Dying brings you to the River Styx, where you have the option to bribe Charon to come back to life. This is also where you’ll receive the difficulty changer option (which I used to the full extent–I shudder to think of how hard it would’ve been on the normal mode!) Going to the easiest level does makes some previously tough battles relatively easy, shortening some boss fights to a few turns.
On the other hand, bigger bosses remain quite challenging even through the difficulty change. During such battles, you’ll be faced with dialogue options, similar to the recruiting process. But in this case, there are right and wrong answers—yielding buffs or debuffs for one side or the other. These can really turn the tide of the battle.
One other part of fighting bosses that I really love: the music that plays during it. The whole soundtrack is brilliant, but in my opinion this track really takes the cake. The great music is backed up by rich voice acting that covers most of the lines in the game. Demon negotiation doesn’t have per-line voice acting, but there’s a pretty big pool of different voices for them to make grunts, sighs, and short phrases from.
All of these aspects will be introduced to you gradually within the first few hours of Shin Megami Tensei IV. Meanwhile, you and your buddies get to explore the cave of Naraku… which, it turns out, isn’t really an endless underground labyrinth after all. In order to hunt the mysterious Black Samurai, the group is asked to head down into the forbidden area of Naraku—which is actually only three floors down. There, the Samurai will discover a passage that leads down into the massive underground… and the sprawling remains of Tokyo.
Tokyo is so big that the main map is navigated with a little pointer icon. You move it through the streets from a long-range view, occasionally finding buildings, settlements, dungeons, and treasures. There are enemies here, too—so many that it can get a little tiring while you try to find your way. Knowledge of the real Tokyo would probably be somewhat helpful, but the game has its own barriers just about everywhere. No trains, either. People do sometimes direct you, and you can unlock Terminals in specific areas to warp, but there’s a lot of exploration to do. At this point you might not even know what to look for, because several parts of the main story are disguised as side quests. If you love exploring this is great, but if you’re the type that just wants to get on with things… Tokyo becomes a rather frustrating place.
At this point you can pretty much forget all the plot points that were important in Mikado. Say goodbye to your boss and one of the Samurai that’s been tagging along with you this whole time—they’ll never show up again. But they’re easy to forget in the frantic rush to understand this half-destroyed Tokyo, where the “Unclean Ones” (also known as regular people) live in fear of the demons running amok.
Factoring in Tokyo’s existence just ups the ante on the story’s persistent questions. The monks that sent you down here seem bent on pitting you against the people here, but there are lots of different factions in the city. They’re not so different from the class system in Mikado, in fact. It’s just a lot trashier, and some of these factions are doing really… shady things.
Is it okay for things to go on like this? Should you listen to your missive from up above? Does everyone need to know the secrets hidden down here? Are demons people too? The game poses a lot of questions that only the player can answer. Sometimes you’ll have to do so without knowing all the details beforehand, and you’ll be taking a lot of chances at first. But the more you begin to understand about the world, the closer you come to making the final decision that leads towards the ending.
Forgive me for a moment while I bring up my personal feelings on Shin Megami Tensei IV’s story. I can’t say that I’m really happy with the endings that I saw in my playthrough. Don’t get me wrong—the narration makes a really noble effort to convince you that things are going to be okay, and it works. But I also felt that the sacrifices that had to be made, which seem to be purposely forgotten in the final scenes, were not justified. Heck, for the last hour or two of the game, I was on a story path that I didn’t really want to take because of my own earlier choices.
In other words, you can’t just take these story paths lightly. Some decisions give you a chance to leave and come back to think on it first. Others will come up only after a hard-fought battle that you don’t really want to go through again, but you’ll have to do so if you decide you don’t like what you picked. I tried to make extra saves at crucial points to see different story paths, but I missed my chance when it came down to the one that determines the ending.
Luckily, there’s hope. The game gives you a couple of New Game+ options when you finish, depending on how much data you really want to carry over. These files also seem to have a sort of checklist on their surface for showing the endings you’ve gotten, so I know I haven’t exhausted all my options. Though the endings I’ve seen were ambiguous, there may just be a true ending waiting somewhere on the horizon.
That’s what I hope for, anyway. I’ve only had a chance to play through it once, at the time of this writing, but you can bet that even as you read this, I’m playing through the game again and choosing different paths, different demons, and different strategies. I’ll probably still be at it when the game releases on July 16th for the Nintendo 3DS.
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Review copy supplied by publisher. Online features such as DLC and Digital Data Service were not available at time of writing.
