Circe and Drew's Gamearama Megathons!

Playing thru game franchises from stem to stern! Not a Dragon Quest-only blog, despite the fact that Circe's way better at playing Dragon Quest than Drew is at playing Mario

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Megami Tensei II: Japanese Intensifies

Circe here! One thing I wanted to note before we get started is this game's opening, since I didn't really talk about it in my first post. This opening doesn't appear to be skippable, so every time you boot up the game, you're greeted with the image of a missile descending upon Tokyo, then a huge face looming over the city, followed by a billowing mushroom cloud. The image cuts to static, which then transitions into the title screen. It's an evocative and unsettling image, and one that the game makes sure to remind you of each time you power it on.

That said...we left off having won a video game and unsealed Pazuzu. Our shelter is being invaded by zombies, which sounds like a great time to make our exit. Unfortunately, this is where my extremely loose grasp of the Japanese language starts to make things tricky. The first problem I ran into is that when I went to the armory I did not understand that I had acquired two guns, so I spent some time wandering around unarmed, which made things quite difficult. It also took me some time to find the option to recruit demons, since that was moved out of the COMP menu. Perhaps predictably, demon negotiation has been a bit rough, but I can't tell if it's because I can't read Japanese well, or the game is just very picky about it, or both.

The shelter proves to be a very small dungeon, so it doesn't take long to explore. Unfortunately, unlike the Tower of Daedalus, it affords you no safe zones, which really sucks. If anything, it feels like this game's beginning sequence is much less forgiving than Megami Tensei's, forcing you to find the clinic while dealing with monsters, not even giving you a place to revive teammates in the shelter, and on top of that, your friend learns magic but either can't learn healing spells yet or not at all.

Luckily, it is possible to leave the shelter and find a Heretic Mansion in a nearby town, where you can bring people back to life. Which is good, because the first boss, Nebiros, hits hard, and it took me quite a bit of wandering around before I figured out how to beat him. Perhaps I should've expected this, but you do actually have to recruit demons to have much hope of winning, because he can take you out pretty quick otherwise. I was hoping to pull together some strong demons, but truthfully, Nebiros doesn't have much HP and what you really need more than anything is some meat shields so you don't game over. Sucks, but it gets the job done.

Once you take out Nebiros, you can poke around the shelter and find your friend's girlfriend, who gives you a Flame Talisman, which will let you cross a body of water on the back of a turtle...I guess? Look, I did not parse enough Japanese to figure out why, but that's what happens. From here it looks like we have a bit more free reign to explore the overworld. Going forward, the overworld and towns are seen from a top-down perspective, while dungeons are in the first-person view we've come to expect from Megami Tensei.

It looks like, rather than just big dungeons, there are now smaller spaces to poke around in and explore, like abandoned buildings and tunnels. So things are likely to be a bit more broken up between overworld exploration and dungeon crawling, as opposed to Megami Tensei where you are trapped in a series of monster-filled boxes the entire game. I'm not complaining; we could probably use the fresh air.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei II: Devil Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good

Circe here! After an exhausting trip through Majin Tensei, we're going back to the main series with Megami Tensei II. Now here's the thing, there's two versions of this game: the NES original, and Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei, an SNES remake where the first two Megami Tensei games are bundled together. A fan translation of the SNES version exists, but the NES version has never been translated, officially or unofficially. So guess which version I decided to play! Ultimately, I figured that this would be good practice for eventually tackling the games that are exclusively in Japanese, which I'm going to want to tackle eventually, if only because they're among the most obscure and under-explored titles. It does mean that my grasp of what is going on might be a bit...looser than in other games, but hey. It's an experiment.

Megami Tensei II takes place in post-apocalyptic Tokyo, after a nuclear war. We're just an ordinary person living in an underground shelter, chilling with our friend and playing a video game. That's right, Megami Tensei II opens with a game within a game, known as Devil Buster. In the game, you play through a simplified recreation of the Tower of Daedalus from Megami Tensei, although this time we're navigating in a top-down perspective. Inside Devil Buster we get a chance to learn how to play and fight demons, which is pretty similar to how things work in Megami Tensei. Also like Megami Tensei, it unfortunately takes quite a bit of grinding before you can safely walk more than few steps into the dungeon.

From here, you can actually quit the game and wander around the shelter if you want. If you do, though, your friend urges you to defeat the Minotaur, and, not wanting to get confused by wandering off the intended path, I didn't bother poking around too much.

I think you're supposed to recruit some demons at this stage, but I found it easier to just go to the Minotaur and beat him down. He has much less HP this time around, so it wasn't all that tough. Also, I feel that I should note that this is the first game to feature the work of Kazuma Kaneko, whose demon designs have appeared across the series all through the present day. The original Minotaur had a pretty doofy design (which didn't make it into the blog, oops) so I think this is a considerable improvement.

Defeating the Minotaur frees Pazuzu, a real demon who had apparently been sealed inside the game, and who emerges from your computer into the real world. This is where things get exposition-heavy, and I should note here both that my understanding of the Japanese text is going to be a bit sketchy, and also that I don't want to focus too much on plot recap here. The upshot is that Pazuzu claims to be a messenger of God, and explains that the nuclear war tore open a portal to Hell, and you and your friends are the saviors who will rid the human world of demons. He gives you a demon-summoning program and sends you on your way, and by the way you don't have much choice because demons are invading the shelter now okay good luck have fun.

And that's where we leave off, having absorbed probably more plot than in the whole of Megami Tensei. Now, I haven't had much opportunity to do critical analysis of the games up till this point, being almost entirely devoid of plot as they are. But I want to take a moment here to pick at the interesting way that Megami Tensei II opens. It's not entirely unusual to have a game that features a recreation of an older game in the series as a sort of easter egg. I'm pretty sure that in one of the newer Doom games, you can have Doomguy go play the original Doom. I think the subtext here is pretty easy to understand: the old is subsumed by the new; Doomguy exists in a world so much bigger and richer that the original game could be played inside it. For something with a similar vibe, take the opening of Donkey Kong Country, which basically makes this idea explicit. We see Cranky Kong playing the original Donkey Kong theme on an old phonograph, and then Donkey Kong busts in playing a rock version on a boom box. It's not hard to interpret: that was the old shit, this is the new shit, it's way cooler and better.

What makes Megami Tensei II unusual is that the game it's comparing itself to is its immediate prequel, a game that was released three years ago on the same system. That game that you just played, it seems to say, is just a piece of fiction in this new world. Why would they take this approach? I think there are a couple reasons. For one, Megami Tensei II is a big leap forward in the series's storytelling. We're seeing ideas introduced that are going to shape the series in huge ways over the long term, much moreso than the simplistic dungeon crawler that Megami Tensei was. But remember also that Megami Tensei was based on a series of novels. Megami Tensei was already kind of a loose adaptation, and Megami Tensei II seems to be almost deliberate in its severing of what weak connection remained. No references to the protagonists Nakajima and Yumiko exist, and the game establishes that it's its own thing with its own identity. And I think that's important for what the series would eventually become, essentially a self-contained set of games with no reference back to its source material. Consider that by the time of Shin Megami Tensei, the game that one might consider the 'true' start of the series, the messy association with the original novels has already been cleanly cut away. This game, it feels, was made from the start to pave the way for greater things.

[gamearamamegathons]

Majin Tensei: Hell is Other Demons

Circe here! So I made the difficult, but correct, decision that there would be nothing more interesting to say about Majin Tensei until I'd beaten it. So here we are. I played a pretty big chunk of the game and it's all kind of a blur now. I kinda can't believe my last post went up just two days ago because it has felt much, much longer than that.

To pick up where I left off, I did go solo without my partner for a bit. I kinda had the idea that there would be a few maps as just me, and then a few maps as my partner, or else I'd end up massively overleveled. Silly me, I just ended up massively overleveled. Eventually I got to a map where I couldn't proceed on my own, went back to a location I'd already been prior to the last boss fight, and she was there for some reason, so I freed her. Not...really sure what all that was about.

As the game wears on, the idea that you're surrounded by weak monsters you can just kinda mow down starts to fall away. Enemies start to become more and more stubborn, and I hit the strength cap like halfway through the game. So maps go from a tedious but easy process, to a tedious slog where I can actually die. Healing pools become vital to surviving, forcing me to park on one of them and just weather the waves of demons. And if an enemy group has a healer, this process can take several times longer than it otherwise would.

And lest you think I've really just been playing incorrectly and should just use my own dang demons already, even when I successfully recruited high-level demons, they tended not to last long in battle. They were just that much weaker than my human characters. Which makes sense just from a sheer numbers game. If I'm slowly but successfully killing off 10 demons with 2 characters, and then I recruit one of those demons, of course it's going to be a lot weaker. What makes it feel strong is that it's part of an absurd swarm.

And the swarms are absurd. Enemy generators are no fucking joke now. Instead of summoning groups of low-level enemies, they eventually graduate to summoning pretty strong ones, sometimes in truly ridiculous numbers. The first map to really get across how dire this was going to get was one where four different summoning circles brought in four Leviathans each, which are a powerful flying enemy. So that got kind of desperate. One of the maps near the end of the game had summoning circles that just called in waves upon waves of Hydras, another pretty strong enemy. It took so long that I started to worry that there was legitimately infinite Hydras, and it was the closest I got to straight up forfeiting the game. I think there must've been at least a hundred Hydras.

At the very least, it took a Hydra swarm to make me realize that my partner has some actually good offensive spells now. Possibly that could've made some of the earlier stuff easier, but oh well. Better late than never. Close to the end of the game, she learns a new spell called Rimudola, which is a wide-range multi-hit spell that does massive damage to almost everything. I'll admit, it was cathartic to finally be able to wipe out a ton of strong demons in one big sweep. It certainly helped to make the final few maps at least tolerable.

As you probably guessed, I defeated a number of bosses on my way, but I no longer care to post pictures of or discuss most of them. Bosses really did become afterthoughts compared to the slog required to actually reach them. This lasts up until the final boss, Satan. To get to Satan you have to navigate three floors of warp mazes, so that was fun. Then I had to go through the tedious process of peeling off the swarm of demons surrounding him. Finally, Satan is just by himself. Unfortunately, he has a ton of HP and is in a room with four healing pools, which made it pretty hard to stop him from healing. My ultimate solution to this, and what felt like the perfect symbolic sendoff to Majin Tensei's broken design, was to trap Satan by surrounding him with my two human characters and two summoned demons, and every time he killed one, just replacing it with another while I kept hitting him. By sacrificing most of my useless demons, I was able to whittle down Satan's HP and finally end the game.

The game's ending has your partner doing some kind of heroic sacrifice to send you home, and it acts like there's some kind of significant relationship between them even though they barely talked. I dunno. It doesn't matter.

I've been trying to compare my feelings about this game to Megami Tensei. I definitely disliked Megami Tensei, I disliked it quite a bit. But I did have fun at times. And as much as I disagree with its design ethos, I understand that it has one. I get the concept of an old school mean dungeon crawler. Majin Tensei just feels broken. Playing it made me feel like my conception of what a video game is began to break down. Technically, the software we actually make is only an infinitesimally narrow slice of what computers could do, but for the sake of human comprehension we restrict ourselves to this narrow range. Technically we could make video games that subject people to bizarre tasks that strain our ideas of fun, or entertainment, or worthwhile use of our time. Some games dip a toe into the edges of that boundary on purpose, but Majin Tensei is special in that I think it did this on accident. It meant to be a regular game and just failed that badly. It's purely a mistake that I have had an experience that I reflect on and struggle to contextualize it within the experience of "playing a video game".

I think I hate this game. And I never said I hated Megami Tensei. Majin Tensei is worse, and given that I said Megami Tensei had nothing at all to recommend it, that's truly damning. There's nothing more to say. The story of this game is how it is, as a piece of game design, a failure on almost every level.

Next time: Megami Tensei II.

[gamearamamegathons]

Majin Tensei: Inventory Manglement

Circe here! I think I've finally figured out the true villain of this game: your inventory limit. See, you can only carry up to 16 items. And you might say, well, that's fair, tactical RPGs often have an element of motivating you to use items by limiting how much you can hold onto. There's a real problem though. A problem evidenced by the screenshot above. See, there are gemstones. You can trade gemstones to a shopkeeper named Rag. There are many different types of gemstones, and he wants different kinds for different things. So it makes sense to hold onto gemstones, especially when you don't have the right combination you want yet. But each individual gemstone takes up a whole inventory slot. Thus, the inventory crisis you see here. Eventually I realized it was a waste of time to hold on so many gemstones anyway.

What's that? How's the actual game going? Uh, pretty boring I guess. As I get deeper into the game, needlessly large maps are becoming the norm, which only makes battles drag on longer. The thing is, in many strategy games, the size of the map dictates the pace of the battle. In Advance Wars, a big map means space from your opponent to build up your resources and spread out. Even in Fire Emblem, which doesn't really have resource production, you have to think about how to defend your position and strategically arrange your units to survive the approaching army. Majin Tensei has none of these things, so a bigger map just means more walking.

Another frustrating element is neutral demons. In theory they're just fine -- basically the idea is that they don't fight either side and they're easy to recruit. Enemy demons will sometimes attack them (when and why they do this is unclear) but the neutral demons themselves are totally passive, mostly not relevant to the battle at all. In spite of this, they will still make moves, often just kind of milling around in one place. There's an entire neutral phase that largely just wastes time. They could just not move, or move on the basis of some kind of directive or goal, like avoiding enemy demons, or something. But no. On some maps you might have a dozen neutral demons, who all take one step every turn and do nothing else and impact nothing. Like Megami Tensei, it often feels like Majin Tensei is deliberately wasting your time, but instead of doing it with unfair setbacks, it's just by literally making everything take longer for no reason.

You might say the shine has worn off this game a bit. But at least I feel confident in being able to plow through the game, however long that takes. I should be about halfway through now. After beating Moloch, we go through a tower that leads to Hell. We fight Medusa there, who's kind of an afterthought who comes surprisingly soon after the next boss, but she looks cool, so here you go.

After that, we end up in Hell. There's fire everywhere, but don't worry, this time the fire is merely decorative. Nothing of interest changes here in Hell, so let's go straight on to the next boss, Belial.

I feel like this game has the same problem as Megami Tensei, in that the bosses only become more underwhelming with time. The big challenge this battle was keeping him alive long enough to get all the treasure.

After Belial is defeated, he retaliates by teleporting my partner away, forcing me to fight alone for a while. I played a bit past that, and basically responded to this challenge by parking on a healing pool and obstinately refusing to do anything resembling strategy, instead preferring to let the entire enemy army come to me until they're all dead. So, that's where I leave off, like a child throwing a temper tantrum at a parent who's not strict enough to do anything about it. If the game becomes interesting at any point, I'll be sure to let you know.

[gamearamamegathons]

Majin Tensei: Tactical Genius

Circe here! So I'll be honest, I was considering playing much further into the game before writing a post. I know I said that about Megami Tensei too, but there's really just so little variation between battles in this game. Luckily, the day was saved by the second boss fight, which managed to be at least marginally interesting.

Our path takes us into a forest north of town. We meet a bland-looking guy, who tells us that demons are storing magnetite energy in Yggdrasil, which is here, for some reason. We slaughter our way through the inside of the tree in typical fashion, and carefully disable the magnetite reactor.

Ahem. Not much to comment on beyond that until we reach the second boss, Moloch. There's a few things that make this battle a bit unique among the others. This map has a couple summoning circles, which regularly generate groups of weak demons, as well as treasure chests to the north and healing pools to the east. It's not really feasible to handle all that with my human characters, especially with a boss who is an actual threat. So I actually...strategized! Imagine that.

The idea was to take out the nearest demon forces, then summon two demons to block the summoning circles, and a third flying demon to head north and collect the treasure. Then I'd head east and summon a couple more demons to occupy the healing pools along with my human characters. A nice idea on paper, but it didn't really work out too well. Your partner is separated from you by a mountain range, so she's able to reach the healing pools well ahead of you, while you need to deal with the demons near your starting area. That means that she and a couple demons need to hold the healing pools on their own, and Moloch has an actual fairly strong fire spell that can hit multiple targets. And your demons, even the relatively strong ones, are so, so weak.

Ultimately the solution was much simpler: bring in some demons to block the summoning circles, and have the partner meet up with us around there, where we can fight Moloch away from the healing pools. From there, if you have some healing on the board, you can weather his spells and just beat him down. This did involve two demons dying, because once Moloch is out of MP it turns out he can just walk up and one-shot your demons. Sucks. It's a shame, because if I'd had more than two units who can hold their own in combat basically at all, I think my idea would've been sound and maybe even fun. Alas, it was not to be.

At least maybe this indicates that there will be maps that will be more engaging. But if it just turns out to be boss maps, this is going to be a long, boring playthrough.

[gamearamamegathons]

Majin Tensei: Like Paper Mache, or Raditz

Circe here! So I'm getting started on Majin Tensei, an odd little SMT spinoff that differs from the main series quite substantially. Majin Tensei is a tactical RPG that takes strong cues from Fire Emblem, with your characters moving across a 2D grid and clashing with enemy units. The demon-summoning and recruiting mechanics from SMT are still here, but it quickly becomes clear that things are...off.

As before, we have a physically strong male protagonist and a magic-casting female protagonist. Both can summon demons this time, and demons both cost macca and drain magnetite when they are out, like before. However, something about the balancing seems to have gone badly wrong in Majin Tensei. Offensive magic seems largely useless, and demons tend to err on the side of being pretty weak, flipping the dynamic from Megami Tensei where your humans fell into supporting combat roles while your demons did the heavy lifting. In this game I largely avoid summoning demons and just plow through my enemies with my two human characters, especially the protagonist, who can easily one-shot most low to mid-tier enemies.

This produces an experience that's not really much like Fire Emblem at all, with the way that it requires strategically managing the arrangement of an army to overcome obstacles. Instead it's mostly just making sure your two humans' HP are topped up and letting the enemy army of weak demons uselessly smash themselves to bits against your blade. On top of demons being weak, I don't have a good fusion chart for this game, and experimenting with fusions hasn't been promising, so I've mostly just recruited demons here and there, and then not used them.

There are a few things that complicate matters. Certain demon types have healing spells, and although healers are extremely fragile, they will keep enemies alive longer and draw out the battle. There are also healing pools littered around most maps, and a unit that starts a turn on one will recover HP and MP. It will probably not shock you that the enemy AI doesn't tend to make great use of them, although there are occasional exceptions.

Now, sure, you might say. I didn't need demons at the start of Megami Tensei either. Surely the first boss will be the wakeup call that I need to take my demons more seriously. Weeeeell, no, not exactly. After going through a few fights, we face up against the Minotaur once again. After a big chase around the map, all the remaining units end up piled around a 2x2 grid of healing pools. This led to one of the more bizarre boss fights I've experienced in an RPG.

If left alone, the Minotaur does basically nothing, just casting a weak damaging spell forever and healing back any damage I do to him. Once I whittled down his army to nothing, I dealt with this by luring him away from the pools, summoning two demons to occupy the other pools, and then whaling on the minotaur while he's stuck away from a source of healing. I could've played this safe, but I got aggressive about it and one of my demons died. Turns out they're gone permanently if that happens, so, good to know. Ultimately, he did manage to park on one of the pools again, but I managed to kill him by just piling on attacks and weathering his pretty brutal counterattacks.

I feel fairly sure this wasn't how the developers intended the game to be played.

The fact that I don't have a good handle on the demon stuff makes me a bit concerned. But going back and grinding will be an option, even if it might be tedious. So, even if it takes a bit more trial and error, I'm sure I'll be able to stumble my way through eventually. At the very least, I appreciate having a break from a game that's...challenging...pretty much at all.

Oh yeah, as far as story goes, this game is just about as story-light as Megami Tensei. We find a demon-summoning program from a mysterious guy on the internet who tells us to download it and stop the coming demon invasion. So we do. I think we're also supposed to be in a post-apocalyptic Neo Tokyo, but we're not gonna have much context for that till we play through Shin Megami Tensei. So, you know, don't worry about it.

[gamearamamegathons]

Shin Megami Tensei Play Order

Okay, so I’ve officially put together a play order, of sorts. Not a strictly linear one, because I don’t want to commit to that, more a set of guidelines for how I generally want to do things. I hope you like your information presented in needlessly large graph form. Tumblr is being naughty, so here’s a direct link rather than an image embed.

Click here to see a graph!

Key: Green: Completed Blue: A rank (official English release) Yellow: B rank (unofficial English patch) Orange: C rank (console-based barriers to play) Red: D rank (no English version) Grey: Failed/forfeited

Solid lines are prerequisites. I’m gonna insists on playing direct sequels in order. Dashed lines are loose connections that don’t require playing in order. So, if all the solid connections to a game are completed (or failed), I can start them, and games that only have dashed lines to them I can start at any time. Although I’ll try not to skip too far ahead chronologically. I’m not planning to go straight to Tokyo Mirage Sessions quite yet.

Make sense? I hope so. If not, don’t worry about it too much, it’s just to give the marathon a bit of structure. I’ve decided now that I’m going to be moving on to Majin Tensei next, to take a break from dungeon crawling. It probably won’t be too long till I have my first post for that ready.

Oh yeah. Also, there are two games that are such an afterthought in the series guide that I missed them. Oopsie. So I quietly added them to the original games list and this graph.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: Let Me Off This Crazy Thing

Circe here! Well, this is it. The final dungeon, Infini Palace. So, how is it? Um. How do I put this...not good. I was hoping that maybe this would be a relatively straightforward dungeon to finish things off. Again, this was a foolish, foolish hope. This dungeon is truly a haphazard mess. This dungeon or maybe the one before is kinda the point where they just kind of gave up. Infini Palace is made up of some of the biggest dungeon floors in the game which are mostly empty, full of monotonous sets of empty rooms or just kinda haphazardly placed walls, with mean tricks like little areas full of doors (which again, drastically increase the encounter rate) or warp mazes with literally nothing in them, tons of tiles that arbitrarily spin you around, and with a map, you can basically skip 90% of it.

For the record, this is the point where I gave up mapping. I filled in a few of these, and I reached a point where I simply couldn't do it anymore. More than any other dungeon in the game this one seems deliberately constructed to waste my time. Even just leveling up ceased to be worth it, because I reached endgame levels and was able to fuse the best demons in the game. Once I had the single required key item, literally the only thing forestalling the final confrontation and the blessed end of this journey was my own stubbornness, so I finally threw in the towel and made it to the boss in like five minutes.

I would politely suggest that this is not good game design.

For the big finale, I wish there was more to say. Aside from the dismal dungeon layout, it's about as you'd expect. The encounters are aggrevating, level drain is still a threat (although the guide neglects to mention it this time), and Lucifer is completely nonthreatening, although he does have 8,000 HP, more than double that of the last boss, so buckle in for a long fight. I played at 400% speed. Despite his huge HP buffer I think I needed to fully heal each party member no more than once the entire fight.

And that's it. Happy ending, roll credits. I can't really tell you what happened since the game is still in Japanese and it doesn't have the consideration to wait for me to translate the text before scrolling through it. And that's it. We're done with Megami Tensei, the rightfully forgotten origin of the Shin Megami Tensei series.

I figured that in each game I'd reserve some space for my final thoughts. Might make this a separate post long-term, but I think I can fit it into this one, for now. In terms of narrative, there's not much to say. The game is not super interested in its original source material, it's just a big dungeon crawl where all your friends are demons. The one big question that looms over the game is, "Is it really okay to just take gods from other modern religions and make them into demon pokemon?" Unfortunately, if your answer is "no", well, I'm afraid this is going to be the foundation of the entire Shin Megami Tensei series. For my part, it did feel kinda awkward referring to gods people actually real life worship as "demons", but that terminology is going to persist through the whole series, so, it's pretty much just going to be something to be mindful of going forward.

The bigger story here is about the game design, the part I have not been able to shut up about all game. Not necessarily shocking for an NES game, but it seems almost actively disdainful of the player's time. Even I was playing with a guide, and I felt it wearing on me. Someone going into it completely blind would've struggled much more, especially given how many boss fights are intentionally unwinnable until you find the magic item that circumvents whatever special power they have. And any time you reset or stop playing you'd need to input a giant password. And, in addition, you'd have to deal with agonizingly slow combat, which already felt slow to me playing the entire game at double speed. Unless you have a historical interest or like doing things that are a bad idea, or maybe both, there's absolutely nothing to recommend this game. Nothing. I really mean it. Don't play this game.

Given that, I probably should do the right thing and not jump straight to Megami Tensei 2. I haven't decided what game I wanna play yet, but I'm sure you'll find out soon.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: I Deeply Resent Being On Fire

Circe here! I had entertained the foolish hope that Hellfire might've been a short dungeon, and I could fold it into my post on the final dungeon, Infini Palace. But no, it was not remotely short. The first thing of note is that Hellfire is full of, well, fire. The walls are fire. The floor is fire. You are on fire. Everything is on fire. There are NPCs who seem to be kinda just fine down here who are not on fire, but besides that everything else is on fire. The practical upshot of this is that every step you take, your entire party takes 1 damage. At this stage of the game, when everyone has like 600 HP or more, you can take the hit, but it is very annoying and distracting, and exploration did not need to be any more harrowing than it already is.

Level drain also continues to be an issue. The Taraga (pictured above) is the only enemy with level drain in this dungeon, but I ran into problems with them more than I did last dungeon. Of course, sometimes getting level drained is simply unavoidable due to bad luck. Not great in a dungeon that's already testing my patience.

There is a fix for being on fire, though. Somewhere in the dungeon is Izanami, who needs to be rescued, so she can give you her robe, which makes you immune to the fire effect. So the first order of business is to find Izanami, right? You'd be right, but the thing is, Hellfire is a sprawling, confusing, and oddly-shaped dungeon, with warps everywhere. The guide I've been following also didn't explain the way to find her super clearly. The area she's hidden in is reachable only by a warp, which the guide doesn't mention, and due to confusion over where to go, I ended up exploring basically the entire dungeon except the part with Izanami in it.

I will be honest, I am kind of mad at the guide, but also, I feel like making areas accessible only by warp is highly frustrating for a game that more or less requires hand-mapping. There's not much of a good way to tell where you've ended up after warping, and without a good sense of your location, navigating the dungeon risks basically becoming impossible. So I strictly avoided warps whenever possible, which is how I got into this mess in the first place. As a consequence, I spent a very, very long time on fire. This may have been the worst dungeon in the game to date, and I can't really remember if I said that about a previous dungeon but this definitely supercedes it if I did.

Another thing of note, as you probably noticed above, I've switched back to the Japanese version of the game. For reasons unknown to me, I was starting to get more frequent random crashes, and some odd bugs here and there, and I decided I didn't need to put any more game-resetting issues in my path. I'd been hoping to start picking up some Japanese anyway, and if I'm going to get serious about playing every game I can, I'm gonna have to take this on one way or another. There's not a lot of vital text in this game and I already know how to play it, so we can consider this the training wheels version of playing a game in Japanese. So far it's been going alright, though it's a bit harder to follow what's going on in combat since it's so wordy and light on visual effects. At least that exact problem is going to fall away in future games. For this game, given that I'm following a guide, I don't anticipate any language-based issues preventing me from finishing. And I'm finally free of all English patch-based bugs. I just hope future fan patches don't have these kinds of serious issues.

Once I finally dragged myself up and down this literally godforsaken dungeon, the actual boss, Set, was practically an afterthought. I also dropped him from the headliner image because I think his sprite is kinda bad, and also there's no fire in the tile he's standing on. The fire is important. I can't convey to you the experience of this dungeon without the fire. The real boss was the fire we were on along the way. Absolutely demolishing Set was cathartic though, so there's that.

This dungeon sucked.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: Time Drain

Circe here! I said I wasn't sure if I'd have a full update per dungeon, but honestly, Mazurka Corridor is a mammoth of a dungeon, so I think I'll be able to find something to say about it. The game is, of course, continuing to be meaner. The big thing here is enemies that can inflict level drain, basically causing you to lose a level and needing to grind it back up. Of course, if that ever happens I just reset. I figured at first that this would be a bigger issue, but it kinda faded into the background. I finally have a surplus of magnetite, so that's finally ceased to be much of an issue.

What's left is just the overwhelming bigness of the dungeon, which is divided into a west and east tower, with the east tower being significantly larger. I'm pretty much just making my way through and mapping as I go, and hoping that no dumb random events totally screw me over. In terms of pure power, my party has continued to be pretty overwhelming, with the exception of the succubus monster. Succubi appear in large groups, and although fragile, each one has a chance to cast the Kandeon spell, which can deal around 100 damage to four out of five party members. That's a lot. That continued to be a problem for quite a while, until the point where Yumiko got a weapon that hits 5 enemies at once, at which point the fragility of the succubi gets the better of them and we can kinda just wipe most of them out all at once.

It's kinda hard to convey the experience of making my way through such a large, monotonous dungeon. At least mapping keeps me busy, but everything looks so samey. I'm glad there's only two dungeons ahead of me, because the truth is that there's just not a whole lot to this game. So many of the design choices kinda seem intended to waste your time on purpose, like level drain, dangerous attacks you can barely defend against if you get unlucky, dungeon traps you have no way of preparing for, and so on. The main source of entertainment is just the steady process of becoming more powerful, which I'll admit is satisfying to a certain degree. Getting to go back and fuse new demons kinda feels like the dessert after eating my vegetables, which is a big shift from my earlier feelings that trying to use them was a big hassle. Of course, now I have significantly more resources so summoning them isn't really a problem anymore.

I'm sure you've noticed the pattern by now, and yes, the boss of this dungeon, Hecate, is barely a speed bump despite having a pretty awesome design. It makes me feel like I'm misrepresenting the experience of this dungeon, because this cool-looking boss is less a capstone to the dungeon than it is the "You are now leaving Mazurka Corridor" sign you'd see for a split second during an hours-long road trip. But just posting a picture of a long grey corridor would not be very interesting.

Still, that's not to say I'm not having fun, it's just that it's a very workmanlike sort of fun, busying myself with the steady progress of maps, level ups, and fusion charts. But it hasn't changed substantially for a few dungeons now, so I'm glad the light at the end of the tunnel is coming.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: Donut of Doom

Circe here! At the rate I'm going, I may end up sticking to one dungeon per post now, since I'm making progress at a decent rate. I'm starting to settle into a routine with these dungeons; as before, the big obstacles here ultimately aren't the strength of enemies, but rather being peppered with status effects and the constant bleeding of resources. The structure of the gameplay is kind of odd -- since encounters are mostly the same throughout a single dungeon, and your demons don't level up, you can basically prepare yourself with a team that is strong enough to take the dungeon and the boss from the moment you begin exploring the first area, it's just a matter of mapping out the dungeon and fighting your way to the boss. Meanwhile, magnetite is starting to become a bit of a problem, since my stronger demons drain it faster, and the amount of magnetite I get back as I explore the dungeon is very inconsistent. Eventually it may be easiest simply to allow magnetite to drain to zero, which will instead cause the demons to lose HP every step instead. But hey, they have a lot of it now, so it might save me some pain.

I continue to largely ignore my characters' spells, although I did get a demon called Bastet that has an all-party heal spell, which was quite useful. Weirdly, demons can't cast spells out of battle, only Yumiko can, but it's still better than healing everyone one at a time. For the most part it's just a matter of bashing my face against monsters and crossing my fingers that they don't inflict nasty status effects on my party. Yumiko did finally learn a spell to heal any status effect, called "Clink" for some reason. The spell names in this game are quite strange.

The dungeon of the day is Valhalla Corridor, a two-tiered ring shape that encircles the entrance to the Sky City. It's quite large, almost double the size of the Tower of Daedalus, and it seems as though dungeons are only going to get larger as we go along, which promises to be, uh, fun. Along the way I also managed to run into a different sort of difficulty entirely: a game-crashing bug. Now, to be fair to Megami Tensei, I tracked down this issue to the English translation patch I was using, not the game itself. There's a couple ways the game can crash, but in one case it's guaranteed to crash if you encounter a specific demon. Fortunately, it's confined to a single, optional forced encounter that appears in one room of this dungeon, which I can just avoid. I looked ahead and it doesn't seem like there should be any more surprise crashes.

Another thing of note is that the dungeon design is starting to become more deliberately antagonistic. One spot will warp you to another location in the dungeon, which might be kind of bad if you hadn't mapped it out yet. Another forces you through an area where you can't see, and then hides one-way walls to disorient you and get you stuck. Or, perhaps my least favorite, a big square chamber that just has a bunch of tiny little rooms. The encounter rate seems to be much higher when passing through a doorway, so this entails a lot of tedious walking in and out of little rooms and slogging through many fights in what could barely be called exploration.

The boss of this dungeon is glorious hair metal Loki, pictured above. If you were thinking this might be a more vigorous boss fight than Medusa, well, uh, no, sorry. You can get a charm that cancels out *all* of Loki's spells, meaning he wastes half his turns doing nothing, and like Medusa he only has a couple hundred more HP than the last boss. Sure, he hits harder than regular enemies, but without the threat of status effects throwing a wrench in things, he's effectively just another meat wall. A shame, he does look cool.

Gotta be honest, I might even struggle to have a full post's worth of ideas in a single dungeon if the game is going to fall into such a predictable routine. I guess I'll have to dig into the next dungeon, Mazurka Corridor, and see how things look after that.

[gamearamamegathons]

Shin Megami Tensei Game List

Circe here! Okay, I finished reading the Unofficial Shin Megami Tensei Guide, so I sat down and put together a complete list of all the games. Rather than listing them chronologically, I’ve decided to sort them into tiers based on the difficulty in acquiring and playing them. Ultimately I’m going to be playing these games in any order I want, and weeding out any games that prove unfeasible to play. Also, just because an official release exists doesn’t mean I’m committed to using it, it just means I won’t let issues with fan patches or the like stop me if I run into issues. With that said, let’s get started.

A Tier - No Problems These games are known to be available in English, and there's no reason not to play them.

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey Shin Megami Tensei IV Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse Persona Persona 2: Innocent Sin Persona 2: Eternal Punishment Persona 3 Persona 4 Persona 5 Persona Q Persona Q2 Persona 4 Arena Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon Digital Devil Saga Digital Devil Saga 2 Tokyo Mirage Sessions Devil Survivor Devil Survivor 2 Last Bible Devil Children Light/Dark

B Tier - Some Assembly Required These games are only available in English via fan translation. I don't anticipate issues playing them, but there's always the possibility of running into problems with unofficial patches. 

Megami Tensei Megami Tensei II Shin Megami Tensei Shin Megami Tensei II Shin Megami Tensei If... Shin Megami Tensei Synchronicity Prologue Majin Tensei Majin Tensei II Last Bible II Last Bible III Last Bible Special Another Bible

C Tier - Obscure These games are on consoles I'm not entirely sure I can emulate/acquire. I'll probably be able to get it figured out though.

Persona: Dancing All Night (Yes, the Vita and PS4 aren't technically obscure, but I don't own them and I am not buying them just to play the Persona dancing games) Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight Jack Bros.

D Tier - Japanese These games have never been translated into English, officially or unofficially. Uhh...mmmaybe?

Giten Megami Tensei Shin Megami Tensei NINE Devil Summoner Ronde Devil Children Red/Black/White Devil Children Fire/Ice Devil Children: Puzzle de Call! Devil Children: Messiahliser Shin Megami Tensei Trading Card: Card Summoner

F Tier Stands for "Fuck mobile games and MMOs". Mostly not available in any form now anyway.

Shin Megami Tensei Imagine Shin Megami Tensei Dx2 Imagine

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: Slogging Mall

Circe here! As you can see, I've decided to try and add in pictures for a bit of color. Probably should've sooner, but it felt like it'd be more work than it really turned out to be. Probably I'll try and snag more interesting pics going forward, but at least you get to have a look at our latest dungeon, the Sky City Bien. So anyway, how has it been going so far? Well, it's been, uh...up and down. Megami Tensei is a land of contrasts. We do at least have a new tileset. The Sky City seems to be styled to resemble a sort of future city, with storefronts and stuff, but it's unfortunately a bit busy, and it is, of course, still basically just a dungeon, so it does feel a bit like exploring a city made of cardboard sets.

The good news is that encounters are not too tough in Bien. At this point, the game offers you two dungeons to explore, either Bien or Valhalla Corridor. I hung out a bit in the Corridor to recruit some demons, and it left me quite concerned about a spike in difficulty, because the monsters in Valhalla Corridor do not fuck around. Luckily, once I'd gotten all the monsters on my wishlist and gotten out, I found that things were considerably less dire in Bien. In fact, my team can pretty easily punch a hole in most enemies in a couple turns at most. Unfortunately, other issues have plagued my attempts to explore the city. For one, you'd think that now that you're required to make use of demons to get by, you'd start picking up magnetite pretty frequently. Unfortunately, that's not true at all, and I was bleeding magnetite pretty much the whole time I was exploring. Luckily, I had a solid stockpile to last me through the dungeon, but it does kinda concern me how this is going to play out in the long term. If I'm forced to grind in the Tower of Daedalus in-between every dungeon just to have enough magnetite, I'm not going to be happy.

The dungeon itself is no picnic either. Despite the enemies not being that strong, there's still the random chance that some enemy might paralyze you. You might think that we're hitting our stride to where the game should be giving us tools to deal with that, but no, the only solution if one of your human characters is hit seems to be to go back to town and get it fixed (for demons, you can just un-summon and re-summon them). Odder yet, the healer can't actually heal status effects. Rather, the guy who fuses demons for you does that. Because...uh...hm. Nevermind that.

Of course, I was adjusting to this game's bullshit and kinda getting used to what to expect. The magnetite concerns and the random status effects are annoying, yes, but they're pretty par for the course so far, and I was taking them into account as I was exploring. The real fuck you came when I was exploring the first floor; the path through the city starts on one side of the first floor and then loops up to the third floor and back down, so I was quite far from my starting point. I found there was an exit on the opposite side of the floor from the entrance, and poked my head in to see that it appeared to be the Valhalla corridor again. I took a couple steps out, decided the area didn't look familiar, and turned around, only to find that a guard was blocking my way back in. So now I was stuck in a completely unmapped area of Valhalla Corridor, with no idea how it connected to the small area I had mapped. Basically I was just completely screwed, and went ahead and reset. So yeah, that soured my mood a little bit. I suppose these kinds of setbacks are going to become easier to swallow once I acclimate to the idea that random resets are going to be necessary sometimes.

The boss of the Sky City is Medusa, and given how much bullshit this game heaps on you, that might make you nervous. Luckily, you can find a statue that makes you immune to being petrified, and even while you have it Medusa will waste a bunch of turns trying to petrify you. With that protection she's pretty much a pushover. I'll admit, bullshit aside I could get used to this difficulty curve. Defeating Medusa un-petrifies some NPCs in the area and unlocks a healer and a shop on the second floor. It seems like the city can now be moved to different areas as a sort of fast travel system, although it's probably a bit early to be making use of that.

Combat continues to be as simplistic as ever. Basically all the problems this game requires me to confront so far are about resource management, team management, and unfair nonsense that makes me randomly have to reset. Still, I'm moving forward at a steady clip now, which is encouraging if all I care about is just making it to the end.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: Bonk on the Head

Circe here! So I was anxious that Megami Tensei might be too complicated, and as it turns out, it might actually be too simple! Let me explain. For the most part, I've still left demon summoning off to the side, so it's just been Nakajima and Yumiko. With just the two of them in play, the game is very much like a typical grindy dungeon crawler. I run around, draw a map, fight monsters, get EXP, it's all very rudimentary. Which I suppose shouldn't be surprising. I let the mystique of the ancient game get in the way of the fact that it is, ultimately, still just an NES game, without necessarily a whole lot going on. I've been following a guide for advice on what demons to have in stock for the future, but I haven't really been using them.

You can recruit demons by talking to them, and trying to negotiate. It seems like the best thing to do is generally pretty obvious; if you can make a friendly choice, do, if they want something, give it to them. It won't always work, but recruiting demons is not really that hard. You do have to whittle a group down to just 1 demon to recruit, though. Once you've got some demons, you can go to a guy who will fuse your demons. Fusing is free, amazingly, and has fixed outcomes. The only restriction is that you can't get a demon of a higher level than you (although you're not told what level demons are, oops). Through recruiting and fusing, I ended up with a Trent (a tree demon) and a Cerberus (a cerberus) to keep in the wings for when I fight the boss.

The boss of the Tower of Daedalus is the minotaur, and he's a big ol' wall of meat, so just whacking him with your two human characters isn't going to work. Unfortunately, combat is not any more nuanced or deep in this fight, but neither is it particularly low difficulty, so it's really just a battle of attrition to see if you can break through the meat wall before you fall down. Through failures and heartbreak, I did learn that grinding levels for your humans is not a productive way to toughen up for the boss, because they improve very slowly (and your demons don't level up). Instead, I had to commit to actually doing a bit more recruitment and fusion, and eventually I ended up with a serviceable team.

So okay, let's go into how summoning demons actually works. You can summon a demon at any time, which costs macca, the game's currency. Furthermore, for every step you keep a demon summoned, they drain a secondary resource called magnetite. I think this is a huge drag, since it really makes you not want to keep your demons out if you don't have to. But we're going to have to going forward I think, so it's something I'll have to get used to. For this fight, I basically summoned my demons before the boss fight and dismissed them after, so magnetite was not really a big concern, for now. I think you can stock up to 7 demons, and summon 3 into battle at once. So, with a solid team put together, us and the minotaur took turns bonking each other on the head, and this time he fell down instead of us. Admittedly, this isn't nearly as dire as Dragon Quest's combat, where it was literally just one hero and one monsters trading blows till someone's health was whittle down, right up until literally the final boss. Even in this first boss fight, I had more party members, and access to more combat options...it's just that my combat spells didn't do any more damage than just hitting him. Still not exactly riveting combat design.

Ultimately, I'm more confident that I won't get stuck, since being prepared is just going to be a matter of fusing more demons and leveling up. And not running out of macca or magnetite, I guess, but I figure that will be less of a concern over time. Despite my low faith in the conveyance of NES RPGs, the game did manage to teach me that I need to overcome difficulties by fusing demons instead of just grinding for hours, which is something. Still, there's a lot of jank here. The encounters are kind of unbalanced -- plenty of the demons in the lower floors of the tower are reasonable to fight, but some are just not worth it. Cerberus clearly just exists to be recruited since he's way overpowered to fight, but you still have to deal with encountering him all over the place. There's also one enemy that is clearly a joke enemy, called "bug" (like a glitch, not like an insect) but it's not that funny because it has 1500 HP, more than double the minotaur, and is absolutely not worth your time to fight. Sometimes you'll also get double encounter randomly, one after the other, and you have to beat both to get any rewards. If the second encounter is a Bug or a Cerberus, well, sorry. What's more, everything in this dungeon looks the fucking same, which makes it easy to lose my place in the dungeon even when I have it fully mapped. Oh, and in classic RPG fashion, if you get hit with a status effect this early in the game, you're kinda fucked. I don't even bother trying to deal with it, I just reload my savestate if that happens. Ultimately, it's nothing that can't be worked through, but the warts evident in early console RPG design are very much on display here.

For now, though, it's time to forge ahead, because there's five more dungeons ahead of us. The first floor of Daedalus Tower opens up into a corridor, which is...I dunno, underground? Still part of the building? It still looks the same. But I should be able to pass now, and hopefully I'll find someplace on the other side that has different-colored walls.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: Oh Yeah, Rules

Circe here! So in all the excitement of getting everything set up last post, I didn’t establish what the rules of this marathon were going to be. So as before, I’m generally disallowing emulator shenanigans, with a few exceptions: speedup is allowed, because god, these games can be slow. And second, Megami Tensei has no battery-backed save! It’s passwords all the way. So, you know, fuck that. I’ve pretty much selected one specific square right outside the entrance to the dungeon proper where I savestate, like a proper checkpoint, and I’m using it nowhere else. The need for savestates will probably fall away in due time, but for now I’m going to treat it as a proxy for a real save system, more or less.

My aim is to finish every game I start, but unlike Dragon Quest, I’m reserving the right to abandon a game if it becomes truly intractable to progress. I set down this clause because I truly do not know how onerous these games are going to get, especially early on. I don’t expect to need this get-out-of-jail-free card outside of the NES titles, but it’s there, if only so the marathon can proceed instead of grinding to a halt. Honestly, I probably should’ve just myself do that with Dragon Quest 6, but oh well.

Next, as I said, I’m not planning to play the games in strict chronological order. As far as what games I intend to play, due to a bit of providence I have access to Hardcore Gaming 101′s Unofficial Guide to Shin Megami Tensei and Persona. Not every game from the guide is going to be doable, because some are, well, untranslated, or extremely obscure. But I basically intend to play every game from the guide that I’m reasonably able to access. I may give a full list in a later post.

Oh, and guides are completely fair game. I’m going to make at least a cursory effort to not use them until I need them, but as before, I am going to be playing a *lot* of games and I’m not going to enjoy all of them, most likely, and also don’t want to get screwed by obscure mechanics, which is, as I elaborated last post, something that could basically happen from the literal first minute of the series.

[gamearamamegathons]

Megami Tensei: Yes, I Am Sure About This

Circe here. Okay. Here we go. Let's begin playing the first game in the Shin Megami Tensei seri -- actually, before we do that. Maybe it would be worth giving a bit of context. Where did this thing come from, anyway? So, believe it or not, the first game is based on a horror novel of the same name. It's basically about a high school student who can summon demons with a computer (I guess that's what makes it a "digital devil story"). The protagonists of the game are ostensibly the characters from the novel, but really, the connection is pretty loose. The main thing we need to know is that we've got a cool demon-summoning computer and we're going through this dungeon fighting and recruiting demons. The part about recruiting the demons is, of course, going to be a pretty important gameplay conceit, and something that resonates throughout the entire series, all the way up to the modern iterations like Persona 5. For now it's much more modest, and, uh, clunky, but really, we're barely even there yet, so let's take a couple steps back and talk about the experience of trying to get started playing this game.

So, honestly, the first couple hours were spent trying to find new mapping software. Ogmo Editor allowed me to create basically perfect replicas of Dragon Quest maps, but it's fragile and kind of a pain to use, and I wanted to find something that just kinda did what I wanted without fuss. Since Megami Tensei is a first person dungeon crawler, some robust form of hand-mapping is necessary, and I just can't bring myself to bust out the graph paper after what I went through hand-drawing the DQ1 and 2 maps. So I settled on the basic version of Grid Cartographer, which required me to spring for 20 bucks, but god, it's everything I ever wanted, it's perfect, and at last making video game maps is fun again.

Okay, we're all good. We can start the game now, right? Well, maybe. The first thing you're presented with when you start the game is a stat allocation screen. What's that? You have no idea how to play the game or what stats are relevant? Too bad, sucker, this is an NES RPG, better get used to opaque and confusing mechanics. My first attempt at the game was basically a dry run because I barely knew what I was doing and didn't really allocate my stats correctly. It turns out that Nakajima, our male protagonist, can't learn magic and never will. So basically we just wanna pump his physical stats. Our second character, Yumiko, does learn magic, so we want to give her good magic stats. Fairly basic stuff, if you just went ahead and assumed that the male character is the fighter and the female character is the caster (grumble).

Okay, so now we can get started. We begin on the 8th floor of the Tower of Daedalus and we're going to be making our way down. This top floor is basically the town and our safe haven, where healing and shops and stuff is. Of course, I had to map it out to even learn that, since it looks identical to every other floor of the dungeon. From here, we learn a few things pretty quickly. First of all, healing costs money, and you get money by defeating monsters. So I guess if you run out of cash you've essentially softlocked the game. Good, excellent, love it. By the way, we're in an NES RPG, so by "get started" I mean "go one floor down and walk in circles until I'm strong enough to not get mauled by gnomes and bipedal fish". At least Yumiko learns a healing spell, which does reduce the chances of going broke.

There's other stuff I could go into, like moon phases, which affect monsters in some way, or the actual recruiting and summoning process, but demons are prohibitively expensive to summon at this stage, so really, my experience of the game so far has been walking in circles, hoping I don't render the game unwinnable almost immediately by running out of money, and reflecting deeply on whether this is really what I want to do with my spare time. And that's pretty much been my progress thus far. Now, you might say, it sounds as if I've accomplished precisely nothing so far. And you'd be right! But I think this is probably the most honest way to start talking about this game: by explaining that you really can't just dive into a game this old and opaque without immediately screwing yourself. As far as accessibility goes, dungeon crawlers were probably close to the bottom, in an era of gaming that was already, well, just a bit thorny, on account of still figuring out a lot of the design principles we take for granted today. Hopefully, with mapping software and a bit of input from guides, I can find a path forward that ends with me dragging myself over the finish line before outdated RPG design and my own impatience beach my unfortunate player avatar. I suppose if I can't finish this game I might end up calling it good enough if I played to the natural endpoint where progress becomes impossible or just prohibitively obnoxious. We'll see how it ends up.

[gamearamamegathons]

Introducing: The Shin Megami Tensei Marathon

Circe here! Okay, so it's probably no secret by now that my Dragon Quest marathon is kind of dead in the water. Every time I think of trying to go back and play Dragon Quest 6 again, my mind fills with static and I wake up several minutes later in the nearest room with no computers in it. I feel like things got bogged down past a certain point and it started to feel like more of a slog than fun, which wasn't helped by the fact that the games were really, really samey. So I figured I'll try diving into something new and hopefully seek out a bit more variety.

Now, I'm not about to claim that trying to play every single game in the Shin Megami Tensei series is a good idea. In fact, it's almost objectively a worse idea than trying to play every Dragon Quest game. But at least it's an excuse to dig into a weird series I've only really engaged with at the surface level. And hopefully I can learn from my mistakes and make this more fun for a longer period of time, and try harder to make this my own thing rather than failing to imitate the original marathon blog that inspired this idea.

Part of the changes here is that I'm going to break from playing the games in chronological order, and instead mix it up so I can keep things fresh. I'll probably try not to jump too far ahead, but it's really going to depend on how I feel at the end of a given game. That said, I intend to start with the first and possibly worst game to begin this journey on. Yes, that's right, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, for the NES. An opaque and needlessly difficult NES dungeon crawler. Baphomet help me.