A look back at: Shin Megami Tensei

My birthday tends to often be a day in which I want to deadline my completion of certain things. Okay, today isn't my birthday, but I wanted to finally get through with Shin Megami Tensei before then. And so I did, today, and amusingly enough while on the clock as well. This game honestly should not have taken over a month, but I get extremely busy with other things, plus my return to Freelancer has me playing that a whole lot. Budgeting time ends up being a big hurdle in what I do nowadays, huh.

Anyways, it's a good thing I played Digital Devil Story 2, because this game is actually just that except on the SNES. Annoyingly, the guide I followed for this game was awful, it had barely any recommendations for what demons to recruit, so I just picked the ones that had the best HP values. Making matters worse, well there's a ton of things, but fusing demons didn't get me anywhere truly substantial. And like the other games, you want to keep your human characters healthy as much as possible, meaning grinding to give them better stats and also just plain keeping them out of trouble, since your heroine has the important spells and your hero has the computer.

I felt a lot of annoyance with this game's encounter rate, so much more than Digital Devil Story 2. Almost every step was an encounter, and you get back-to-back encounters very, very frequently. I ended up overloaded on both makka and magnetite as a result, so those weren't really worrisome (though those last few shops have the best equipment in the hundreds of thousands of makka, my god). Figuring out which branching path, law, chaos, or neutral, was tough at first, but I eventually settled for neutral since it seems to cover the most baggage, plus it kills everyone! How fun. But of course, all that damn grinding, it takes a toll on me. And heck, the alignment screws up how I would even recruit some demons. There were ones I absolutely wanted, but the way my alignment leaned prevented me from doing so. And even then, the demons get super stingy and want all sorts of stuff. And others, of course, they'll just leave. Bastards.

And with it comes my traditional RPG fatigue. I really wanted to get it over with at that point, so I used the PAR codes to remove encounters from the last stretch. This helped me explore things without fuss, though there's still the tough bosses. And honestly, should mention that there are bosses that are either immune or have innate reflection of certain skills, so its makes you feel awful for hitting yourself with a mass shock spell effect. This game had a good stride early on, setting the examples for the hero, the law hero, the chaos hero, and the heroine, and to me, it just sort of falls flat once Tokyo gets nuked. Oh, you couldn't avoid that, but you get a cool dream sequence, then have to work your way back through. And things happen, and your alignment makes things go one way or the other. Sometimes you even get locked in at your alignment until you can progress further. This game really does tell you how hard it gets.