Completed the game, did not get all the magic and equipment possible. Completed without guides, used info from the internet a couple times.
Overall, I enjoyed it. The game was suffering a bit from slowdowns, but I am not sure if it is expected or because emulation on PSP is underperforming.
The game is strong in its atmosphere of hopelessness and not knowing what to do and where to go. But as you play the game and explore the island, you get the sense of accomplishment and everything starts to make sense bit by bit. At first, you will die to squids, but then you learn to circle strafe and become stronger both in terms of stats and in terms of your skill. In a sense, this is a predecessor of Dark Souls as much as it can be in the year of 1995.
Unfortunately, as much as the game tries to explain how to play it to the player through notes and NPCs, it doesn't always succeed, and I often found myself stuck in endless labyrinths, or trying to find certain places, and I wish I could leave notes on the map so I could navigate better.
Having many "secret" doors in the walls in style of Wolfenstein3D, where you have to press every wall to be sure to not miss a secret passage or treasure without any indication of them being there is quite annoying as well. I have at first missed Flame Sword, for example, which was hidden behind a wall mounted enemy, and I would struggle a lot later in the game without it.
The difficulty curve is a bit uneven. It is very high in the beginning, goes down in the center, but then spikes up in the end, because the enemies are dealing a lot of damage and tanking quite a lot of hits even with the best equipment possible. The final boss took several tries, because the game was laggy, he was casting a flame spell that was taking half of my health, I was shot by his flying minions and he kept knocking me out into the water, because he was standing on the bridge.
But all in all, it was surprisingly a much better experience than I could expect from a game from 1995 on PS1.
Apparently this is the second game in the series with the misleading title, so I will have to beat the actual first game that was released in Japan with English patch to be able to compare it to.

A "rougelike" DLC story for a game that uses that genre in the loosest definition possible.

For brevity sake, check out my review on the base game as this DLC isn't about doing things radically different or new.(https://backloggd.com/u/AlphaOne2/review/971762/) The rougelike is really just randomly generated dungeoneering, with a slightly harsher punishment for death where you lose a lot (or all, depending on difficulty) of your earned force. In case you didn't read the old review or forgot, force is used to progress through the game's skill tree. You earn a looooooot of stat ups using it, and you also use it for unlocking new spells and valuable items. Regardless, everything else you earned prior to death is kept, hence rougelike being a poor descriptor.

Just like the base game, this DLC wants you to become absurdly powerful. Like, the most overpowered character you can possibly be. Able to cast magic that starts as standard fireballs, and end with summoning lasers so large it kills hundreds of enemies off screen as all their loot gets magnetized towards you. All the other progression systems are here as well (equipment leveling, crafting and upgrading, magic leveling, item trading, and so forth). One of the more notable additions is the style system. Think more of a class system in other RPGs, but they don't change your playstyle too much in comparison. Each style comes with their own passive bonuses and one unique skill that's on a short cooldown. A magician can recover the magic meter on the spot, or a samurai will do a iaido slash as the demon gets cut in half a second later, or a assassin will teleport behind the enemy and stab them in the back. They aren't a game changer, but it is fun experimenting with them as leveling up styles will also earn permanent stat ups.

How are the random dungeon exactly? Crude and sloppy, but admittedly pretty fun. Namely due to the enemy placement. Each stratum has 9 floors. Early in the stratum enemies are relatively straight forward and spaced fairly normally. But by floor 6 the dev just seemed to not care anymore and will just randomly place twenty high level monsters in a room that attack the very instant you enter their domain. Doubly worst if these monsters can inflict debilitating status ailments like paralyze or webbed. It's actually comical how little restraint these monster closets get the further you get into the game, and they aren't rare by any means. You start getting into the habit of holding down to immediately readying your shield anytime you enter a new room, cause there's a high likelihood you'll get sucker punched by a horde of photo-shopped monsters on the otherside.
At the same time, this actually makes it pretty fun. There's a great satisfaction overcoming something so blatantly unfair and unhinged, and being rewarded with gold, loot, experience a plenty that hits me in the dopamine tenfold. And even though I played this game on hard, I never died from these relentless ambushes. Certainly came close, but you have plenty of tools to conquer these ridiculous enemy layouts. Magic gives you invincibility frames, which combined with how absurdly busted some spells are makes these things both unfair but also not frustrating.

I am a little disappointed with the lack of new in this DLC. The enemies and many boss fights are recycled from the base game, and the story doesn't go nearly as hard as it either. Though the game does warn that this DLC has massive spoilers if you hadn't played the original, so I unfortunately can't recommend this if it were standalone. This DLC is more of a abridged retelling of the base game, but as a dungeon crawler with a different main character. Again, do not expect anything truly unique.

And you know, if I ever get the hankering for Astlibra Revision again I think I might play this instead. With the nature of the random dungeons, you are experiencing more of forward momentum during your grinding sessions as you descend further down; whereas grinding in the original has you walk back and forth between the same exact areas over and over. Not to mention this is 20 hours versus 50 hours. The DLC is lengthy but not too obscene as the base game, if you feel like replaying it from start to end.

Plus now you can dress up your main character and that shit is a plus in any game ever.

People will point toward Final Fantasy II regarding hostile worlds and a very downbeat atmosphere talking about NES RPGs, but Megami Tensei I & II take the cake for me.

The first game takes place entirely in interiors, I know it's a dungeon crawler but it's the way it builds an entire megadungeon that takes around 30 hours to complete, with infrastructure design that makes a lot of sense (there is a sky city that can attatch itself to certain areas, and in those floors there is always a square shaped hole where the city would be located for example) and demonstrates a lot of attention to detail.
There's not a lot of thematic depht in the first game, but it's compensated by a nice level of personality as a first in a looooong franchise I still haven't touched apart from this one, the dialogue shows you are dealing with very opportunistic entities, and enticing a demon to join your party is appropiately uncomfortable and dynamic, even if after a while you notice repetition in the texts. Boss fights are an extreme uphill battle as you are on the edge of your seat because of how intensely difficult they are from early to mid game. My biggest complain with the game is that it becomes very "80's game criptic" at points and the enemies towards the end don't give you enough energy source ("magnetite") to feed your high level demons that deplete it fast, so you go around with them taking 1HP every step.

Megami Tensei II is an ambitious step forward, on the base of the previous game, the story is more detailed, kind of like a lesser version of the second half of Final Fantasy VI: a postapocalyptic world where people either gather around what they proclaim as divinities, desperate for protection; or your own human allies can get lost in their chase for who they were following, seeking for glory under their direction, even if they end up doing things that are not moral. You end up confronting God himself who lets the world rot without doing anything (it got quite edgy in that point) so that humanity can have a chance at rebuilding society again "through its own strenght", or, what's very interesting, you can follow god and live in his paradise even if all the other people who are still following other gods remain in the ruined place you came from. It's still told in a very superficial manner, where I expected things to get more focus regarding this idea of the concepts we dedicate ourselves into, but what it presents in the scope it does so for a 1990 NES game it must have been spectacular (a custom music chip for the cartridge even allowed for more complex output than regular NES games even)

This SNES remake of the first two games has included a new automap feature that I think it wasn't in the NES versions in this convenient manner, and even then however, this is a brutal game that doesn't let down. In the second title, there's an obligatory story moment where your arm gets torn off and must rush to an implant hospital with your main character unable to fight and bleeding his HP out. If Megami Tensei doesn't demonstrate that this world is not merciful with this story beat, I don't know what does it for you apart from Lisa the Painful

MT1: 5/10
MT2: 6/10

URGENT: For the love of god, play the PS1 original, not the PSP version. I have deleted the log that I originally posted here and am re-posting this now in hopes of getting eyes on this and counterbalancing any misunderstanding that it may have propagated. As it turns out, the entire crux of my disappointment with Innocent Sin is the PSP version's doing.

On PSP, REGARDLESS of difficulty selection, Innocent Sin's gameplay is a desert one must cross to reach the oases of its wonderful story. On PS1, Innocent Sin's battles are NOT exclusively a waste of your time! It's NOT a small difference! It turns out that the auto-battle system used to NOT SUCK, and there used to be some modicum of ACTUAL TENSION in some of the fights!!! I honestly feel cheated by having the PSP version taint my first experience! The PS1 version is as good as the PSP version of Eternal Punishment, maybe even better!

It's not a simple matter of being "too easy." The PSP version of Innocent Sin traps you in a position where the encounter rate is disruptively high and then presents you with two options for achieving the forgone conclusion of your victory in any of these encounters:

Option 1: Navigate the menus for each character every turn and tell them each to do the obviously optimal thing every turn with no interesting variations because the only thing enemies can do in their own defense is annoy you but they have too much health to courteously die in a timely fashion,

or Option 2: Press Triangle and sit patiently while the game resolves the encounter on its own in the slowest, most painful way possible, including all of the bosses, with pretty much complete, unquestionable safety.

On the PS1, the game is DESIGNED around a WAY better auto-battle system, and things can actually hurt you, so you have to pay attention! Even if the fights aren't much more interesting on PS1, they fly by so much faster that it's hard to complain about them. It's still by no means difficult, but it at least provides Final Fantasy levels of combat engagement now! In fact, the game clicks into place in almost the exact same ways that a PS1 Final Fantasy game does, as a breezy trip through a meticulously told and thematically resonant story, with gameplay that doesn't turn any heads, but doesn't get in the way of a good time either.

It feels at least slightly insane to bump Innocent Sin from the lowly score it had all the way up to this, but everything wrong with it is in its gameplay mechanics, and on PS1 almost everything I held against the PSP version is a non-issue. It still doesn't sit right with me that the easiest path through the game means never even setting foot in the Velvet Room, and having to grind out demon negotiations if you choose to use it sucks, but compared to my previous problems of constant, meaningless, tedious encounters, that's practically nothing.

Am I willing to give it the full-on five star treatment? Not quite. The design is still too shaky for that. Aside from the Velvet Room thing, money and SP still grow on trees in a way that makes dungeoneering and shopping even less interesting than it is in, say, Final Fantasy VII, and something like materia is enough to blow this implementation of the Velvet Room out of the water.

The question is, will Eternal Punishment bring enough tension back into the battles to overpower those other flaws and win my full marks?

EDIT... again:
The balance is fine. I'm nearing the end of my replay on PS1 now, and I've totally come around on the battle system and its balance. The gap between PS1 Innocent Sin and PSP Eternal Punishment is small, and there's no need for Eternal Punishment to "fix" it. I have however decided that yeah, I do have to dock a bit for pacing reasons. The beginning of the game absolutely knocks it out of the park, but the middle drags. It really does start wearing you down when Lisa's spotlight arc plays out across three of the blander dungeons with only brief glimpses of story in between them. The mundane setting plays a hand in this, because while it may be interesting to see a game turn an exercise gym into a dungeon, it ends up being the fifth or sixth "normal building" dungeon the player has navigated in a row. On top of this... like, the air raid shelter just sorta sucks, dude. Not letting you save before you fight King Leo after you just did a whole dungeon and a bunch of cutscenes? Also sucks. I think there are enough low points here to hold this back from really trading blows with something like Final Fantasy VII or even IX. I guess this really IS an alternate universe Final Fantasy VIII...

Edit AGAIN:
So at the end of this journey, of my many initial criticisms, the following still stand:
-The third or so of the game after the first two hours drags.
-Minor setpiece groaning about King Leo and Air Raid shelter.
-Negotiation sucks and isn't fun to grind so Velvet Room rots.
-For MOST of the game SP is a non-factor (not endgame).

That's... not a long list, and the impact of everything on it isn't really much bigger than say, the overbloated animations and trance system failures of FFIX, another game that I've recently decided I can't deny a spot in the five-star club. The honest truth is that Innocent Sin is so cosmically far ahead of its time in terms of writing that it should take a lot more than that petty list of grievances to lower its standing.

HANYUUUUUUUUUUUU

A forma como a historia foi se conectando e respondendo ~quaseeeeeeee~ tudo foi PEAK FICTION

AU AU ENDING

todo mundo virou au au