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.
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