A Shin Megami Tensei IV review i made in hopes of spreading The Plague to you, the reader (yup, that's right), so that my kind (smt fans) may absorb others like us into the sect. If you read this sentence, you're already marked, sorry.
No spoilers, by the way.
cool ass box art
If you're into SMT online circles and communities people will often praise IV as "the best megaten game".
I really disagree in a way that makes me feel that these people have a stockholm syndrome like attachment to the game, almost like the curious case of pokemon fans and modern generations, but instead the cope is fueled by jealousy and or hatred for the much more popular Persona series (which is actually a spinoff of SMT, which some might not know), i imagine.
Anyway.
Gameplay - Combat
screenshot i got from google
Right off the bat, this game (series, really) has THE COOLEST party mechanics i have ever seen in videogames. You start out alone, but you can recruit... your enemies, the demons, to fight for you. Yeah,
every single guy you fight can be convinced to join you, either by
making them beg for their lives, or just paying them off with money, HP, SP, etc. You can recruit every single enemy you fight in game, except for the final bosses (lame detail, if you ask me), with each one having unique sets of spells, elemental affinities and stats. However, although you level up at a fair rate, your allies do not (this is intentional). They will quickly lag behind, which encourages you to recruit new ones when you get the chance, or... fuse the useless ones into something new. You can fuse two demons into a completely new one, who will inherit everything the sacrifices had. No demon is truly useless when you can fuse them off to make better allies. And that's honestly really fucking awesome. I love that aspect a lot.
New to this game, however, are partners. Partners are a 5th party member with their own HP and AI, who will use a skill they know at the end of your turn. Some are generalists, some are pure damage dealers, support, healing, etc. The only fault to this is that the one you get at the start of each battle is random out of the ones travelling with you, so you may end up with a terrible partner for the current situation, with nothing you can do about it. More on that in a second.
As for the combat, SMT IV returns with the press turn system from Nocturne, which is basically the following:
- One press turn per team member (up to 4)
- If you pass, crit or hit an enemy's weakness, you consume half a turn. This behaves like a normal turn, except passing won't give an extra turn again
- Missing an attack, your attack being nullified punishes you by consuming 2 turns. If your attack is drained or reflected, you lose all of your remaining press turns and the enemy's turn begins.
- The exact same rules apply to the enemies as well!
Press turn rewards strategizing against your enemy correctly and, in theory, making balanced builds (so it'd punish not investing into agility/luck) and making sure your side's resistances are equipped for the task at hand. Keyword in theory.
A core mechanic introduced in SMT IV is Smirk. If your character performs an attack that only consumes half a turn or forces the enemy to lose their own turns, they may Smirk. This is where we're starting the trend of
terrible balance decisions. Smirk gives your next basic attack a 100% crit rate, your next attack is 100% accurate, stupid high evasion that feels like 75%+ until the end of the next turn, and a general stats boost. But, like i said, your enemy can abuse the exact same thing too; you'll often find yourself in a situation where an enemy crits, chaining off of the damage and extra turns to leave your team half dead, and then you'll be scrambling to hit them back through their ridiculous evasion and extra boosts. To make it worse, lots, and i mean LOTS of enemies in this game know attacks that have a high crit rate. This is a genuinely unfun thing to go against in normal battles due to not only how common it is but the limited counterplay that you probably couldn't do anything to prevent in the first place.
Case in point:
Walter knows fire element skills. The first boss in the game nulls fire. You roll Walter when beginning the battle. Walter eventually uses a fire skill. The boss nulls it and will probably smirk. He crits someone, nearly killing them, then gets a free extra turn to keep going with his high-power attacks (which may crit again). If you're not outright dead, it's probably unrecoverable at this point.
There was nothing you could have done to prevent it, and it was purely up to luck.
It's also not very useful, all things considered. It gives you a flat ~20 stat boost to everything, which falls off as you go. Magic builds do not recieve much out of it besides a one time boost, and physical/dexterity (the ones that can crit) builds would probably rather use something than their pitiful basic attack. It's really only impactful because of the evasion.
If you're a masochist that enjoys poison swamps and wandering because you don't know where to go, this game is for you. Although SMT IV's dungeons are quite well crafted in terms of level design, fun, and uniqueness, the overworld map is completely fucking horrendous to traverse at any point in the game (i'd show a picture, but it'd be spoilers). You literally get NO CLEAR DIRECTIONS in a map of narrow roads that takes AGES to go through. If you don't want to wander aimlessly, you'll have to try and make sense of what some NPCs tell you to do, and eventually stumble your way to the place you're supposed to be at.
I really can't stress how shit it is. Everyone who played this game will tell you that.
On a more positive note, finally ditching random encounters SMT IV has overworld enemies that you can attack to initiate a fight. Pretty cool, don't think anyone dislikes that
But uhhh yeah dungeons are pretty good. They're fun to traverse and have their little tidbits and hidden stuff. Some may open up new paths once you've progressed in the story or activated some sidequests. They all do their job to be unique in visuals and gameplay. My favourite dungeon is the Chaos Realm, the last dungeon in the game for both the Neutral and Law routes.
This is one of the key factors as to why people praise this game. Your every choice in dialogue affects your alignment: Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic. After a certain point, depending on your alignment, the game's last stretch will present yourself to you in a way that reflects the ideologies you showed throughout your playthrough. The obnoxious part is that Neutral can be quite hard to get without guides.
The themes of religious benefits and extremism, freedom of expression, the right to uphold your ideas, much moral ambiguity and the cyclical nature of conflict and humanity's mistakes as a whole are pretty well portrayed (my favourite parts were the Reverse Hills, White Forest and Tsukiji Hongwanji since they do a very good job at showing that there is truly no "correct" answer to the many conflicts throughout), i do think. The writing is pretty strong in this game, though at some points they could've done certain aspects better. Strong overall in my opinion. The Law ending is especially good. There's also another ending, the White ending, which is essentially nihilism. A lot of people will tell you that it's the most correct one out of the 4 within the context, and i honestly do think that morally you can easily make the argument for it. This game, back when i played it, made me view religious pseudo-fascism in particular in a different light (particularly the Blasted segment & the Law ending). I'm dead against it and i'd fight it if it ever came to risk of being installed into my country, that hasn't changed, but it's still very interesting to think about as an instrument of "unity" as argued by one of the central characters to the plot. As for Chaos (specifically the Infernal and Mikado segments), it also changed my perspective on anarchy a little, which previously was a completely incomprehensible ideology to me. Much like previously although i do understand why you'd embrace it, i still do not endorse it in the slightest. Neutral was fine. I liked that it's extremely open ended, full of uncertainty. It does not have anything to do with what you'd see in centrism nowadays i don't think
Don't wanna get spoilery so won't elaborate much, which in retrospect may make me look like a weirdo rightoid. I hope it doesnt come off as that though
Graphics
(i could not find a good screenshot of a pure 3d environment, but there's some in the exploration section)
For a 3DS game it holds up surprisingly well. It makes good use of the limited capacity of the system by mixing in the 3D environments with 2D visual novel-like elements, namely for areas with NPCs or during cutscenes. I really love it.
Unfortunately, before this game's development started, the lead artist for the series quit permanently. They didn't get a new one immediately, so a lot of the demons' designs have extremely inconsistent styles and quality due to how many people participated in making them. Particularly, i think the final bosses' designs are terrible.
I'm not a fan of the UI's monochrome in the battle. The sound design isn't great for it, so that may be giving me bias, though i don't think it contrasts very well with some elements.
Soundtrack - The Big One
Hands down the best soundtrack i've heard in all of my time playing videogames. Just look at the fucking album art. It's so good
This game's soundtrack, by Ryota Kozuka (goat), is absolutely PHENOMENAL in compliementing and enhancing the feel and atmosphere of every single one of this game's atmospheres.
It's impossible to describe if you have not played the game, because that's where it truly shines. From medieval tunes to weird atmospheric tracks, sick rock themes and whatever else. Here's some of my personal favourites, in no particular order:
Unparalleled OST, if you ask me.
Balance - The Ugly One
Gonna be real here, this game's systems are fundamentally broken. Stats scale too high in lategame and are inconsequential in the early game, enemies die too quick. Every boss past the 2nd one will die in a few turns. As a tradeoff, early game enemies can one or two shot you.
Remember when i said you'd be forced to distribute stats wisely? It doesn't matter. Just dump it all into magic or dexterity. Magic clears everything fast consistently, while dexterity is the objective best for the endgame: Desperate Hit is the strongest skill in the game, with 450 power (the highest tier of magic spells have ~250), always hits neutrally, hits 5 times, and can crit. Just one of those crits can make you smirk and gives you extra turns. Scales off of dexterity. Antichton is Megidolaon (strongest Almighty skill) + Debilitate (lower all stats) combined. And so on.
Famously, the first boss in the game is the hardest one. By far. Here's a chart i made that reflects my opinion on the game's difficulty as you progress:
pretend the x axis is time and y is difficulty i made this in 2 minutes in paint
In my first playthrough, i one shot the final bosses lmao
Misc
It sucks that there's no dyad (pick 2) fusion. It's been a staple in the series since SMT 1, and instead we have a really clunky and bad to use system. Sucks. The "Hard" difficulty is only accessible in NG+ and is even worse on balance. Just jacked up stats.
When you black out, you can pay an excrutiatingly large sum to revive. That's pretty good, i think. What isn't is that you can use play coins to revive instead of money.
Completing the demon compendium is really annoying because of fusion errors, rare happenings that give you a completely unexpected result. The Hero and Zealot races are exclusive to fusion errors.
TL;DR
Kinda cool if you dont mind bad and unfun gameplay (IMO)
6.5/10 the soundtrack, plot and visuals carry it hard
It's worth getting into to experience the what-if/sequel to it, SMT IV: Apocalypse. Completely different setting, story, protag, etc. It's my favourite game of all time. Has it's faults but the gameplay is the most fun i've ever had in a single player game