Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey — Actually Not That Strange
A lot of current generation gamers became introduced to the Shin Megami Tensei series through the Persona spin-offs, or at very least the PS2 Nocturne iteration. However, most of these gamers forget what Shin Megami Tensei was before it featured high-school students shooting themselves in the head to summon demons. Way back when, back when graphics were still described in bits, Shin Megami Tensei was a first person dungeon roaming RPG that involved negotiations with demons and killing god. Now, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey looks to go back to the series’ roots by bringing back all the first person demon negotiation action that the originals had.
Dateline: the future! Mankind has fucked up the planet so bad that the planet has finally said “I have had enough of this shit!” In a sort of natural response to mankind’s fuckedupedness the planet sucks nearly all of Antarctica into an extra-dimensional space. A crack team of explorers wearing ultra high-tech battle suits decides to crash this extra-dimensional space, to see what the problem is. It turns out the problem is Armageddon. Fortunately enough, you are an RPG protagonist. So it falls to you to make nice with all the demons in the extra-dimensional space, and save the world from impending doom.
As is the case with most SMT games, Strange Journey is sacrilegious to, basically every faith in existence, and that is what makes it awesome. As you wander around this extra-dimensional space, named the Schwarzwelt, you meat deities, demons, and mythological figures form every pantheon you can think of, and they mostly want to kill you. Of course, you can sweet talk them, and pay them off with money, items, and pieces of your very soul to get them to join your party. Then, once they have joined up, you can fuse demons together in weird and unfathomably complicated ways in order to get more powerful demons. The quest for new and more powerful demons is one of the biggest parts of any Shin Megami Tensei game, and there is no exception for Strange Journey.
Outside of the fusion system, the game is basically mission based. You are given a mission to complete and it gets scribbled down in your mission log, and it doesn’t go away until you complete it. Missions all pretty much follow the standard “go here do this” template that MMOs have been using for ages, but it’s all really just an excuse for you to explore more and more dungeons.
The dungeons of the game are pretty good all things considered. Strange Journey makes good use of the DS’s graphical power and renders moody and atmospheric locales that you can traverse in first person. On the top screen, you will see the dungeon itself, while the bottom screen shows you a map that sketches out where you have been. The controls are a little wonky. It’s almost tank like, with forward making you go, right or left rotating you, and down causing you to pull a 180. It might cause some problems in the beginning but you’ll get used to it.
Battles are your typical RPG turn based deal, with each side picking a series of actions that play out in order of your characters’ speeds. Use MP to heal and do cool stuff, make sure your HP doesn’t hit zero, that sort of stuff. There is only one real “town” and that is your home base. Here you can purchase new equipment and install new apps into your battle suit that heighten your character’s abilities. It’s all standard RPG faire. Nothing new here.
If I can think of one complaint I have about this game, it would be about the wordiness. Yes, it’s an RPG so you have to expect there to be a certain amount of text to read, but there is a LOT of text to read. Even with the text speed set to instant it felt as if I was flipping through pages of text forever before I got to any real sort of action. You’ll encounter this sort of thing a lot. The dungeons and missions tend to be short and the text tends to be long and drawn out. The story is interesting, but the fact that your main character is silent tends to get to you after a while. Really, you find yourself wanting to tell people to shot up so you can get on with your demon fusions. More than once I fast forwarded the text without reading it, and simply got a summary from the mission log later.
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey was a pretty good game all things said and done. I had a decent time playing it and, aside from a few frustrating parts in the middle, I got through it no problem. If you have a DS, and you are an SMT fan, this is definitely the game for you. If you are new and just looking to get into the SMT craze, you might be better off sticking with Persona, but after that you should probably pick up this game.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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