prioritizes glistening sand and dynamic/abstractly animated text boxes over having consistent draw distance or texture streaming is a real bummer. Its so weird even going into the cathedral of shadows and seeing textures on the goddamn curtains pop in seconds later let alone all the demons while looking through the compendium.

If anything it just showcases how underpowered the switch is
I've also noticed janky demon movements in the distance that becomes smoother as you approach.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by BryanM »

ArKnights had really warped my expectations of what crossovers are like. That they don't need to be horribly out of place and terrible.

Dante From Devil May Cry was silly, but at least... at least he kind of looks like he belongs in a megami tensei universe. But you want to see something that is truly cursed? That's broken my brain?

It's canon. The implications... unsettling. Perhaps The Merge was real all along??
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by EmperorIng »

Atlus can handwave anything with its multiverse conceit, eh?

40 hours into SMT5 and I am loving it. It is my first proper SMT game so I guess everything feels super fresh to me.
I did pick up SMT4 on the 3DS sale for pennies so I will one day get to that, but this is the first honest-to-goodness RPG I've played in years and it's extremely addicting collecting my edgy pokemon and fusing them into even edgier pokemon.

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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Steven »

Soul Hackers 2 just got announced for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by MX7 »

I can't believe Atlus took the best looking Megaten game (Soul Hackers) and did... this...

Also, gave up on SMTV. It was fun for exactly 18 hours and then nope
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Mortificator »

Hell yes, I had a great time with Soul Hackers. Seems like the MC might not be silent this time (or is that just wishful thinking on my part?). I don't have a problem with the art style, it's not the '90s anymore
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

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So I picked up the re-release of Ultimax. I own vanilla Arena for PS3, but hadn't played the update / sequel before. At the moment, I'm just messing around with its substantial singleplayer content, I might hold off on online until rollback drops (and until I get gud :oops:).

I've also been rewatching bits of the Persona 4 anime, mostly jumping to the slice-of-life episodes. It does a good job with character interactions, and main dude actually has a personality now, but the fight scenes are weak.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by BrianC »

EmperorIng wrote:Atlus can handwave anything with its multiverse conceit, eh?

40 hours into SMT5 and I am loving it. It is my first proper SMT game so I guess everything feels super fresh to me.
I did pick up SMT4 on the 3DS sale for pennies so I will one day get to that, but this is the first honest-to-goodness RPG I've played in years and it's extremely addicting collecting my edgy pokemon and fusing them into even edgier pokemon.

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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by BryanM »

Put a good number of hours into this fresh new game called SMT IV. Don't know if I'll finish it, it feels pretty much identical to every other SMT game. (Multi-element units in the early game to hit a boss weakness more often, mono-element with passive boosts late game when they stop having weaknesses.) Inheritance and looking for decent monsters to fuse is less of a chore, that's nice. Otherwise it's a plain dungeon crawler, as things have always been. Has some nice scenery and atmosphere at times, ruined by constantly having to react to trash enemy spawns. (It does make it feel like you're living in an apocalypse, granted.)

The guest artist is by far the most interesting change to things so far. It reminds me of 90's Image comics, like Spawn and Savage Dragon. When the medusa scene dropped, all this build up and boss hype... then they brought her out of the shadows and I laughed. Laughed and laughed.

Soul Hackers getting a sequel of sorts makes me hopeful Devil Survivor will get another one, one day. Hopefully they'll keep down the scope and character roster, DS2 tried hard to be bigger and better but ended up being diminished by it by stretching too far. Once again, if you haven't tried it, I recommend DS1.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by BryanM »

Marsh is doing a series on the entire Last Bible franchise. Acceptable fare back in the 90's was a pretty low bar; what's even more insane is the delay between release and localization was seven years... and yeah, it sure felt it.

His observation that the super ultimate final dungeon in the gameboy version used the same rock cave with wood ladders tileset everywhere else used hurts me in the heart because it's so true. These games, not really the best. Which is what gives them value I guess. Makes them different.

Instead of some cute shit as your first enemy, like a fairy or slime or fluffy mammal, it's a floating skull with a snake crawling through its eye socket or what-have-you. Altogether was a very confused initiative from a conceptual level on their behalf: yeah, they wanted to move in and get some of that Dragon Quest money, but they didn't have a cohesive roadmap to get there. The gothic/metal monster designs are a high point of Last Bible, they would have been better off just making another conventional Megami Tensei game in modern times imo. The good Devil Children games were better for it. Or they could have gone with some light-hearted fare like Earthbound. Or straight up "Dragon Quest, but on the gameboy". The theming is all wrong, is what I'm saying.

Leaning more toward pure dungeon crawler certainly would have helped, due to the dialogue limitations of the old Gameboy ROM mapper they used..

I don't know if Last Bible was an experiment they didn't learn anything from: Their project Project Re: Fantasy certainly seems like they want to try to get into that genre again. But instead of a game that doesn't know if it's trying to sell itself to six year olds or edgy teenagers, they've accepted that edgy teenagers are their niche.

... jeez, Re:Fantasy was announced in late 2016? Feels like it's been longer than that. Like over seven years..
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Blinge »

Started playing my NG+ of Strange Journey Redux..
I'm in Sector Eridanus now and finally re-aligned myself to chaos. Not sure what the hell the point is in playing this game 6 times through to get all the endings. It took me long enough to earn enough macca to summon some good demons from my existing compendium and I'm ignoring pretty much every encounter.
By the time I reach the final boss again i'll have clean forgotten everything and probably get utterly wrecked.

In other news, I also picked up a little game called SMT IV -
Yo I like it.
I dunno man, Atlus just seems to nail the presentation every damn time. The challenge level seems decent to me, hella fun in the beginning, I get my ass handed to me on a platter sometimes if the enemy attacks first.
Probably some of the most aggressive on-field enemies I've ever seen.. I often get hunted down or hit by an encounter before I can begin to swing my sword at them.
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Re: The Shin Megami Everything Thread

Post by Steven »

I bought Deep Strange Journey a year ago or so, but I don't think I ever played it. I was really hoping that they'd give it press turn and a soundtrack that doesn't make me want to mute the volume, but they didn't. General consensus seems to be that regular Strange Journey is better, but I never got far in that game since I can't stand the boring battle system and the horrible music.

Shin Megami Tensei IV, though, was really great. It has some problems, like smirk being completely broken, the 0.390625% chance of finding the Fiends (and yes, I did find all of them and it did take a while), and physical skills costing MP, which renders physical-type demons with tiny MP almost completely useless unless they have Healing Knowhow (thanks for ruining physical skills by making them cost MP, stupid Strange Journey), but it has probably the best soundtrack of anything that's ever had a soundtrack and most of the rest of the game is great, although there are some points where the writing isn't so great. We don't talk about Shin Megami Tensei IV Final other than to say that it doesn't exist. Fuck that awful game that doesn't exist. Except its soundtrack, which is also pretty decent. Buy both soundtracks if you can since both are absolutely worth having, but good luck getting IV's OST now...

I just remembered that I never finished SMT V, the game that I bought a Switch for and then dropped the game three times. I'll give it another try again soon, I think, but I think it's probably one of the most disappointing sequels I've ever played, along with IV Final and Rogue Squadron III.
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