As the fifth Shin Megami Tensei title I've finished, the series is starting to feel very familiar to me. Shin Megami Tensei is one of the bigger RPG series in Japan, and it's pretty easy to see why once you get in to the games. They are designed like classic RPGs, emphasizing challenge and sometimes frustrating random chance. They do monster collection effectively, making the player adapt to the changing difficulty curve instead of getting too attached to his team. They offer the option of changing the game's outcome, even if the choices aren't so hot. Shin Megami Tensei IV ranks somewhere in the middle of the series to me, but it is a good introduction to mainline SMT for newcomers and probably the best RPG on the 3DS so far.
SMT IV starts out differently than its predecessor, Nocturne. Instead of a kid in the big city, you're a hopeful samurai candidate in what appears to be a feudal Japanese kingdom called Mikado. Things seem fishy to the player because the samurai have electronic technology that they regard as mystic relics. After a quick trial, you explore a strange cave called Naraku that lies beneath your kingdom and is filled with demons. The game's story doesn't really unfold until you reach the bottom of Naraku, and I don't want to spoil what happens, but needless to say it evolves in to the usual Law vs Chaos story so prevalent in the series. While I enjoyed the setup of this game, I think the characters don't always show the best motivations or justification for their actions. Like in other SMT titles, only the extremes of each personality type accomplish anything by end-game, and you never feel right about supporting them. The Neutral path makes a decent compromise, but still has a questionable result. I'm not opposed to a game having nothing but bad endings, but I do feel like SMT games often end on an unnecessarily bleak note, only accentuating the negative. Fortunately, the story is secondary to gameplay in SMT, so nitpicking it too much doesn't accomplish a whole lot. One thing the game does really well is creating a sense of dramatic irony: the player is aware that something is wrong with Mikado and the game's world as a whole, but the characters have no clue. This makes the game's many twists and pokes of humor, especially involving your AI assistant, Burroughs, very effective.
SMT IV's visual style is weird. For the most part, it looks good. The demons are well-animated and the 3D environments look beautiful. It's clear that the game was on a limited budget, though. Most of its cutscenes are just characters standing and staring at things without moving, leaving one to wonder why the game wasn't just developed in visual novel style like Persona 3 Portable. Some of the new demons introduced in the game have very odd designs that I didn't think meshed well with the old ones. Often, they are caricatures of humans or grotesque things with anatomy that makes little sense. I feel the developers could have done a little better job of hiding the fact that some parts of the game didn't get as much attention as others. On the other hand, the music is great. It has a nice mix of electronica, hard rock and even bagpipe music. I thought I would miss Shoji Meguro, who really made Nocturne and Strange Journey work well on the sound front, but this game's composers are more than worthy to take his reins.
The gameplay is mostly what you'd expect from the main series: the press turn battle system is back. Hitting weaknesses and not missing is of vital importance, even if you have to burn MP to do it. I was not sure how I liked this system at first back in Nocturne, but I do like how it encourages using skills instead of conservation, which makes for slow and boring gameplay in many games. This time, your main character's build is almost completely up to you. Instead of learning skills from equipment, Flynn gets them from Demon Whispers. When your party members have learned all of their skills, they can "whisper" them to the hero, letting you basically pick whatever skills you want. I think this is great for many reasons, but the primary one is that it lets you experiment with skills before committing to them. Many RPGs force you to go down skill paths without prior knowledge of where you'll end up, but here there's no ambiguity. Overall, this makes the game engine feel improved from its predecessors, and the typical fast battle speed returns as well, so combat is very streamlined. As far as battles go, my one real complaint is about ambushes. If an enemy sneaks up on you, often you are just plain dead. Getting hit by a weakness, a critical, or status effects often spells the end for your entire party. Worse, ambushes can happen on reinforcements or even during boss battles. It just feels cruel and unusual.
On the flip side, the game has a lot of features that make it more newbie-friendly than other entries in the series. It's very forgiving about game overs, for one. For a fee of either money or 3DS Play Coins (which I thought was a nice touch as it got me to exercise a bit while playing this, believe it or not) you can get revived right before the battle you died in. I don't care how hardcore of a gamer you are; this is a good feature that every RPG should have. The game also does everything it can to make the monster fusion system easier to understand, even to the point of recommending fusions. These recommendations are usually good choices, so I think new players will be able to pick it up with little problem.
The game's biggest problem is really its overworld map. Once you reach this area, it's pretty obvious why. You can only travel on small, jagged paths that are maze-like in structure, and you have to do this just to get from town to town. While it's possible to avoid encounters in the dungeons, you cannot on the world map. You also cannot control whether or not you get ambushed. The game assumes you have some knowledge of Tokyo's layout, which would probably help in finding areas you need to travel to, but even then it can be hard to remember a certain road is blocked off or you have to take X tunnel to reach Y location. Add together the dead ends, frequent encounters, and backtracking the game requires and you end up with some ultra tedious exploration. This problem plagues the game from beginning to end, and even the air travel you eventually find only lets you land in useless spots. It's a gross stain on a game that easily could have been one of my favorites.
Shin Megami Tensei has gone on for a long time. Many good games have been released under the brand, and it's gradually becoming one of my favorites. That said, Atlus really needs to get a clue about certain things. It's just silly that Persona gets all of the innovation, character development, and fast travel while the mainline series gets the gameplay depth and build options. These things should not be mutually exclusive. While Shin Megami Tensei IV is a great game, with just a few of the lessons learned from other games in the series, it could really have felt more polished and appealed to more players. RPG enthusiasts should still enjoy the game if they can get past angels and demons being lumped together as the same thing, but even though it's more accessible, I'm not sure I can recommend this to a player unfamiliar with the genre.
8
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