[NO SPOILERS REVIEW]
Often regarded as the "best SMT game", while i personally think it's a strong contender, by itself it really isn't that great of an experience
To understand better, you gotta know that this is a reboot of SMT 1. The story/plot is very simmilar with a some changes. This is important because, well, if you played that game for just a little you'll start to notice some things throughout.
__Gameplay stuff__
This game has a very unique premise and setting that really either sells it to you immediately on it or putts you off. Unfortunately i doubt most people will even get to see the main events unfold due to the horrendous difficulty curve (check it out here). If you get past the first 2 bosses, without a doubt the hardest ones in the game, you will enter the actual setting of this game and begin to wander for hours until you decide to pull up a guide or luck your way through finding where you need to go next.
Unfortunately this happens a lot throughout most of the game. You're never given any map markers on where to go next. You've got quest dialogue, you've got some NPCs sometimes to help you get directions (though you're never explicitly told about them).
A very prevalent mechanic you should be using a lot is demon fusion. Take two demons you recruit from battle and fuse them into a different demon that knows all the skills the previous 2 had. I genuinely don't know how they managed to mess it up this bad. It was completely fine in past games. SOMEHOW, someone decided that you shouldn't be able to manually select demons for fusion. You either gotta use the search function which is super janky and unpractical due to not only the way it was designed but probably the 3DS' ram limitations (if not that, then i couldn't possibly begin to imagine why there's an enforced limit, meaning the game doesn't let you go through if it exceeds 50 demons displayed per search) or you pick the usually awful 3 reccomended fusions that the game suggests you make.
Like i showed with my beautiful graph (go check it), anything after the beginning is a complete joke with no challenge whatsoever other than not getting lost. This is due to the following reasons:
- Every enemy (bosses included) has no HP at all
- Level-ups are too rewarding
- The game is fundamentally broken (stat scaling, skill power)
- Smirk
When i say the game is fundamentally broken, i mean two things: how stat scaling and skill power works. I'm not gonna put up the damage formula here, but the general gist of it is that it doesn't matter what skill you use. Only stats matter. Power is inconsequential. All that matters is your stat for that skill. Unless said skill has an obscenely high base power. Not only do both the first 2 bosses posess both of those combinations, but their attacks will go unresisted by a good 95% of all demons you have available when you get to them. Yeah.
And that brings us to level-ups being too rewarding: you get to spend 5 points in whatever you want. This is a huge problem because you can hit 200 magic by level 40 without really any repercussion for neglecting other stats and just steamroll EVERTYTHING. Bosses will fall in 3 turns. You also get 10 app points to spend in additional off-battle bonuses but that's pretty cool, i like it :)
As for Smirk, a must-know battle mechanic introduced with this game, is extremely busted (though both ways). If you don't have any bad status hitting an enemy weakness has a chance to give you smirk while landing a crit is a 100% smirk chance. Smirk gives you ~90% evasion rate, next attack can't miss, and you've got extra stats until it wears off (next action). Normal attacks are a guaranteed crit in this state. This is a problem because you're heavily rewarded for either getting lucky, or... playing the game as it's intended? This problem is made worse by 2 things: proccing smirk gives you an extra turn and the fact that there are skills dedicated to critting: Critical Wave, Megaton Press, Gigantomachia and Titanomachia for example. All of these have extreme destructive power no matter what part of the game you're on with a heavily increased crit rate at the cost of low accuracy. If an enemy gets lucky and crits you once without missing (which causes turn loss), you're pretty much dead and you just gotta accept that, nothing you can do about it
Worth mentioning that sidequests in this game can be extremely annoying to execute since they suffer from the same issue as the main quests of not knowing where to go ever, but in their case you gotta manually accept on your quest menu to actually be able to do them. Can't have more than one at once, and you can't have the main story quest active while doing them either lmao who designed this
Last thing i wanna mention is the routes/endings this game has, specifically the way to get them. Most if not all choices you make can impact your alignment. Your alignment is a hidden stat that goes like this: above +8 makes you lawful, below -8 makes you chaotic and between that you're neutral. At a certain point in the game this is used to determine what ending you get (provided you haven't chosen the preemptive White ending). By concept this is fine but like everything else in this game it has a horrid execution: a lot of choices either earn or lose you a gargantuan amount of alignment, as well as the fact that there's a lot of points in the story where you're forced a loss/gain of alignment which don't cancel themselves out. And also, sidequests can impact your alignment. The cherry on top is that the only way to tell your alignment is extremely obscure (a SMT 1 reference) and you'd never know without a guide: it depends on which way your character spins in the overworld.
__Story stuff__
Like mentioned before, it's a reboot of SMT 1's story. But in a very unique way. I loved that.
It starts out EXTREMELY strong. Like i said, the setting sells you or drops you out. The characters actually feel like people who live in their world (which unfortunately doesn't happen with a lot of games nowadays imo) and they've all got unique personalities that really do their job in either making them likable, hatable, maybe both, maybe an inbetween, maybe neither. The writing NEVER falls off and only gets progressively better, at least until the alignment lock. At that point there will be one character that doesn't feel like them at all and another who only doesn't feel a little like him. Still relevant and very noticeable though. Everything before that though is so good
__Everything else__
The artstyle is unfortunately a scattered mess since this game had a handful of well-known guest artists after the main artist for pretty much every past SMT game, Kazuma Kaneko, quit. It's hard not to notice how low quality some stuff is compared to others.
As for the soundtrack (and sound design, though to a slightly lesser extent), it's probably the best one i've seen so far in all my time playing video games. It perfectly encapsulates and compliements the feelings, environments and everything else in the game. An actual godsend. And if you've played SMT 1 & 2 or heard the Law theme and the Chaos theme for those games respectively, you'll come to appreciate it way more because of 3 tracks that play in a very short segment. But it's still really cool and probably the best part of the game, so make sure to listen to those two tracks!
__Overall__
Gameplay is hot garbage, literally 0 good things to be said about it
Story/plot/characters are pretty damn good
Soundtrack is a 10/10. No exaggeration
Artstyle is very inconsistent and kinda sucks sometimes
Often regarded as the "best SMT game", while i personally think it's a strong contender, by itself it really isn't that great of an experience
To understand better, you gotta know that this is a reboot of SMT 1. The story/plot is very simmilar with a some changes. This is important because, well, if you played that game for just a little you'll start to notice some things throughout.
__Gameplay stuff__
This game has a very unique premise and setting that really either sells it to you immediately on it or putts you off. Unfortunately i doubt most people will even get to see the main events unfold due to the horrendous difficulty curve (check it out here). If you get past the first 2 bosses, without a doubt the hardest ones in the game, you will enter the actual setting of this game and begin to wander for hours until you decide to pull up a guide or luck your way through finding where you need to go next.
Unfortunately this happens a lot throughout most of the game. You're never given any map markers on where to go next. You've got quest dialogue, you've got some NPCs sometimes to help you get directions (though you're never explicitly told about them).
A very prevalent mechanic you should be using a lot is demon fusion. Take two demons you recruit from battle and fuse them into a different demon that knows all the skills the previous 2 had. I genuinely don't know how they managed to mess it up this bad. It was completely fine in past games. SOMEHOW, someone decided that you shouldn't be able to manually select demons for fusion. You either gotta use the search function which is super janky and unpractical due to not only the way it was designed but probably the 3DS' ram limitations (if not that, then i couldn't possibly begin to imagine why there's an enforced limit, meaning the game doesn't let you go through if it exceeds 50 demons displayed per search) or you pick the usually awful 3 reccomended fusions that the game suggests you make.
Like i showed with my beautiful graph (go check it), anything after the beginning is a complete joke with no challenge whatsoever other than not getting lost. This is due to the following reasons:
- Every enemy (bosses included) has no HP at all
- Level-ups are too rewarding
- The game is fundamentally broken (stat scaling, skill power)
- Smirk
When i say the game is fundamentally broken, i mean two things: how stat scaling and skill power works. I'm not gonna put up the damage formula here, but the general gist of it is that it doesn't matter what skill you use. Only stats matter. Power is inconsequential. All that matters is your stat for that skill. Unless said skill has an obscenely high base power. Not only do both the first 2 bosses posess both of those combinations, but their attacks will go unresisted by a good 95% of all demons you have available when you get to them. Yeah.
And that brings us to level-ups being too rewarding: you get to spend 5 points in whatever you want. This is a huge problem because you can hit 200 magic by level 40 without really any repercussion for neglecting other stats and just steamroll EVERTYTHING. Bosses will fall in 3 turns. You also get 10 app points to spend in additional off-battle bonuses but that's pretty cool, i like it :)
As for Smirk, a must-know battle mechanic introduced with this game, is extremely busted (though both ways). If you don't have any bad status hitting an enemy weakness has a chance to give you smirk while landing a crit is a 100% smirk chance. Smirk gives you ~90% evasion rate, next attack can't miss, and you've got extra stats until it wears off (next action). Normal attacks are a guaranteed crit in this state. This is a problem because you're heavily rewarded for either getting lucky, or... playing the game as it's intended? This problem is made worse by 2 things: proccing smirk gives you an extra turn and the fact that there are skills dedicated to critting: Critical Wave, Megaton Press, Gigantomachia and Titanomachia for example. All of these have extreme destructive power no matter what part of the game you're on with a heavily increased crit rate at the cost of low accuracy. If an enemy gets lucky and crits you once without missing (which causes turn loss), you're pretty much dead and you just gotta accept that, nothing you can do about it
Worth mentioning that sidequests in this game can be extremely annoying to execute since they suffer from the same issue as the main quests of not knowing where to go ever, but in their case you gotta manually accept on your quest menu to actually be able to do them. Can't have more than one at once, and you can't have the main story quest active while doing them either lmao who designed this
Last thing i wanna mention is the routes/endings this game has, specifically the way to get them. Most if not all choices you make can impact your alignment. Your alignment is a hidden stat that goes like this: above +8 makes you lawful, below -8 makes you chaotic and between that you're neutral. At a certain point in the game this is used to determine what ending you get (provided you haven't chosen the preemptive White ending). By concept this is fine but like everything else in this game it has a horrid execution: a lot of choices either earn or lose you a gargantuan amount of alignment, as well as the fact that there's a lot of points in the story where you're forced a loss/gain of alignment which don't cancel themselves out. And also, sidequests can impact your alignment. The cherry on top is that the only way to tell your alignment is extremely obscure (a SMT 1 reference) and you'd never know without a guide: it depends on which way your character spins in the overworld.
__Story stuff__
Like mentioned before, it's a reboot of SMT 1's story. But in a very unique way. I loved that.
It starts out EXTREMELY strong. Like i said, the setting sells you or drops you out. The characters actually feel like people who live in their world (which unfortunately doesn't happen with a lot of games nowadays imo) and they've all got unique personalities that really do their job in either making them likable, hatable, maybe both, maybe an inbetween, maybe neither. The writing NEVER falls off and only gets progressively better, at least until the alignment lock. At that point there will be one character that doesn't feel like them at all and another who only doesn't feel a little like him. Still relevant and very noticeable though. Everything before that though is so good
__Everything else__
The artstyle is unfortunately a scattered mess since this game had a handful of well-known guest artists after the main artist for pretty much every past SMT game, Kazuma Kaneko, quit. It's hard not to notice how low quality some stuff is compared to others.
As for the soundtrack (and sound design, though to a slightly lesser extent), it's probably the best one i've seen so far in all my time playing video games. It perfectly encapsulates and compliements the feelings, environments and everything else in the game. An actual godsend. And if you've played SMT 1 & 2 or heard the Law theme and the Chaos theme for those games respectively, you'll come to appreciate it way more because of 3 tracks that play in a very short segment. But it's still really cool and probably the best part of the game, so make sure to listen to those two tracks!
__Overall__
Gameplay is hot garbage, literally 0 good things to be said about it
Story/plot/characters are pretty damn good
Soundtrack is a 10/10. No exaggeration
Artstyle is very inconsistent and kinda sucks sometimes
2 Comments
this review sucks
DashDash
1 year ago