So, first something that needs to be said, I came into this game knowing nothing about Shin Megami Tensei, so I had no idea what to expect.
Story:
Strange Journey starts with you on a ship traveling towards an anomaly called the Shwarzwelt that is covering the south pole and is expanding outward. Your ship and three others are tasked to investigate the Shwarzwelt. Things predictably go wrong and your left stranded in the Swarzwelt and having to deal with the demons that populate it.
The story starts out pretty slow, and doesn't really pick up until the latter half of the 60 hour experience. When it does pick up, it gets interesting and thought provoking.
Unlike a lot of games, you have a real choice in how the story plays out, though not until the end. The entire endgame changes based on your choices during the game. There are other consequences related to where you fall on the scale of Law-Neutral-Chaos, but those fall under gameplay.
Gameplay:
The basic gameplay of SMT: Strange Journey is a mix of first person dungeoun crawling and random battles that are intensely tactical.
There are two main parts of Strange Journey's gameplay: The Dungeon, Battles
There are a number of dungeons, each with its own theme. while they start out simple, they gradually get more and more complicated, though the most difficult dungeon is not the last, which feels a bit strange. These dungeons are mazes with hidden doors, teleporters, floor traps, and many more obstacles standing between you and the end of each dungeon. The dungeon designs can get very devious, and even unfair, but it's worth sticking through it to explore more.
You can find NPCs in the field who will give you side missions. These side missions, along with your ever expanding toolset, encourage you to go back to dungeons you have already visited in order to do things you couldn't do your first time through.
To help you out, you can return to your ship, which basically functions like a town for each dungeon. You can turn materials called forma that you find in the field into items, and you can heal and save as well as find some side missions.
Something about the way Strange Journey is designed makes it very hard to not explore every last square on the dungeon map. Because the draw distance is rather short, and NPCs only appear when you are on the same square as them, you never know what lies ahead. The dungeons can be quite atmospheric because of this, or at least it would be if there weren't random encounters. Normally this would drive me nuts, as it kinda destroys immersion. However, when the combat is this fun, I don't really mind.
The combat is starts out fairly easy, but it soon reveals itself to be very deep. Buff, debuffs, status effects, and instant kill attacks are not only useful in this game, but they can often times be crucial to success.
While all that is nice, the main crux of the system is that if one of your party members hits an enemy with an attack that they are weak to, all of the demons in your party that share an alignment with first attacker will do a followup attack. What this system means is that you always have to pay attention to weaknesses, as they can make fights that would normally result in you dying into cakewalks.
On the subject of how you can lose, it feels a bit stupid that if the player character dies, you lose the game. While it makes sense in the fiction, the game would have been much more fun if you didn't have to go back to your last save every time you got hit with an instant death attack.
Regardless of the problems of that problem, the battle system is addictive, with special mention going to the great boss battles which really test your planning.However, taking advantage of the system will only get you so far, you need strong party members as well.
For those who don't know, SMT is a mon game, with the franchise having started the genre way back in 1987 for the Famicom. To recruit your teammates, who are all demons and other mystical beings from various mythologies around the world, you negotiate with them. The type of demon and your alignment on the spectrum of Law-Neutral-Chaos determines how the negotiation plays out, but they all follow the same structure. First you make small talk with the demon, then, if you answer the questions they ask correctly, you can ask them to negotiate, from there you can ask for items, money, or for them to become your demon. If you ask for the first two, they give it to you and leave, but if you ask them to become your demon, they ask for various things such as HP, MP, money, or items. Get through that and they will most likely become your demon.
While the questions asked in Strange Journey basically make the negotiation process a multiple choice test, it's still more satisfying than throwing balls at weakened enemies.
To get even more powerful allies, you are going to need to fuse your demons to make more powerful ones. I won't say much about this system since discovering how it works is fun, but just know that it is vital to your success. Fusion and recruiting, just like the rest of the game, is very addictive.
Graphics:
As you can see from the screenshots I've posted, the game looks pretty good. The two biggest problems with the game graphically is that the draw distance is not very impressive (though that is a bit of a plus as I mentioned earlier) and that the tiles for the dungeon walls are unimpressive, and they repeat way too much. The game looks unimpressive in the dungeons because of this.
The 2d elements of the game are much better with great artwork and a nice amount of detail the boss sprites are especially impressive. The portraits of the demons in your compendium are really good looking. The backgrounds behind the battles are fairly good looking, but the sprites are really the star here.
Sound:
The music in Strange Journey is very good, here have a listen:
While the music is great, in game it can feel a bit fuzzy, like it's a bit too compressed. But worse than bad compression is the fact that the tracks, despite being excellent, are repeated so much that they inevitably become irritating. So, don't feel bad about turning the sound down after a little while.
Overall:
Shin Megami Tensei is a very addictive game. It was able to distract me from games like Just Cause 2, so be warned, it will keep you away from other games. Regardless, this is easily the best RPG on the DS bar Chrono Trigger. Pick it up, don't think, just buy it.
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