ATLUS Piss Me Off

 

When I got home from work this evening I came face to face with an announcement for Shin Megami Tensei 5 Vengeance.  In fairness, SMT V probably needed a bit of a re-do.  While I didn't hate it on the Switch it felt a little half baked, especially in the story department and it sort of ran like complete garbage with weird frame drops when doing basic stuff like opening the menu so moving it to PC is probably a good idea.

But what pisses me off is that this sort of initial release followed by a "real" release is a thing that ATLUS has been doing that really pisses me off.  A good example is with Persona 3 all the way back on PS2.  Persona 3 comes out in 2006 and then in 2007 they drop an updated version, Persona 3 FES, in 2007 which is basically the same game but better.  Then they do it again with Persona 4 on PS2 and then Persona 4 Golden on Vita where P4G is basically identical to the base game but with just more stuff.  Persona 5 is also guilty of this shitty practice with base P5 and then Persona 5 Royale coming out a year or two later.

You might think that mainline MegaTen is free from this practice since the only thing that seems to come close before this announcement is SMT 4 but 4A is a sequel to 4, its an entirely different game.  But what you may not know is that Nocturne did this shit a couple years prior but it was only in Japan so most players weren't aware.  There was a initial release of Nocturne and then this was followed up with Nocturne Maniax which is the version we got in the west with the True Demon ending and the fiends and all that good shit.  If you were a Japanese player though, you might have got fucked by buying the initial version because its basically the same game just with less shit.  Then they released it AGAIN with a version called Chronicle where its basically the same as Maniax just with Raidou instead of Dante (from Devil May Cry).  

It's not just the double releasing to leech money out of fans that pisses me off though, their DLC policies are horrendous.  When SMT V first dropped it came with a whole bunch of DLC.  Demons, quests, a secret boss fight all locked behind a paywall instead of just being in the game so some scumfuck suits can make a line go up.  Even worse than that you could just pay for levels and money with another set of DLC and what made the whole thing super annoying was that you couldn't just buy the demons and secret boss, it was all or nothing.  It took me way longer than needed for me to get the DLC because I had to painstakingly buy the "good" DLC one by one in order to avoid that pay to win magatama dogshit.  The DLC side of things gets especially shitty with the release of Soul Hackers 2

Fucking iconic demons like Mara and Satan locked behind a 10 pound day 1 DLC.  Absolutely fucking disgusting considering that the game is (still) 50 fucking pounds.  Shoutouts to BOOK OFF for selling me the PS4 version for the yen equivalent of 5 pounds.

I fucking love Shin Megami Tensei and I'm of course thrilled to be getting more of it.  I just wish whoever is in charge of the more business side of the franchise would just fuck off forever because I'm sick of being nickle and dimed with one of the only IPs I'm still passionate about.  

Also bring back SMT Imagine, ATLUS, you fucking cowards