Shin Megami Tensei: The Dark Souls of JRPGs

i want to talk about shin megami tensei but the series is pretty niche i wonder what i should call the video [Music] when you really think about it shimagami tensei is just the dark souls of turn-based rpgs okay gamers listen up i'm sure some of you have played a title in the critically acclaimed persona series but did you know that persona originally started as a spin-off of the shin megami tensei series that's right the one you always hear about after saying how much you love persona 5 only to be interrupted by some elitist telling you to play a real smt game i wonder what people are saying about my persona video i can't take this anymore play a real shin megami tensei and shut up about persona 5 already [Music] we'll have no fear because today i'm gonna be giving you a rundown of what the heck this series is all about while also reviewing the latest hd remaster of shin megami tensei shimagami tensei three knocked it can you let me live for two seconds elitism is always a strange phenomenon to witness in gaming usually it comes from people thinking they're too good at league of legends or that animal crossing isn't a real video game for god knows what reason doesn't this animal crossing town look great yeah it's my mom's i think that gives her more gamer points than any competitive rank ever could for some reason while plenty of the shinmagami tensei fanbase is perfectly normal i've seen more bizarre acts of popular thing is bad now in this community than i have from most other games in recent memory smt fans can be just as bad as persona 5 fans except the difference is they think their game is better than everyone else's with the persona series growing from a spin-off of smt to atlas's money-making main stage act the worldwide 2021 release date for smt5 is starting to sound like a sweet nothing you whisper to someone on their death bed [Music] shin megami tensei five will launch exclusively on nintendo switch november 12th never mind after trying out several mainline smt games i gotta say persona is definitely the more marketable and accessible series in the persona series you fight shadows alongside a cast of lovable characters while also making new friends and balancing combat with high school life in shin megami tensei 4 for example the game spits relentless tutorials at you before dropping you in the first dungeon saying good luck [ __ ] and watching you die 20 times trying to recruit a couple demons so you don't get one-shotted by the press turn system and you know what considering the growing disdain for turn-based combat it makes sense why a lot of people wouldn't want to deal with this [ __ ] gathering your ragtag team of demons isn't exactly the easiest task in persona 5 the shadows are cute you know they're kinda quirky say a nice or gloomy answer to match their personality and bam boom you have a shiny new mask well in smt negotiating is a bit more complicated than you might expect you see you're trying to convince demons these little scum rat [ __ ] bags to join your party so unless they decide to force their way in without your consent it's gonna take at least a little bit of sweet talking but not too much every negotiation is a crap-shoot balancing act of denying them and giving them what they want but most of the time they'll just call you a [ __ ] and run off with all your stuff if you're such hot [ __ ] then crush this rock with your bare hands shin megami tensei is an incredibly unique series but due to its general unapproachability it doesn't sell all that well overseas and isn't receiving the same level of care that atlas gives to the persona series however i bring all this up because it just feels childish and misguided to twist your love for a game into hatred towards an adjacent fanbase you can be mad at atlas for the questionable quality of the nocturne remaster which i'll get to later but taking it out on persona fans does nothing but make smt seem even more niche and unapproachable and the fanbase even more elitist persona fans already have enough on their plate after discovering the existence of jazz music but enough about gamers let's talk about the dane game already i mean nocturne has been called every classic from cult to contemporary by gaming news outlets so it must be good right [ __ ] classic i haven't played it yet oh okay one of the main draws of the shin megami tensei series is the darker more mysterious settings heavily centered around gods demons and the occult this [ __ ] is basically what religious parents thought pokemon was back in the 90s some people might say smt is better than persona but i think they're almost too different to compare in persona 4 you move to the rural town of inaba and solve scooby-doo mysteries with your high school friends in nocturne your teacher invites you to the hospital so you go looking for her in the basement pop into a room and whoa everyone outside of this hospital will perish as for regrets i have none you what instead of telling you anything nocturne starts throwing strange characters and terms at you and you kind of just sit there like okay guess i'll go hang out in the parking lot with jack frost until [ __ ] goes haywire like 30 hours into the story so without very many tutorials at all you start learning the ropes if you know how to play turn-based rpgs that is i feel bad for anyone who would ever try to start with nocturne you may get out of the hospital explore a post-apocalyptic shibuya and ginza fight a few bosses you might feel like you're getting the hang of combat after all you can auto kill the random encounters that show up every [ __ ] second and then while walking through the ginza underpass you get met with a funny [Music] me to the voice [Music] thank you shin magami tensei nocturne basically as soon as you think you're getting a hang of things a boss named matador shows up to kick the [ __ ] out of you harder than i want to punt morgana across a football field every time the words lady on come out of his mouth the boss battles in this game demonstrate the other reason people love the shin megami tensei series difficulty shit's tough having an amply leveled team isn't gonna cut it nor is grinding the be all end-all solution to difficult content bosses have very specific designs that will leave them doing kick flips on top of your corpse until you learn their attacks weaknesses and resistances equipping specific loadouts and fusing demons with a diverse set of buffs debuffs and abilities is essential after discovering that the only feasible way to defeat the boss in ikebukuro tunnel is by fighting him at the exact moment there's a full moon so you can see his shadow among the fakes i'm not even upset that i called this series the dark souls of jrpgs anymore major bosses and fiend battles were easily my favorite part of the game as having to constantly switch up strategies instead of hanging on to demons you like for too long keeps things interesting after all the demon collecting and fusing is what really hooked me on the gameplay of persona and brought me to smt after getting more and more disappointed with pokemon over the years but unfortunately this game is a jrpg from 2003 with random encounters so it's about time to talk about all the things i didn't like because while the game is beautiful from an artistic standpoint i've got at least a few bullet points when it comes to actually playing it while rpgs are one of my favorite video game genres and there are countless examples of games that push boundaries and demonstrate that turn-based combat is by no means outdated using smt nocturne as an example would be one of my worst possible options because this game is outdated first off and probably my biggest complaint overall the gameplay loop is tedious until you get a spell 10 hours into the game to reduce random encounters which only works on enemies that are considerably weaker than you backtracking sucks due to the fact that fights can happen literally everywhere even in cities where there are shops and save points take the [ __ ] tall grass and slap that [ __ ] right in the pokemon center if i gotta fight demons right now then so does that kid waiting for his charmander with a fractured neck dungeon design outside of the game's optional labyrinth of amala just feels repetitive and slow and designs within the labyrinth of amala are so winding and complex that i want to smash my face into my desk but there's some form of video game stockholm syndrome that keeps bringing me back for more i think i finally understand why smt fans exist now most dungeon gimmicks require you to run back and forth to hit switches or wander through hallways and doors while getting randomly teleported around the map until you give up on trying to memorize the patterns and bust open the game fact again rather than introduce interesting exploration or puzzle mechanics the dungeons feel as if they were designed to throw you into as many random encounters as possible dragging out the game's length in an incredibly shallow way the diet building near the end of the game is filled with wacky hallways illusions fake doors and secret passages and was one of the only dungeons in the game i thoroughly enjoyed a welcome change after the third underground tunnel of grey monotony this place given anyone else persona vibes when it comes to nocturne's atmosphere i understand that a lot of fans enjoy the darker world driven tone of the game but it just wasn't enough to hold my interest if i had to give exploration in this game a description it would probably be lonely traveling around as the silent demi fiend is a pretty stark contrast from the party-filled banter of many rpgs and without strong characters or a continuous storyline i often felt my attention span waning as i wandered through abandoned buildings with droning ambient synths for background music the story starts off incredibly strong in its introduction and then practically disappears outside of sparse cutscenes until the end of the game which is preceded by 30 hours of walking down tunnels climbing ladders and running away from hundreds of battles after walking down the 50th [ __ ] hallway that literally contains nothing and exists purely to waste my time outside of boss fights combat just feels wholly uninteresting as 90 of random encounters can be cleared simply by pressing auto or using one powerful skill i genuinely think i could have finished the game in half the time and liked it more without copious amounts of random encounters and while the battle music is jamming combat is definitely hindered by the audio compression it's hilariously bad this [ __ ] sounds like it's coming out of a wii remote man while the story of nocturne becomes fairly engaging once you make it to the end it's one of the slowest burns i've played in a while and handing someone the jrpg equivalent of watch the first three seasons and then it gets good at the finale doesn't exactly instill confidence in the average player shin megami tensei is much more focused on telling a story through its world and artistic design than through characters or plot lines and while nocturne wasn't always my cup of tea i can't deny its incredible style i'd honestly have a hard time recommending this franchise to someone that isn't a fan of turn-based combat hell i straight up just wouldn't recommend this series to the average person smts for the people who hate having fun oh yeah all right that's me but that doesn't mean i hate it for a niche game to exist it has to fill said niche and despite the aggravating random encounters tedious traveling frustrating dungeons confusing bosses and backtracking that would have made me give up on this game halfway through without the game fat guide written in 2004 i liked nocturne just maybe could have done with a few less colorless underground tunnel dungeons before i close things out i'd like to touch on the quality of the hd remaster i never played the original ps2 version but outside of the new voice acting it feels like upscaling a ps2 game on an emulator so 50 definitely seems a bit steep maybe not as anti-consumer as a 60 dollar skyward sword port with a 25 amiibo for fast travel but it makes it a bit hard to fully support the remaster even though i got a review code for it sorry atlas love you guys but music is important and i know you could have probably re-recorded those instrument solos to update all the music instead of being lazy when it comes to one of the most defining aspects of a game's style and design your community loves the game so much they fixed it for you i care about video game music a lot if you couldn't tell when it comes to the digital deluxe edition hiding minor editions like dante who crashed my [ __ ] game extra grinding dungeons and interchangeable background music behind a whopping 20 dlc feels like well it feels like cashing in on people that wanted to play the game four days early the frame rate is also locked to 30 frames per second on pc and while i don't really mind all that much and realize that it might be hard coded into the game's design this is a modern 50 remaster so the lack of 60 frames per second has gotten the gamers pretty riled up so yeah that's the shin megami tensei series and nocturne in a nutshell let it be known that this video has finally been made so you can stop pestering me in the comments to play a real smt game if you enjoyed the video consider subscribing and if you'd like to support my work directly and get rewards like your name in the credits and behind the scenes content you can check out my patreon in the description i'm gonna go back to finishing smt4 now but i still like persona 5 better eduardo and you know what while we're at it why don't you stop playing these rip off video games and go read a real smt book that's right this series didn't start with video games but with a series of novels published in the 1980s i spent 70 dollars on this and i can't even read japanese [Music] you

Channel: yakkocmn

Views: 547,399

Keywords: shin megami tensei, nocturne, smt, yakkocmn, persona 5, SMT V, shin megami tensei v, atlus, e3 2021, shin megami tensei v e3, gameplay, persona, persona 3, persona 4, shin megami tensei nocturne, shin megami tensei switch, hd remaster, p5, p4, persona 5 royal, shin megami tensei review, p3, nintendo switch, smtv, smt 5

Id: oiqWG1fQ038

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021