Finished Shin Megami Tensei III today, oh boy, I have a lot to say honestly.
Playing SMT III after playing IV and Apocalypse was really rough, other than the combat SMT III is worse in everyway imo.
First the positive thing I'll say is that the combat for the encounters were just as fun as ever and I managed to break it quite easily I felt. This game was surprisingly easy for the most part, I misunderstood the MCs growth and got bodied by the first fiend but after getting a grip on it and grinding for five hours I made him my bitch and steamrolled over every boss encounter until... I think her name was Skadi? and that was only because the devs realized how broken physical attack builds were and started throwing in bosses that nullified it. I had to figure out how to setup a decent magic team, took a few tries but those bosses also went down after a bit. Battling, recruiting demons and fusing them were easily the best part of the game, again none of it was particularly difficult but it was fun, the rest however was pretty weak.
Dungeon design was infuriating, the game has random encounters and while I don't have an issue with that alone (I loved Octopath Traveler after all) the design around it was the most obnoxious I've seen yet. So many hallways, rooms, and traps only exist to waste your time, in a game like Octopath Traveler they at least put items on the wrong paths to tempt players, SMT III only does that 25% of the time, the other times you'll be greeted with empty space or a trap that forces you to backtrack through multiple rooms to get back. I know they want to wear me down with the random encounters and perhaps other games have this but here it happens so frequently it becomes annoying. That's not all either, because later in the game they start having trial and error trap and teleport puzzles where you'll basically have to go through the same hallways multiple times to figure out what the correct pathways are. This seriously, ruins the final dungeon as it becomes a slog to get through. Not helping is the save points being so spread out at times, occasionally their were hour long gaps in between them and it felt rare of them to put one directly by a boss fight. Too me it only mattered for a few but I could see people having to go through at least 15 minutes of backtracking to get back some bosses if you die.
The characters and world were not well done in my opinion.
Spoilers ahead for SMT III & slight spoilers for IV:
So, what I get from SMT series is that basically Apocalyptic Tokyo happens at some point in every game. SMT IV spent quite a bit of time building up to it and established characters and relationships between those characters and even after they're in Tokyo they're still with MC for quite a bit of the game. In SMT III, you have maybe one entire conversation with your friends before the world ends, then the friends disappear for most of it and when you do encounter them they don't act like friends and are instead off doing their own thing. It's not until a very late boss fight that them being friends get brought up and it's just brushed aside. Pretty weird thing to do, but what was weirder was how the end of the world happened and no one has any reaction to it and NPCs seem to act as though the apocalypse world has been their for some time? I feel like I missed something? Spirits are all over talking about world specific stuff as if it's been in place for some years, some are partying, theirs factions already built up trying to conquer the world.
But going back to the friends and maybe it was me just not paying attention but the direction they go in didn't make much sense to me. Wannabe cool man turns into an... idk... isolationist? He wants everybody to be alone, in their own little world, never interacting with anyone else. I didn't get that from his character and him taking in spirits was odd as well, I forget the reasoning behind that but I would think that would be counter to his desires, since if he has spirits in him he's never alone. The caring looking girl wants a World ruled by those with power, also didn't see this with her character. Tbf she did show desire for becoming more powerful to handle herself in the world but then she apparently goes evil off-screen because of that. Also she made it to the top of the Mantra Tower on her own (no idea why she was even their) and gets merged with a demon and then goes on a killing spree. A lot of this felt rushed and out of place, even with the little time you get to spend with those two.
Anyway I guess that's it. Combat good, everything else not so much. Thankfully SMT V looks like it's taking things from IV and improving it so it looks it'll be a much better time.
www.lego.com
i am the new member of this club here
Andyliini
is taking a stab at it
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