The Last Story will be set on Ruri Island, a small continent surrounded by mountains. Though the main city of Ruri is prosperous and thriving, the rest of the island has been corrupted. Lord Aruganan, the ruler of the island, is trying to utilize the power of magic to fend off invaders. This power will determine the future of the island.  Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game’s director, added that The Last Story isn’t influenced by sci-fi. Instead, Ruri Island is sunny and the materials for technological advancement are scarce.

Molyneux also announced that the butler will be voiced by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. However, he did not say whether this butler would be in charge of the character’s silly walks.

Source: Kotaku

Occurring some time after the end of Shadow of Chernobyl, Pripyat follows the military’s attempts to chart and assert control over the Zone. An aerial survey mission, Operation Fairway, predictably goes awry as the choppers are downed by unknown forces. Lacking information, the Ukraine Security Service sends an undercover agent, Alexander Degtyarev (Dehg-Tie-Rehv, in case you’re wondering), into the Zone to investigate. Finding the crashed Stingrays means mingling with communities of stalkers; scattered groups of survivalists, adventurers, and thieves that inhabit the Zone. As far as these men know, Alex is a free agent, and it’s in his best interest to keep them thinking just that as he figures out what went wrong.

Gameplay is functionally identical to prior installments, such that nobody who’s played them will feel lost here. FPS basics still apply with a few welcome improvements to the Clear Sky interface, like adjustable quick-use keys for medicine, food, and such, for starters. Your overall mission and various sidequests are managed through a PDA, with additional information available if you need a reminder of what you’re supposed to be doing. Unlike previous games, you’re given considerable leeway in how you approach your main objective, and thanks to better scripting, many sidequests now have several possible outcomes. The plot eventually funnels you into a linear series of quests, but the majority of the game feels more open than the series ever has.

DEGTYAREV DO EVERYTHING just doesn’t have the same ring to it, so these guys politely volunteer to sweep the building first.

Aiding the open feel is a major redesign of the Zone, limiting the number of checkpoint-linked areas but greatly expanding their size. Any one area in Pripyat is as big as at least three in the other games, yet a simple fast travel system – hiring guides from available stalkers to take you to marked locations on the map – helps the player get around in a hurry. Zones are vast and distinct, often containing several smaller areas. For example, an old research center connects to a train station serving as a town, along with various small settlements and abandoned railway infrastructure. Pripyat itself has changed a lot since Shadow, feeling more like a proper urban jungle, albeit with fewer well-known landmarks. The Zone’s physics-defying anomalies are ever present, only now they’ve ripped deep, impossible scars into the ground and feel more unearthly and dangerous than ever.

Visually, GSC’s X-ray engine is showing its age but still serves well enough to convey the atmosphere. The Zone is bleaker than ever, littered with derelict Soviet-era structures and overgrown foliage. Stalkers have a tendency to all look alike, but they (and their mutated counterparts) are well detailed and very convincing in behavior and motion. It’d be a stretch to call Pripyat’s vistas stunning, but some of the game’s best moments are when you can stop and soak up the scenery: picking through an anomaly field at the base of a massive bucket-wheel excavator or sneaking into a rotting village populated by brain-dead, gun-toting zombie stalkers. While nothing here tops the underground sections of the first game – still very potent nightmare fuel – Pripyat transitions just as well from the Zone’s open wastes to linear yet eerie dungeons.

Sounds go a long way in sealing the deal, from the memorable crack of a sniper rifle to the distant growl of an enraged bloodsucker. Day or night the game sounds alive, as distant battles play out and groups of stalkers chat away around a campfire. Stalkers still break out guitars and trade anecdotes in Russian, and some catchy new guitar tracks keep the ambiance from feeling recycled from previous games. Storms rumble as they gather, anomalies crackle and hiss menacingly, and your geiger counter clicks ominously as you near a hot spot. On the downside, voice acting is spotty at best. Degtyarev and a handful of stalkers sound fine, but too many key figures either overact or fall flat, and the cheerful “Howdy ho!” some stalkers tend to belt out just sounds strange. It’s also worth mentioning that there’s a noticeable mismatch between the audio and text of the intro and outro narration.

Other new additions here and there keep things interesting. Equipment stashes can be found out in the world without having to mark their location first, though they can still be marked for a price or as a reward. New creatures spice up combat considerably, such as the psychic, bullet-deflecting Burer, and old ones have a few new tricks too. Fewer groups of stalkers will shoot you on sight, making them seem less like cardboard cut-out bad guys in endless supply. Your map helpfully points out where you can safely hide from blowouts – massive supernatural energy storms that can fry the unprotected in seconds – and shelter is never too far away. The above-mentioned sidequests have gotten a lot more versatile this time around. To name one, a tug-of-war between competing business interests in Skadovsk carries over several quests, such as picking sides at the last minute during a planned ambush.

So, who’s up for poking around in that for an invisible, moving, radioactive thing?

Shadow and Clear Sky often defined themselves by unique moments, when all the elements came together just right. Pripyat stays true to this, working the intelligent stalker AI and unorthodox monsters into its bigger and bolder playground. An attempting mugging might go south if your would-be robber’s friends run afoul of the local wildlife in the process. Enemies track sounds and flashlights, and it’s sometimes to your advantage to kill your own light and wait for others to come looking for you. Stalkers will take shelter from blowouts if they can, gathering indoors and passing the time with songs and jokes. And every now and then, the attack you expect to come never does, leaving you alone with your itchy trigger finger and overactive imagination. The moments will vary from player to player, but when they hit, the only word that seems to fit is magic. There is something deeply engaging about exploring the Zone, and Pripyat captures it as skillfully as its predecessors.

There are still snags, however. Certain quests later on can take some guessing to do right, like picking off the right enemy in a sniper section. The game’s freeplay mode, available after clearing the last mission, is oddly placed; it asks you right at the end of a running gunfight if you’d like to stay in the Zone. Enemies are still frustratingly accurate with grenades, though they don’t spam them as much as they did in Clear Sky. The story starts off interestingly enough, as Alex has free reign to investigate the choppers as he sees fit. Missions build predictably towards a hazardous journey into Pripyat, and the build-up is handled well, drawing on allies and enemies you’ve made along the way. However, the finale is rather sudden – hardly as climactic and memorable as the assault on Chernobyl in Shadow – and weak acting hampers the cutscenes.

However, chief among Pripyat’s redeeming features is just how polished it feels in relation to its predecessors. The atmosphere is intact, and unscripted mayhem between various stalkers and mutants means no two trips across the Zone will be identical. For once, though, a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game doesn’t trade technical stability to achieve this. Not a single crash was encountered in the course of the game, and all manner of quicksaving and quickloading couldn’t break quest scripting. The game did tend to eat more horsepower as time went on, suggesting a memory leak, and there were occasional issues with creatures bunching up at doors or other locations. Overall, however, Pripyat is an extremely stable game by any measure. Given the series pedigree, this is both doubly surprising and worthy of considerable praise.

Outside of technical errata, the game feels more balanced than it ever has been. As in Clear Sky, artifact hunting involves tiptoeing through an anomaly field, detector in one hand and bolts in the other to find a safe path. With a little effort, one can safely rack up plenty of cash, and thanks to a relatively fair economy, it’s rarely cost-prohibitive to repair and upgrade your gear, even if you don’t plan on keeping it for long. Returning stalker and professional narcoleptic Nimble now has an arms dealing business, taking special equipment orders that are often well worth the wait and expense. Pripyat takes achievements one step further, giving tangible rewards for passing certain trials; get enough cash and traders open their special stock, solve a murder mystery and earn a recurring reward of medical supplies, and so on. The addition of a sleeping system, dedicated storage box, and stat-boosting medicines round out the list of things that make Pripyat much more convenient and fun to play.

Not that there’s ever a good time to have your phone go off with La Cucaracha as the ringtone, but now is particularly bad.

What Pripyat inarguably does better than its predecessors is maintain a sense of consistency, the feeling that your actions matter and yet life in the Zone goes on without you. If your safe is suddenly emptied, it’s not a bug; you wronged someone and they’re getting back at you, so go get back at them. Those scientists might want to know if their guards haven’t been on the level, and they may pay you to go find replacements from a faction. That faction, in turn, will thank you for the job reference by taking your word for it if you vouch for a freed Monolith stalker, a former member of the main enemy faction in Shadow. And keep tabs on that ex-Monolith fellow too, because you never know when you’ll need a hand yourself. Quests and characters very often tie into each other in sensible ways, and with the exception of some plot missions, nothing really comes out of left field.

Bear in mind this is still S.T.A.L.K.E.R. we’re talking about, so expect a tougher fight than most shooters will throw at you. Fortunately, Pripyat isn’t stingy with medical supplies, and you’re rarely more than one looted enemy away from finding a medkit and turning the fight around. Overall playtime ranges comfortably in twenty-plus hour territory, give or take depending on how thorough you are. The choices you made in the game are tracked in satisfying Fallout-style epilogues, and quite a bit can change depending on who got hung out to dry; in spite of lackluster acting, it was good to see certain people come through in the end. It remains amusing that a game based on Russian science fiction, set in one of the bleakest environments imaginable, still manages to finish what it starts better than most other shooters on the market today.

The Zone’s alien beauty is sometimes difficult to put to words, requiring you to find those moments for yourself: to creep through that abandoned factory and keep your ears open for footsteps or gunfire; to track that invisible monster by luring it to water and leading the splashes; to wait out that storm while a passing musician tries to cheer everybody up. This time, however, the scripting has the chops to stand alongside the robust world that GSC has created, and the mechanics of gameplay work better than ever. Pripyat may not pull in a lot of newcomers, drawing its backstory from Shadow, but series veterans will not be let down. What you want is here, stalker. Come.

Kasumi’s bio page can be found on the Mass Effect 2 website here.

Last Rebellion flew completely under my radar.

I’d expected my March gaming revelry to mostly consist of Pokemon NewHotness and Sakura Wars: We Finally Released One In English. Little did I expect to be issued a copy of Last Rebellion, a game for a platform I don’t actually own. So, three favors and a round of Chinese food later, I’d procured a PS3 on which to test-drive this latest NISA release. (And two smart-aleck copilots, playing Crow and Tom to my Joel.)

… I’ll level with you. I’ve written, deleted, rewritten, revised, and rerewritten the two paragraphs that should go here. I can’t find the right tone. This game has left me torn. So, in an attempt to balance the two sides of my head and the multitudes of opinions contained therein, I will write two reviews. One filled with vitriol, and one filled with happiness and ponies. That’s what this game left me with. Enjoy.

Last Rem… Erm. Rebellion. I forgot which one this was.

Last Rebellion feels like a brazen attempt to woo the western audiences with a turn-based JRPG, which seems as sensible as wooing the cute girl at the laundromat with a discussion about how many followers you have on your Youtube channel in which you crush cans against your head. There’s a disconnect here, and most people can find it in a heartbeat. But no matter, you’re gonna pay $50 for this disc, so you might as well dive into the pity headfirst.

In the kingdom of INTERCHANGEABLE, two gods, INTERCHANGEABLE and INTERCHANGEABLE, representing Death and Life (respectively), are out of balance. It falls upon you, INTERCHANGEABLE, to fix things, because your dad’s the king and there’s also this hot girl, or something. Frankly, my eyes glazed over at the third Generic Fantasy name and never really got better. The plot of this game is just one huge Cliche Katamari, so dense with tired story elements and typical RPG conventions that even the characters themselves redline the ERPM (eye-rolls per minute) gauge. In a better game, a little bit of Genre Savvy is welcome and can help to break the 4th wall. This game, instead, chooses to funnel any poignant sarcasm or intelligent postmodern analysis into yet-more Stereotypical-Protagonist-Angst fuel.

So you have to slay your Necromancer brother, discover the reason for the disappearance of these girls, find the eccentric inventor, there’s discussion about a civil war in a country you never actually get to visit… Honestly, if you’re going to design for a game that non-JRPG fans might be interested in, could you do any more wrong than this? You’re not going to get the hooks in ‘em far enough to justify the one or two plot twists that kinda subvert the player’s expectations. (Only to replace them with completely new, tired, overdone expectations that fit the new worldview.) I don’t think I wouldn’t have been able to make it through this yawn-fest without turning it into a Mystery Videogame Theater experience. The dialogue is painful, every emotion can be predicted scenes in advance, the soundtrack listing consists of “Ominous Drumbeat Over Creepy Sounds” repeated for every track (except the final, hidden entry: “I Thought You Said There Wasn’t Any Japanese In This”), and the monster designs can, in some cases, differ by what seems to be two points of light or shade. (Because in an ecosystem where members of a species are completely identical, of course the one that’s 37% grey is wildly different from its 39% grey cousins.)

And the animation? NONE. Outside of the main gameplay engine, absolutely every dialogue is done with still-frame paintings, panned around or spun or whatever to make folks think that there’s a little more effort here. And even the art style begins to grate after a while. Does Mr. Angsty even have lips? What obsession do these people have with hoodies? Humanity is never meant to know.

I’d say this was phoned-in, but that’d be a disservice to Japan’s telecommunications superiority. I can’t think of a more un-memorable plot, but that’s kind of the point. I just want it to go away.

Hopefully not the Last Rebellion

I’ll admit, the plot was trash. Though occasionally funny, the rampant cynicism makes Baby Conan O’Brien cry. But no matter. This game needs only one thing to justify its existence: the mechanics. In most JRPGs, multi-segmented enemies are the domain of final-bosses ONLY. What body parts does a slime have, anyway, to require such dissection?

Last Rebellion’s response: “Body, left eye, right eye, grin, stalk.” Five points. Because it’s that detailed. Every mob, no matter how trivial, has between six and ten distinct body parts. Every mob, no matter how trivial, has an order to those parts, a prescribed battle-plan that the wary adventurer is wise to discover through trial, error, and deductive logic.

Man. I love games like that. I actually get to think! During battles! Not just mashing a button to attack, there’s a reason behind this! Landing blows in the correct order serves dual purposes: it increases a combo count, which in turn yields bonus EXP, and it increases the duration of the stamps placed upon that body part. Each appendage that can be targeted has its own defense value; any particularly weak spots are marked in red to indicate that they will trigger a powered-up counterattack if struck out-of-order. So do you include these danger zones in your first couple encounters with a new mob? Do you risk it, or do you attack everything else, doing less damage but sparing you the counterattacks? It’s exactly this strategy that makes Last Rebellion unique among most JRPGs. In other titles, you might encounter this scenario once per game, in one particular boss fight. Here, such deduction must be applied to every troll, skink, cyclops, and chicken.

It also helps that every round, you may attack as many body parts as you like for 1 Combo Point per hit. 10 parts on a mob? Pony up 10CP, and you’re hitting it 10 times that round. 10 parts on each of 5 mobs? 50CP, and that’s 50 melee attacks that turn. And that’s 50 stamps you’ve just laid down.

“Wait,” I hear you say. “Stamps? The hell does the Postal Service have to do with this game?” No, no, no. Stamps are what make magic work. Think of them as targeting points for every offensive spell you cast; any given cast of a spell will, for the same flat MP cost, target every “stamp” on a mob. So, if this troll has one stamp on its head, a 60MP cast of Thunderbolt (L5) will hit that stamp. If the same troll has a stamp on every one of its 10 appendages, that same 60MP hits the troll 10 times. 10 stamps on each of five trolls? That’s 50 Thunderbolts, all for 60MP. Stamps wear off after time, though, necessitating melee attacks to keep the magic working. Stamps placed out of order last for two turns, those in correct order last for four, and critical hits land a five-turn stamp. Stamps stack if repeatedly attacked, and the longer a stamp’s duration, the more effective the magic that hits it.

It’s a strange version of synergy, balancing physical beatings with CP use and using magic to fill in the rest. Each turn, you get two actions, one from each of Angst Man and Plot Girl. (They have real names, but one’s a number anyway and this is funnier.) In keeping with standard RPG expectations, he’s the physical power and she’s the magical maven, though either can use any magic so far learned. The only other difference between them is in their special abilities: Nine (I told you he had a real name!) can absorb MP from downed foes, while Aisha’s (She does, too!) ability removes downed foes from the battlefield by converting them into HP.

The two-action-per-round limit may seem stifling, but Last Rebellion’s strength is in its scaling. The game feels well-balanced from start to finish, with no real pushover battles but nothing that’s by any means “cheap” either. The HP/MP regaining techniques intrinsic to the duo are a great way to keep the game rolling without being knee-deep in curative items or restoration points while at the same time keeping the player on a knife’s edge. Further, HP or MP (depending on which half of said duo is active) is slowly regained while maneuvering through the dungeons, dungeons, and dungeons which form the bulk of the game.

(Further, in one thing I rarely get to comment on… the trophies may be the greatest ever created. A silver trophy entitled “Congrats, You Beat Up a Little Girl?” Who wouldn’t be envious of that?)

These are… really awesome designs and features. I can only hope that these words what I’ve written convey some of the exhilaration I felt as I maneuvered my way through this combat system. It’s amazing. It’s thought-provoking. It synergizes logical experimentation and turn management with tried-and-true RPG elements and mainstays. It’s set the bar high for every other game I’m going to play this year.

The plot was just kinda… yeah.

All Together Now

Nothing’s right; I’m torn. This is a game I want to give a 5/10, if only because the plot merits a -2/10 and the mechanics a 12/10. I suppose I can give it a little boost, though, in that there’s a certain… shared sufffering, I wanna say? Shared suffering between the player and the characters living out this mess. You don’t really connect on a personal level to these creations, but you do feel sorry for them. On the other hand, they get to pull off really shiny things when they’re not delivering painful exposition or overdramatized line readings. On the other other hand… GYAARG. Never before have I dealt with a game that swings from abysmal to glorious so swiftly or so often. Some folks don’t really “get” the Orwellian notion of Doublethink. Let me lay it out for you:

PLOT DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD. GAMEPLAY DOUBLEPLUSGOOD. WE ARE THE DEAD.

BUT WE’RE STILL ALIVE.

KINDA.

Played to completion using a copy provided by the publisher.

What little plot Borderlands has to offer revolves around four mercenaries and their hunt for a supposedly mythical treasure house known as the Vault. The Vault is hidden on a backwater little dirtball known as Pandora, a colony world recently vacated by pretty much anyone with half a brain as the planet entered its “Spring phase,” wherein more or less every carnivorous species on the planet (i.e., all of them) comes out of hibernation and starts looking for someone to snack on. The practical upshot of all this is that the player is taking charge of a gun-for-hire on a planet populated by psychotic criminals, extra-terrestrial predators, and other opportunistic entrepreneurs.

The fauna of Pandora is monstrous, and more importantly, hungry.

The story itself is usually told through short audio clips, ostensibly broadcasts over the interplanetary communications network, the ECHO net, and progresses by means of a very basic quest structure. The quests that drive the plot tend to follow a simple fetch quest setup, with the game progressing in a pattern of talk to NPC, collect or kill a certain number of MacGuffins, return to NPC, repeat. The story is exceptionally sparse, very easy to predict, and more or less devoid of sympathetic characters. It seems everyone on Pandora is either psychotic, antagonistic, or about thirty seconds from the gloomy bosom of writer-mandated death. True, storytelling isn’t Borderlands’ primary focus, but the overall lack of anything very compelling in the plot and the choppy quest-centric means of delivery takes the story into “why bother” territory.

Where Borderlands puts most of its effort is in the combination of First-Person Shooters with RPG elements. Essentially, Borderlands is an FPS game with RPG-style skill trees, leveling, and damage calculation, and on the whole, the end result is fairly solid, though not without the occasional hiccup.

At the beginning of the game, the player selects a character from amongst the four classes available; the Soldier, the all-around combatant and combat medic; the Hunter, a hawk-wielding sniper and survivalist; the Berserker, the tank and physical damage specialist; and the Siren, an assassin. Each character has a special ability, called an Action Skill, that can be triggered for special effects and, usually, a nice burst of damage, as well as three separate skill trees full of abilities that enhance or modify the character’s basic abilities and Action Skill. For example, the Berserker gets the Brawler tree, which focuses on raw damage output with melee attacks; the Tank tree, which turns the character into a damage sponge; and the Blaster tree, which turns the focus to the Berserker’s preferred weapons of grenades and rocket launchers. The end result of this setup is that Borderlands offers a very solid level of customizeability for each character, allowing each class to be used in surprisingly varied ways, and in such a way that players are never trapped into one setup.

In addition to this, Borderlands has quite a robust multiplayer setup, allowing players to duke it out or play through the main quest cooperatively. The multiplayer focus does create a slight problem for players going through the game on their own, as the way Borderlands encourages co-op is by making certain monsters very difficult for certain classes to take down. For example, the hulking Brutes are basically walking meat walls for everyone but the Berserker, while laser-guided turrets practically require a Siren to dispatch them. For single players, there will always be one kind of enemy whose appearance will be cause for irritated groaning.

Though the game’s combination of FPS and RPG elements may make the game easier for role-playing enthusiasts to swallow, it’s pretty clear that the game’s focus is strongly on the shooter side of the equation. From the early chapters of the game, where players must reach level five before being given any abilities, to the critical hits which only trigger on headshots and specific weakpoints, fans of RPGs will be thrown into the deep end of the FPS world at first sight. This isn’t necessarily a slight against the game, as Borderlands’ system ends up balancing elements of both genres fairly well, but the transition is a little rough to players unused to First-Person Shooters. This is most prominent in the early parts of the game, where the RPG elements are at their sparsest.

The very brief initial tutorial doesn’t help with this at all. Even fairly significant system elements, such as the weapon proficiency system, aren’t given so much as an introductory nod in-game. By and large, Borderlands is a game that expects you to give the game manual a thorough going over. Even certain story elements — for example, that Roland, the Soldier, was formerly a member of the military organization called the Crimson Lance — are noted only in the manual.

Borderlands’ interface is a bit shaky, with a number of loose ends that really could’ve used tying up. For example, the heads-up display uses a simple compass with a marker that will point players in the general direction they need to go in order to complete the next phase of their quest. This may have been an attempt to give the player a general guide rather than the more obvious direction of a minimap, but given that the game still gives players a full map in the menu, the only practical effect the compass has is encouraging players to open their menu frequently when traveling. Other areas of the interface are similarly loose, such as the subtitles, which are poorly matched to the voiced lines and which often interfere with each other when multiple people are speaking at the same time, and the vehicle control, which attempts to combine traditional FPS two-stick control with a third-person perspective, muddying both elements. On the whole, the basic control scheme is at its best when the player is simply running around shooting things, but it encounters increasing difficulty when asked to perform other tasks.

The game’s soundtrack is a mostly background affair, with the music only popping up occasionally to provide a bit of ambiance. The lack of a strong theme to the music, along with the fact that it is usually drowned out by gunfire and other sound effects, means that the soundtrack doesn’t have much punch, and ultimately comes off as forgettable. Conversely, the voice acting is quite solid. The story doesn’t exactly provide a wealth of characters, but the ones who do talk are voiced well, with a sort of over the top style that fits well with the rest of the game.

Vehicles are absurdly overpowered. Running a monster over is easily ten times more effective than using the mounted rocket launcher.

Visually, Borderlands takes a bit of an odd track. The game is almost exclusively cel shaded, down to basic environmental features. This produces very comic book-style visuals, with thick black lines and deep shadow, and the overall effect is quite effective. The only real issue lies in the lack of variety in the environments players will be exploring. Pandora appears to be a one-biome planet, where everything lives in a wasteland or a trash heap, and after a while it all becomes a bit mind-numbing. Overall, the visuals are solid, but the lack of variety in environment does end up making the game come off as a bit bland.

Though it presents a wealth of sidequests and various things to do aside from the main story, Borderlands eventually comes down somewhat shorter than most games, at around 20 to 25 hours. The difficulty varies pretty wildly depending on the level and build of the characters involved, but overall Borderlands is not a spectacularly difficult game, especially for players with FPS experience.

Although Borderlands has a number of flaws, the end result of its design decisions is a game that effectively blends RPG and FPS elements, and yet skimps so heavily on story that the final product lacks flavor. Borderlands should appeal to gamers looking for something new in the RPG department, but overall, it’s really more geared towards gamers looking for something new in the FPS department.

This game was played to completion and reviewed using a retail copy.

Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2
Source: Famitsu

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Etrian Odyssey 3
Source: Game Watch

12►

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Rockman EXE: Operate Shooting Star
Source: Dengeki

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Summon Night Granthese: Sword of Ruin and the Knight’s Promise
Source: Dengeki

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Spectral Force Genesis

Once again, the world is staring annihilation in the face, and once again players step into the shoes of a nameless protagonist and decide whether to save the world, or to destroy and re-make it in their own image. The core ideas of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne’s gameplay– demon collection, fusion and negotiation, large-scale dungeon crawling, mature story choices leading to good or evil, just to name a few– have all been updated and refined. Atlus has definitely learned what works across the last six years, and they put that knowledge to good use in Strange Journey. There are a handful of unfortunate issues that detract from the overall experience, though not so much as to make the game significantly worse. Gamers who are already fans of the Megaten universe should be well pleased with this latest installment, and newcomers will find plenty to like.

Sometime in the near future, an unknown black void dubbed the “Schwarzwelt” begins expanding in the Antarctic, and if it isn’t stopped it could eventually swallow the entire world. The game’s nameless protagonist is a member of an elite, multinational task force charged with entering and exploring the Schwarzwelt in an attempt to find out how to destroy it. The mission goes wrong almost from the word “go,” of course. Disaster strikes as the team of four ships enters the Schwarzwelt and the protagonist’s ship, the Red Sprite, is separated from the others and crash lands. The survivors have little time to recover, however, as crew members start keeling over dead, killed by things no one can see. Only intervention from a mysterious trio gives the protagonist the ability to perceive the demons, and hence fight them. From there the crew’s mission becomes simple survival, with the slim hope of eventually finding a way out. Will that hope be realized? Will there be a world left to go back to? Will the protagonist even want to go back, or will he have other ideas about what to do with the power hidden deep inside the Schwarzwelt? That’s up to the player…

Like Nocturne, Strange Journey is one big dungeon-crawl at heart. The only “safe area” is the few rooms of the Red Sprite. Everything else is the sprawling, labyrinthine zones of the Schwarzwelt. The game is in first-person with the top screen of the NDS being the first-person view, and the bottom being a map of the area while on the field, or enemy/ally stats during battle. Controls are handled almost exclusively via the D-pad and buttons. The only real use for the touch pen is to scoot the area map around so you can see various parts. The story progresses in a series of main missions, and there are dozens of side missions players can pick up as they choose from other crew members or even demons. An easily navigable menu system keeps track of player progress in those missions, as well as player inventory and demons. FMV is kept to a bare minimum, most cut scenes being handled by character portraits with dialogue boxes. The rest of the graphics are serviceable, if not very spectacular.

The game gets players into the action pretty quickly. No 2-hour long tutorials, no silly “practice” battles. Aside from a the interaction in a short 6-question quiz to determine the protagonist’s personality type (and hence how his stats will grow as he levels up), players will only be stuck twiddling their thumbs for 30-45 minutes of story set-up before getting dumped out into the wild. Be warned, though, these zones are enormous. Even the first one is labyrinthine enough to take several hours to fully explore. One of the mid-game dungeons is so mammoth that both the first and second floor maps are four times the size of the bottom screen. These areas aren’t all simple sprawl, either. There are one-way doors, conveyor belts, three different kinds of damage floors, holes, warp panels, dark zones and other obstacles everywhere. Each zone is literally a maze, and how to get from Point A to Point B is half the challenge of a stage. Visual-wise, the zone backgrounds are disappointingly bland but, frankly, that’s not a big deal. While out on the field, most of the action happens on the bottom screen map anyway. There are hidden items, enemies, doors and even entire sub-floors to find, and those only ever show up on the map via the Demonica Suit’s radar system.

Now while all that stuff is great, the most important part of Strange Journey, like Nocturne, is the demons. The game starts off fast here, as well. Both the Compendium and the Demon Fusion ability are conveniently located on the main menu and are fully available straight off the bat. Negotiation is also something players get to dive into almost immediately, as Pixie is the only demon in the beginning party. The rest will need to be scrounged for, but don’t worry about lack of choices. Atlus wasn’t kidding when they said there would be 300+ demons in the game. At my count, there were at least 44 different demon categories.  Several demons are available only through passwords, and there is even an entire category attainable only through fusion accidents! Getting 100% completion on the Compendium will definitely require multiple play-throughs and more than a little OCD.

Negotiation has been tweaked so that demons will be less prone to extorting all of a player’s hard-earned macca and items before deciding no, they don’t want to join the party after all. Instead, they ask a pair of questions first and decide whether or not to entertain your request dependent on the answers. This is where all the effort is. Each demon type has a long list of preset questions, from which it will randomly ask two. The correct answers aren’t set, though the same demon will tend to like the same answers. Get an answer wrong and it won’t join, simple as that. Get the answers right, though, and it will start demanding loot, but by this point it’s almost certain that it will join the party. Only once in the entire game did I have a demon decide it wasn’t going to join my party after I’d already answered it’s questions correctly and it had bilked me for what it could.

Fusing the demons collected has become worlds easier thanks to two major upgrades; the analysis gauge and demon source. Every demon has an analysis gauge that goes up incrementally every time a player faces it in a battle and every time it completes a battle in the player’s party. Pass specific points on the gauge and the bottom screen will begin displaying parts of the demon’s stats. From then on, that demon’s stats are always on display for a player’s reference, without the need to keep casting scan all the time. In fact, there is no longer any “scan” or “analyze” skill in the game at all. But the most important aspect of the analysis gauge comes into play once it has been maxed out. A full analysis gauge for a demon means the next time it levels up in the player’s party, it’s guaranteed to hand out a demon source. Demon Source is an item specific to each demon; i.e. Pixie Source or Angel Source. It will contain 2~4 skills, usually ones the demon originally had or an upgraded version thereof. Sometimes, though, entirely new skills will be on there.

When players decide to fuse two demons there’s the option to add a demon source into the mix. Doing so opens up the ability to customize the new demon’s skill set. Unfortunately, this system isn’t without its downsides. First off, demons are limited to a maximum of 6 skills instead of 8. Also, the skills on a demon source are set, and they aren’t necessarily the best ones the demon had. If the demon was one that was fused, its demon source may contain a bonus skill that had been fused onto it, but again, no guarantee it’s one of the good ones. Outside of adding a demon-source, there’s no other way to customize a fused demon’s skills. When two demons are put together the skills that show up are the ones you get, period. Still, despite these shortcomings overall the system is a vast improvement over earlier Megaten games.

The battle system, compared to the other parts of the game, has undergone a complete overhaul. Basic battle is very old school; all four player party members’ actions are input via menu commands, they go off all in one shot, then the enemy gets a turn. Players get a blade for slashing attacks and a gun for piercing attacks or magic spells. The armor equipped determines weaknesses and resistances, and accessories provide some various bonuses. All of these are available for purchase in the Red Sprite in abundance.  Too much abundance, actually. I found myself skipping over new weapons and armors in swaths because they weren’t much of an upgrade at all, especially later in the game.

The Press Turn system of gaining or losing turns by hitting an enemy’s weak points or resistances has been completely scrapped. Replacing this is the Devil Co-Op system, where a strike on an enemy’s weak point earns immediate follow-up attacks by any other party member of the same alignment. Having similarly aligned demons in your party allows for some pretty hefty damage output, but conversely, if everyone is different, aiming for an enemy’s weak-point becomes almost meaningless. This shifts strategy very heavily onto the party composition side. Putting a party together becomes a delicate balancing act between having enough same alignment demons to make Devil Co-Op worth it, and getting the right demons some battle-time so you can max out their analysis gauge. One thing that doesn’t need to be worried about, though, is having the enemy Co-Op the party back. There are no penalties for missing an enemy or hitting its resistances, reducing player-party weaknesses to more of an occasional irritant as opposed to lethal disasters waiting to happen.

Lastly, and pretty least, is Alignment. All the demons in the game have an Alignment put together off of two scales: Light-Neutral-Dark and Law-Neutral-Chaos. So there can be Light-Chaos demons or Neutral-Neutral demons and so forth. The player’s Alignment is on the Law-Chaos scale only and it can and will change across the course of the game dependent on what answers are given to which question. Which Alignment the player is at the end of the game determines which of the three endings is gotten. And, to be blunt, that’s the only point where Alignment matters at all. For 90% of the game, it’s effectively fluff. It really doesn’t help that a little over half-way through things, an easily repeatable NPC encounter opens up that allows players with a little patience to shift their Alignment any which way they want. Player Alignment only becomes locked in once the final zone is entered. Before then, it’s entirely possible to get both Law-Only and Chaos-Only things in the same play-through. On the plus-side, this makes it really easy to get all three endings. And it’s not like it is possible to get absolutely everything on the first play-through. A handful of Law/Chaos-Only quests do lock off their opposite number once accepted. So again, while this is a downside, it’s relatively minor.

Overall, I think there is only one thing about Strange Journey that I can say just flat-out disappointed me; the music.  Megaten games have always tended to have great and distinctive soundtracks, from Nocturne’s heavy techno to Persona 3’s hip J-pop.  Strange Journey tries to come up with a new concept by adding some tribal chanting to sweeping orchestrals, and this works in maybe one or two cases (notably the opener).  The rest of the time… not so much.  Battle and boss themes are regular orchestrals that are just about as bland as the backgrounds.  There isn’t the variety of music that a Megaten game usually has, either.  Most zones of the Schwarzwelt have their own music, though some repeat.  The battle and boss music stays the same throughout.  There aren’t many different tunes for the Red Sprite safe-zones or cut scenes, either.  The official soundtrack either has to be pretty short, or include tracks that are hardly ever heard in the actual game just to fill out the disc.  Ah well.  I guess you can’t have everything.

While the upgrades over its spiritual predecessor Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne have made Strange Journey a less vicious game that’s more forgiving of player mistakes, it is still by no means easy. A single error may not wipe the party any more, but players who don’t pay close attention to party members and inventory will soon find themselves in a boatload of trouble. A single playthrough will likely take at least 60 to 80 hours and there are ample incentives to play through a second time, including new demons and even an entire new dungeon. In sum, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is a solid game with a handful of flaws that are easily overlooked. Fans of the Megaten universe both new and old should find plenty to love about it.

This review is based off of a copy of the game that I purchased myself.

Updated 3/16/10.