Topic: Atlus Fan Club

Is Strange Journey Redux gonna be good? Better or worse than SMTIV? I never played the original.

@Ralizah I thought it was okay but it felt like I was just being quickly pushed through a very linear experience, and there was very little to do after the story. It's definitely my least played Pokémon generation by far.
Ultra Sun and Moon are a lot better than the originals and they have really improved and streamlined the experience, but it was just too similar to the originals to be interesting

Atlus has always recycled sprites and models as much as they possibly can so I wouldn't be surprised if they appear in SMT V. All of the teaser trailers so far have used P5 models and I wouldn't expect Atlus to redo all of the textures and materials for every demon just for a mobile game. They should look really good on Switch though, they already look impressive on a mobile game. It's good to finally see some new SMT IV demons in 3D too!

The wait for Strange Journey Redux has been painful, but at last it will be over soon.

I'd wager it was either budget constraints, trying to cut down localization time as much as possible, or some combination of both.

@SMEXIZELDAMAN A lot of people like it better than the IV duology, and I think I've heard it said that SJ is considered the second best in the series after Nocturne.

I'd certainly hold it at that place. It feels more like the original SMT in some regards, but much more streamlined. Mind you...now that I've actually played the original SMT in English with tons of improvements, I'm curious to see how my opinion of Strange Journey holds up. I do still remember loving the music and atmosphere, and the story was had all the right elements to get me hooked, mixing sci-fi with supernatural. Hopefully voice acting helps the characters and dialogue stand out a bit more. It's been a long time, so I can't really say if there were any real deficiencies there, or if I've just forgotten it all due to time, but I don't remember much about the characters or their personalities and motivations. It might not have been a big deal, though.

@Ralizah I started with IV, and then Apocalypse, and went I, II and III after. My current favourite is Apocalypse.
I thought that Apocalypse's English CA's were pretty good.

@xPH03N1Xx86 My first SMT was actually Devil Survivor Overclocked. Very different from core SMT, obviously, but the brutal difficulty and focus on constantly fusing demons with a variety of skills was good training for the rest of the series.

Apocalypse is also my current favorite. The voice acting wasn't terrible, but the name pronunciations were terrible. Especially poor Asahi, or, should I say, "Uh-saw-hee."

Heads up: there's a free Strange Journey theme on the eshop.

I would pick this game up today if not for I'm still playing Alliance Alive. I really need to finish my games before buying another.

Early on I believed in supporting whatever Atlus brought to the system so we would get titles like these. Glad that seemed to work out well in the end. I own more Atlus games then Nintendo on my 3ds!

@Spoony_Tech There are some free Alliance Alive themes, too. No idea how long those have been up.

Man I got too many themes to rotate now

Just finished SJ Redux and I gotta say there is no boss in this bloody series I hate more than Mem Aleph! Whenever I heard people talking about how hard she was in the past, I always thought they were exaggerating. I had to turn it down to Casual (from Standard) to get through her bull-crap.

@SilverEdge92 Yeah I didn't enjoy that battle in the original, I'm almost at that point Redux now

I finally finished Persona 5 today. Such a masterpiece. At first I didnt think it would surpass Persona 3 and 4 but it probably did. Thank God we have Atlus.

@Askur It's definitely better on a pure gameplay level. Actual dungeons. Denser locations to explore. Demon negotiation. It's an improvement all-around.

SMT IV is still king in my book, but SJR sits comfortably in 2nd place on my list of favorite MegaTen titles. Jimenez is hands-down the better Chaos hero, heck he makes Walter seem almost Neutral by comparison, though I do think Johnathan is the superior Law hero to Zelenin.
All-in-all, I hope the writing in SMT V has the same sense of scope as it does in SJ(R).

SMT IV: Apocalypse is definitely my favorite game in the series so far. I love the dungeons, QOL improvements over IV, fun characters, gorgeous OST, balancing, etc.

@Ralizah Honestly I consider Apocalypse to be the absolute nadir of the series. @Alex90 hit the nail square on the head in the comment they left on the SJ review: yes, gameplay-wise it is the most well-polished, mechanically sound entry in the franchise to date (and I say that grudgingly because I will never stop being salty over how hard they nerfed Chakra Pots and the like, and Smirking not having the evasion boost it does in IV thereby making it less valuable defensively), but in terms of the narrative, it's a typical shounen anime where literally everyone, Asahi and gang included, is a manipulative dongle and one that's littered with plot holes and contradictions to things established in IV.

@SilverEdge92 Smirking NEEDED to be nerfed. It was OP, and bosses like Minotaur could smirkroll even a well-prepared team if they managed to get a critical hit on one of your characters. I also like how it could be both induced and removed more deliberately, and how it's used when activating certain skills. It feels like a properly fleshed out game mechanic in Apocalypse.

Anyway, the change to atmosphere and presentation is obviously a massive change for the series, and one I've gone back and forth on. While I really do like the creepy minimalism of games like Nocturne and SMT IV, I also liked having a cast of characters I actually cared about. I think how much you enjoy it, like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which saw a similar change in style, will depend on how much you enjoy the anime tropes it employs. The aspects contradicting IV's lore didn't bother me much, as it was clearly a sort of alternate history take on IV's neutral route. While grounded in IV's lore, it becomes its own sort of beast. I liked how characters had motivations that weren't purely ideological in nature, and how they didn't fall into easy "order/chaos/etc." categories.

I think a lot of my tolerance for this change comes from the fact that I feel like the eerie minimalism of previous games just doesn't sit as well in modern SMT games that are devoid of Kaneko's utterly evocative character art.

I can see why a fan of other SMT games would recoil from the changes made to Apocalypse. It might feel like an utter betrayal of the unique identity and feel that this series has established over the years. And, you know, I'm not going to say that I don't miss that unique SMT feel that's distinctly missing from this entry. But in terms of user-friendliness, polish, dungeon design (sans the final dungeon; who thought that was good work?!), music, AI (no "Walter using Agi on the Minotaur" moments in this game), and overall fun factor, I've not played anything else in the series that even comes close to this.

My one major criticism would be that I don't care for the Undertale-esque dual endings in this game. The game leans VERY heavily into the "Bonds" ending, and I don't feel like the other ending is really consistent with the game's narrative arc. It just feels like a compromise, like Atlus figured it was unthinkable for mainline SMT not to have multiple endings. But, like in Undertale, you're just a complete monster in the other ending, and it's just not terribly compelling, given you have no real reason to act this way. For all intents and purposes, the Bonds ending is the canon ending, and I actually prefer the game to just give me a single ending and be done with it.

Anyway, I wouldn't mind if SMT V mixes a more classic SMT structure with the refinements and general level of polish found in IV: Apocalypse.

Uh-oh, now you're sounding alarm bells...I wasn't worried before, now I'm thinking I should've done more research into the story before I bought it...

@Ralizah I don't think Smirking was OP at all, though that it might considered so is perhaps more a symptom of the more general balancing issues that IV unfortunately suffers from. The Magaon skill is definitely a welcome addition as a means of dealing with bosses Smirking since most are immune, or at least highly resistant, to Ailments, and I imagine the final boss would be borderline unbeatable without it. The Smirking bonus effects were a neat idea, but I wish there was a wider variety of them; hopefully that's something that will be expanded on in V.

I guess I'm just at that age or getting to the point where I'm becoming less tolerant of tropes being thrown in for their own sake or simply for mass-market appeal if they don't add to the narrative in a significant way, especially in a series that's been so successful and managed to craft a unique identity for itself without them--the prime example being the Asahi-Toki-Nanashi love triangle. So Toki's affection is meant to be a hint toward and effect of her being under Innana's influence, that's fine; but what's Asahi's excuse, especially when she is, for all intents and purposes, Nanashi's own sister? And the Digital Devil Saga and Devil Survivor duologies do a good job, I think, of having the bonds between comrades as a theme without invoking all that silly "power of friendship" nonsense (though DeSu 2 perhaps toes that line a little more dangerously than the others).

"A compromise" is probably the most apt description of the Bonds/Massacre dichotomy. The Massacre ending is more tonally and thematically consistent with the rest of the series, achieved only after Nanashi has sacrificed literally everything, while Bonds involves no sacrifice, sense of loss, or equivalent exchange whatsoever and is just so damn saccharine that it feels like it exists solely for "teh feelz" and to be the golden storybook ending.