~ Estimated Reading Time: 4 min ~
I've been running circles around gremlins, doing default unreal engine physics platforming, and looking at a mini-map instead of what's in front of me for 40 hours now, and I'm starting to feel like I'm wasting my time.
Shin Megami Tensei's birth hinged on being counterculture against Dragon Quest's sparkly-clean adaptation of PC RPGs - accepting everything old and initially off-putting about them as still valuable. The result is a set of wildly emotional games - acknowledging feelings like stress and frustration we usually avoid in games. I remember teenage me's mind being blown playing Nocturne; getting to a town, expecting a moment of safety, only for an encounter to show up the step I take out of the save-room. When placed in an inspired context, random encounters soar as this system that forces unavoidable conflict that you must deal with; Nocturne proved to me the much discredited mechanic could still be genius. Now I'm playing a mainline numbered Megaten, one where sluggish enemies passively roam around loose & spacious overworlds - one where every fight that isn't a boss is optional - and it's making me yawn.
The game is constantly grappling with the consequences of this; when the player isn't spending most of their time in an up-hill battle against waves of enemies, the meta-progression has to move elsewhere. Now there's so much EXP provided from side-quests - which at best are some pretty fun fights, but are most often busywork or dialogue - that you get above the recommended levels off them alone. The overworld has to have things for us to spend our time on other than enemies, so you end up with this pseudo-3D platformer control-set to run around there, but the focus isn't there to make it enjoyable on its own. There's such a sharp contrast to how this game expects you to split your time evenly between the 30 years-iterated, pristine combat system, and this "we haven't made a game with a more complex map than the windows vista maze screensaver" exploration. I'm having less fun playing this than games with drastically worse combat, simply because the game isn't good at actually making me play the combat. V:VENGEANCE is bad at actually getting us to the fun part
It's hard not to get sick of how segmented this game feels; split between these long stretches of absent-mindedness in its overworld, suddenly interrupted by the filter-points of major fights. Of course, the bosses are good, it's SMT; this is closer to my favourite battle system in the series than least favourite, which makes it easy for me to understand why everyone loves this one.. It just makes the repetition of getting through said bosses so much more obvious: I figure out their weakness, whatever Dampener will end their Magatsuhi turn, die, maaaaybe adjust my team, and then retry it and win. I just miss playing dungeon crawlers that felt like more than a puzzle-box, routing you to the next boss standing around the corner of a save-point. I miss playing something more emotionally involved than the motions of reaching success, followed by achieving success
Can't say this is bad with my whole chest cuz Ryota Kozuka got into pop music. Maybe the greatest technical producer in game music history, who else even uses noise, reverb, or fading this well? It feels like it's apart of the 2024 music ecosystem, like it was composed by someone who actually listens things coming out - while somehow ALSO managing to retain the 90s snes metal sound. if he listens to mahōgakkō, smt6 will be the best game ever..... Everything beyond that feels blatantly like an entry-level game you can use to Get Into Shin Megami Tensei, so you can explore a back-catalog they'll drop on Steam during bad business years. And despite that, there's so many elements here I can easily see turning players off. They'll grab some clip of them losing 3 members of their party to some random guy doing some Press Turn fuck shit, then perform a boring run-back to the nearest healing point; why fear enemies taking advantage of the resources you just lost, when you can hop over them? Saving anywhere is gonna cultivate some playstyles that make people hate this game; why spend your precious items and MP every time you accidentally run into someone, when you could just reload from 30 seconds ago?
Realizing that all I wanted was a game with less emphasis on the bosses, and more emphasis on mundane traversal; I should just play something else. Maybe this game was just Etrian Odyssey propaganda