A look at a brighter past, when having a cursory understanding of the existence of the bible and esoterism made you into a pretty decent game developer instead of a hardcore twitter user. You know which kind

I'm really not a retro gamer. I'm really bad at going to the older titles of, well, any franchise. That being said, talks about how stuff aged feels tired at this point, although it is pretty interesting to see how little actually changed in the mainline SMT titles compared to the old ones, and how a lot of stuff got comparatively stale in newer releases (I started playing this game as a way to escape replaying SMT V).

The combat remains mostly the same in 30 years of history with some QoL stuff here and there. On the route side they are generally really well done. I ended up going with the Law route since I heard it was the most consistent one and it did not dissappoint, with a really good subversion at the end regarding your decisions and what you come to expect from the story, considering the law routes are usually considered to be the most bland choice in the saga.

I was pretty surprised at how atmospheric this game ended up being. The people making this game were clearly having fun designing it, mixing popular culture stuff alongside some pretty well versed abrahamic and shintoistic religious imagery and ideals. You can traverse the Hebrew Sephiroth to fight against an army of Buddhist yaksas defending Lucifer with a party consisting of Shinto and Hindu gods, angels, Cthulhu mythos monsters fucking Michael Keaton.

All in all, it's a really good game. I recommend emulating it and using the fastforward function whenever possible, since it can get pretty slow with the backtracking and encounter rate. Who cares about "true to form" experiences anyway, be free.

“In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of kittysaurus with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of banbans and they saw a nabnab entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the garten like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The naughty one sloped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the nabnabs were fed by hand from sacks of givanium and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered garten and watched the whitehot drones go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their monster hearts beating in the unity assets like workers exhausted upon the face of the Banban Kindergarten, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the lifts grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue Cityngeon stood footed in their paler image on the unity assets like reflections in a lake and there were no naughty ones now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the lifts and the wheeze of the nabnabs. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their stitches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the drones jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack cardboard walls. They came to know the nightskies well. Garten eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Worker Liftsround while Train rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The unity assets lay blue in the moonlight and the iron wires of the lifts rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished legs of the monsters kept hasping up like a myriad of drones winking across the garten floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the Cityngeon chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild monsters racing on the plain, pounding their poorly stitched together models down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.” -Banban Meridian, or The Evening Badness in the Indie Horror Community by Cormack Banbarty

Euphoric Brothers are slowly yet steadily approaching actual game developer status with each new Banban release. Those two extra months of development show (no, really, they do. There are actual puzzles this time), although the base problems still persist. The story is still nonsense, clearly being dumbed down for young audiences which the devs expect to either not pay attention or be spoon fed by a youtuber for them with the "interesting" morsels of lore being just dumped around the world for you to stop and reaad two-three paragraphs explaining why each Banban does their Banbans in their specific way. There are yet again flashbacks in this one, and they are a perfect way to make your entire VC call lose their shit with what's going on on screen.
The gameplay is still severly bad, the drone being a hindrance for puzzle solving most of the time, clearly porpusefully obtuse to make you die during tense situations and completely useless besides pushing buttosn that could be easily pushed by yourself. The inclussion of the 2.0 upgrade is kinda novel, but the way it controls makes it absolutely dreadful to play. You are expected to use it to see the solutions for other puzzles and push hidden buttons, but the thing will reset back to your position the second you hit a wall, something that happens way too often thanks to the tank controls it has.
The game still looks pretty ugly, but the lightning and music has been upgraded, making it look actually nice from time to time.
They got some youtubers to voice characters in this one, in their original voice. Get ready to be screamed at in various languages for some reason. It makes a genuinely dissorienting experience out of it all.