ALL THE SERIES. ALL OF THEM. EVEN FUCKING JACK BROS. ESPECIALLY JACK BROS. But yeah no megaten's pretty sick. I've been playing through SMT1 lately and it's been a blast. Really having fun with the mapping and I love the care taken into trying to capture the nature of the dungeon's in their map layouts. Things like the office buildings being boring rectangles with many floors and things like the Kongokai being a series of concentric rings that make a mandala like shape or how the Girl's Mind is all wrinkly twists like a brain. The combat's also fun for an RPG of its time? It's extremely easy to break open and it's nowhere near as tough to deal with as the later games in the mainline are. But like the ideas are there and it's really neat seeing a SNES era RPG that heavily incentivizes the use of status effects and debuffs even on bosses. Hell. Especially on bosses. I had two of my demons spam marin karin on Zenki and Goki till they were both charmed and then watched the AI kill itself. I had two zio users spam that shit on the security program while a kushinada transferred her mp to said zio users to get around the fact I hadn't brought any buffs with me. Early on my setup was to spam rakukaja while shooting everything with nerve bullets. And I look at the situations and my potential options and I realize that there's so many other ways I could tackle these situations and have it work. Some easier than others but the point is I can fuck with this system. And that's neat. Also neat is that SMT1 does maintain the whole like wake up call boss thing? There's one boss early on that you just aren't going to beat unless you've gotten at least something of an understanding on fusion. And if you don't have access to Cerberus you're going to have to make use of the buffs, debuffs and status ailments to get through. Because if you don't you're going to get shibaboo'd to hell and back and watch as the fuck just slowly eats you alive as you are helpless. He's not as hard of a wake up as things Minotaur and Matador are (I've not yet fought him but I have heard some fucking tales). But the point is that the wake up call is there. It's also really weird seeing the game's "grind" not be for the sake of level ups. I'm used to that being the primary way of getting powerful in rpgs from around this time period. And at least the first MegaTen. game adhered pretty heavily to that idea. But by the time of the first SMT Atlus really figured out how to get their difficulty curve based not around how high your level is, per se, but on what your team comp is and what it's capable of doing. And that's really cool to see so early on! Soundtrack's a fucking banger too. Beyond this...I tried a bit of SMT IV but the Minotaur deterred me. After I get through 1 and Strange Journey Redux, I'm planning on giving IV another shot. As I did like what I had played. I've also play a bit of Devil Survivor Overclocked. Never beat it. Again. I intend to get through it. I was about half way through the game from what I recall. I'm most familiar with the Personas, particularly 3-5. I do like them though I do kind of think that in terms of replayability, the mainline games seem to be more my style. Persona 3 and on's blend of school sim and rpg is really fun but it's also extremely time consuming and really a lot of what I want to mess around with again is fusion and team comp. Mainline gets me to that easier. I also tried out Digital Devil Saga a bit but...never got far in it for some reason? I am not sure why. I do have an emulator set up and my current computer can handle PS2 emulation well so we are going to try it out again. But first. I gotta get my first person dungeon crawl on.
Some maps I've drawn for SMT1. I really like first person dungeon crawlers because you have to draw maps. I know there's an automapper but that thing is extremely limited. Both in terms of what I get to see and in terms of annotations. So it's best to make your own maps while going along, especially for larger locations you're going to be traveling through a lot like the Shinjuku mall or ones where you are traversing through multiple levels of it several times like Roppongi. Gotou's Base. This is a simple one. Many of the maps in the game are like this one. Simple little office buildings that are tall and not wide. Easy to navigate even without a map. But it is fun having the map drawn out to look at. These two are the Kongokai maps. I fucked up on the spacing in the outermost ring and the map was correct enough for me to use it that I just did the middle ring's map separately. I like how the thing is laid out? And I like how it looks somewhat like a mandala. Like the ones we make of the Diamond Realm for which the dungeon is named! Like that's a fun way of conveying what this place is when your hardware is so limited. And here are my maps for the Girl's Mind. There's two maps because I couldn't figure out where I had been teleported in it. Though it is neat seeing that, yes, everything does fit into the middle of the map. I like the twisty brain wrinkle like look it's got. It was neat. Didn't run into a single thing in it though because I kept estoma on throughout it. So it was mostly just a matter of sedately walking along and mapping things out while I looked for stuff. I grew up on games like Phantasy Star 1 and Shining in the Darkness so these kinds of dungeons are just. My kind of deal, honestly. There's a sort of delight to a first person dungeon crawl that's unique to it. There's the physicality of making your map. But there's also the fallibility of that map. You draw them. Not the game. And while you might have tools like a limited automapper to help you out, it is ultimately up to you to draw the thing accurately and to be able to keep your place on it. Whatever traps they throw at you. And that's terrifying because sometimes you do lose track and sometimes you are stuck staring at walls and walls of the same shit and are filled with the realization that you might not have enough supplies to make it out. Not if you waste fucking time. It really captures the whole trapped in a dangerous labyrinth feel well. Very immersive.
