Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey

Screenshots

Notes

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is a first-person dungeon crawling JRPG in the SMT series.

I thought the game seemed kind of similar to Etrian Odyssey, and on looking it up it turns out the EO developers were involved with this and it runs on a derived engine. No map drawing in this one but there's a general similar feel of how the 1st person map looks and feels.

My biggest gripe with this game, as with basically all SMT games, is the demon negotiation system. Rather than having something like a Pokeball, we have this dialog system to work with. It always feels kind of random and arbitrary, but not in a way where you can fire off a Pokeball and catch x% of the time. Instead you're forced to engage with the nonsensical demon dialog trees, even though it's basically impossible to manipulate them in any meaningful way. To recruit a demon, just keep trying dialog options until it works I guess, and then hand over whatever they ask for, hoping it's not impossible. Really sours the rest of the demon training and fusing systems because I have to recruit in order to engage with those.

Early on (as with EO) the game is fairly harsh and there's a good chance you'll die quite suddenly. It gets a bit smoother over time. The key to keeping the game under control is to consistently fuse new demons as you level up. This seems to keep your party stronger than if you attempt to level up the same demons.

There are some odd choices in this game, like the fact that when you encounter a new type of enemy in random battles they will be a generic "unknown demon" sprite. This leaves you fighting kind of blind for a while in new areas.

I ended up deciding not to push through and finish this one. I played a solid amount of the game, more than 9 hours over a couple of weeks. However I just wasn't having fun, and looking it up reveals the game is very long and I was probably only 1/3rd of the way through, if that. I didn't find the core demon training/fusing gameplay satisfying enough, and the dungeon crawling was kind of boring (possibly worsened by having recently played the better dungeon crawling of EO). So, I'm putting it down.