The Shin Megami Everything Thread

[Cata]

All the Persona RPGs after 2 are total cack

I usually take icycalm posts with a huge grain of salt but he has a point there. My only problem with this is that he makes it sound like the games are a walk in the park. I have yet to play Persona 3 but atleast in 4 there a couple fights that turned out to be much more difficult than just "Scan for weakness > exploit > all-out attack > repeat "

[Squire Grooktook]

P4 is no Nocturne but its a mile above P3 imo.

[BryanM]

3 in particular suffered from having no budget. You can really feel the dearth of money as you play - the tiny number of areas, the tiny amount of animation during the social cutscenes.

The correct activity for social links you don't like is of course to avoid them and go to bed. Accelerate to the next dungeon. It's bad on my OCD to know there's some scant advantage to pursuing them; but the game is going to end and it won't ever matter after that.

SMT does lack pretty heavily when it comes to the battle system. It's not like I can visit Japan and say "Make poison damage worth using against most bosses or your combat system blows" to every person I see until this most basic of designs begins to gain traction. Think I already said this, but Pokemon has better variety on unit setups than this. Walls, baton passers; there's a lot of ways to make characters feel different from one another than just the damage type they use. It's a Dragon Quest clone, but Dragon Quest has had powerful boofs since 2 or 3, and summon skills since like 6 at the latest.

There's a slot for a melee weapon and a slot for a gun weapon in Persona 5. But neither will matter much since damage in Persona games is determined by the skill you use. The passive effect a weapon grants is more important than anything else it has going on.

I'm sure it'll be great for the type of experience it's going for. But with everything stripped down to just the game part, Persona Q is probably superior unless they've done some massive restructuring to combat and dungeons.

I usually take icycalm posts with a huge grain of salt but he has a point there.

It's one of his minions~

Why work when you can outsource.

[Formless God]

"Make poison damage worth using against most bosses or your combat system blows"

Why would you do that? I'm all for making statuses more useful than they are, but this sounds exploitable as hell to me. FOE fights in EO become stupid once you figure this out.

SMT

Persona is a stripped down SMT; it is not SMT.

[Squire Grooktook]

Persona is a stripped down SMT; it is not mainline SMT.

Fixed. I don't think its arguable that "its smt" when its in the title. Its a stripped down smt lite spin off.

[BryanM]

I barely noticed a difference. Are there SMT monster builds that are more than Pierce+Best Physical Attack, Elemental Spell Attack+Amp+Boost, Almighty Attack, with a couple copies of Revive and Heal Party and maybe a slot for a boof like Luster Candy?

Why would you do that? I'm all for making statuses more useful than they are, but this sounds exploitable as hell to me. FOE fights in EO become stupid once you figure this out.

Etrian Odyssey goes the route of poison being overpowered early on and underpowered late game. Really it doesn't take much: Have the poison do 1.5x to 2x the damage as a single target attack over 3 to 4 turns, a simple number fix. It's completely weird in 2015 for it to have a fraction of a chance of dealing miniscule damage.

Stuns, paralysis, sleeps; general crowd control is a more complex ball of wax. Far more powerful than simple direct damage. Etrian Odyssey goes the route of giving them subsequent diminishing returns on their odds of landing, which is at least trying.

I like systems with buffers, debuffers, DoT, summoners, direct damage, units with "synergy" with each other; but they opt for something much more straight forward and simple. I guess that's a given whenever a system uses the traditional Dragon Quest MP resource system.

I think it's innately a bad resource system. : (

[Formless God]

I barely noticed a difference.

I remember you saying battle system, not unit/skill setup (which is just a part of it). If it's the latter then yes, it is indeed similar for both (at least in the late game).

Stuns, paralysis, sleeps; general crowd control is a more complex ball of wax. Far more powerful than simple direct damage.

Sleep/paralysis/mute/poison are encouraged in Press Turn SMT games because you can waste these on the extra turns (the problem with status ailments is the fact that they're random; in normal cases you're better off just going in instead of rolling a dice until you get lucky), and they synergize with other skills or the system itself (paralysis gives you extra turns via criticals; guaranteed kill on sleeping units; tricking a muted enemy into giving you extra turns, etc etc.)
Buff/debuff are a core aspect in both SMT and purse owner because they greatly cut on resource costs or let you manipulate the percentages to an extent.

Anyway, being "far more powerful" is kind of a problem. Because they are powerful, they are tied to luck. Because they are tied to luck, they are less preferrable over guaranteed options. It's a dilemma.

[Blackbird]

I'm like a year late to this train, but I just discovered this video today and couldn't stop laughing.

Silly Persona 4 Argument

"Note:I disabled the comment section because just looking at it killed my brain cells and now I'm down to very few."

[ryu]

Surprisingly, SMT X FE is not dead! It doesn't look like much either game though, much more like a Persona spin off. I guess we'll get more iinput on the game at this year's E³.

[Pretas]

So the Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem project isn't dead, but it turned out to be something that fails to even vaguely resemble SMT or FE.

It's just another trendy modern Persona JRPG, except it almost seems to be set in the world of Tiger & Bunny. It's trying to be a million things at once, none of which fit together in the least. At the very least, I expected a vast SRPG with a huge cast of familiar characters spanning the histories of both franchises.

What a massive let-down. Maybe it would have fared better if Atlus R&D 1 hadn't been preoccupied by Persona 5, or if Atlus had an actual vision for the project beyond shitting out a confused, soulless Fantastical Japanese School Life Adventure product to fulfill some contractual obligation for Nintendo.

I should have known better than to expect anything good after both SMT IV and FE: Awakening were the worst mainline entries in each series, though.

[ryu]

I like this concept, works much better than anything else I imaged of the game so far.

I expected a vast SRPG with a huge cast of familiar characters spanning the histories of both franchises.

That's the worst they could have done. What's good about cheaply made cross over games made with artworks from a dozen different games? And putting together universes that don't fit together, making characters interact with one another that have never been intended for that. What's so good about taking characters out of their intended context?

Assuming SMT x FE is just Persona with SMT and FE summons (with obscured faces!) , I'd say we're getting the only worthwhile crossover RPG ever made.

[BryanM]

So the Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem project isn't dead, but it turned out to be something that fails to even vaguely resemble SMT or FE.

It's not supposed to. If someone wants FE, they buy FE. If someone wants SMT, they buy SMT. If you don't try making something weird and newish, you'll only cannibalize your own franchise. These things have delicate 2 or 3 year lifecycles so as not to oversaturate demand.

Also assumed it'd be a jrpg for several reasons. Being set in one of the infinite SMT universes where these people meet each other in new lives, and the FE characters exist in one of those parallel worlds of fairy tale and myth; it's a decent enough premise.

A severe problem of mash ups is the story; going on "after the end" after all the loose ends are tied off as it were. Capcom X Everybody can get away with it, but in a game where you have to listen to an elf complain about how her classmates make fun of her cooking for 6,000 hours worth of social links.... eh.

[Pretas]

I expected a vast SRPG with a huge cast of familiar characters spanning the histories of both franchises.

That's the worst they could have done. What's good about cheaply made cross over games made with artworks from a dozen different games? And putting together universes that don't fit together, making characters interact with one another that have never been intended for that. What's so good about taking characters out of their intended context?

The main series SupaRobo Taisen games are my counterpoint. They've had excellent presentation (at least in battle animations) since the PS2 era, and they manage to mesh together the disparate sci-fi/fantasy technologies of dozens of different franchises in a strategic context amazingly well. For example, Evangelions being powerful melee fighters with their movement restricted by umbilical cords, or Ideon only being able to use its superweapon under difficult conditions at critical health. The mecha also have special attention given to their function in squads, and how they would cooperate with robots from other universes.

It's not hard to dream up ways in which this could apply to a SMT/FE crossover.

[Formless God]

Yo I just woke up and what kind of faggy shit is this; this is neither SMT nor Fire Emblem

both SMT IV and

you mean Strange Journey right

[Squire Grooktook]

Pretty much sums it up.

Also don't feel like retyping so here's my opinion/cross post from another forum:


It's not what I expected at all, but it does look colorful, I'll give it that.

However, what will make it or break it for me is whether it actually plays and feels like SMT X FE, and not just Persona with a few FE people as summons. I'm talking mid battle movements on a square grid, rock/paper/scissors weapon advantages, lengthy 20+ minute engagements, press turns, demon summoning, maybe some form of perma death, etc. The works from both series.

The extremely brief battle clips they showed seem turn based and persona-esque, hopefully there's more to it then that though. Otherwise fuck it.

And it better not play like Devil Survivor either. DS1 is probably one of the best story/settings in the smt-verse but I did not care for the gameplay at all. Too much of a grindfest if you weren't a master of fusion/stat min maxing IMO, and the excision of the usual exploration in between battles hurt the pacing rather then helped also IMO.

*second post

The ironic thing is that, even though it also looks very anime (though to a lesser extent), FE:If looks closer to a true SMT X FE game then this does so far.

In fact, come to think of it, SMT IV was pretty close to an SMT X FE setting wise, given the modern day post-apocalypse/fantasy world dichotomy.

I should have known better than to expect anything good after both SMT IV and FE: Awakening were the worst mainline entries in each series, though.

Nah, the worst mainline entry in the FE series was Radiant Dawn for allowing mid mission saving and ratcheting up the difficulty till it became a save-state-o-rama that felt more like Super Meatboy: The RPG then the tense series we'd come to know. Other bullshit about that game too (axing supports iirc, dumb new mc, introduction of some wacky smt-esque "god is evil" plot that felt out of place, tons of units that weren't viable end-game iirc, etc.).

FE:Awakening is actually a really solid game that handles the ability to grind way better then Sacred Stones (ie you can generally bypass grinding with smart gameplay unlike SS where it was practically mandatory). Even the silly-broken new systems (pairing, reclassing) only make the game marignally more broken then past entries (let's not forget, this is the franchise where end-game battles are usually won by 3 dudes) and work fairly well if you don't play it like a Nippon Icchi title. And that's the best you could really hope for for a game that introduces at least 2 new major mechanics for the first time ever. I'm hoping IF refines pairing and reclassing even further.

[Formless God]

What, you might need it for the secret boss, but there's no min-maxing required in DS. Fusion is your standard SMT fare with selectable skills (and really, simply fusing upward will get you pretty far) and the winning tactic is just to crack and equip the right skills. You only need to "grind" 3~4 battles per day (mostly to get any skills you didn't manage to crack). It's a really easy game. I actually prefer it over everything else including the Press Turn games because you only get some real action in the boss rooms there.

I don't know about what an ideal SMTxFE game would be like, but If is giving a pretty heavy IV vibe with the whole black&white, peace&power thing. Looks like they're adding a third option as well; I'll laugh my ass off if it's neutral.

P.S. Interim saving is a feature that you aren't forced to use. I have more beef with the midgame turning into a oneshot festival and the Maniac mode disabling range viewing for some godforsaken reason; but it's still a more fun game than, say, 9.
P.P.S. It's interesting that you pointed Nippon Ichi out; I went full ham with marriage/pair up/reclassing on my first run of it and thought I was playing Disgaea, lol. And btw, If fixed pairing by making enemies pair as well. Get your anus ready

[Squire Grooktook]

What, you might need it for the secret boss, but there's no min-maxing required in DS. Fusion is your standard SMT fare with selectable skills (and really, simply fusing upward will get you pretty far) and the winning tactic is just to crack and equip the right skills. You only need to "grind" 3~4 battles per day (mostly to get any skills you didn't manage to crack). It's a really easy game. I actually prefer it over everything else including the Press Turn games because you only get some real action in the boss rooms there.

I am apparently really bad at fusion and understanding rpg stats, so the game was a nightmare for me from beginning to end lol.

P.S. Interim saving is a feature that you aren't forced to use. I have more beef with the midgame turning into a oneshot festival and the Maniac mode disabling range viewing for some godforsaken reason; but it's still a more fun game than, say, 9.

Eh,it's a pretty blatantly self imposed challenge not to use it. It's not like the game penalizes you or gives you a lower score/rank or anything for doing it (would be like if Cave games didn't zero your score for continuing), and the boost in difficulty really encourages you to use it if you want a no causality run.

And btw, If fixed pairing by making enemies pair as well. Get your anus ready

Oh man yes. All of my money.

[Blinge]

Okay. I just saw Squire's image and thought 'it can't be that bad, I'll give the trailer a look.'

Oh dear God
Dafuq did I just watch?? was there even a hint of Fire Emblem in that? I barely feel like there's any SMT in there either. Sure, there's school kids, but.
(I've only played Persona 3)

Too much of a grindfest if you weren't a master of fusion/stat min maxing IMO

Is it bad that I felt this about P3? The fusion process was so long and complicated, the menus too clunky, I just wanted to play the damn game. I did fuse more often towards the end but didn't get any ultimate fusions or really get to grips with the system either. This probably meant I was unleveled enough for the endgame to be a real struggle.

Nah, the worst mainline entry in the FE series was Radiant Dawn for allowing mid mission saving and ratcheting up the difficulty till it became a save-state-o-rama that felt more like Super Meatboy: The RPG then the tense series we'd come to know. Other bullshit about that game too (axing supports iirc, dumb new mc, introduction of some wacky smt-esque "god is evil" plot that felt out of place, tons of units that weren't viable end-game iirc, etc.).

Aww man, that bad huh? Radiant Dawn was the next FE on my list, having played Path of Radiance last year. Is it much worse than PoR?
I've only played Shadow Dragon and Radiance but surely non-viable endgame units describes most FE games. You said yourself the final battles are usually won by 3 units.

[Squire Grooktook]

Dafuq did I just watch?? was there even a hint of Fire Emblem in that? I barely feel like there's any SMT in there either. Sure, there's school kids, but.
(I've only played Persona 3)

Definitely not alone. Besides the complete lack of Fire Emblem, SMT elements like demons, post apocalyptic settings, alignments, etc. It definitely looks more like Persona X Persona, which is a fitting title given how self indulgent the school life adventure jrpg's have become after P3 and P4's initial burst of quality.

Is it bad that I felt this about P3? The fusion process was so long and complicated, the menus too clunky, I just wanted to play the damn game. I did fuse more often towards the end but didn't get any ultimate fusions or really get to grips with the system either. This probably meant I was unleveled enough for the endgame to be a real struggle.

IMO it's slightly better in Persona 4 and to an extent Persona 3, because the day by day system gives you a better sense of how much grinding/fusion the game wants out of you, so it's easier to avoid feeling overwhelmed. I also feel the big battles vs dungeon exploration vs social links give the game a stronger sense of variety and pacing. There are definitely parts that are obnoxious if you're not great at SMT but it feels more manageable to me.

Aww man, that bad huh? Radiant Dawn was the next FE on my list, having played Path of Radiance last year. Is it much worse than PoR?
I've only played Shadow Dragon and Radiance but surely non-viable endgame units describes most FE games. You said yourself the final battles are usually won by 3 units.

You'll probably want to give it a shot without listening to me. As I mentioned, the main issue with it for me was the mid mission saving. It essentially turns the missions from intense, arcade-like experiences where every move matters, to save-stateable exercises in trial and error where you frequently replay the same 3 turns over and over. If making it through a tricky mission in past games is like a 1cc, then Radiant Dawn is more like Super Meat Boy.

The rest are all minor/subjective quibbles that may or may not bother you. In fact, it's been so long that I can barely remember if the axed supports and sizable number of non viable units is from this game (though I've heard other people mention those too in connection with RD so I'm probably correct). And the story of course is the same (I might just be biased towards PoR). It's more the core gameplay change that bugs me, but if you don't mind that then it's still a fun game.

Being the worst Fire Emblem game (only imo anyway) is like being the worst Cave game anyway. Still a solid game regardless.

[Blinge]

hold up...
trailer uploaded april 1st

[BryanM]

Don't be such a skeptical cat!

I think this comment sums it all up best: "After seeing the trailer, now I know less about the game than I did before."

Dafuq did I just watch?? was there even a hint of Fire Emblem in that?

The pegasus knight girl flew around on a robot space jet horsie. That's in Fire Emblem, right?

Is it bad that I felt this about P3?

Not really. These games probably go too far away from the Pokemon "live with this one guy forever", toward the "churn into something new every 50 minutes".

Devil Survivor and everything made after SMT4+ are much better about this since you just select the skills you want and go on living your life, instead of having to select-cancel a fusion 6,000 times to get what you want. Devil Survivor is especially simple, since all that's required to get a monster of a higher rank of the same type is fusing one with an elemental; dunno if the other games have currently adopted this wonderful improvement or not.

The problem of there being like a thousand sucky dudes with poopy averaged stats or lousy resistance that might as well not exist persists of course. Rock - Paper - Shotgun is such lousy design; "we'll give you the illusion of choice by offering you obviously wrong choices."

[Pretas]

hold up...
trailer uploaded april 1st

Start of the fiscal business year in Japan.

[BryanM]

#FE seems weird and unnecessary. Will probably have a hard time since all the jRPGs are on the 3DS.

I just played Digital Devil Saga most of the way through. Was just in the mood for a simple dungeon crawl. In retrospect I'm appalled when I realize that one dungeon can take as long as an entire playthrough of Final Fantasy 4 on the SNES. And all this hidey-hole back-track or 2nd loop to get to special battles is rubbish. At first I was moderately amused at how they conserved the budget (the fourth dungeon is just the second dungeon! Cheap stakes! At least put a couple other dungeons between them!)...

It's one of my unfavorites.

Is the 2nd one significantly better or am I better off playing Progress Quest?

[Squire Grooktook]

#FE seems weird and unnecessary. Will probably have a hard time since all the jRPGs are on the 3DS.

I could really rant about #FE. Maybe I will, hold on.

Okay here goes: Some people are still willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt. "It looks like shit, but maybe the battle system will be cool!". I'm not seeing it. The way I see it, these guys proved that they were Atlus's Z-Tier Team with no idea what their doing the moment they made the game a dungeon crawl instead of a demon summoning srpg.

They even said something like "we wanted to make it an srpg but couldn't figure out a decent way to do it". Holy shit there are a million ways to do it. At the absolute worst they could have just made it Advance Wars but with demons summoned from pentacles instead of infantry from barracks, and it would have been great.

Since they don't have any idea how to make a fun srpg or try anything new, I sincerely doubt that they have any idea how to make a fun dungeon crawl either. The teams aesthetic choices don't speak for the strength of the team overall either. I could be wrong, but I'm willing to bet this whole project is just going to be a generic mash up of Atlus rpg mechanics and another attempt at cashing in on Persona 3/4's fanbases and the anime crowd in general.


On the other hand, word on the street is that Fire Emblem Fates/If is fucking great. Pretty much makes up for all the disappointment with this shit.

[iconoclast]

They even said something like "we wanted to make it an srpg but couldn't figure out a decent way to do it".

The interview I read didn't say that at all.

Initially the companies began building a turn-based strategy game in the style of previous Fire Emblem games. But as pre-production wrapped up and concepts were starting to take shape, both developers realized it was the wrong approach for their collaborative project.

"From Nintendo's point of view, because it's Fire Emblem, we thought, let's make this a turn-based strategy game," Yamagami said. "In the beginning, even Atlus wanted to make it a turn-based strategy, but after finishing the concept for it, I said, no, don't do this, if you do something like this, it's something [Fire Emblem developer] Intelligent Systems could just make with the main series.

"Do something we can't do. That's when we decided to make it a JRPG set in modern Japan."

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-fi ... 0-6428306/

#FE also has some respectable staff behind it: Mitsuru Hirata, who directed Radiant Historia, and Eiji Ishida, who directed Strange Journey. Both of those games were very well received.

[Squire Grooktook]

Maybe I misread (or maybe shitty translation, has happened to me before), but it's still an absolutely horrible idea. Atlus already has their share of jrpg dungeon crawlers, and so their bright idea when given a venerable strategy series is to warp into yet another one? No thanks.

They could have done a lot of interesting things with an srpg fusion of the two franchises that would have been experimental enough to be beyond the scope of the standard FE formula (which tends to evolve veeeerrrrry slowly between games, and generally sticks to a tight formula. Awakening and Fates are really radical as far as sequels go, given how much new stuff they introduce). Given that one of the series involved has a whole history of weird demon summoning and fusion mechanics that they could draw from or take inspiration from, the fact that they couldn't think of anything beyond "something that intelligent systems would do for the main series" just proves my point about the lack of creativity.

Also holy heck, even if the choice was between retreading Intelligent System's formula and...that, I think they still made the wrong one.

I think they really threw some great potential down the toilet. The fact that they made that choice alone does not inspire any confidence in me for this project whatsoever. I guess it can't be much worse than an okay Atlus grinder, but I don't see much reason to get excited for it (compared to what it could have been).

[BryanM]

That could be said of pretty much every game ever made. I think it's reprehensible to still be using Dragon Quest 1's MP system in 2015, for example.

What they're probably concerned with is only losing a little bit of money instead of a ton of it. It's a niche system that only people who care about Mario Maker and Zelda U own, creating models of that quality for a hundred+ units that a decent SRPG would need... things aren't as easy as they used to be back when they made Devil Survivor or that Last Bible tacticsy game.

It's almost like I was just bitching about a game that was 95% refurbished content they put together 10 years ago.

[Squire Grooktook]

That could be said of pretty much every game ever made. I think it's reprehensible to still be using Dragon Quest 1's MP system in 2015, for example.

Fire Emblem doesn't even use MP for magic. Further proof of wasted potential.

creating models of that quality for a hundred+ units that a decent SRPG would need... things aren't as easy as they used to be back when they made Devil Survivor or that Last Bible tacticsy game.

Their going to be making a ton of models for player characters and enemy encounters in this, don't quite see the difference. An SRPG would probably use less unique models if anything. Fire Emblem has about 30-40 classes per game? All with the same model that get recycled throughout. Most dungeon crawlers/rpg's have what? 3 times that amount of unique monsters to model.

[BryanM]

Most dungeon crawlers/rpg's have what? 3 times that amount of unique monsters to model.

You're dramatically overestimating that one, which means the devs deserve kudos for creating that illusion.

Persona 3 and 4 reuse the same monster models from SMT3 that DDS1+DDS2 use, and possibly some other games (Imagine?). They would not have made SMT3 as it was if they did not plan to reuse those.

From scratch, Persona 3 has around 7 characters, ~10 or so personas, and 30 to 40 monsters. Then around 18 NPCs that require limited animation. It's a game that screams "NO BUDGET NO MONEY" the entire way through.

Final Fantasy 3 on the NES, though... is a real beast that just never seems to end. Completely above and beyond expectations. Was a big factor in why they avoided remaking it so long.

[Squire Grooktook]

Most dungeon crawlers/rpg's have what? 3 times that amount of unique monsters to model.

You're dramatically overestimating that one, which means the devs deserve kudos for creating that illusion.

Persona 3 and 4 reuse the same monster models from SMT3 that DDS1+DDS2 use, and possibly some other games (Imagine?). They would not have made SMT3 as it was if they did not plan to reuse those.

From scratch, Persona 3 has around 7 characters, ~10 or so personas, and 30 to 40 monsters. Then around 18 NPCs that require limited animation. It's a game that screams "NO BUDGET NO MONEY" the entire way through.

Same technique applies to srpg classes though. You get:

Armored dude.

Armored dude on horse.

Armored dude on dragon.

Armored dude with bow and arrow.

and so on and so forth.