For all the SMT fans out there that don’t already know, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon has been officially announced for an English release by Atlus. Pre-orders WILL be shipping with the Raiho plushie.
For those less informed, it’s been improved on since the last one. The combat is much more fluid, two demon summoning in combat, and enemy conversations make a return, among other things.
Devil Summoner 2 is more than living up to my expectations, and it’s a massive improvement to the first.
Curious if anyone’s played Imagine the SMT MMO. Depending on the doctor’s verdict about a recent leg injury, I may be having a lot of extra time on my hands without kick boxing and giving this a try. Any opinions on it?
I highly question whether it would be as good as the games, which are so heavily plot-driven and the character interactions and cutscenes are core elements to it. I feel it would be much like .hack//fragment where it had the core gameplay mechanics of the main game, but without the plot elements, was not so exciting, atleast to the audiance who found the original games excisting.
That has, and continues to be, the biggest obsticle to MMOs, specifically MMORPGs. They largely attract a certain type of player and, unless you are the exception like WoW, it generally disinterests players as it doesn’t engage them in storyline. This leads to a different type of player that tends to play these games, which by a large, is not the typical player as they have to go through areas multiple times, fighting dungeons from beginning to end, multple times, just to get the item drops. It’s almost like the acade era of the 1980s reborn in the form of an online game - there if you lost all your lives you had to start the game from the very beginning.
Yeah, I ask because the only MMO’s I’ve played were WoW(didn’t care for it and quit before my trial ended) and Guild Wars, which I enjoyed because it was pretty story driven and I enjoyed. From the couple video’s I’d watched of Imagine, it had looked as if there was a similar approach to it as was Guild Wars. Seeing as it’s free to play I wasn’t expecting much to begin with, but I suppose that also means it doesn’t hurt to give it a try when and if I have the time either.
Thanks for the response Jinnai, I’ll be sure to post back here if and when I do try it out and what my thoughts were.
Ok well I downloaded it awhile back to go ahead and give it a try, but just recently had some time to go take a look at Imagine. From what I can tell so far it feels a bit slow getting started, but once you’re used to the control the pace picks up pretty quick. It does have acts that follow a story from what I can see… I got up to about act 4 or somewhere in there, and it seems there are a lot of characters that the story plays around. It’s similar to how Guild Wars handled it’s story. The demon system seems to be just like Nocturne with fusing and so forth. You can negotiate with demons on the field to get them to join you, and you can even directly control their actions and even switch over to them to control movement. The overall art and atmosphere are very much like many other SMT games, so all in all I was pretty pleased with it being an SMT fan. I’d probably play it actively if I had the time and a smaller backlog of games, so it is worth at least looking into if you enjoy SMT and don’t mind MMO’s.
Hmm…well its good they got the atmosphere the game. Wondering how the storyline goes as you progress though the game though. A lot of MMOs are good for the first 10 or so levels (or the equivalent), but loose their focus after a while.
Age of Conan was absolutely brilliant the first 20 levels of the game. Multi-player Day / Solo-Player story driven quest Nights.
Then they spaced out the next solo content to 30, 40, 50, 60 to 80, and instead of multiple story driven quests, you slogged through 10 to 20 levels of horrible grinding and rather fun random PvP griefing to do ONE story based quest. I wanted to shoot myself in the face when I got to 40 and found out I only got to go through one cave before it was back to the grind. That, or strangle a funcom employee. Of course, when I actually hit 80, there was NOTHING to do. No high end PvE, and high end guild raid PvP was broken as well, but that’s a different matter.
As for Imagine, I keep on wanting to try it, but I’m just not sure I could get the hang of a MMO-Styled SMT. Having Story/Acts is a major plus though, so if I ever get some time off, maybe I’ll check it out.
*edit, wow the little trailer they have is pretty impressive.
now that i’m through with P4, gotta wait for P5 to come out, Raidou 2 was okay but I did not like the art too much. There are so many rpg coming out for 6th gen and handheld but not much in the 7th thats worth playing (jrpg wise). I wish one of the rpg companies will wise up and actually create some characters that are not so stereotypical (I’ve had it with hot headed self righteous main characters, worst case, Edge from SOIV). Anyways, I wonder when they are going to make SMT main characters speak for themselves instead of you pick the response all the time.
The only problem with that is that it’s been tradition for the MCs to be silent in the SMT games. It would almost be like Link or Adol Cristin suddenly talking.
Still, it would be interesting to see an SMT where the MC speaks, and since the dialogue choice option has become popular thanks to Persona 3 and 4, maybe they could make the dialogue choices something like Mass Effect’s.
I haven’t really had enough time with Imagine to comment on it’s later levels, but I can see the same thing being a potential problem with there being a lack of story as things slow down. From what I understand there are only 16 acts in the English version(Not sure about the Japanese version, but they have a -lot- more content… Like Alice for one.)
Honestly, I love the art style most of all in the SMT games. Back when I very first played an SMT game, I really hated it, but soon came to love it as the game went on. The Persona art style is actually the same thing, it’s just in a more animated aspect, if you look at some of the concept art for some of the other SMT games, you start to see how much it looks like the Persona art.
I have to agree with DarkFusion though, SMT games have always been completely unvoiced, or leaving the MC unvoiced/unspoken and letting you make all the choices.(And I prefer it this way honestly.) It’s the effort to give the player more control in the direction of what happens and goes on.(Or at least feel that way.) It would just feel odd if they changed it. Having a role voiced along with the choices you make would be interesting though, at least in the Persona’s.
There is a dire lack of good RPG’s in general as of late though, but have yet to go wrong with anything SMT surprisingly. But the rest of the selection out there has left a lot to be desired.
I really don’t mind silent MC in some games but P3 I think would have benefited with one that actually had voice. Arisato Minato came off as a character that really didn’t care for anything. (from facial expressions to body language etc) I would like to at least see what goes on his head (doesn’t have to be dialogue with other characters, a bubble of what he thought of the situation would suffice) I mean when he learned the truth, you get no reaction from him at all, its like “whatever”.
It kinda sux that its rpg dry season on the home consoles lately. Well, except cross edge. Crimson Gem Saga is good, but thats on the PSP, Knights of the Nightmare is okay too, though thats a bit complicated. I guess inFamous is pretty good if you count that as a rpg / sandbox rpg. There is always FF thats coming next year, though I’m not really expecting much from it.
The idea of a protagonist that talks being popular is a popular gimick really. People like the idea that their character has lines. The problem with a silent protagonist is that you really have to develope dialogue and scenes around them. One problem with the silent protagonist is with their reactions: you might not feel the same way they do and thus a disjunct develops and you feel not as close. The other is gender problem and it is really hard to develop good storyline that involves different genders that isn’t utterly bland.
The second issue is probably too complex to deal with in most cases, and usually isn’t a problem. Someone who really enjoys a story and who has any kind of imagination can place themselves inside the opposite gender’s shoes. Also the gender is usually chosen based on the target market as well.
The former is more of a problem which someone pointed out to me that during the 2-D 16-bit era with the inability to distinguish facial features, it was much easier to project your own impression on someone. However, that isn’t the case with newer games with a silent protagonist. Also most games do not give many options to choices upon how to react. Even SMT doesn’t completely do this, but it does go far beyond what typically would be done in most games. Even if the end result is the same, a person wants to feel, if they have the silent protagonist, that they represent their view and to do that you need options…or you need some of that new technology to register emotions and have dialogue based upon it.
Nest SMT title will be on DS again, as SMT: Strange Journey. It seems as though this one was geared more towards a dungeon crawl similar to Nocturne, they also went with the ability to trade demons via passwords with other users.(Sounds pretty familiar.)
Looks like the game’s going to be using a Metroid/Castlevania kind of map system. Also there’s some new screenshots for the game on rpgamer.com, one of them kind of makes me think of Dead Space.
