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Shin Megami Tensei and Persona

SanoBaron said:
The SMT elitism is strong on this thread.
I'm sorry I'm not down to support a series that turns a famous mother goddess into a loli and Zeus into a Monokuma gijinka
 
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Oh god, I didn't even know we had seen any designs other than the owl and the anime, these are fucking garbage.
 
Ruin said:
I'm sorry I'm not down to support a series that turns a famous mother goddess into a loli and Zeus into a Monokuma gijinka
You know that design aesthetic on Zeus existed long before Dangan Ronpa, right? It’s on Two Face ffs. It’s meant to represent a duality of man, which is pretty fitting for Zeus considering he’s this great respected god who everyone knew couldn’t keep it in his pants.

Hell, Doi admitted in an interview his design is based on zeus’s duality.
EDIT:

WELL, I tried to link a Tumblr post that has the interview translated, but the forum refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. So if you want to read the interview, message me and I’ll send you a pm after I get off work.

Until then, here’s a little snippet I took from my phone.
36579FA5-23A4-4FE6-AE3B-169C2F0E7001.png
 
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There's better ways of communicating that than a sentai reject

edit: to elaborate now that I have time, I dislike the Zeus design less because it's half and half, but more because it lacks a certain element of respect, I feel.
I read the interview already and I actually would have liked a Zeus with the classic toga and armor, something majestic and sinister at the same time to really give you a sense of "Zeus is fucking cool" but also "Zeus is a fucking asshole" and Monokuma Zeus doesn't do that for me. It's just "white marble cool guy Zeus" and "BLACK EVIL MEAN GUY ZEUS MADE OUT OF METAL AND SPIKES"

It's tacky, and I think it does a disservice to the original mythos, especially with fucking Loli Demeter running. If Persephone is in this game I might just get an ulcer
 
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The post also links to an article talking about Demeter, which Doi explains why he gave her a childlike appearance to fit the more mischevious themes of demons. She’s apparently part of the story too from what I can get from the interview.
 
I don't really think mischievous when I think Demeter but yeah sure whatever helps you sleep at night
 
Speaking of problems with Atlus.
Also as little as I want to play Deep Strange Journey, the Japanese limited edition is pretty cool.
71vX4ayjvIL._SL1000_.jpg
In other news (to me) Kaneko Works IV after being repeatedly delayed (after just not appearing on the date it was supposed to release with no one saying anything) apparently came out in June and V (previously unannounced) came out last month. Since they're just Devil Summoner split up it makes me think they probably had issues justifying the publishing issue of IV as one book. Will still probably grab them myself since I have the first 3.
 
wait wait waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait

why the FUCK is Jacklevania not it's own game
I'd buy that shit for sure, it looks fun. Why attach it to a worse game
 
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Code: 
http://eirikrjs.tumblr.com/post/166326819817/judging-from-dois-aversion-toward-making-zeus

just check this guy's material. controversial as it may be, he, dijeh and a few others are some of the most diehard SMT fans i've ever seen. And they have a very decent basis for slamming doi's insipid pseudo-sentai design in Zeus and Odin or the bullshit call of making a mother goddess looking like anything EXCEPT motherly or divine

EDIT: tumblr plugin is busted, just copy the link

on a side note, this side scroller is the most inspired thing SMT related atlus released since SMT4
 
Aden said:
Mate, the stamp at the end says it's fake. We're not getting anything unless the reaction to the video is loud enough and they actually decide to take it seriously, for now it's literally just a joke, not a game attached to DSJ.

Figures that making a good looking game is what qualifies as a joke to atlus these days
 
Ruin said:
It's tacky,

Yeah, that's the right word for it. Just like the SMT IV angels being over-designed visual clusterfucks. It lacks taste.

It's not an eyesore like those designs, but it's not great either and there's zero subtlety to it.

I like some of Doi's designs. His humans are fairly distinctive and attractive by anime standards, but his monsters/demons tend to be a bit...hit and miss, at most.
 
Doi is a solid artist who can adapt kaneko's designs really well (sometimes, SJR isn't one of them lol) and he made some of the more "ugh" designs from SMT4 more palatable in 4A
but I find that a lot of his human designs lack depth, that sense of dimensionality, and his demon designs tend to either be uninspired or different for the sake of being different.

That isn't to say there still isn't some good designs in newer entries though, everyone loves Minotaur and I fucking can't get enough of Chemtrail. I think Anahita is a solid design too, if a little bland.
 
Doi is at his best when he is literally just copying Kaneko's art like in Persona 2 for PSP.
 
Aden said:
Doi is at his best when he is literally just copying Kaneko's art like in Persona 2 for PSP.
yeah it makes me wonder what went wrong with SJ, stuff like "pressed against a pane of glass" protagonist and Jimenez's spray on hair isn't what I came to expect from P2P Doi
 
Ruin said:
yeah it makes me wonder what went wrong with SJ, stuff like "pressed against a pane of glass" protagonist and Jimenez's spray on hair isn't what I came to expect from P2P Doi

Sometimes the SMT "elitists" aren't so wrong.

Kaneko is horrible designing human characters, but they fit his own style in a way: in a world where the most bizarre demons are real, humans are the most bland being to see. So having everyione looking like a porcelain doll fits.
 
DukeMagus said:
Sometimes the SMT "elitists" aren't so wrong.
other times its an echo chamber, but this all seems more like a difference in opinion.
 
I mean i can sit here and suck off Kaneko all day but I'm not so single-minded that I'd blame everything wrong with the series now on him not working on it anymore, I'd blame some of the creative direction going in a direction i don't like as much on his absence sure, but Kaneko isn't one of the damn writers. I think the only game Kaneko was involved in the writing with was... Strange Journey, I believe. Maybe Raidou? Whatever.

Hell, I can't even completely fault Doi for putting out designs I don't like, he's not the art director as far as I know, so whoever that is, I'll direct my scorn at
or just throw eggs at Yamai, but executive producers either have all the power or don't do shit, and I'm not sure with him.
 
also somebody mentioned that SMT4 was visually inconsistent, that was probably because while Doi was the lead artist, that game had a bunch of famous guest artists, including one Keita Amemiya who for some reason decided to go against his usual artstyle that he has for Garo and other Tokusatsu mockup designs and instead went for a scrap metal design.

I mean I still like his designs. He's a very good artist.
 
Ruin said:
I mean i can sit here and suck off Kaneko all day but I'm not so single-minded that I'd blame everything wrong with the series now on him not working on it anymore, I'd blame some of the creative direction going in a direction i don't like as much on his absence sure, but Kaneko isn't one of the damn writers. I think the only game Kaneko was involved in the writing with was... Strange Journey, I believe. Maybe Raidou? Whatever.

Hell, I can't even completely fault Doi for putting out designs I don't like, he's not the art director as far as I know, so whoever that is, I'll direct my scorn at
or just throw eggs at Yamai, but executive producers either have all the power or don't do shit, and I'm not sure with him.

Cozy Okada is another old timer that could make the difference
 
Also they've been talking about balance changes for the remake, claiming difficulty hasn't been changed while also saying things like the player character will actually be useful in combat now. Oh, and Macca Beam will still be present.

I know everyone here is itching to buy it.
 
Bite the Dust will now be accompanied by Jimenez loudly going "HOLY SHIT IS THAT A MOTHERFUCKING JOJO'S REFERENCE?" even when he's not around
 
Atlus stream in about 11 hours, hope we get some news about the HD project, not that I expect much with it having been preproduction in January, but news at all is nice.
SMT I/II remakes when? It is the 25th anniversary, after for I after all.
Why do I ask for things that will probably be bad?
Soul Hackers was pretty good though, so maybe it could work as long as we don't get terrible new art.
 
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Honestly I don't know why I even linked the stream, I assume I'm actually not in the minority in that I choose to just go about my day until someone posts the 5 seconds of news from the 4 hour event.
 
I'm already expecting to be disappointed, i just hope it isn't too much
 
ITS ACTUALLY PERSONA BUT WE JUST PRETENDED IT TO BE SMT GUYS. IT WAS JOKE HAHA WHO CARES ABOUT CLASSICS?

Q_Q
 
Hopefully they learned their lesson from SMT4 >_>

Like, ok, little mini rant, but SMT2 is less confusing in its design than 4. Like, holy shit. Vanilla SMT4 had waaaaay too much bullshit at the start with Naraku and low level fights being waaaay to difficult and the Minotaur being one of the worst designed first bosses in any RPG I've seen. Then you get out and the game gives no real pointers on where to go. Yeah, sure, they say its north or west of this or that place you've been, but when you can't actually GO north from that place due to the walls everywhere why does it matter?...Why the hell did I beat this game 7 times and complete the compendium again?

On the other hand, I do hope they do what it did in terms of paths. Each path has a lot of unique quests and demons to unlock making it worthwhile to play each one. And then past that some demons can only be unlocked after a certain amount of playthroughs and some of those are on specific paths. I like that. It's a small thing that gives you reason to get good and stay good. Getting to that point is a fucking chore though.

On a random note, I've been looking back at SMT3 and Persona 5 and I realized something: They're about the same level of difficult, the difference is how they view the player:

Nocturne views you as a weakling and wants you to prove it wrong. It won't hold back and teaches you the basics for you to figure the rest out after that. Its got some older game design with you needing to stop every 20 minutes to go back and recover SP. Then some asshole comes out and gets a lucky hama first turn on you and its game over. However, the game isn't exactly hard to beat as long as you're patient and pay attention to each enemy.

Persona 5 sees you as the underdog and is there to support you. As you make more friends and get further you get more and more mechanics to put battles in your favor. You still have to manage SP but there a lot more ways to get around enemies besides brute force and abilities (guns and such). The game can then throw harder and more complex encounters at you without it feeling overbearing or even difficult to many people. However, that one asshole can still jump out and get that lucky hama and wipe out 5 hours of progress. The game stacks things in your favor, but doesn't forget to make it clear that you're still at risk with every fight.

I love this comparison because it made me realize that difficulty wise these 2 are at basically the same level, it just depends on how you prefer it being presented to you and how patient you can be. Hopefully SMT5 takes one of these 2 paths for game design. Oh, and keep SMT4's Hama/Mudo, I really, REALLY like what they did with the instakills.

Long ass post with multiple thoughts over. :P
 
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Just make each route worth doing and actually make "neutral" a choice instead of having to waffles between Law choices and Chaos choices the entire time
 
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The protagonist's clothes look cool. Very Kaneko-esc. I am excite.
 
As much as I actually did enjoy IV and IVF's OSTs I hope we get Meguro back, I really want a follow up to what Nocturne's OST was and I feel like P5 shows he's still doing pretty well.

The new DSJ trailer is just full on spoilers by the way.

North888 said:
Hopefully they learned their lesson from SMT4
I feel they have shown they have to some degree, Final in terms of mechanics showed them actually taking feedback and hammering out a much better game using that feedback and not making the same mistakes, unfortunately it's also built on IV and there is only so much you can polish mediocrity, especially with what was clearly a limited budget. That said, do they apply those lessons to something new or do they just consider it adjustments to the last thing and consider the new game something new?

That said, in terms of theming and especially applying that to gameplay I'm not going to say they got any better with that for Final, the only thing I will say about the writing for that game in a positive light is what Dagda's motivation turns out to be is actually cool and interesting. I'm actually confused about that game and have never cared enough to look into it, but from what I understand the friends ending still has you go fight YHVH and I don't understand how that gets there or more importantly why you are supposed to feel like you should side with Dagda to fight YHVH if you're going to fight YHVH anyway since you're supposed to like your party in theory.

Ruin said:
Just make each route worth doing and actually make "neutral" a choice instead of having to waffles between Law choices and Chaos choices the entire time
neutral1.jpg
 
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Aden said:
I feel they have shown they have to some degree, Final in terms of mechanics showed them actually taking feedback and hammering out a much better game using that feedback and not making the same mistakes, unfortunately it's also built on IV and there is only so much you can polish mediocrity, especially with what was clearly a limited budget. That said, do they apply those lessons to something new or do they just consider it adjustments to the last thing and consider the new game something new?

That said, in terms of theming and especially applying that to gameplay I'm not going to say they got any better with that for Final, the only thing I will say about the writing for that game in a positive light is what Dagda's motivation turns out to be is actually cool and interesting. I'm actually confused about that game and have never cared enough to look into it, but from what I understand the friends ending still has you go fight YHVH and I don't understand how that gets there or more importantly why you are supposed to feel like you should side with Dagda to fight YHVH if you're going to fight YHVH anyway since you're supposed to like your party in theory.

I agree with this 100%, however, on the whole friends thing, it basically just ends up rolling around to give you a reason. Its not as personal as with Dadga's, but they DO give you a reason.
 
North888 said:
on the whole friends thing, it basically just ends up rolling around to give you a reason. Its not as personal as with Dadga's, but they DO give you a reason.
I mean, I didn't expect them to not give a reason since obviously you have to write anything at all instead of jumping from thwarting Krishna to the last dungeon with no context, but there wasn't build up for that prior to the choice and so the choice felt to me like "Go destroy YHVH to stop his bullshit" or "Hang out with these losers and don't stop YHVH's bullshit meaning all of this just continues being fucked BUT MUH FRIENDS" so I chose the logical choice to me of saying YHVH and these scenarios need to stop, that will be better for everyone, regardless of the the cost only to later find out that you do it either way and the choice is actually pretty much "murder your friends you edgy fuck, lose the Akira subplot" and "FRIENDSHIP FOREVER" which I view as a huge negative since it means that the choice in context is just a lie. I don't even remember if Dagda explains why he's such a bitter asshole before or after you choose his route, and that's important because if he doesn't but you know that either choice leads to the same thing then you're choosing between the stupid mostly unlikeable anime tropes or the one douchy anime trope instead of knowing that his behavior is actually for a reason other than poor writing, where at this point you do know that basically none of the party have anything going on.
 
if i gotta make friends in SMTV they better sit their asses in the back and keep their mitts offa my press turns
 
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Ruin said:
if i gotta make friends in SMTV they better sit their asses in the back and keep their mitts offa my press turns

just fuse better friends. ones with physical resistance
 
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North888 said:
I agree with this 100%, however, on the whole friends thing, it basically just ends up rolling around to give you a reason. Its not as personal as with Dadga's, but they DO give you a reason.

Dagda is conceptually bullshit, though. He's closer to bacchus and odin than emo hades
 
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