Even though the Partner rush attack was a nice thing to have, kind of like a limit break from Final Fantasy, it was never a huge portion of my gameplay strategy. What was a more important part was that you can use your partners to augment any deficiencies in your main party lineup or to make better use of your strengths. In other words, I could make an all out attack group and then have Asahi as my partner, and she would heal up my group after each round. You will learn to be careful of such all or nothing lineups, but in general it allows you much greater flexibility. This is especially important depending on the difficulty you select. Like most SMT games, this one can get pretty brutally difficult at times on anything but the easiest difficulty level. But unlike previous games in the series, you can actually change the difficulty level at any time and there are no changes to rewards or experience for changing it. The only change I found in my playthrough was that there is a long optional dungeon that you cannot enter on the lowest difficulty level. But there might have been more than that, I only tested out the easiest mode for a very short time because I wanted to get the average person’s experience with the game.
Even beyond the partner system there were some valuable changes to the fighting in this game. One of the most major changes was in the realm of spell effects. Hitting an enemy gives your character a smirk status that not only gives them an extra turn, but also guarantees the next action will be a critical hit, which has not changed. But what has changed is there are a ton of spells in the game that now have a special effect that only activates while smirking. Additionally, one of the most requested additions to this series has finally happened… Hama (Light) and Mudo (Dark) now do damage in addition to providing a chance to instant kill. Que the applause, this has been desired for a long time now. One thing you have to be careful of is that it makes those spells extremely powerful and that can work for you or against you. But even beyond the light and dark spells, the spell effects make for a much more interesting combat experience, and even though this game is on the 3DS, it’s a much more flashy one than previous titles.
One of my favorite other changes was in the negotiation system common to the SMT universe of games. To be honest, in previous games negotiating with the demons was frankly my least favorite part of the entire game. There just seemed to be so much randomness to it, and anyone who knows me knows that I despise randomness. For this game the negotiations are generally a little bit more interesting, but one aspect makes the entire process far less frustrating. The demon type that you are trying to recruit does build up some kind of memory of your previous associations, but only in the positive direction. So if you have failed several times, you will meet up with one and they will remember you and just join up with your party with no fuss. Also, you can unlock special abilities via Apps on your Smartphone (which is also used to summon the demons in this game) that will also make a huge difference in your ability to Scout or to gain items and money from demons.
The demon raising that has made this series a worldwide phenomenon is back, and with each entry they hone this blade even further. There are all new gods and demons that you will be able to make, as you would expect, and also many of the old ones have changed in new and fabulous ways. Not only do the demons have fantastic character art, but the story blurbs for them are translated well and are always interesting. Another fascinating aspect of creating all of these demons is that many of their inherent abilities and elemental attributes have some resemblance to their mythological source. As someone who is interested in comparative mythology, this has always been a highlight for me.
Unfortunately the story did focus again on YHVH and the Semetic religions as being the king of all the deities. That’s a little disappointing for me both because it’s been told many times before and because I’m not a part of that group. Although, to be honest, anyone who took this story seriously would be quite offended by how blasphemous it is. Still, it did change things up a little by having some pretty strong Irish influences in the mythological side of the story, most of the gods on the hero’s side of the conflict happen to be from that pantheon. Just like in the original SMT IV, the story can end one of several ways. I have no way of knowing how many ways it can end, but I would guess that there are at least 3 different endings. Unfortunately I did not have time to go through it multiple times to see how many different ways it can go or to see how different it would play out. But I would guess that the final dungeon that I went through was optional, it seemed very much to be while I was playing it. But that wasn’t because it was small or just felt tacked on, in fact it was by far the largest dungeon in the game.
There is one small complaint I have with Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, and that is the English dub was less than stellar at times. This wouldn’t have been as large of an issue if it wasn’t for the fact that I already wanted the Japanese track anyway. This is a very Japanese game, with a ton of Japanese names and locations, so hearing it all in English was already a bit weird. So they would have already had a tough balancing act to please me in the first place. There were very few spelling and grammar issues, though, so they definitely put their time in on such a massive task. There is new and exclusive dialogue all over in this game. The music is good but not quite as memorable as the Persona offshoot series. Mostly the music was similar to the previous game, and that’s not a bad thing. What was a lot better than the last game was the overarching story and the character development. Bringing it back to a previous comment I made in this review, this game felt a bit like a course correction. This game felt like the halfway point between SMT III and SMT IV. They took some things that they did better in Nocturne and combined it with all the best parts of SMT IV. And they also scrapped several of the most frustrating parts of the original game, especially how confusing the Tokyo map was before. This map I had no trouble navigating around it or finding where my next mission was going to be.
So this game is fantastic, it feels like what SMT IV should have been all along. Don’t get me wrong, I would have still given SMT IV a 4.0 rating when it released. But after this title, it pales in comparison to a large degree. The one major issue is when you have to ask if this game is so great as a stand alone product. I would still enjoy this game a lot if I had never played the original one, but not quite as much as I would have in this situation. Yes, the major events from the previous game are recapped, but only to a very shallow degree. For the most part any nostalgic meetings will be a personal experience that they will not fill in the details for. The story does stand on its own as great (and much better than the last one), but it is even better with the previous experience. There was some concern that even though they were reusing assets this game was still being released at the $49.99 price point. But for one playthrough I clocked in at 130 hours of gameplay by the time I rolled the credits. This is without going back through on New Game+ to unlock any different endings or exclusive demons (I finished with 93% of my compendium filled in). They did not cut any corners, it is well worth the price of admission. This will go down as one of the best RPGs, and one of the best games overall, for the Nintendo 3DS, and a significant improvement to SMT IV.
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