Topic: The Megami Tensei Thread

@TheFrenchiestFry I wish the PSP remake of Persona 1 had retained the original soundtrack instead of the complete overhaul they opted for. Particularly when it comes to battles.

lol I hate that song. PS1 Persona had a banger for its random battle theme. I think it was actually remixed in Persona 5 Scramble, right?

Persona 2 IS on PSP was the right way to do a remaster. It's just a pity for fans that the EP remaster never made it over.

@Ralizah I like Persona PSP's soundtrack quite a bit...in isolation

It just does not fit with the actual tone of the game. I get that they wanted to bring it closer in style and presentation to P3-5 but it just doesn't work well with the more melancholy tone of the pre-Hashino Personas. P2 on PSP did a way better job updating the soundtrack and even included the original as an option in Settings.

Also yes both the P1 and the Innocent Sin battle music were remixed for Scramble but to my knowledge you can only access them if you buy that special physical edition on Amazon JP that comes with the other Persona battle tracks, or as DLC

Digital Devil Saga is just a 30h episode of Transformers Beast Wars except instead of car robots, they're replaced by human demons change my mind

@TheFrenchiestFry ...I need to play this game now.

@link3710 Yes you do. It's very good

@TheFrenchiestFry great. I hear the cast of Eternal Punishment might be even better, is that right? But that Innocent Sin has QOL improvements being a PSP remake.

I probably don’t want to know the answer, as disappointingly being in Europe I can’t get hold Eternal Punishment by legitimate means on PSN anyway (and the few ROMs I tried wouldn’t work on my PSP either). A shame the fan translation of the PSP game is unfinished.

@JoeDiddley I'd say they're equal. Both games have excellent writing and characterization, and they even bring in characters from the first Persona game as party members who play major roles in the story. However it's not really required for you to play P1 in order to understand how they got to where they are as it's pretty concisely explained when they're introduced.

Also yeah I heard EP never got a European release and that's honestly a shame. Must be really hard trying to track down copies of it without resorting to emulation.

@Slowdive good read. Thanks for posting that.

Ugh.

“The Merciful difficulty is truly a merciful setting that allows you to button mash your way around even tough enemies. We will offer this as a free DLC.”

I'm not the gatekeeping sort, but I don't like this. It should be possible to create an easier difficulty for less skilled players that still maintains some of the thrill of the original. I can envision people playing through this on the game journalist difficulty setting and then saying "i DoNt ReAlLy SeE wHaT aLl ThE fUsS wAs AbOuT."

@Slowdive This is a good watch. As fine as I would be with Persona on Switch the people who're upset about the series remaining predominantly PlayStation exclusive should honestly widen their viewpoint on Atlus' support for Nintendo systems. They've been with Nintendo and have supported them for far longer than they ever did with Sony to begin with. Persona is the only active sub-series PlayStation has to themselves

@Ralizah Yeah I'm personally not a fan of "so easy a game journalist can beat it" difficulty either. It kind of defeats the purpose of calling it a difficulty setting if it isn't difficult or challenging on some level, especially for a series as notorious for its difficulty as SMT

I dunno. The difficulty thing is harmless enough. It just means that more people will be able to experience the game. However, I really like the challenge so I won't be using it myself. I can see why it not being difficult would undermine the atmosphere of Nocturne.

@Slowdive that could be clever. Something in-game offers to make it easier for you.

I was hoping for an easy mode as an option to help with accessibility but this seems more like their safe mode which is a shame if it takes away any need to understand the battle system.

I like how SMT IV handled the difficulty, didn’t you have to die a few times to get the option.

Altus are viewing the releases on the Japanese front though, so one is out this year and the other in 2021.

@Slowdive I'm not really as uncertain about SMT V as I would've been had they not waited until now to actually share info on the game. It's been 3 ish years since development properly started so surely progress must've been made. I'd even think that it should be in a playable state now but they just aren't ready to show off gameplay yet. Maybe at TGS

Also yes I believe this is the first time two mainline entries came out in the same year. The closest we had before to that was SMT Nine and Nocturne being released about 2 months apart

A bit of a side tangent but honestly a week later and I'm really happy with the growth of this thread. I'm about to start uni in about a month so I won't always be there to talk but I'm really satisfied with the influx of people coming in to discuss the series, and I hope this place gets more traction as SMT Nocturne, the Persona 5 Scramble English version and SMT V near release.

@JoeDiddley Yeah, it did. And even after the difficulty is lowered, SMT IV still isn't a braindead game. You still have to understand the core game mechanics, build teams of demons to take down specific bosses, etc.

Why not offer something like that for Nocturne? Something a little less difficult. Nobody wants to "button mash" their way through Nocturne.

@Ralizah I wonder if something has been lost in translation and there will be an option in between.

I remember hearing somewhere that PS2 normal would be hard mode this time, but I’ve not seen that substantiated.

@TheFrenchiestFry thanks for setting up the thread. I’ve not been posting as much at Nintendo Life recently, too busy playing SMT! But I’ll keep checking this conversation.