Similar Games to Persona and Shin Megami Tensei

[Music] you know on this channel i've done multiple videos on atlas published games that aren't megami tensei but i haven't talked a lot about other games that are similar to megami tensei when a gamer franchise becomes successful it's probably going to give other developers some ideas sometimes a game's influence from another may go completely unnoticed other times it may be to a point where one game is basically ripping off another now i've heard the word clone thrown around a lot when describing games that are similar in style to another i mean even i made that mistake in my castlevania aria of sorrow video where i called blasphemous a clone of castlevania which it does have similarities to but is definitely not a clone i've also seen a lot of people using the word clone to describe games like other games that weren't even really the first of what they did but that's sometimes how influence works sometimes someone comes up with an idea that doesn't quite catch on until someone else does it a certain way and sometimes two people just happen to have similar ideas at the same time similar to how wolfenstein 3d wasn't the first first person shooter megami tensei wasn't the first game to let you collect and summon monsters and persona wasn't the first game that combined dungeon crawling with social sim elements and for the games on this list i wouldn't go so far as to call most of them clones but i do think the similarities to megami tensei are pretty noticeable and i could be wrong these similarities could be completely coincidental but whether or not that's the case these are games that remind me of megami tensei in one way or another these are megami tensei light games that you may or may not want to check out let's start with one that was actually published by atlas themselves at least in the west conception two children of the seventh stars developed by spike chunsoft and released for the 3ds in ps vita in 2013 and later ported to pc in 2016. now i don't hear a lot of people talk about this game anymore but when it was announced for a western release it was kind of a big deal at least in the weird niche anime jrpg community that i was a part of and it actually had a decent amount of hype leading up to its release possibly due to the fact that we all thought persona 5 was just around the corner and this would be a good enough experience to hold us over until then now when this game was close to release atlus released a demo for the 3ds version which i played but i wasn't all that impressed by it and i couldn't afford to buy a new game at the time anyway so i just deleted it and then went back to playing smg4 but anyway the premise of conception 2 is that in the world there is an infestation of shadows i mean dusk monsters and also in this world are people called disciples that have special powers ether for males and star energy for females given by the star god that can be used to fight these monsters and you are one of them and are sent to an academy for training young disciples to fight these monsters you take on the role of chad thunder i mean wake arcus who has an extremely high amount of ether so much so that he earns the title god's gift much like persona the gameplay is divided into two sections the dungeon crawling and the social simulation the dungeon crawling pretty much speaks for itself while the goal of the whole social sim sections is to become closer to your female classmates so that you can produce star children with them through a process known as classmating [Music] now despite what you may have assumed from watching that supposedly all that's really going on is that their hands are touching though if that's really the case i don't know why the girls move like that or why the characters in the game get all shy and awkward when thinking about it but regardless it's through this ritual that star children are born these are basically minions that you bring with you into dungeons to help you fight their stats are affected by your relationship with your heroine and her mood which is what the social sim part of this game is for you can have up to nine of these children in your party at a time and in addition also bring one heroine with you supposedly they will perform better if their mom is with them but i haven't noticed any significant differences now in terms of similarities to megami tensei it's more or less influenced by persona it's definitely not a clone or ripoff and probably the most original game in this video but there are still some pretty obvious similarities i already joked about how the monsters are basically just shadows but the overall design of the dungeons is extremely reminiscent of tartarus the ui is also similar to that of persona 3 and 4 and the music well just listen [Music] now the combat of conception 2 is unlike anything i've ever seen in a jrpg you have your attacks your equipment your magic spells and whatnot monsters have their own attacks and weaknesses and everything but the way it works is that when you're fighting a monster you can attack it from one of four directions with one or more of these directions being a weak point on top of that conception 2 is also one of those jrpgs that feels the need to over complicate things with unnecessary features that you're probably rarely if ever going to use for one thing your party is divided into four teams you and one heroine and three teams of three star children all of which have their own equipment mind you then you have your ether gauge which affects speed and then your chain drive meter which affects turn order and then like i said things that affect your star children's performance like whether or not their mom is with them and stuff like that i get that they wanted to make the gameplay more than just run around and keep pressing a or x to beat enemies but the thing about conception 2 is that this game is extremely easy half of those mechanics i mentioned earlier i barely even thought about and i don't think i even came close to dying a single time when playing this game oh and i know i'm not the only one that thinks this game is too easy as well even the game's battle theme thinks so and there is no way to increase the difficulty at all the other aspects of this game don't really do much to make up for the lackluster gameplay either honestly i found the character designs unappealing especially for the heroines the heroines themselves are extremely cliche and uninteresting the music is pretty hit or miss the sprite animations look awkward like the characters are gently humping the air or something and not to mention the pc version of this game isn't exactly the best port i mean it runs fine in everything but there's no way to adjust the graphical settings no way to remap keys and even if you're using keyboard and mouse the game always displays button prompts as if you were using an xbox 360 controller so unless you're actually playing with one you'll just have to guess which keys do what that's not to say conception 2 has no redeeming qualities though for one thing the english voice acting is pretty good the fmv anime cutscenes are well done for a game that was originally made for the 3ds and ps vita the graphics are pretty good i'd be lying if i said there weren't moments i didn't have fun with the combat i was invested enough in the game's story and world to want to keep playing and despite the hilariously corny way the game handles it i do like the idea of building your party out of little minions especially in this case because they're basically your own family and also despite the extremely awkward dialogue there were some lines that got a few chuckles out of my 13 year old sense of humor [Music] i like you you can come over to my house and my sister overall though i didn't find myself enjoying this game much more now than i did when i played the demo as a kid at some of the gameplay mechanics been more streamlined the challenge been handled a little better with some more depth to the dungeon crawling and the characters written and designed a little better i'd say conception 2 is an underrated jrpg from the last generation but as it stands it's hard to recommend this game unless you've played just about every social sim rpg known to man and you're just dying to play something new up next is another game that was released around the same time as conception 2 developed by acquire and zero div this time as an exclusive for the ps vita until it also got ported to pc that game is mind approximately zero or sorry just mind zero i don't know what the approximation symbol is for but whatever now when this game was announced people were already complaining about the obvious similarities to persona and smt and this game isn't too ashamed of it either in fact despite the game being localized by axis they managed to get many of the popular persona voice actors for the dub now the premise of mind zero is that there is an epidemic of people being controlled by monsters called minds you and your classmates all find out that you have minds as well except you have control over yours and it's up to you and the rest of the cast to investigate and protect tokyo as for the gameplay it's a first person dungeon crawler with turn based combat no surprise there the similarity to persona comes from your mind which you can summon or unsummon at any point in battle and when it's summoned it completely changes your properties in combat so it's really more like digital devil saga than persona as a normal human you can attack defend use items and escape while bringing out your mind allows you to use skills which you can add to your mind with skill cards another thing about your mind is that when it's out you don't take damage instead of taking points from your life getting attacked takes points from your mp instead if this reaches zero you'll go into mind break where you'll be left vulnerable for one turn and unable to summon your mind for two this style of combat is actually pretty fun and there's a lot of strategy to it unlike conception 2 there's actually a difficulty switch and on expert difficulty the game can actually be reasonably difficult at times you really have to think about how it's best to approach each battle like do you summon your mind right at the start and risk leaving yourself vulnerable later do you conserve your mp and bring out your mind only when you need it do you retract your mind or just take the mind break instead of losing life now outside of battle you navigate the overworld go to towns shops dungeons etc so again if you're gonna compare it to persona it's more like persona one and two though plenty of other games do this so i wouldn't even call this an influence though i can't help but notice the similarities in style it also does have a very light social sim aspect though i think even using the term very light is a stretch because there's pretty much no point to these segments other than to hear the characters interact which i'll admit was entertaining at first and i do like these characters but this gets old pretty quickly the story is nothing to write home about either it's basically just your run-of-the-mill teenagers with special powers fight to protect tokyo or whatever which i suppose i should have expected but from watching the opening cinematic it kind of makes you think the story is going to be something a little more and i will say the opening cinematic and song are awesome i mean the overall art direction of this game is great the character and mind designs are cool the music is great the english voice acting is very good and for a vita game the graphics aren't bad either oddly enough mind zero wasn't all that well received when it came out back in 2014 in fact it actually has a lower meta score and steam feedback score than conception 2 but i honestly enjoyed this game a lot more than i thought i would i think people are a little too harsh on this game because of its noticeable similarities to the persona series and while it's definitely not as good as any of the persona games i still think it's a solid rpg that holds up on its own merits aside from what i already mentioned my only major complaint about this game is that there's more dialogue than necessary and also the pc port of this game is actually worse than conception 2s once again there's no option to adjust the graphical settings and to make matters worse the frame rate is capped at 30 fps and the game is stuck on the 544p resolution of the vita but i think the worst part is that in the control health screen they replace the button instructions with buttons for the xbox 360 controller but they forgot to add support for the xbox 360 controller how do you make a mistake like that at least you can remap the keys though what's honestly kind of hilarious to me is that on the screen where you do this you don't map them to commands you instead map them to the vedas buttons like you're emulating the game or something and that's pretty funny but if you can get past that mind zero is a decent game that i think is at least worth checking out it'll probably be over by the time i'm done but as of the time i'm writing the script for this video both this and conception 2 are on sale for 4 on steam and for that price you can't really go wrong with either of these games so check them out if you get the time [Music] now let's talk a little bit about the fate series though it's honestly not something i'm super familiar with it started out as a visual novel about a high school student who gets caught in the middle of a war whose winner will have his or her wishes granted by the holy grail the characters that fight in it are called masters who fight using servants that are reincarnations of famous figures throughout history i have seen the 2006 studio dean anime several years ago but that's about it the visual novel and anime are only a small part of a big franchise of manga anime light novels microtransactions memes and of course video games and the one i'm looking at today is fate extra developed by type moon and image epoch released in 2010 for the psp now with a concept like fate you would think it would be perfect for a video game especially an rpg and does fate extra deliver well kinda the story of fate extra is that you are a high school student trapped in some kind of virtual world and are forced to partake in the war for the holy grail you'll see lots of familiar characters from the series like rin tosaka kirei kotomine and shinji mato the story is very interesting and it really makes you feel like you're part of the game's world and keeps you eager to find out what's going to happen next like what will you learn about the holy grail war who's your next opponent going to be stuff like that it's basically a reimagining of the holy grail war from the visual novel inside a virtual world and instead of shiro and mia you play as a new protagonist who can either be male or female in the beginning you can also choose from one of three servants saber archer or caster now right off the bat the game makes a great first impression with some very impressive graphics for the psp not to mention you can actually explore your school grounds in 3d which is more than can be said of a certain other similar game for the psp the voice acting i can't comment on because it's only in japanese but the music is freaking amazing it's such a unique style of music and some of the best i've heard from any jrpg on the psp in fact i honestly think i may like it more than the music in persona 3. now much like persona 3 and 4 the game is divided into two sections the dungeon crawling sections and the high school sections and this game also has a time management system it doesn't have the same calendar system from persona but it does have a countdown the countdown tells you how many days you have before your next opponent you have until then to prepare by doing things like grinding accepting and completing side quests gathering information on your opponent's servant and looking for triggers that you'll need to find before the deadline while it doesn't give you as much freedom as persona it does occasionally throw curve balls to make things more interesting and it really makes you excited to fight the boss at the end of the period so you're probably thinking right now that this game is one of the best sleeper hits of the psp and that you should all stop watching this video and play it whether you're a fate fan or not unfortunately fate extra has one fatal flaw one crippling design choice that ruins what is an otherwise great game and this lies within the combat as you probably expect fate extra is a turn-based rpg but the combat of this game is unlike anything i've ever seen and not in a good way the way it works is that every turn your servant and your opponent gets six actions to use in the order you select them in you and your opponent both execute these actions at the same time and the result depends on who selects what you have attack which works if your opponent uses break break which works if your opponent uses guard and guard which works if your opponent uses attack and if you both choose the same thing at the same time you'll both either take some or no damage so yeah basically it's rock paper scissors every turn you play rock paper scissors six times with your opponent and keep doing this until you or your opponent runs out of hp it's not really what i would call fun and it gets tiresome fast although it wouldn't be completely fair to say that the gameplay is just glorified rock paper scissors sometimes the game will give you hints on what the enemy is going to do and every enemy has its favorite attack pattern like some may attack or guard more often the more you fight each enemy the better you'll be able to predict what they're going to do and if you do manage to land three hits in a row you'll gain a free attack you also have equipment for your master that not only increases his or her stats but also gives them skills that you can use to assist your servant in battle and as you'd expect from an rpg you also have leveling and stats stats that your servant doesn't automatically gain when you level up you instead have to go to the chapel to increase them first which is kind of stupid but at least your servant can also learn skills by doing this unfortunately even these elements can't save the combat of this game i'm not going to say it's impossible to have fun with the combat but more often than not it's just unrewarding and especially frustrating when the enemies beat you why type moon or image epoch thought a combat system like this was a good idea i have no clue and i know that there are some people that will defend the combat of this game but even type moon knew they messed up because last year a remake of this game was announced that uses a more traditional combat system if you're one of those people that plays jrpgs on easy mode and plays them primarily for the story you're probably going to get a lot more enjoyment out of fate extra than i did but as someone in the seemingly minority of people that plays jrpgs mostly for the gameplay i wanted desperately to like this game because the graphics the story and especially the music are all really good but even that isn't enough to save this game from its dreadful combat system if the remake is able to recreate everything the original game got right but with a better combat system it could be one of the best jrpgs of this generation but as it stands i cannot recommend the psp version just wait for the remake to come out next year the next and final game of this video that i'm including on here not only because of its story and gameplay but because kazuma konico himself recommended this game in an interview with the developers by four gamer that game is the lost child developed by crim and released in 2017 for the ps4 and ps vita and later ported to the nintendo switch which is the version that i own the lost child is a sort of sequel to a game called el shaddai ascension of the metatron yeah the name alone got my attention but anyway el shaddai was an action game released in 2011 for the ps3 and xbox 360. it didn't sell very well for obvious reasons but has since gained somewhat of a cult following and even got a remaster not too long ago now the lost child like every other game on this list is a dungeon crawler rpg with turn-based combat you take on the role of hayato ibuki a boy's love protagonist working as a journalist for an occult magazine called lost one day while investigating he gets pushed in front of a train only to be saved by some mysterious woman and given a suitcase that he can't open that is until he meets an only fan's cosplaying angel named lua who helps him open it and inside is a gun that lets him capture and summon monsters from here you go around tokyo investigating various supernatural events now does any of this sound familiar guy finds a weird gun thing that lets him capture and summon monsters going into shops ran by quirky characters that sell you important items and power-ups going around a big city investigating strange occurrences yeah the lost child clearly takes a lot of inspiration from devil summoner soul hackers and that is not a bad thing at all if there's one thing that the lost child really succeeds at doing it's capturing the charm that made the devil summoner game so great in fact even though this isn't a megaton game you'll still recognize a lot of the characters and demons names from megaton because they both draw from a lot of the same source material now the gameplay is pretty self-explanatory you explore dungeons fight and capture monsters build your party out of these monsters you get the idea it's about as close to devil summoners you can get without actually being devil summoner and this is probably the only game in the video that i would actually consider a clone but only to a certain degree the monsters that you summon are called astrals and like the monsters in megaton are based on mythological gods and demons now instead of talking to them you capture them through a process called astral burst as you fight your astral meter will go up and the higher it gets the more damage your astral burst will do and the more likely it'll be to capture an astral once you capture an astral you can't use it immediately you first have to purify it which you do with karma which you get by either battling or from certain dialogue options you can also use karma to quickly level up your astrals re-purify astrals when they die or revive yourself when you die yeah whenever you die you see this creepy old lady that'll offer to revive you with either money or karma which some may say makes the game too easy but it's a good way to save yourself some unnecessary frustration because save points in this game are few and far between and also this game is brutally difficult at times especially early on if you're someone who craves difficulty in rpgs you're not going to be disappointed with the lost child on expert mode the enemies will very easily be able to one shot you and your party members and the bosses just forget about it i tried for hours and could not be the first boss on expert mode i just had to turn the difficulty down to normal and even then i just barely scraped by unfortunately the lost child doesn't give you as much customization as the devil summoner games or any mega10 games really there's no fusion but you can transfer skills from one astral to another and you can evolve them when they reach a certain level astrals will also learn new skills during battle at random points the overall dungeon design can be confusing at times but thankfully the dungeons aren't very large and the encounter rate isn't too high either like other games in this video the lost child received middling review scores from critics but i honestly ended up liking it a lot the combat and dungeon crawling is fun i absolutely love the ridiculous character designs the cheesy storyline and dialogue are quite enjoyable and the voice acting is surprisingly decent at least for nisa standards it's definitely not perfect though with a few exceptions i think most of the astrals look pretty dumb the graphics aren't all that great i mean it's clear that this game was made with the vita in mind but even for the vita these graphics aren't too impressive and the music doesn't really do much to stand out either like it's not bad but it's not something i'd want to drive down the highway blasting out my window like i do with most of the mega 10 soundtracks but overall the lost child is a great rpg that i think is a must play for any megatin fan especially fans of the devil summoner series as much as i hate to say it this is probably the closest we'll ever get to a new devil summoner game and that is going to be it for this video i hope you all enjoyed and let me know if you agree or disagree with any of the things i said if you guys know of any other games that are similar to mega10 please let me know in the comments because i'm definitely eager to check out some other similar games that you guys may know about as always be sure to check out my other links in the description be sure to rate comment and subscribe if you haven't already and if you want to support me financially consider leaving a kofi donation till the next video i will see you all later [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nyarly

Views: 150,524

Keywords: Megami Tensei, SMT, Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Persona 5, Nintendo, Switch, 3DS, Sony, Playstation, Vita, Clones, Full Metal Jacket, Atlus, Xseed, Aksys, NISA, PSP, Kazuma Kaneko, Conception II, Fate, Grand Order, Type-Moon, The Lost Child, El Shaddai, Mind Zero, Blue Reflection, RPG, JRPG, Gaming, Video Games, PS4, PS5, Persona 2, Persona 3, Fate/Extra, Saber, Nero, Underrated, Steam, PC, Japan

Id: pZZF41ppLBM

Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 06 2022