Topic: The Megami Tensei Thread

@Alex90 Gotcha! That random roll on skills brings back memories of P3P - it’s an irritation, but not a dealbreaker for me. Admittedly, demon skills seem to matter far, far more in SMT than Persona.

Just bought P4G on Steam. Not sure when I’ll next have 100hrs free, but it’s not like I was ever going to buy a Vita just for this (although I was seriously considering it at one point).

@Krull Persona 4 Golden actually took me around 60-70 hours to complete according to Steam, but it's a real binge once you start the game, not going to lie. I may have been a little disappointed with the ending (not going to spoil anything), but it was a really addictive game regardless.

@Varkster
The premise of battles, speaking of bosses, is to have no weaknesses that the enemy can exploit. But in the mid to end game, bosses use Almighty spells (you can't resist) if you fight them with certain Null / Repel / Drain affinities.
Another very important thing in SMT that is different from Persona: buffs/debuffs stacks and is exactly the way to get past that boss who has no weaknesses.
In Nocturne, you will have the Press Turn System: each weakness of the exploited enemy gains you another turn, it is different from Persona's "one more". In the beginning, enemies have weaknesses, but towards the end, it starts to lose its usefulness.
Anyway, all of this won't make sense if you don't have the patience to fight enemies ... If you don't usually have the patience to fight enemies, you will probably feel it in SMT too.

I've played P4G and P5R (and a little of the PSP port of Persona 1), but I'm yet to play an SMT game proper. Gonna have to give SMT5 or the SMT3 remake a spin when they release

A little late, but I would try 3 remastered, and if you like the gameplay and level design, give 5 a go when it comes out. 3 is a great entry point into the series.

@Varkster SMT III/IV/IV: Apocalypse are some of the most rewarding games out there. They reward planning, strategizing, and a full understanding of the interrelationship between different battle mechanics. Even random battles can be disastrous for the player if they let their guard down, too, and boss battles often require the player to completely change up their party to adopt a new battle strategy.

In general, the difficulty is usually perfectly fair, with some exceptions (I'm not a big fan of boss rushes or instances where enemies ambush you and cast instadeath spells).

The exploitable mechanics and breezy difficulty of modern Persona games are part of the reason I maintain a strong preference for the mainline series.

Also, I enjoy the creepier vibe and religious horror aspects of mainline versus the anime slice-of-life antics found in modern Persona games.

I do enjoy me some slice of life antics that neo Persona provides, but SMT just draws me in more with its dour settings, exploration of themes that pertain to topics like religion and reincarnation as well as the generally more focused, yet considerably more difficult gameplay, and this also applies to the classic Persona games as well because they're considerably more SMT-like compared to Persona 3 onwards

And yeah Persona games are also generally considerably easier than main SMT. Persona 4 in particular is probably the easiest MegaTen game I've ever played thanks to the fact all physical skills are put together under one affinity, and since most of the harder Shadows and boss characters have some major physical attack, you can just fuse a Persona that resists or repels Physical damage and basically clean house.

I wouldn't worry. It's probably pretty far out anyway due to the pandemic disrupting both communications between Atlus and Koei Tecmo, as well as the scheduling around the VAs, and casting processes for new VAs for characters like Sophia and Zenkichi

https://personacentral.com/smt-iii-hd-media-guidelines/

It's your boy Atlus back at it again with the stupid video recording/streaming guidelines that encourage you not to spoil the ending of a 17 year old PS2 RPG even if it's marked as a spoiler

The battle music still sounds pretty compressed in Japanese streams. I thought it might have been a Switch issue at first, but it's the same in the PS4 release as well.

@Slowdive Oh man, PC really is about to become the ultimate platform if it starts enjoying robust Atlus support as well.

Oh boy

If Atlus announces PC versions of SMT games in addition to Persona I might have to start double dipping after getting these games on their original platforms

Now, I will buy SMT Nocturne on Steam IF there is a chance to play on Japanese and some good mods. Btw, Firefox "Picture-in-Picture" mode is awesome, I am watching BuffMaister playing the game while navigate on Nintendo Life.

Considering Catherine Full Body introduced a trend of Atlus having multilanguage options for their games, which carried over to P5R and P4G on Steam, I bet Nocturne will get similar treatment

Oh man they didn't actually remaster the music? That kinda sucks, but Nocturne's tracks are already so goddamn good I'll probably move on relatively quickly

Compressed sound is there in the PS4 version, too, based on the stream I watched. So no reason not to opt for Switch.

Yeah I'll go for Switch at launch if the Steam version is presumably coming later based on that datamine from yesterday. PlayStation has and always will remain as purely my Persona console

For the life of me I can’t understand why they wouldn’t remaster the music- I’m no audiophile and even I could tell a stark difference in a comparison video.

Be that as it may, it’s not a dealbreaker. Switch version looks surprisingly good, too. Couldn’t tell any difference from the PS4 version.

The lack of a remastered soundtrack is beyond me. The tracks exist and have been released before, surely it wouldn't have taken that much work? Smacks of laziness.

I complain as though I am not going to buy it day one, which of course I am. Such is life.

I'd be inclined to call this a lazy port if they weren't also adding voice acting. Who adds what must be hours of voice work in multiple languages, but doesn't remaster the music? Very weird. I'd understand if it was purely a thing for the Switch release, given cartridge size limitations and all that, but PS4 is affected too.

A lot of times, these Japanese games launch in a hairy state and then get patched prior to their Western launch. I'm hoping that's the case with Nocturne.

They remastered everything for that game even down to the freaking Japanese commercial

But left out the music

That's wild