One Google Search Is All It Takes

 

We all like to rag on a game journo from time to time.  Despite being members of enthusiast press they often don't seem very enthusiastic about the things they are writing about.  However upon my travels around the internet it seems that it's not only video game press that consists of hack writers that probably failed English in high school and the world of Table Top also seems greatly affected.

Despite how steeped I am in Shin Megami Tensei video games I had no idea that this rule book for a table top game even existed.  To be fair, almost all of my table top gaming experiences to this day have been extremely negative so its something I tend to ignore and turn my back on.  Anyway, the game is called Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Conception and its based on, obviously, SMT 3 Nocturne and was originally released in 2004.  It even has a supplementary book called the Amala Labyrinth or something that adds even more shit to it.  It seems pretty cool and if I could find a table top group that doesn't make me want to fellate the business end of a shotgun then I'd be extremely down to give it a try.

So in swoops Chase Carter of Dicebreaker.com and to his credit, the majority of his article isn't even that bad.  He mentions that there's other SMT table top systems and these things have been around since 1993 which was an interesting fact I didn't know.  Pretty much exactly what I wanted that hack at Gamespot to do when talking about Helldivers (http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2024/03/gamespot-being-embarassing-again.html) although he then does proceed to refer to the game as Tokyo Connection and Tokyo Conception so maybe a lack of reading is how such a fucking awful headline happened.

"Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG based on Persona's video game series" is what it reads and if you know anything about Shin Megami Tensei even just in passing you'll know that what is written here is just WILDLY incorrect.  Just in case I have to spell it out for you, Shin Megami Tensei is the mainline series and Persona is the spinoff.  It's not so much that the information is wrong that gets to me, its that this guy is supposed to be a contributer to this niche interest website and yet can't do even the most basic bit of research to get things correct.  One google search is all it would have taken to know that SMT is the main one, Nocturne is the 3rd game and the Conception is the event that happens at the start of the game which kicks of all of its events.  Its literally on the fucking Wikipedia page and takes about 4 seconds to look up.  Even if you didn't want to look it up you should know that the headline is just wrong because Persona 3 and 4 both had "Shin Megami Tensei" in the fucking title.

If I was willing to be charitable to Mr Carter here I would say that, at best, he's a click harvesting little fuckhead.  Persona is undeniably, at this point, the more well known and more popular arm of SMT so using that in the headline is probably more likely to draw traffic to the rag he's writing.  However I'm not willing to be charitible so I'm just going to assume he's a lazy piece of shit.  You're a niche writer for an enthusiast website.  A website where I imagine its members spend all day pretending to be half-elves while jacking off to pornography of bears or whatever the fuck you weirdos are into.  You aren't so busy that you can see something like this and not look up the absolute basics of what it is and what is is about.

If you're going to take the trouble of writing for a niche topic or in this case, a niche interest within that niche topic, make sure you do it justice.  Instead of just shitting out a crap article to earn a quick couple of bucks why don't you take some time and actually write something helpful to people who may be interested.  But let's be honest, Chase Carter doesn't really give a fuck about what he's doing and gives even less of a fuck about SMT.  Farm clicks, get money and move on

A fucking sad way to exist

Neo-Persona's Insane Game Over Mechanic

 

Persona 3 Reload is on the horizon and I'm sort of torn about it.  On the one hand I am completely fucking sick to death of remakes.  The constant remaking and remasting of various games that were already good is tiring. It feels like a big chunk of the industry at the moment, both AAA and indie, are just constantly re-treading old ground for nostalgiabucks and safe bets rather than pushing anything even remotely creative.  On the other hand though, Persona 3 has a number of glaring issues that probably need fixing and could be fixed in a remake.  For example, the biggest example actually, Tartarus is one of the most boring dungeons ever conceived not only just for Megami Tensei but for JPRGs just in general.  Hundreds of floors of samey bullshit with the most monotonous music ever written, it's actually fucking awful.  Juding from the gameplay trailers we have of Reload so far it looks like that won't get fixed and this whole thing is pointless but we've seen very little so far so let's withold judgement for now.

But what I really want to talk about is a problem that has plagued Persona since the third game and is probably the most annoying aspect of the franchise and that's the instant game over on main character death.  This isn't something that's new to SMT, there are a number of games in non-Persona entries that also have this mechanic.  For example Shin Megami Tensei 5 also has this feature but in that and other games it sort of makes sense.  In the other entries in the series you are a demon summoner of some description, either through some kind of magic or the series mainstay, the COMP, so when you eat shit the control you had over your party of accumulated demons gets broken and they leave you to die.  That's what you get for relying on demons from hell to help you fight God, I suppose.

But in Persona it's a different story.  You aren't negotiating with demons, (mostly, 5 is the exception but even then it's different) you are a group of high school friends, quite close knit ones we are led to believe, going into a shadow world to fight weird Carl Jung bullshit. So when you eat shit in those games the instant game over makes absolutely ZERO sense.  You can be surrounded by characters that are holding actual kilograms of Revival Beads in their pockets and monsters in their brain that can use magic to revive you but instead they leave you for dead, fade to black, game over.

What makes this even worse is that this never happened in Persona 1 or 2.  The MC or Maya in those games can eat a big attack and have their HP reduced to zero but their friends are able and more than likely will pick them up before the battle is done.  Imagine if you had the ability to revive people from the dead with a magic spell and while you're walking down the street someone rolls up and shoots one of your parents in the face with a shotgun. You aren't just going to run away, you're gonna wait for the guy to leave and then pick them up and dust them off, right?  Makoto, Yu and Ren all have the worst fucking friends of all time.

What makes this mechanic even worse is that SMT has spells such as Mudo and Hama which, if they connect, insta-kills you.  If it's your first playthrough and you are unaware that demons in whatever dungeon you are in are packing those spells then there is a fairly high chance that you are going to take one right to the chops and lose a bunch of progress.  Obviously there's counterplay to this with you being able to fuse Persona's that have resistances to this stuff or null it outright but if you don't know it's coming then kiss your progress through the dungeon goodbye.

I hope it's a feature that Persona 3 Reload changes.  Hell, I would be OK with the next player turn being forced by the AI to use a revival bead or a recarm spell and you only get a game over if you have no items in your inventory OR you are completely out of MP.  At least then your friends being unable to revive you makes sense for a game over rather than they just run away from your unconcious body as soon as you get knocked out ONE time.

At the end of the day, just get better fucking friends

DLC was (mostly) a mistake

 DLC or Downloadable Content is something that has been with us for a while now.  When I first heard the idea of DLC back with the PS3 and Xbox 360 were considered new it seemed like a cool idea but over time it has been twisted and exploited by publishers and developers and now I associate most DLC with soulless money grubbing bullshit.

We've always sort of had DLC even way before high speed internet and console that were always online.  Back in the day when you had a PC game a company would occasionally release and expansion pack.  The expansion pack was like an entire box, disc and manual that you would buy from a physical store and you'd have to go home and install it.  I remember pretty vividly buying the conquerors expansion for Age of Empires 2 back in the day which came with a whole bunch of stuff like new campaigns, new civilizations to play as, new tech, new maps, new units, it was brimming with content and it was exciting to take that shit home and spend countless hours with it.

DLC like this still exists to this day, and this is why there's a "mostly" in brackets in the title.  The series that springs to mind is Dark Souls as an example of this.  The DLC for those games usually comes with entire new areas, bosses, weapons etc. and is usually a decent amount of additional content for the money that you pay.  Basically any DLC that is basically the same thing as an old school "expansion pack" is what I would call good DLC.  Although even this comes with a level of bullshit because most games will eventually release a "complete edition" which just comes with everything some time after release.  So you COULD spend $60 on the game, plus anything between $20 to god knows how much depending on how much extra story or missions or modes or whatever gets put out OR you could just wait, and get a complete edition for like $40 later down the line.  Even though old-school style DLC is good, it deters me from buying most new games day 1 because I know I'll get shafted for extras later and just waiting is infinitely more cost efficient.

But then there's the DLC which I class as either cosmetic items or small amounts of content that would have been avaliable in the base game back in the day.  Maybe this is a sign of my age but I remember a time when unlockable or hidden content in games, especially fighting games, was common place.  Beat certain modes or fufill certain conditions and you'd unlock things like music, concept art, costumes, stages or even new characters.  But this has changed, cosmetic touches to a gun or an alternate costume for a character in a fighter are no longer something that you unlock just by playing the game any more, these are things that you have to buy with actual money.  One of the most horrible examples I have had some degree of experience with is Guilty Gear: Strive.  In Japan, if I was to buy the base game it would cost about $80 and then if I want things like extra stages or extra characters I have to spend an additional $30 to, not even get that content, have that content trickled out to me slowly over time.  Then when they decide that the "season 1" content is over, I'll have to spend ANOTHER $30 for the season 2 bullshit.  What's even worse is that if you decide you just want 1 extra guy or the extra colours (not even new costumes, just colours for fucks sake) that'll be $10 for the guy an $10 for the palette swaps thank you very much.  Considering features like this, not all that long ago, were built into the games and you would get it all for a single $40-60 purchase, this new form of DLC is taking monumental amounts of piss.  It wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to unlock it by just playing and people who wanted to speed up the process could pay to get it faster.  That's scummy, but I'll accept it.  But pay-walling features like PALLETE SWAPS is just pathetic.  

But that's not even the worst kind of DLC, there's a tier of DLC that's so disgusting, so vile that just thinking about it makes me unwell and that's Pay to Win "DLC".  Usually found it games that have level up or upgrade systems that you earn by playing, a game may give you the option to just give you all that stuff or boost the earn rate for those things for a fee.  For example, Shin Megami Tensei 5 comes with a number of DLCs, most of which are for extra quest lines that unlock extra demons to gather and extra bosses to fight.  Sort of skirting the fine line between the good DLC and the bad DLC but whatever, fine.  But then there are the "mitama" DLCs.  Mitama in SMT5 are monsters that look like apostrophes that, when killed give some kind of massive bonus.  Demon level ups, stats, money, main character level ups, glory points for upgrades etc. and with that DLC it boosts the spawn rate of those things to an insane degree.  Basically if you pay for that DLC you cannot die unless you are unapologetically shit at Megami Tensei.  The reason DLC like this pisses me off so hard is that if you are going to pay to just win like that, why the fuck are you even playing video games in the first place? If you want a braindead, easy way to experience a story then go watch a movie or read a book or something.  If it really needs to be interactive because you want to at least pretend to enjoy video games, then go play a walking simulator like Layers of Fear or Dear Esther or some bullshit like that, some low-skill garbage that you can beat by holding a single key for two hours.  Playing an easy mode is one thing because at least you're still sort of trying but just paying to have a game clear handed to you ON TOP OF the price for the game itself is just pathetic, please fucking stop.

 (Just as a side note, the SMT V example is even more annoying because of the way the Nintendo E-Shop is.  You either buy everything at once, extra quests + mitama included, or you have to painstakingly buy each non-mitama DLC one by one.  When I did it the process to just get Demi-Fiend and the other demons without the beyond Safety Mode dogshit took like 10 minutes.  I even know new SMT players that got tricked and thought they were a normal part of the game, fuck Nintendo/ATLUS for real)

So while good DLC does technically exist, its 90% absolute dog-water that you should avoid.  Wanting extra stuff for the games that you love makes sense but just remember that 9 times out of 10 you are supporting shitty business practices that are only going to keep getting worse as time goes on.  

Don't ever forget that Capcom once made you pay for a games ending

 

Build Woes and Rockman

 

A Monday in the office means a MegaTen-Mega-Day with Shin Megami Tensei 5 in my lunch break followed by Persona 2: Innocent Sin in the evening on stream.  

Persona 2 I'm having fun with but today's session was fairly uneventful.  Summoned some demons, beat up a high schooler with my brain monsters, grinded some levels, you know, the usual stuff.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 however I'm starting to have some serious concerns over.  

Usually when I play these games I go for Strength builds on the main character.  Even in Shin Megami Tensei 4 where magic is OP as all hell, I went for a strength build on my first playthrough.  So when I started SMT 5 I decided to try and mix things up a bit for myself and try out a magic build, pumping almost all my level up points into magic, vitality and agility and letting strength fall to the wayside.  I've not been having a massive amount of trouble with the game so far but I've seen some things on line that have me slightly worried.  There's a group I follow that talks about the Megami Tensei games and a few members of that group have been posting their builds that they used to kill the DLC boss Demifiend.  All but one of them have been strength builds with only 1 guy doing it on magic and talking about how difficult it was.  

I don't mind a challenge, I'm not about to start investing in strength or restart the game to get the build right, I'm locked in now.  However I can't help but feel slightly worried that I've made a whole bunch of the late game challenges a whole bunch harder for myself than they needed to be by trying to get cute with my stat allocations.  At the very least, if I have made it harder for myself it will be so much more satisfying once I eventually pull it off. 

Another thing I've been doing in recent days is trying to get better at speedrunning Megaman 1 for the NES.  Out of all the Megaman games games in the classic series the first one I feel is one of the hardest.  It's got less robot masters than the other games, sure, but it just feels sort of janky and I never really could get fully behind pre-dash (slide) Megaman.  Still though, I'm having a blast running this game.  I managed to learn a few zips that make some of the stages easier but my overall lack of practice is really holding back my time.  The game isn't very long, with my runs now consistantly sitting under the 30 minute mark but one mistake is EXTREMELY costly and it can feel very frustrating when it goes wrong.  Today, for example, I died one time to Elec Man and ended up losing about 30 seconds.  Despite most of my other splits being green or gold I couldn't quite make the time back and ended 17 seconds over my personal best.  In other games I've run obviously mistakes put you in the red but I always feel like there's some area where I can pull the time back or at least be close to a PB by the end, in Megaman 1 however, a single mistake may as well be a reset.  The only reason I don't reset is because I have to practice all the other stages and I'd probably be stuck in the first 3 robot masters if I tried to be that strict with it. 

Still though, I'm pretty motivated to keep practicing and bring that time down.  I'm pretty certain I'm not quite good enough to come close to a world record but if I could get, maybe a top 50-ish time on the leaderboard I'd be pretty happy I think.

Imagine If... Shin Megami Tensei AR Game

 

I remember when Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 Liberation was announced.  It was around the time that Pokemon Go was still riding a wave of popularity and I got the (mistaken) idea that Dx2 was going to be that kind of game but when it came time to download I was sorely disappointing.

 When I spoke about Dx2 on the blog I had a few nice things to say about it.  Despite the awful gatcha system and some legendary amounts of grinding that needed to be done, for a shitty little mobile RPG it wasn't actually that bad.  There was even a mode available to some phones where you could use an AR thing to take pictures with your demons in the real world but it didn't really have anything to do with the game itself.  So I'm going to use this post to sort of dream up what I think a proper Shin Megami Tensei AR game would be like and hopefully someone at ATLUS will stumble on this page and steal the idea.  Probably not but a mans gotta dream.

Your phone in this hypothetical game would take the place of the COMP or maybe the gauntlet from SMT IV.  In fact the gauntlet from SMT IV makes a little more sense because in that game you buy "apps" with "app points" as you level up allowing you to store more demons, get more skills or make various features cheaper.  From your phone then you'd manage your team, manage your items, buy player focused skills and you could probably put the Cathedral of Shadows in the main menu too.

The main meat of the game I suppose would be the same thing as Pokemon Go.  You would go outside, walk around and get into encounters on the map where you would fight demons. In those fights you could kill the enemies for EXP or you could do demon negotiation to recruit them into your party.  That of course isn't enough to hold an entire game by itself so you'd have to lift some things from Pokemon Go, mainly the raid system.  Instead of calling them raids though you could take a page from the Nocturne book at have "Fiend" battles where groups of players would fight a single enemy.  For the 6 people in the world that have played Dragon Quest Walk, sort of similar to how raid battles work in that.  When you beat a raid in Pokemon Go you are granted a chance to catch the rare monster but that wouldn't really work in a game like this, so pulling from the SMT3 book once again, a Fiend could drop a menorah that you could use to access a dungeon.  These dungeons would be separate from the walking around and be done in a first person view, a nod to the classic games for the long term fans, and in these dungeons you'd have a chance to get rare items and recruit strong demons.  Although it would be unfair to lock out players from this side of the game if they aren't strong enough to do the fiend encounters so randomly around the map you could spawn "Amala Terminals" or something like that.  Players could walk to these and take part in a sort of mini dungeon-crawl  and these areas would have their own loot and demons to gather.

Of course, this is just my personal dream of what an SMT AR Game would look like, I'm sure some actual game designer with many years experience over me could put something better together but it's nice to dream about something that could be.  Although, being really honest, I'd rather ATLUS just get SMT 5 out rather than focus on side projects like this.

 

Dx2 Shin Megami Tensei Liberation First Impressions

I never thought in my life I'd be impressed to the point of gushing HARD on a mobile game but it's finally happened and OF COURSE it's a fucking Shin Megami Tensei game that has me frothing at the mouth with excitement.

I've talked about it before but just in case I'll cover once again what Shin Megami Tensei is before I continue in case a new reader has stumbled across this post.  Shin Megami Tensei is a long running series of RPGs that has been going since the old NES days.  It has its roots in tile based dungeon crawling but as the series has progressed that style has dropped in and out.  The big gimmick of the series is the whole "demon negotiation" thing where you can convince your enemies to join your ranks and use their skills in order to reach the end.  The series has seen some massive success recently with it's spinoff series Persona and at some point a Shin Megami Tensei 5 has been cited for release on the Switch.  In a VERY basic way just think of it as sort of Grimdark Pokemon.

So I woke up on Sunday with a big fat hangover and grabbed my phone only to find that Dx2 SMT Liberation was on the front page of the Japanese app store and despite my pounding headache I did a little squee and downloaded it.  As far as mobile games go it's not all that different from any other RPG where you collect monsters and battle them but if you're a fan of the series, especially the mainline series, the look and feel of the game will have you hooked pretty quickly.  EVERYTHING you expect from a tried and true SMT game is present in this title just sort of simplified a little bit because it's on a phone now but presented in a way that makes it perfect for short burst plays on a train, bus or while you take a shit.

 I'm not going to go into too much detail about how it all works because there's A LOT going on and I've not levelled up enough to see it all but curiously the game has only 2 out of 5 stars on  the app store.  Addressing some of these complaints I've seen in the review section will help you to understand something about how the game works though so here I go.

The first big complaint I've seen is that they say (in Japanese) that the demons and the artwork look like crap.  The game has opted for the older SMT look as opposed to the more modern art direction that they have used in games like Persona so this is more of a taste thing.  I started the series with Lucifer's Call on PS2 when it was still using that sort of older look so it doesn't bother me really, this is just a taste thing but be aware the art style looks a bit "dated" which will be nostalgic for some and hard on the eyes for others.

The one thing I can't forgive though is people complaining about the fucking "gatcha".  If you don't play mobile games then a gatcha is the way most games give you new items or characters.  You pay a number of whatever currency it may be and the game randomly gives you a character.  If you're lucky you'll get a rare thing and if you're not lucky you won't, it's the main way these free to play RPGs make cash by making people pull lots of gatcha for mad rare shit.  These are usually a big part of mobile RPGs but in Liberations case it's not such a big thing.  The complaints state that the gatcha is too expensive and the rate of rare shit coming out is too low, which is fine I guess but that's not really how your supposed to expand your roster of demons.

As you play levels, occasionally a demon will offer to talk with you and you enter a negotiation.  If you complete the negotiation successfully the demon will join you, this is how SMT has worked basically since the beginning.  From there, you have you fuse the demons together to make new ones in order to strengthen your ranks and this is the main way that the player in Liberation gets rarer things.  For example today I took a 1* demon and a 2* demon and fused them into a 3* demon with some sick fire skills.  The gatcha does give you rare shit but the game wants you to focus on negotiation and fusion, you know, the thing where you actually have to understand how the game works, rather than just dumb luck.  While paying your way into the rarest demons is an option and probably how Sega plan to make profit, doing it the old fashioned way is preferable and series fans will probably enjoy this more than just "push button, receive demon".

I've never been this hooked by a mobile game before so if you're a SMT fan then absolutely try it out and if you've never played one before then this free outing into the mainline may be a good place to find your feet. 

Some Persona Fans Piss Me Off

I can feel the hate mail coming just from the title so hold your fucking horses and let me start with a clarifying statement.  I fucking love Persona 5, it was an amazing experience with both style and substance and is probably my personal favorite game on the PS4 right now with very little chance of being overthrown any time soon.  I'm also a big fan of Persona 3 and Persona 4, also great games that I sunk many many hours into and loved dearly.  Persona 4 Golden (and Dancing all Night) was pretty much the entire reason I bought a Vita.

But with that said, god DAMN some of you Persona "fans" on the internet piss me the fuck off.  Now I'm not talking about the legions of Weaboos that seem to make up the games fanbase, that's just sort of par for the course when it comes to titles like this and while they are cringy as fuck their slightly overzealous enjoyment of games in this style aren't really the problem.  My problem comes when I see posts from supposed "fans" shitting on mainline SMT or Persona 1 and 2.

First I think it's important to understand where I am with this series.  Way back when I lived in the UK, I remember my mum telling me about this game called Lucifer's Call on the PS2.  God knows how she came across it but it piqued my interest and I grabbed a copy and went from there.  This game blew my goddamn mind.  It was a bit like Pokemon but instead of shitty little woodland animals coming out of my balls and winning the day with friendship the whole game was basically a struggle to survive in a harsh world of demons that you had been thrown into (there's more to it than that, but for another day).  So I played the fuck out of that and then I don't remember playing much of the series until Persona 3.  It wasn't until that game that I realized that I wasn't just playing "Persona 3" but I was playing "Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3".  So I did some research on the series at large and the obsession grew from there.

Now the reason I can't stand the people who shit on Persona's 1 and 2 is just because I'm a ponce.  Those games are harder and a bit dated but it just seems silly to shit over the first two games and then go around the internet touting yourself as "a fan of the series".  Let's face it folks, Personas 3 and up and designed for ages 3 and up.  Easy mode SMT for people new to the series, a nice little way to break you in.  It's a great place to start if you've never played a MegaTen game before (although I'd argue that Digital Devil Saga is better) but by ignoring the rest of the series because it's "too hard" for you is just a crying shame.  As Souls fans say, "Git gud" because you're really missing out on so much and if you just spent even a LITTLE bit of time learning the basics of these games even notoriously hard entries like Strange Journey won't seem so impossible.

The people who get my back up though are the ones who shit on SMT as a whole.  The ones who are elated to point out the fact that ATLUS dropped the "Shin Megami Tensei" off the front of Persona 5.  The ones who will type out pages and pages of stupid, backward reasons about why the series sucks and Persona is the only thing keeping it alive (untrue).  These people are a bunch of stupid fucks that need to shove a Mara up their gaping assholes.

I can get why one might say "I don't like these games, they are hard and dated" because they are.  I'm currently replaying Megami Tensei on the NES (not even Shin) and coming off the back of P5 GODDAMN it's taken some readjusting.  But to turn around and say that SMT sucks is just fucking stupid.  Without SMT there wouldn't even be a Persona and as much as you probably don't want to admit it you are just playing easy mode MegaTen.  Hell, you could rename Persona "Shin Megami Tensei USA" because that's almost what they are at this point.

For those of you who didn't get the joke

Persona as we know it today wouldn't even be a thing if it wasn't for a very specific Shin Megami Tensei game called Shin Megami Tensei If...

It wasn't a hugely successful or popular title but two things in this game were direct inspirations for Persona.  First was the high school setting and the second was the guardian spirit system but if you think Persona 1 and 2 are dated you don't stand a chance with SMT: If...  The point is, everything that you love about the later Persona games has been tried, tested and perfected throughout the rest of the series at various points.  Disliking it is fine but shitting on it just makes you look like a fucking moron.

If you've tried the games and felt that they are dated or too hard, I implore you to go give them another try.  Use a guide if you have to or play the next best entry game after Persona in terms of difficulty, Digital Devil Saga.  If you think that SMT in general just sucks and you aren't willing to try again or even accept the massive impact its had on your so called "favorite" game, then have Morgana put you to bed and then do the world a favor by never waking up.

Persona 5

Well it took a fucking age and a half but last weekend I finally beat Persona 5 and HOLY SHIT it's actually one of the best RPGs I've ever played.  I'll try to avoid spoilers as much as a can but there's a CHANCE that some may get dropped at some point, I'll mark them appropriately if I get into that but just be on your guard since people seem to be very uppity about spoilers for this game.

So here's a short version of my thoughts for people who are familiar with Persona and Shin Megami Tensei as a whole.  Persona 5 doesn't actually do anything particularly new with the franchise but it has an absolutely INSANE amount of polish on it.  If you like Persona you'll adore this game and if you are a mainline SMT snob then even you will find it hard not to get a kick out of this one.  It's just generally a damn good game.

For those that aren't familiar, Persona 5 is half monster breeding JRPG and half school life simulator. The story begins with our protagonist being set up for a crime he didn't commit and then getting sent to some shit school in Tokyo where everyone hates his guts.  From there he runs into a couple of other outcasts and they discover that they can enter an alternate universe where they dress like gentlemen thieves and can invade the hearts of certain people to change them from shitty people to not shitty people.  When you aren't doing that however, you have to go around making friends various folks around your school and Tokyo which has a knock on effect of making your Persona's stronger when you fuse them together to make new ones.  When you aren't doing THAT you can go around a number of places raising stats like charm, courage and academics in order to make you better at doing stuff/providing chances to deepen your friendships with the people mentioned in the sentence before.

The monster breeding, JRPG side of this game is where it really comes to life though.  When you are wandering around the hearts and minds of your targets you run into demons.  If you beat them up in just the right way and knock them down you can hold them at gunpoint and "negotiate" with them.  If you're negotiation is successful they will give you money, items or best of all join you so that you can use their skills in battle.  Once they've joined you can go inside a prison in order to put them under a guillotine and fuse them together to make new ones that are even better which in turn makes stealing  the minds of your targets much easier.

This is just a basic overview of the main two parts of the game but there's so much going on in P5 it'll make your fucking head spin.  There's no way I can do it justice in a short blog post like this, just go and play it.  The fact that I've not dedicated a paragraph to things I didn't like should say a lot about how I feel.  The only "complaint" I do have is that this game is fucking LOOONG but that wasn't really a negative for me and won't be for a lot of other people.  Just be warned though you will be probably at this one for at least 90 hours just for the main run through.

If you like RPGs, play P5
If you don't like RPGs, play P5 anyway
Just if you like games in general, play P5.  Just play fucking P5, right now

RPG Difficulty Spikes

Before anyone asks where the top picture is, I'm currently on a road trip with my in laws so I'm posting from my phone.  The blogger app crashes so I'm stuck using fucking Safari and this thing just hates the idea of pulling images from from my photo roll.

Anyway, difficulty spikes aren't exactly a new concept to anyone that's been gaming a while.  There are plenty of games in all genres that have but I feel like it's the most annoying in RPGs because of the greater sense of security before the spike.

Now the main reason people have trouble with RPGs is because they are either underlevelled from running away from enemies.  Of course RPGs can pose all sorts of challenges but when people are complain that's usually the reason. However there are times where everything will seem completely fine but then you reach a boss and you just get your shit kicked in.

For example I was just playing pervy vita dungeon crawl Dungeon Travellers and the dungeon I was currently in was a complete breeze.  Enemies aren't really doing shit to me of any concern and and I'm killing enemies with ease.  Hell, my magic user was one shotting stuff for fucks sake.  So I get to the end of the dungeon and BAM the boss just shits all over my face.  Eventually I won but it required some extra grinding for skill points to get it done.  Other examples of this could be the wall boss in FF7 or Matador in SMT: Nocturne

It's annoying because the game makes you believe that everything is fine with easy as fuck trash mobs and then slams the breaks on your progress with a bullshit boss battle that makes you fuck off and rethink everything.  In other genres it's either easier to deal with or faster to change up what you gotta do to progress.  In RPGs all the management and preparation you have to do means that dealing with a spike could potentially take hours of tedium just to get on with the game.

Being challenged is good and all but any developer who puts these sudden spikes in their games need something sharp through their cheeks.  Fair challenge please guys

Yokai Watch Is Bullshit

I don't know about the west but in Japan you almost can't go a single day without seeing some stupid reference to this stupid fucking TV show.  I hate this fucking show and the worst thing about working as a teacher for elementary and kindergarten kids is that they won't shut the fuck up about it.  They bring in toys and branded pencil cases and just blab on about the show and good lord it's enough to make someone want to die.

Yokai are these things in Japanese folklore, kind of like ghosts but not quite.  They usually cause some kind of trouble which can range from mild inconvenience to outright killing folks.  Go look up the Wikipedia article if you want a quick low down on Yokai, it's a long standing Japanese folk thing that would be way to hard to explain in a single paragraph.

So then Yokai Watch fucking comes along and just repackages years of Japanese folk tales into trite little shit shows for fucking stupid bastard children to enjoy.  Apart from the fact that I'm assaulted constantly at work about the show and it's workings, they have the fucking gall to release a number of shitty Pokemon type rip offs for the fucking DS.  I remember when Yokai Watch 2 came out and every single game store had big fucking posters for it everywhere and I couldn't move without seeing this cheap knockoff Pokemon shit everywhere.  This of course attracted lots of kids to the store and kids in game stores are the fucking worst, always begging loudly at their parents and getting all twinkle eyed over the most obvious pile of shit shovelware on the shelf.

What's funny is that hating Yokai Watch makes me feel old.  I have a buddy in his 30s who HATES Pokemon with a passion.  I don't really give too many shits about Pokemon, I stopped dealing with it a long time ago and while the games are pretty bad they are unfortunately the best place to go if you want online monster breeding action.  I never understood his deep seated hatred for Pokemon but now I do because that's exactly what Yokai Watch is, Pokemon for a new generation of thick pricks.

What's even more depressing is that I quite like reading about Yokai and shit.  Game developers, especially for JRPGs would often use these Yokai folk tales as a sort of inspiration for their enemies and bosses.  I would then go off and read these folk tales and it would be extremely interesting to see which part of the culture these things came from.  But now Yokai Watch has completely ruined all that, now I feel like a complete twat for looking any of this up because you know there's some fucktard on the internet or some shit weeaboo somewhere who will hear you mention it and use that as an excuse to regail you with their Yokai Watch knowledge.  What makes it even worse is that half the fucking Yokai in the show aren't Yokai, their either completely made up or taken from non-Yokai stuff like Shinto lore, stupid shitty writers.

Shin Megami Tensei is a great example of a monster breeding game that draws from folklore instances without being geared at twats.  Unfortunately the genre of monster breeding games is completely shit up because of mass market bullshit like Pokemon and Yokai Watch making cutsey shallow bullshit the norm for the genre.  Fuck Yokai Watch, fuck Pokemon and fuck all of this other shallow crap, burn it all.

What the fuck are you doing Atlus?

One game that has piqued my interest since I first heard about the idea a while ago was Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem. 

I'm a HUGE Shin Megami Tensei fan, it's probably one of my favorite series of games.  For anyone who may not know, SMT is a huge series of monster breeding type games.  The idea is that you have to collect demons and shit and go through dungeons just to give it a very simple explanation.  The main series started as dungeon crawls and it was changed up a little for SMT3 but there's also been a shit ton of spin offs, the most famous of which being Persona.

I'm also a big fan of the Fire Emblem games, a series of strategy RPGs that is famous for it's perma-death of characters, challenging maps, RNG that will fuck you in the ass, memorable characters and great stories.  So of course these two series coming together seems like a fucking great idea.  Then I saw the trailer....

What the fuck is this shit?  It looks nothing like a Fire Emblem and there are only a few little nods to a way an SMT game should be.  It's all anime and moe now with fucking crappy J Pop playing and anime girls being all kawaii n' shit.  Don't get me wrong though, I'm fine with moe, crappy J Pop, fan service anime girls, that shits a little bit of a guilty pleasure of mine but this is not the time and the place for it.  These two series of games are just not all moe and overly anime like this fucking trailer.  Even the Persona series, which comes pretty fucking close, still retains the general feel of an SMT game.

I'm not saying however that this game is going to suck, I just wish it was being marketed as a fucking SMT/Fire Emblem crossover.  It's one of those cases where under a different name I'd be kind of excited but you put this kind of branding on it and it just disappoints me.  That said, information is still a little scarce so maybe as more is revealed by sadness at this trailer will subside but any hype that I had for it is now pretty much dead.

Finally, while I was writing this post I just remembered one game in the SMT series that kind of looks and plays like Fire Emblem anyway.  It's called Majin Tensei.

It's not quite the same but if there is too much moe bullshit for your tastes then this is a good alternative

The July Retro Haul

Picture unrelated I guess, but whatever

Here is this months retro haul.  Fuck Front Mission

NOBODY PANIC! Atlus seems to be fine!

Atlus, if you are not familiar with who they are, have given us some really great games.  Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Trauma Centre and many many more, but recently there has been some news that has made people a little worried.

Do a quick google search for "Index company bankruptcy" and you'll find that parent company to Atlus have basically fucked up big time and now they are doing the Japanese equivalent of filing for bankruptcy.

This may have you freaking your shit thinking that the future of franchises like Shin Megami Tensei or the releases of games like Dragons Crown are in danger, but strangely enough they are not.  I have no idea how the fuck big business works, but if you follow up your google searches you'll find that for our friends at Atlus it's all business as usual.

Dragons Crown is going to be getting released just fine, SMT4 is getting a western release and really they don't seem to be having any trouble making games.  So let's all not panic just yet, everything seems OK and we don't have to give up on that SMTxFire Emblem game just yet, but if you are a fan make sure you buy SMT4 and Dragons Crown, make sure they get the funds to make more great games.

Confusion is the worst

So I've been playing quite a lot of a game called Grandia on the PS1 recently.  It's pretty fucking good and made me realise that I didn't lose interest in RPGs but modern RPGs just became a bit shit. 

Anyway! Before that statement causes some kind of shit storm as I get people trying to tell me stuff like Ni no Kuni is actually worth a damn, I want to talk about one of the most annoying things in any RPG that can possibly happen.  That thing is the confuse status effect.

RPGs tend to have lots of status ailments that do a pretty good job of fucking you over if you're not prepared but confuse really does just take the fucking cake.  For those of you who maybe aren't into RPGs, confuse is a status that causes your own party members to just attack characters at random.  If you are lucky they will go and attack the enemy and all is fine, but if you're like me and you're not lucky then chances are your party member is going to flat out murder another team mate.

It's just so fucking annoying when your strongest physical attacker gets confused and then spins round and decides to shove whatever weapon he or she is holding right up the arse of your spell caster or healer.  The outright worst offender for annoying confusion ailments though, in my experience, is the Pokemon games.

I've not played any of the later Pokemon games because I think they are a load of shit, but I remember quite early into Pokemon Blue there was a cave full of Zubats.  Zubats had a skill that could confuse your pokemon, and when that happened shit would really get ugly.  You see in normal RPGs, there is a team of people, so confuse makes one dude hit his friend, but in Pokemon its 1on1 battles so being confused makes your pokemon hit himself.  Not only is this fucking stupid as a concept but the damage for hitting yourself in confusion is fucking massive, and if you are really unlucky your pokemon will keep punching himself in the face until he dies.

Still, for all my ranting about how much I hate confusion effects, if they weren't there I'd be complaining about RPGs being too easy or some shit.  Also this post does not apply to the Shin Megami Tensei series, because in those games, the lead character being petrified results in a game over, so in those games THAT can go fuck itself just as hard.

The Hype Train is Getting Faster

Well here is where I just jump up and down in a silly fashion and gush for a while, because holy shit this looks good!

Shin Megami Tensei is a name you probably know, or have at least heard of due to the series being absolutely fucking huge.  For those that might not know SMT, you've probably heard of Persona, and that is part of the same series.

So Persona 4 is the game that most people have experience with, and that game is really good, I like it a lot but I don't regard it to be as good as a lot of people do.  You see, Shin Megami Tensei wasn't always about school kids solving scooby doo mysteries.  The best way to describe old school Shin Megami Tensei is like Pokemon and the Legend of Grimrock having a baby together.  Even that description doesn't quite fit the bill exactly but it's a good way to describe it to people who don't have a clue.

Anyway Shin Megami Tensei 4 is coming to the 3DS and from what I can tell it's about dudes with Yu-Gi-Oh duel gloves protecting a big city from demons.  This means lots of dungeon crawling, and monster "catching" and all that good stuff.  Right now, I'm pre emptively putting this down as my 2013 game of the year.  They'll have to fuck this up pretty hard, or someone will have to develop something twice as awesome to budge it from that spot.

A Reason to Buy a WiiU

For the longest time, I didn't give a rats ass about the WiiU, and then I saw this.  Get on that hype train once again, because this is one of the most fantastically strange crossovers I've ever seen.

Crossovers aren't a new thing in games, we have things like Marvel Vs Capcom, Capcom Vs SNK and it even happens in RPGs with things like Trinity Universe, but all those games, and the characters from those games are from the same genre.

For those that don't know, Shin Megami Tensei is the series that has given us stuff like Lucifers Call, Digital Devil Saga and Persona.  They are basically like Pokemon, but meant to be played by people who actually have some taste.

Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs where you take a bunch of dudes on adventures to save lands and whatnot.  As you fight things on a big grid map, you level up your characters and make them advance classes so that the next big bad guy in the plot wont ruin your shit.

They are basically two completely different kinds of game, but somehow they are being crossed over.  I'm aware Shin Megami Tensei has had a "tactics" version on the DS and 3DS, so it could be based on that, but then it should have "Devil Survivor" in the title and not just "Shin Megami Tensei"

There is a trailer which I will provide at the bottom but there is 0 information about what they are doing with this thing.  It's basically saying "This is a thing, get hype", and oh boy did it work.  Check it!

Take all of my money Nintendo, all of it.

Persona 4 Ultimate

Persona 4 Ultimate is the new 2D fighting game to hit Japanese game centres, and, according to wikipedia, came out yesterday for the PS3 and Xbox360 in Japan.  America and the EU are getting it in August.

For anyone who may not know, Persona is a spin-off series of games in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise.  Shin Megami Tensei is kinda like pokemon, but for real men.  SMT is an extremely challenging and unforgiving series and when you do eventually beat one of them it's one of the most satisfying things ever.

However, Persona 4 Ultimate isn't a RPG at all.  Like I said in the first sentence, P4U is a 2D fighting game and contains no RPG elements whatsoever.  That said, the game is actually a blast to play on 2 levels.  The first level of fun is what I like to call the fanwank level.

Above is a picture of the character select screen, and I swear the version I played in the game centre had more characters available.  But my point is, if you're a fan of the Persona games, you're probably gonna get your rocks off to kicking the shit out of the Persona 3 and 4 cast as your favourite character. 

The other level of fun to be found here is in the gameplay itself.  The game is developed by Arc System Works, who gave us amazing fighters such as Blazblue and Guilty Gear, so you know this shits going to be good.  As a result of this however, the characters all feel like characters straight out of Blazblue and there is a little sense of this being an excuse to reskin that game and make a shitton of money off the Persona series popularity.  But you know what?  I'm not going to get angry about that! Arc System Works have done a good job of providing and solid fighting game that doubles up as fanwank, and even though it is very similar to Blazblue, it does seem to be just different enough to qualify as its own thing rather than a cheap Blazblue knockoff.

So warm up those arcade sticks because you're in for a treat with this one.  It doesn't matter if you like Persona or not, if you like fighting games then you'll like this I'm sure.