SMT:SJ is an absolute juggernaut when it comes to playtime. I’ve cracked the 80 hours mark and still only played the neutral route (there’s chaos/order left). It’s like the love child of old Wizardry-style dungeon crawlers and visual novels. Which means the Wizardry parts are absolutely delightful and one of the reasons I put in so many hours, while the visual novel-style elements occasionally began to really grate on my nerves.
The story is easily told. It’s the near future, some strange field has been growing in the South Pole and you’re part of a team sent to explore it. What you find is another dimension full of powerful demons trying to save the world from human vices (overindulgence, industrial waste, war and violence) by destroying it and replacing it with a more barbaric and anarchistic version. Very odd logic (less rules would make human vices rule even worse), though if you go with the whole chaos/neutral/order motive I can imagine the demons as libertarians, the humans as liberal democrats and the angel side as the communists and all somehow seems to make sense again.
Anyway, mostly you explore various parts of that pocket dimension, collect various demons (Shin Megami Tensei feels a lot like Pokemon for grown ups), map out the various levels and fight a lot Wizardry-style battles. While there’s an automatic mapping systems that makes playing blobbers (grid-based dungeon crawlers) much easier than if you had to map it out on real paper, later levels throw in various element to counteract even that (teleporters, blind areas, etc.). One level had so many teleporters I had to map it out on paper again to make heads or tails of where to go.
Battles are fun, with a diverse group of elemental and other weaknesses and counter-effects to consider and with a lot of leeway how to develop your monsters, research and build weapons, armor and items. The biggest annoyance in the game is that nearly all game mechanisms are luck based. Which is really annoying when you want to fuse two monsters into another to get the right mix of spells (which you can’t just manually add, they get rolled each attempt) or when you need a certain ingredient that only a certain monster loses (again luck-based) from time to time after a fight.
While all those systems look simple at first, there’s a lot of depth to the whole monster growing system that can be fun to play around with, but can also be a hassle at times when you want a very specific spells or immunity.
Besides the battles, the story is interesting, though the writing is only moderately well done. It’s not bleed-my-eyes-out bad, but has all the subtlety of a kick to the head and oftentimes the whole chaos/neutral/order theme gets in the way of the story unfolding more naturally. Like I said above, if you think about the demon’s argument more than two seconds, it doesn’t make much sense. The angels on the other hand do make sense (in a horrific kind of way), but for the whole motive to really work, the demon side should have an equally strong argument for why they are doing what they do.
And the visual novel style of doing dialog is pretty annoying with a real option once in a while and most of the time clicking through pretty insubstantial jabber from people and demons you talk with. The most fun I had when it came to dialog in SMT:SJ was the option to talk with enemies before a fight and trying to convince them to join you, which often ended unpredictably, since the whole chaos/neutral/order motive never gave a good idea of what dialog option was actually the best.
I think I’ve gone on far too long, but it’s a big game, packing a lot more content than you expect and despite some flaws, is utterly enthralling. I expect to replay it at least two times more, to see the other two routes and I probably enjoy it a hell lot.
The Entropy Pump 