nocturne is the only shin megami tensei i really really really like,it can be bullshitting at times (HUR DUR I JUST DROPPED YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF THE DUNGEON,DO THE WHOLE DUNGEON AGAIN!) but the rest of the game is pure gold
devil summoner has an interessing premise but it has TONS and TONS of boring filler fetch questing,the battles are real time,the action isn't too shoddy but not that great either,the sequel is better structured and it has a flimsy moral system that change the plot a bit depending on what decision you pick but i still stopped during the middle as it recycle a lot of stuff from the original
digital devil saga is in my opinion the most boring,it's a dungeon crawler heavy on the plot so it should be the "like final fantasy" one,but the plot is incredibly boring,the enemies are mostly recycled from nocturne,and the skill system is just stupid,to be fair i never played more than the first 3 dungeons because i always got bored first... also note that basicaly digital devil saga 1 & 2 are just one big game broken in 2,part 1 ends up in a cliffhanger and part 2 start right where you left,both game are identical,same menu's,same spells,same combat system
the three shadow hearts game... the first one is really ancient to the point it comes with pre-rendered backgrounds and not even any cutscene of any sort! it looks a little shoddy but it's an okay game and the somewhat horror/somewhat modern setting is really refreshing compared to the myriad of fantasy rpg's...
shadow hearts 2 is the best one of the trilogy,a good chunk of the plot is related to stuff that happens in the first one,while you can play it without having played the original,playing the original will help you enjoy the game better,the thing that really makes the game shine it's that it just plain weird and funny,one of the character you end up recruiting is a musclebound vampire wrestler who believes himself to be a superhero whose whole costume consist of a butterfly shaped mask,his weapons consist of stuff he finds on the ground,at a certain point the heroes go across a desert and he goes like "OMG! A CACTUS! I FEEL A CONNECTION TO HIS DETERMINATION TO LIVE IN THIS HEAT! I MUST HAVE IT!" and he just rips it up and use it as a weapon
,did i mention there is a quest that involve collecting gay porn?
shadow hearts 3 ditches all of the plot of the previous game though there are still a lot of character that makes a bunch of cameo,it's quite similiar to shadow hearts 2 but personaly it's a game that i want to like but it just didn't click with me,i don't know maybe it's the character or maybe it's the stupid plot which mostly consist of the heroes chasing the villain everywhere without concluding anything,but it just isn't as good as the two previous one even though it's really similiar to it
