There’s plenty of games where you can swing a sword and hit a bad guy. Or gain experience points and level up. Or summon a giant chariot-riding penis god and lay your enemies down low in the ground. Let’s take a look at Shin Megami Tensei IV.
Not Born With Special Genes
Shin Megami Tensei IV is an RPG. But it’s a different kind of RPG from most. The Shin Megami Tensei games are well-known for two main things: branching paths based on your choices and a wide selection of demons to fight and capture. Chaos, Law, and Neutral paths are available in this game depending on choices you make during your journey and who you end up killing along the way. Each path has its own ideology and all of them are valid in their own ways, regardless of what Reddit has to say about it. As for the demons, there’s a ton of them in this game and they are all fun to catch and train up. I mean, catching them isn’t always fun in the classical sense, but we’ll get to that later.
In Shin Megami Tensei IV, you start off your journey in the medieval land of Mikado undergoing the test to become a samurai. In this society, the samurai are protectors of the people who fight and control demons. They’re sort of like Pokemon trainers with a purpose. You meet up with your samurai pals Jonathon, Walter, and Isabeau. These three will act as your moral compass through your journey. Except Isabeau. For the most part, she’ll only judge you silently from the corner of the room. While exploring a dungeon that Mikado decided to build a town around for some reason, you uncover an entire hidden land underground. From here, the story really starts picking up steam. Also, books start turning people into demons. The story itself isn’t really dense, but the twists that are here are interesting enough to keep you going.
Yeah, But Which One’s The White Mage?
Gameplay in Shin Megami Tensei IV is your general turn-based fare with a few twists thrown in. You’ve got your physical attacks and your magic, sure, but you’re not going to be doing very much on your own. Your fellow samurai can sporadically attack with you during some battles. This usually results in them either healing the enemy with the wrong magic spells or getting critically hit and killed. They suck. No, the real juice behind this title is in building up an unstoppable team of demons. Each demon has its strengths and weaknesses and specialize in all the different elements like fire, ice, and gun. If you don’t like a demon, throw it into the fusion app. Demons fuse with other demons in order to make even more powerful creatures. It’s incredibly addicting. I think this is the part of the Shin Megami franchise that has hooked people for so long.
Fusing your monsters opens so many gameplay opportunities. This game was made to be abused. Do you have the option to create a demon who’s incredibly strong but has a severe allergic reaction to ice? Make sure one of the demons that you’re fusing has an anti-ice perk that you can transfer over. You can cover up a team’s weaknesses this way and even though you’ll probably never have a “perfect” team for every scenario, it’s fun to see how close you can get. Of course, fusing isn’t the only way to get new demons on your side…
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
You can attack your enemy during battle, sure, but where’s the fun in that? Sometimes, you don’t want to always be hitting things, wearing out your elbow and all. So you can also just talk to enemies. You can convince them to stop attacking, bribe them into giving up, or even recruit them into your fold. Recruiting is a game all in itself. Before they consider joining you, you have to convince them it’ll be in their best interests. Each demon has its own personality and most of them are unpredictable dicks. Once you finally appease them, they ask for a truckful of items before they join up. I hope you’re not attached to that money, those healing items, or even your own HP. And there’s a chance that after all of that, they just leave anyway along with all the gifts you offered. Shin Megami Tensei IV, everyone.
There’s also a system in place calling smirking. If you hit an enemy with an attack they’re weak to, or even just get a lucky critical attack, you get a smirk. Once you or your monsters smirk, you’ve pretty much already ended the fight. With a smirk, buffs are boosted, your critical hit chance goes way up, and you have no weaknesses for a turn. It’s fucking Looney Tunes. This is a bit of a divisive topic in the Shin Megami community mainly because it’s so ludicrously overpowered. And the enemy can also smirk. There’s nothing quite like an enemy force getting the first strike and volleying you back and forth between smirks until game over. And that’s just from the random mobs. This will happen many times. The game lets you save wherever you want for a reason.
Hoy Boy
This is a hard game. This is a game that requires you to use all of your tools and to really think about your team composition. Status effects are king in Shin Megami Tensei IV. If you play this game just mashing on the physical attacks, you won’t even make it to Minotaur. You have to make sure that you’re charging up the right characters, debuffing where needed, and taking advantage of weaknesses in the enemies. Whereas in most RPGs, you can just get away with whacking away at enemies and healing where it’s needed, that shit does not fly in this game. This is a game that forces you to respect its rules. And if you don’t, then Shin Megami has this nice studded belt that it would love to show you. Almost every single battle is one that you have to put tangible effort into winning. This is a good thing. By challenging the player, the gameplay in Shin Megami Tensei IV makes battling worthwhile.
World-building is the name of the game in Shin Megami Tensei IV. Mikado is interesting. The social dynamics and the design of the locales are compelling. And it’s a good thing too because the characters aren’t exactly standouts. Even though your three samurai pals are entertaining, no real development occurs across the story. This game paints characters with very broad strokes and there’s not much deviation from your initial expectations. Instead, the characters all exist as a sort of extension of the world. The characters are put in this game in order to emphasize the type of world this story takes place in and what people are willing to do in order to improve it. In this way, the game excuses itself for having sorta shit characters.
Make Sure you Bring More Macca Next Time
Hmm, who’s gonna be the Chaos route? Out of your three samurai pals, which one do you think doesn’t like to follow rules? Could it be the one that looks like a medieval Sid Vicious?
Even in some of its more lacking titles, the Shin Megami Tensei franchise has always been held up by its amazing demon designs. From Abrahamic deities to creatures from Scottish folklore, almost everything’s accounted for. Even if you’ve never tried out a Shin Megami title before, you’ve seen at least one of Kazuma Kaneko’s incredible demon designs before. And if you say you haven’t then it’s clear that you’re a dirty liar and would probably be the sort of person to pick the “White” ending. But this game is a strange case. Shin Megami Tensei IV brought on a lot of guest artists. This sometimes produced some pretty interesting designs like Minotaur and
The music in this title is an enigma. It’s so good, but I’m not sure a lot of what you’ll be hearing can be called “music.” A lot of the soundscape you’ll be enjoying is incredibly ambient. Tracks will swirl around you and it’s hard to pin down where a musical inspiration is coming from most of the time. It ends up feeling both alien and familiar at the same time. Aside from the grunting of demonic entities and the chimes of bells, some of the catchier tunes will have mainly electronic and rock influences. This is a pretty diverse soundscape and it really helps set this title apart from its contemporaries. And don’t worry, they roll out the operatic themes for some end game bosses. This is an RPG after all.
Not As Many Penises As The Other Titles Though
So that about wraps up Shin Megami Tensei IV. There’s a lot of depth to this game and a lot of mechanics. And just as you can abuse those mechanics, your enemies can just as easily abuse them back. The thing that really makes the Shin Megami games stand out from other RPGs is how equal you are to your opponents. In other games, you can mostly roll right over mobs and random encounters. But in Shin Megami, you can easily get caught off-guard and taken out by a fucking shaggy dog and a pumpkin-headed fairy. You might get pissed and call the game unfair. But in reality, the game is more fair than most games. Just not for you.
If you’re interested in trying to strive for the Neutral ending or even one of the other wrong ones, you can pick the game up here for your 3DS.