Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey

[archie4208]

I just hit the last boss.  Can you say "one shot"?

[Bebpo]

Well it's been too long so I don't remember it well myself, but instead I just dug up what I was thinking when I got there from the import gaf thread:

Dungeon 7 boss was a bitch. Have funnnnnnn guys.

Beat the next neutral path specific boss after 90 mins of retries and using lots of sources. In the end just reflected them to death by making reflect demons and then trying to have my PC survive.

I'm going on record and saying I think making your PC horrible is a major problem, especially when you get to the final dungeon. On attack he is horrible because all he has is a generic slash (does like 80-90 damage, lol), or gun magic which tends to be FIRE SHOT/WIND SHOT/GUN SHOT and that's it! On defense because none of the armors block any elements besides mudo, the most you can be is strong to an element and like I said earlier the armor that is strong to that element you need might have 1/2 the DEF so your DEF will be shit against any other attack. It's really like playing as the PC in SMT3 if you only had 2-3 slots to fill with attacks, couldn't fill with buffs/debuffs/support, couldn't put any blocks/reflects in, and couldn't put on physical hitting special attacks. So basically your PC is super fucking gimped. This is on top of the auto-stating which makes it worse.

Here I am at the end of the game and I have like LUCK 60 which is my highest stat while my DEF is 42 and my lowest stat. That is fucked up!

Basically end game boss battles are "HOW DO I NOT GET MY PC 1 HIT KILLED ANY TURN WHILE MY AWESOME DEMONS FIGHT?". I'm at the point where I'm just blocking every round with my PC while the demons fight the battle. That way I only take 50% damage at won't be 1 hit killed ending the battle 5-10 mins in. Unfortunately because of MP usage and stat effects you're going to need to spend some rounds using items since your demons can't. This gambles life or death of the battle because you can easily get hit by an attack that'll kill you in 1 hit. Right now my PC dies in 1 hit from any attack by a boss if I'm not strong in that element. Unfortunately there usually aren't armors covering ALL the elements the boss attacks with, so yeah....

All I've got left is the final boss now I think, so hopefully I'll get through it and be done with this game. IMO the difficulty balance is pretty bad for a megaten. Dungeons 1-5 are easy, the boss of 5 is bullshit, dungeon 6-7 is easy, and then the boss of dungeon 7 through the end of the game is insanely and cheaply harder.

Beat the game last night (60 hours, 75% book completion, 80-90% of EX missions done). Even with the best equipment for my MC the final boss, unlike the rest of game, requires grinding which is a bit of a shame and something I'm not used to for SMT. Since the boss is about 20 levels higher than the demons in the final dungeon, just playing normally, even with a lot of encounters you're not going to be anywhere near the level of the boss and the main issue is that demons 10 levels or below the boss simply can't survive a single hit and you need them to. Grinded for about 6 hours from level 73->85 and beat it without too much hassle after some party modifying.

In retrospect I think levels are pretty important in the endgame here. If you are underleveled for the final boss rush, the endgame is the hardest in recent megaten history and one of the hardest set of boss in any rpg. If you are overleveled or on the same level as the bosses (which you won't be unless you are grinding) the bosses are pretty fair and approachable by just making the correct team. There's only 1 boss where I'm not sure if being at a higher level would have helped.

Yeah I never felt forced to grind until the final boss. I think you need to at least have lvl.76-80 demons to stand a chance.

[magus]

well...

spoiler (click to show/hide)

the bitch is dead ,it wasn't that hard,luster candy is awesome,i made the unholy version of virgin maria as a healer since she null lighting,i'm surprised they went that far 

[close]

anyway i disagree with bebpo,my main character is awesome and basicaly is the guy who deals the most damage in most situation since he's so damn versatile,boss hits with ice? ice armor! boss is weak to fire? fire gun! boss turns you into stone? go anti-stone ring!
 

[Bebpo]

I dunno.  My main sucked the entire time and was the dedicated item thrower role.  I dunno why he was so terrible.  I had like every weapon & armor by the end.  I'm gonna blame it on my stats.

[archie4208]

Hey magus, could you share that Luster Candy demon?  I don't feel like grinding one out.

[magus]

Hey magus, could you share that Luster Candy demon?  I don't feel like grinding one out.

i just made sleipnir,he's level 56 holy,just pick a holy demon and rank him up with aquans prime until he become a sleipnir,you need a sleipnir to solve a quest too
if you are lazy and just want the password
Y W y F C L C 6 h W y E 4 y G F
d H % q 4 n - V g 0 y R 4 $ z -
also i can now make rangda which has debilitate which is like luster candy but with debuff instead,it's level 68 femme

I dunno.  My main sucked the entire time and was the dedicated item thrower role.  I dunno why he was so terrible.  I had like every weapon & armor by the end.  I'm gonna blame it on my stats.

my current stats
level 68
ST 44
MA 48
VI 51
AG 43
LU 43
funny thing is that supposedly my main stat should be magic

[Bebpo]

Yeah, see my VIT was 42 and that was at the final boss!  Like I said, the random stat generator screwed me over and decided I was going to main on LUCK.  Everytime I leveled most of the stats went into luck.  Everything else was low 40s. 

Plus for most of the dungeon I'd keep the mudo blocking armor on just to be safe and the stats on that are not particularly strong.

Still it was doable, I just had to make a strategy around 3 amazingly awesome demons + me item throwing.
I pretty much stuck to buffing my team, debuffing the enemy DEF and doing the 5 hit physical attack that major power hitters have.

[archie4208]

My stats at the final boss: (Level 77)

ST: 63
MA: 56
VI: 42 ()
AG: 53
LU: 49

I'm one level away from making a Huang Long who will be my Luster Candy bitch.

Edit:  What all carries over to NG+?  I really don't want to redo the maps.

[Bebpo]

Map data doesn't carry over I think.

Book, equipment, macca do.

[archie4208]

Yeah I used an uber Alice to easily beat the game and see what all carried over.  I'm going to try to do it legit in a few days since cheating is bad.

Edit:  I'm probably going to go ahead and wrap up the maps and quests on my virgin playthrough too.  Then I'll probably do a chaos run in 6 months and never touch the game again!

[Bebpo]

There's an alice cheat?  How does it work out of curiousity?

[archie4208]

Password hack.  She has 94 magic and the strongest spell in the game.  I was doing over 2k dmg to the last boss.

[Bebpo]

password hack as in they hacked it to make her stats really good, or they hacked it to make it cheap and affordable?

[archie4208]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

She costs 350k Macca so I barely had enough to afford her.  As I said, it was a cheap excuse but I had just finished grinding for about an hour and I still lost to the boss ~5 times in a row so I was getting frustrated.

[HyperZoneWasAwesome]

I just bought Persona 4 at the Gamestop sale, would that be a good enough place to start with all this wacky Atlus RPG stuff or would I be better served by putting it aside and getting FES at some point in the future?

[Himu]

I just bought Persona 4 at the Gamestop sale, would that be a good enough place to start with all this wacky Atlus RPG stuff or would I be better served by putting it aside and getting FES at some point in the future?

Persona 4 > Persona 3

[iconoclast]

I just bought Persona 4 at the Gamestop sale, would that be a good enough place to start with all this wacky Atlus RPG stuff or would I be better served by putting it aside and getting FES at some point in the future?

Persona 4 > Persona 3

Indeed. But if you ever intend to play P3, I'd start with that first. It's hard to go back after the improvements in P4.

[tiesto]

My stats at the final boss: (Level 77)

ST: 63
MA: 56
VI: 42 ()
AG: 53
LU: 49

I'm one level away from making a Huang Long who will be my Luster Candy bitch.

Edit:  What all carries over to NG+?  I really don't want to redo the maps.

How long does this game take to beat?

[archie4208]

It depends on how fast you want to beat it.  If you rush through everything and consult a guide all the time, you can probably beat it in 30 hours or so.  I took my time and I'm right at 50 hours.  To complete everything in the game is probably around 80 to 90 hours.

[Himu]

I just bought Persona 4 at the Gamestop sale, would that be a good enough place to start with all this wacky Atlus RPG stuff or would I be better served by putting it aside and getting FES at some point in the future?

Persona 4 > Persona 3

Indeed. But if you ever intend to play P3, I'd start with that first. It's hard to go back after the improvements in P4.

definitely. that said, i like p3 more, if only because the concept was novel at the time. with p4 it felt been there, done that despite its quality.

[magus]

 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

i kicked jimenez ass on my first try without any preparation at all and no healer,i went with rangda,girimekhala and that ninja ogre i can't remember the name (ongyo-ki) the guy made use and abuse of chaos tack but all his attack got reflected by rangda,i don't think i'm exagerating when i'm saying he dealt himself over 3000 damage and that he himself was the biggest damage dealer of the fight,he used hellfire once but i was so buffed and he was so debuffed thanks to the luster candy/debilitate combination that it really didn't deal much damage,then he started using a skill that inflicted bomb status over and over and over,i used several amrita to defuse everyone who got inflicted and after that he was dead

[close]

edit: atlus are a bunch of jerks,

spoiler (click to show/hide)

"EHY LET'S PUT THESE GUYS WHO UNSUSPECTING DRAIN MP FROM YOU AND THEN THEY ALL CAST MEGIDOLA FOR LIKE A TOTAL OF 800 DAMAGE OUT OF 500 HP YOUR GUY HAS!

[close]

okay i pressed a button on B7F and now i don't have the slighest clue of what i'm supposed to do as nothing as apparently changed
EDIT: yay i finaly reached the final boss! i'm level 76,should i grind to level 91 so i can get the cool stuff like shiva or do you guys think it's doable on level 76 too?

[archie4208]

Just beat the game legit.

My final lineup was:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

MC: Level 82
Huang Long: Level 80
Xi Wangmu: Level 80
Free slot

My MC was essentially useless.  I only defended and threw items with him.  Huang Long spammed Luster Candy and Megidolaon while Xi Wangmu healed and the free slot was either for a demon with debilitate or some spare damage.

[close]

Odds are you will have to grind for a bit, magus.  The Trumpeters are good for exp, but they are very rare.

Awesome game.  The music was pretty awful though, and the sparse number of tracks didn't help.  Go back to the butt rock for SMT5 Atlus.  Thanks.

[magus]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

yea i got up to level 78 so i could make huang long and the boss seems impossible! huang long is the only one who seems to be able to take more than two hits,thor can somewhat survive and is a decent damage dealer but that leaves the third spot empty... i wanted a demon with charge,physic amp and madness crush but the only one who can gets this combination is fenrir and he dies faster than i can blink my eye
even if i do so,it takes forever just to get her in the red and that was after bouncing 2000 point worth of damage to her thanks to some lucky reflect by rangda and girimekhala

[close]

[archie4208]

If you have the patience to grind to 84, get

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Metatron

[close]

and put Debilitate on him, then the last boss would probably become much easier.

Edit:  I also had over 1 million Macca at the end of the game.

[magus]

yea that sounds like a good idea tough

spoiler (click to show/hide)

i'm fusing kartikeya and garuda so i think he'll be the luster candy guy... he also gain charge so either i'll put my ongyo source and give him charge + physical amp + stuff or use a rangda source and give him both luster candy and debilitate

[close]

off to grind then!
 

[Kestastrophe]

Is this running on R4 yet?

[archie4208]

Probably.  If not you can get an Acekard 2i for like 15 bucks.

Also, having a level 91 Shiva in your party at level 1 is pretty amusing.

[magus]

i finished!

spoiler (click to show/hide)

my team
MC: level 84,spammed bead chains mostly,used a megidola stone when permitted
Metatron: Level 84: charge,berserk god,charge,berserk god,metatron dealt more damage than the rest of the party together,he also had luster candy but i didn't abuse it for fear of the boss cancelling it
Trumpeter: megidola,megidola,megidola,this guy ran out of MP quickly so the main character had to use a chakra pot on him once in a while,like metatron the guy had debilitate but i didn't use it too much for fear of the boss cancelling it
Huang Long: fire amp powered up his agidyne to megidola level so i used agidyne instead,too bad i couldn't give the guy trisagion
even with this setup it taked forever! (not to mention that on my first try the second form of the boss decided to instakill the MC,that's really a good idea atlus! </sarcasm>) anyway just how the heck you pulled it off with that party archie? it must have taken hours!

[close]

anyway i liked this quite a lot,better than the other atlus game tough the dungeon design slighty piss me off... i mean do they really need to hide important place? there were time where i got stuck for several hours only because i couldn't find a secret passage or something,that's not good! also the loot could have been worked better,i didn't like the idea of finding base forma (it feels like it's there just because those guys reaaaaaalllllyyyy loved the gathering point in EO) and most of the things you can buy are useless,get a physic resistant armor and you are done (casualy the best one of these is gived you by a quest) similiary i really didn't need to switch gun anymore after getting the frost cannon,some guns might have better power but none features better spells,did they make the cannon too strong or the other guns too weak? i don't know but it still feel somewhat wrong

but as i said this is a better game than persona 3,raidou,DDS and etrian odyssey and it also features new demon design for once!

[demi]

Is this running on R4 yet?

[Bebpo]

Just beat the game legit.

My final lineup was:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

MC: Level 82
Huang Long: Level 80
Xi Wangmu: Level 80
Free slot

My MC was essentially useless.  I only defended and threw items with him.  Huang Long spammed Luster Candy and Megidolaon while Xi Wangmu healed and the free slot was either for a demon with debilitate or some spare damage.

[close]

Odds are you will have to grind for a bit, magus.  The Trumpeters are good for exp, but they are very rare.

Awesome game.  The music was pretty awful though, and the sparse number of tracks didn't help.  Go back to the butt rock for SMT5 Atlus.  Thanks.

Yeah, see when I was talking about the MC being useless I meant for the endgame boss fights.  For normal attacks he's fine, but your MC sucks for super hard bosses. 

And yeah, the music was weak because there were like 5-6 tracks total for the entire game.  It's a great game, but it's very budget.

[Bebpo]

Since you guys beat it, here's my review I wrote when I finished it for comparison.

Review of SMT Strange Journey if you go in expecting SMT4:

Graphics:  Great.  Very good job on the animated sprites of hundreds of demons.  Lots of good art.  The boss style is really cool and smart to show the detail and overpowered feeling of the bosses.  One nitpick is I wish the bosses animated like the normal enemies.  It's like you are fight a giant jpg, lol.  Spell effects are good, dungeons look good though the budget most definitely was lacking and there just aren't many dungeon textures.

Music:  On the plus side the music is very good.  On the minus side there are about 5 songs in the entire game.  There are slight variations, but basically every dungeon other than the last has the same dungeon theme.  Battle music is always the same.  Story music is 2-3 tracks.  Boss song.  etc... again the game seems surprisingly underbudgeted and doesn't provide the soundtrack you expect for an SMT successor.

Story:   The game starts off full of promise.  You have a mysterious universe, a handful of interesting characters and later in the game other NPCs get mixed in.  But then...nothing happens.  The narrative is about as deep and involved as Doom.  You go in, you kill bosses, the end.  Even the ending was like 2 mins long at most.  The main couple of characters are completely one dimensional and just play out their cliche paths,

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Lucifer

[close]

has no point, other NPCs have no point, the plot is really non-existant for the most part.  Which is kind of ironic considering there is a ton of dialogue from your ships AI (though 90% of it is just explaining "you need to go to the dungeon and kill the boss") and that the opening to the game is 60-90 mins long like P3/P4.  But that's because all the plot is just in the premise of the game!  The actual game has no more plot than an NES era rpg.  Horribly disappointing for the next big main SMT game; has nothing on SMT3's interesting NPCs and philosophical discussions.  Still better than the terrible Persona 1 plot though!

Gameplay:  The core of the game and it's very good.  Take the best parts of EO (the dual-screen dungeon crawling) and the best parts of SMT (demon talk/demon fusion/demon party) and you have an addicting game that always is giving you two incentives, getting further in exploring the dungeon (EO) and building up your demon book and party full of all kinds of cool demons (SMT).  Being able to fuse anytime, pull stuff out of your book at anytime, use accesories to change encounter rates, drop rates, how easy it is to talk to demons, etc... works great and makes every minute of the game enjoyable.  The boss encounters are fairly easy for the first half of the game and then quite hard for the 2nd half of the game and require good strategy and building teams to counter the boss fights.  That's what makes SMT great, not being stuck to any specific skill set or character build and being able to modifying your team to counter boss abilities.  The EX missions are fun little sidequests, and feature some very good and essential rewards making a certain amount of them almost required to progress.  The only negative about the core gameplay is the auto-stating of your character and lack of skills for your character.  It makes the game more balanced since you can't create a skewed but awesome character, but it also makes your main character suck pretty badly and for boss battles simply become the item boy who throws out items every round.  Not being able to give your MC buffs/debuffs/heal spells gimps him pretty badly.  Still, despite the few negative points, the gameplay is ace and lives up to the SMT franchise with enough changes to make it feel like the next SMT.

Overall: With no world map, no interesting locations to explore and only

spoiler (click to show/hide)

*8*

[close]

dungeons along with a very simple and generic plot, the game does not live up to previous main SMT titles even if the gameplay is very good.  B


Review of SMT Strange Journey if you go in expecting a spinoff like SMT...If:

Graphics:  See above.  Lack of dungeon variety is fine considering it's a low budget spinoff.

Music: See above.  Lack of music is still inexcusable.  They really dropped the ball here.

Story:  The game is a spinoff dungeon crawler.  It gives you a good reason to go into the dungeon and that's all you really need since the experience is really about the gameplay.  The story isn't full of questions and won't leave you thinking about it, but it's perfectly fine as a background for a "we're in a dungeon the whole game, let's keep going deeper" game.  The characters although having very predictable paths are likable. 

Gameplay:  See above.  Very awesome though you'll wish your main character could equip skills beyond a few elemental attacks.  You don't need to explore a world when you are exploring the DUNGEON WORLD one square at a time.  The dungeon designs are great and big and tricky and full of secret areas and treasures.  So much fun to explore.  The boss fights in the 2nd half are killer but fun when you beat them.  Lots of content to last a good 50-75 hours.

Overall:  An excellent spinoff that merges the best SMT with the best of EO.  Lots of content, totally addicting gameplay, and very challenging in the later half; the game is the perfect title for for playing on the go. A


Final Thoughts:  the reason I split my review is I feel the team split their game making somewhere along the way.  The game is weird and 'almost' feels like they were making SMT4:  They had a good premise, they had lots of demons, they had new gameplay ideas for the traditional SMT systems, they had some good new art designs by Kaneko, etc...then it seems that somewhere early on they had the rug pulled out from under them.  Maybe they lost their budget?  Who knows.  But at some point the game became a low budget affair (the spritework is fantastic, but duckroll says the sprite team was all of 3 people) and it's like the team gave up on their inspirations and went nowhere with the plot devise they I had thought up, went nowhere with the soundtrack after the first few tracks were made, didn't do much dungeon work after a handful were made, etc... The first half of the game when you're first hearing the new music tracks, following the movie-length story intro, going through interesting dungeons makes you think this is SMT4.  Then after about 30% in when the story drops out, the music repeats, and the dungeons become less impressive looking, you realize your playing a low budget spinoff which is an awesome game, but it's not the next SMT you felt like you were playing at the start.  I have no idea what the behind the scenes was with this game, but there must have been something as the game feels very conflicted as to if it's SMT4 or not.  As long as you don't go in expecting the former you'll find what's possibly the best rpg on the DS.

[magus]

i didn't think the game was very hard as long as you used some common sense
"THE BOSS HITS HARD WITH ICE ATTACK,WHAT SHOULD I DO??"
anyway it seems that on the chaos path

spoiler (click to show/hide)

you don't fight mem aleph,you get to fight mastema when you are supposed to fight zelenin and you fight zelenin as a final boss... that sounds pretty weak,even if we are talking about a powered up zelenin,it's still a boss with a weakness and with a very specific skill sets,the final boss was hard because it had literaly everything!

[close]

also is it just me or most of the law demon sucks pretty bad? every special fusion gives you either a neutral or a chaos demon,and most of the good resistence (read,physic resistence) are found on these so....

[Bebpo]

It's hard because of status effects and damage done vs. damage taken.  Of course everyone is wearing armor that is strong against boss elements and hitting whatever their weakness is.  That's why the first half of the bosses are easy.  The difference from Uruburos on is that they hit HARD and do some crazy shit sometimes. 

It's also not so clear cut.  If a boss does ICE ATTACK and DEATH ATTACK.  You're going to want to wear the armor that protects against death, leaving you open to ice damage.  Or you can go with the ice armor, do much better, and just hope you get lucky and not instant KO'd.  Plus most of the bosses in the 2nd half are like real Megaten bosses, they have no weakpoint.  You just need to hit them hard and fast and buff/debuff/heal.

I mean maybe it's not "so hard you give up" difficult, but name a single rpg in the last 10 years that is more difficult.

[magus]

the last 10 year is a pretty big period of time,without thinking much about it i would say that dragon quest 8

spoiler (click to show/hide)

dhoulmagus fight or empyrea fight

[close]

are harder than what this game has to offer

[Bebpo]

Weird. I didn't think DQ8 was one of the tougher DQs and I remember doing the epilogue with the extra dragon boss as well.

I think difficulty in general varies a lot per person per game.  Some people have a harder time with certain games because they just tend to be unlucky or not have the right equipment/skills/jobs so it makes things harder.

We should just leave it at "SJ is not an easy game"

[Kestastrophe]

Is this running on R4 yet?

:'(

[Himu]

Strange Journey is jawesome.  It's exactly what I wanted in a new first person smt as well. My only grievance so far are the core battle system mechanics. Other SMT battle systems pale to Press Turn and One More, so going back to vanilla turn based SMT is kinda

Especially love the demon negotiation. It's like a mix between SMT 1/2 and Persona 1/2. In fact, it's very Persona-esque. Replace anger/happy/interested/scared and replace them with alignment: chaos/neutral/law. Right now my alignment is neutral-neutral, which kinda sucks because I want to go law-neutral. I don't even know how I got n-n, either. 

Music is refreshing for SMT as well.

Story doesn't really feel SMT-ish to me, though. For a main series title that is. Maybe if it were a Persona title I'd buy into it, but so far the story seems tame for a main series SMT: no demon's crucified on crosses, blood soaked hospital floors or any mind-fuckery. I like the characters though.

But other than that, yeap, this is a true sequel and I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's not SMT4, but luckily I didn't go into it expecting SMT4.

[Himu]

Tried negotiating with a Hua Po.

*Garrett approaches Hua Po*

Hua Po: Hi! What's it called when a guy tries to approach a girl?

> Picking her up?
> Approaching her?
> Saying hi?

I picked "picking her up".

Hua Po: GASP. That's it! So you're...an old man...trying to pick up..a young girl like me?! How disgusting!

*Hua Po leaves the battle*

pedo-himu