Shin Megami Tensei If... starts out with you doing a personality test which will decide a bunch of stuff and then you are thrust into the halls of Karukozaka high school where you do a bit of wandering around and all hell breaks loose. You find a partner to join you on your quest and then you go dungeon crawling around a bunch of areas loosly based on the seven deadly sins. For people who have become confortable with the more modern entries in Persona or even mainline, SMT If... may be a little hard to play at first since it's a traditional first person dungeon crawler but if you can stick with it you're in for a good time.
The gameplay is standard first person dungeon crawling affair where you wander around, get lost, find gear, blunder into traps and so on and so forth. The usual Megami Tensei mechanic of demon negotiation makes an appearance where almost every enemy you come across in a dungeon can be talked to and if your negotiation goes well they well join your party. Right now it sounds almost entirely like a mainline SMT game and not like a Persona title at all but the seeds of the franchise turn up in something called the Guardian System.
In SMT: If... there are no game overs, death just isn't a thing for the protagonists here. When you die you are instead given a nice mode 7 sweeping shot of some grassy lands and then an old man gives you a guardian. A guardian will give your characters stat boosts (or reductions) and in the case of your partner, the guardian will dictate what spells they have throughout the game. Entering the status menu allows you to see a "guardian meter" which fills as you defeat enemies. If you die when the bar is yellow then your guardian gets downgraded and if you die while it's red it gets upgraded. So while you'll never have to worry about a nasty insta-death spell killing you and sending you back to your last save, dying before you're ready for an upgrade can be just as, if not more annoying than a traditional game over.
The guardian system is pretty much what laid the foundation for the personas in the Persona games. Obviously later games would do away with demon negotiation and just have full parties of human characters but it's very clear to see where all the inspiration came from.
Aside from that, SMT If... is also bursting with content, with slightly different story routes depending on which partner you pick at the start of the game as well as a special New Game + character that does away with the sin themed dungeons and instead has a completely different dungeons to explore and bosses to kill, it's almost like having two games in one.
There are some annoyances though that come par for the course with a Megami Tensei game. For example it's extremely easy to get blindsided by a nasty Mudo or Hama spell in some of the later dungeons, instant death attacks that will have you tearing your hair out although there is at least some counter play when you know it's coming. The worst part of the game that isn't well known to MegaTen fans is the Dungeon of Sloth. A slow, boring part of the game where you have to wait for students to dig tunnels by just mindlessly walking up and down the level until the in game moon cycle ticks enough times. If you were going to get pissed off and give up on the game, it would probably be in this exact part and I absolutely couldn't blame you for doing so.
That said though, Sloth dungeon aside SMT If... is an pretty good game and if you're a Persona fan looking to experience a bit more MegaTen, this is a pretty good place to come since it's challenging but not overly brutal. The game was never officially released outside of Japan but if you're willing to get your emulation on then a fan translation does exist for this game so you can enjoy it in English.
So go check it out, go see where it all began
No comments:
Post a Comment