Also hate the moronic camera and tank controls during exploration and how instead of having normal descriptive spell names the spells are all nonsense gibberish made up words like HALABALOO or ABRACABADRA so I have to play with a skill list open because I can't remember what all of that shit means and through the miracle of bad design decisions spell descriptions are not accessible during certain moments in the game where you really need them, like when summoning a new demon and deciding if his SHARALABAMO skill is more useful than the MUBOBOBO skill of the one you're sacrificing.
Other than that, I'm enjoying it a lot.
The skill names will become second nature as you play more of these games. When I see "Maziodyne" or "Sukunda" I don't have to think twice about what those names mean anymore. Ma for many, zio for electricity, dyne for the strongest regular variant of that spell. Suku refers to accuracy, with -nda being the debuff and -kaja being the buff version. And so on and so forth.
Tied to this, I just finished SMTIV - or I should say I am done with it, as there's plenty of optional bosses left that I won't beat for reasons I'll get to shortly. IV is the 2013 entry on the 3DS and therein lied my first concern that proved to be somewhat exaggerated but not entirely unfounded. With handhelds, come limitations, and lots of them. I was concerned with not being able to get into the game due to everything being scaled down, which I find generally to be a far bigger barrier to entry than old age. In the end, dealing with the controls and menus was easy, but navigating the world may have been the most difficult boss. The majority of the game takes place in fucked-up Tokyo as is typical for the series, but it is even more broken-up than in Nocturne and and absolute bitch to find your way around sometimes, to the point where I had to consult walkthroughs constantly to find my way back to places I had already visited multiple times before. The world map has no names on it and even once you start to remember the names themselves, it can still be difficult to find that one guy in Ueno. Is he in the overworld area, or inside the district itself, which then can have 4 sub areas with their own buildings? Even with the help of guides, I sometimes found myself running loops around parts of town, avoiding mobs that hunt you down like no tomorrow, as well as poison pools. By far the most frustrating part of the game.
I'll move on to the good though, because there's plenty of it. Combat is the usual PTB system with the addition of smirking, which causes you to sometimes deal more damage after a successful null or crit, placing even more emphasis on playing around weaknesses to maximise the amount of turns you get while minimizing the enemy's. I'm largely ambivalent on this addition, but apparently it got tweaked in Apocalypse, which I'll be playing next, along with other combat improvements. Moving on to the demons, the compendium is huge, with well over twice the demons compared to Nocturne, maybe even triple. The designs were lifted from practically all eras of the series and there were a lot that were entirely new to me. A number of new designs for old demons were introduced, some by guest artists, but none stood out to me as particularly good. I much preferred to old archangels, for example. Sprites were low in resolution, and a lot of the artwork depicted in game had this bad shading that looked like the type used in 2005 Deviantart OCs. It is a shame, as the designs don't get to shine like this.
The mainline is not known for its strength in the story front, but I found IV's to be enjoyable. Your teammates appeared like reasonable young adults, each representing an alignment as per usual, while understanding each other despite their differences. The clash of cultures was likewise interesting to follow and the twists weren't bad either. I went with the neutral route due to it not only being the most appealing, but also having the most content by far. You get to beat both final bosses and their dungeons, but before that, the flow of the game is brought to a screeching halt as you're forced to finish an arbitrary list of side quests that you really don't even know which ones are necessary or how to get them - anyone who completes this part without a walkthrough gets mad props from me. Unfortunately, the game has a bit of an issue with its difficulty, or rather its consistency. The first dungeon is the hardest one, as you are still learning the ropes and have very limited ways to deal with enemies, who happen to hit hard, which never really stops, so you'd better get that preemptive hit in and wipe em out before your turn ends. The first two proper bosses are brutal, each requiring me a good dozen or so attempts, but afterwards the difficulty takes a dive and stays middling for the rest of the game. I applaud the series for not falling into the hp bloat trap for bosses, but some felt like they could have used a fair bit more hp, and even the final bosses of the main story were relatively easy. Sure, I lost a couple demons, but I don't think final bosses should be beatable going in blind with suboptimal teams.
That is not to say this game doesn't have difficult bosses - it has several brutal ones, but they're optional or DLC. I didn't bother with the fiends, as getting them to spawn requires the highly satisfying and not at all boring process of checking a room, reloading if no boss, for approximately 256 times per boss for a total of almost 10 bosses. It's a shame because the loot is good and you can fuse them afterwards, but even with emulator speedups, I'm not going to deal with that shit. There's also the DLC bosses which get increasingly bullshit. I beat the first 5, Michael and Ancient of Days requiring some real party changes and no small bit of luck. Masakado, the ultimate boss, gets healed by
everything, so you have to construct an entire party around this on top of having a time restriction, so I decided to just stop there. These bosses also follow the rule of chimping out if you do patterns they don't like, or have too many nulls in your party.
The best part of the game was likely the soundtrack which I had gone through before even starting the game. I'll let this regular battle theme speak for itself:
So there you have it. A good game bogged down by some questionable design decisions and the limitations of handhelds. May be my least favorite game in the series to date - which is by no means a sign of low quality, as I've got great praise for all the ones I've played so far. I'll need a few months to put it into perspective - playing the sequel will certainly help with that as well.
(figured I might as well write this mini review here instead of bumping the SMTIV thread for a low chance at discussion - trying to make writing reviews a habit)
