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Game Ramblings #182 – Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne HD Remaster

More Info from Atlus

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Switch
  • Originally On: PS2

Normally this would probably be a How’d It Age, but honestly I don’t really want to talk about the game here – at least not specifically. The game under normal circumstances would have ramblings specifically matching my shelving of Shin Megami Tensei V. What I am instead going to talk about is specifically the Merciful DLC that they added to the remaster and why it’s the best thing that Atlus may have done for their core JRPG gameplay in years.

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At its core Merciful is an easy mode, and it definitely is easy. However, it can be turned on and off at will, so I generally ended up using it for making the trash grind more mindless. Trash has never been difficult per-se in SMT. Once you learn the weaknesses of the enemies in the general area, it’s butter. Being on easy just meant that I could concentrate on the story and bosses. However, easy mode also came with three numbers I want to focus on:

  • Encounter rate – Approx 1/2
  • Experience – Approx 4x

However, the most important one is 18:36. That was my time to completion, +/- a bit of untracked time to deaths.

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Judging by How Long to Beat, I shaved on average about 30 hours or about 60% of the average run. To me, that sits about where these games should be. These should never be 50 hour games with a ton of useless trash fights, because that isn’t the fun part of the game. They should be relatively quick and fast leveling so you can crank through a bunch of different party setups and summon as many demons as possible and have them be immediately powerful and useful.

One of the biggest problems I had when I shelved SMT5 was that it was taking me 25-30 fights to get a single level. It was such an absurd level of grind that it sucked all of the fun out of what is an inherently very good turn-based combat system. In merciful mode, I was getting levels every 5 or 6 battles, if not quicker. It was such an incredible change to the flow of the game that it makes me want this XP rate in standard difficulty.

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The other part that I really noticed was improved was the overall dungeon flow, thanks to an overall reduction in trips back to town. In SMT4 it always felt like a slog getting further in a dungeon. You’d slowly make your way through a dungeon getting stronger, generally getting to a point where you could comfortably make it one save point further before needing to teleport back. Frankly, the Persona subseries is the same way in that regard. It’s just such a time sink having to retread the same ground over and over purely because there’s so much combat and the XP rate is so slow. On Merciful though? I could get through dungeons in one go without losing all my items, so I was able to be prepared to go back up to normal for boss fights.

I get why this might come across as a negative change, and honestly I don’t necessarily disagree. I guess where I fall with this is that I want the overall dungeon mechanic to change. Rather than mid-dungeon save points being a way to get back to town, I would rather they be permanent fast travel points across the board. Allow players to continue their progress at any point where they get to a safe spot, reducing overall retread churn and increasing the pace of play as a positive. Combine this with the increased XP rate to really tighten up the game as a whole.

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The Shin Megami Tensei series is the perfect example of a JRPG that is long for the sake of being long, and it’s one of the few series that hasn’t really adapted to a tighter modern gameplay loop. Merciful mode may not be exactly the solution, but I think there’s ideas here they can pull from. These games have never had the pure content amount to support being a 50 hour experience and cranking through this one in sub-20 proves that to me. This is a series that would benefit from keeping its difficulty but modernizing to be a faster experience, because even this little experimental DLC feels like such a huge improvement. Combine the quick XP rate and reduced encounter rate with a better overall travel system to reduce retread, and I think SMT6 could feel surprisingly modern without having to lose its soul.

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Shelved It #13 – Shin Megami Tensei V

More Info from Atlus

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch

The praise that this one got when it came out really surprised me. It’s not that I necessarily thought the praise was wrong, but SMT games are a very specific kind of niche that I didn’t think would translate well across the board. I played a ton of SMT4 on the 3DS, but even then the formula of the overall metagame felt dated. 8 years later, SMT5 brings the same fantastic combat with the same outdated metagame, and it feels even worse to me now.

If there’s anything I would point to about the game, it’s that it’s not “hard”, at least not in the traditional sense. What it often is is difficult, but artificially so and I think that’s an important distinction. The game isn’t hard in a skill-based sense. Once you know the counters to a boss, the game is trivially easy since you can build your party as a hard counter to it. What it then becomes instead is hard in a time commitment perspective. You’re now just spending time making parties that are tailored towards fighting a specific boss, capturing and fusing demons that act as defensive counters to the boss’ big attacks to allow you to fight your way through it. Even by where my levels were in the mid 20s, this had just become a colossal slog. A single level was ending up being 25-30 fights, which is far too slow a pace to be interesting. Routinely getting into boss fights that then back you up to a ton of grinding is just no longer fun to me. That brings me to my kind of three strikes of shelving this one.

The first strike was just a straight death to trash. I get that there’s some amount of danger involved in any JRPG fight. I was in the middle of a 30 minute walk between save points and came into a rare fight where the enemy went first. It got off a crit, giving it an extra turn, then finished off the main character on the second attack. There was nothing I could do because the main character dying is an instant game over. I was never given a turn to heal up. I was never given a turn to take out the enemy. 100-0 before I could do anything. Against a boss where I’m prepared, this would just suck. Against a trash mob where I’ve been walking for along time and lose a ton of progress because of the main character death rule it’s infuriating. The main character death rule is one of those things that just has to go.

The second strike was around a couple of side quests. Some of them end with you going back to the quest giver and getting into fights. These generally involve a bunch of wandering around to some random quest giver away from any save point and doing chores, so when you get to one that involves a sudden unplanned boss fight and you haven’t been conserving resources, it’s not exactly a fun time. A couple of these I got through fine, a couple of these I was clearly underleveled or needed a different party for. Losing progress to a side quest is not great.

The final strike was just hitting another boss where I was going to have to redo my entire party to act as a hard counter, and I don’t really need to cover it more than that. I had gone through four rounds and only chipped the boss down by about 25% of its health. It then got to the point where it gained its turn with guaranteed crits, did an AoE, and 100-0’d half my party in one turn. It’s not great when you get to that point because it makes it clear that you need to both grind and rework the party to hard counter it. Guaranteed time waste.

I would almost sit here and wonder if JRPGs have left me behind. At this point I lack both the time and patience to really sit around playing grindy games that force me to increase numbers instead of giving me skill-based ways out of problems. Looking at some of my recent shelved games that certainly would seem to be the case – Scarlet Nexus and Bravely Default 2 particularly come to mind. On the other hand, I’m still finishing more JRPGs than not.

FF7R, NEO: The World Ends With You, Xenoblade Chronicles and Tales of Arise are more action focused, which gives players ways to simply skill through battle. However, they are distinctly JRPGs in their meta games. On the more traditional front Yakuza 7 was incredibly grindy but had a lot of fun stuff to do around it that kept me playing for the hell of the character interactions. Fantasian and Atelier Ryza both had pretty traditional JRPG meta games, but had much better overall flow and a far more compact leveling experience so you weren’t just fighting for the sake of padding out the game’s length. In all of those cases they didn’t waste the player’s time through old mechanics. They let individual fights speak for themselves, and if you died so be it, you didn’t lose progress and you picked up having learned some things to apply to it the second time. Given those, I don’t think SMT5 is that far away from actually being actually really fucking good.

For one thing, just fucking add checkpoints and auto saves before fights. Having to manually save at places far apart from each other is a bad mechanic. Losing a ton of progress because you died to some rando is a bad mechanic. It was bad in the 80s and it’s bad today. If a player dies, return them immediately to just before the fight. Secondly, get rid of the fucking grind. Is there any point to me having to do 25-30 fights to level up? Is it accomplishing anything? Is it proving anything about me as a player? If the grind is reduced, then making parties that are specific hard counters to bosses is less of a chore and actually becomes a fun part of the meta game. If you wanna be really frisky, use the mechanic that FF13/13-2 do and just heal the player between fights. Then your fights could all be hard and you could eliminate a ton of grind. Also, get rid of the MC death = game over. I don’t care if you have to story up some bullshit, but if I have a party of four things and one of them is an instant death, that feels dumb. Let the rest of my party finish the fight. Again, don’t waste my time.

So I guess at this point I’m left here not so much wondering if JRPGs have left me behind, but if the older studios are sticking too much to tradition. A lot of what I find boring about this game is just mechanics that have aged poorly that they’re sticking to for tradition. Studios that have broke away from tradition have been the ones that have done far better. FF7R completely turned that game on its head to great effect. Tales of Arise added a much more dodge/parry focused combat, reinvigorating what had largely become an attack spam battle system. Fantasian took a turn-based system to mobile and made positioning fun while reducing grind to make a compact experience. There’s a path here for traditional games like SMT5, but they need to look at what is causing their games to be 40+ hour slogs, because there isn’t 40 hours of content here. Cleaning those things up gives them a path to be more streamlined, more fun, and importantly actually more difficult, rather than just sticking to being a grind.

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Game Ramblings #67 – Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology

More Info from Atlus

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: 3DS
  • Original Released on: DS

TL;DR

  • Still one of the more interesting JRPG battle systems I’ve ever seen with a heavy emphasis on moving and grouping enemies for AoE attacks.
  • Good selection of new content for returning players that is well integrated into the mainline story for new players.
  • Doesn’t do anything to inherently fix the grind of the original game, but a new Friendly difficulty opens up some interesting potential for JRPGs to pull from.

Admittedly this is a game I shelved the first time around.  It’s not that it was bad; in fact its battle system alone makes this game at least worth checking out.  However, in the base difficulty this game is EXTREMELY grindy.  Fights are mechanically interesting, but can be slow.  Damage is large, so healing is often necessary.  Healing burns mana, so items are necessary.  Items cost money, so money is necessary.  Running out of money necessitates more fighting, so you’re stuck in a loop.  Generally speaking, it wasn’t even the bosses that were an inherent problem.  It was usually just getting to the point where taking out trash in a new chapter felt reasonable without being a huge risk.

So, does the remake solve that? Nope.  Does it do anything to really change the game mechanically?  Nope.  What it does so is add a new Friendly difficulty that is entirely too easy, but brings in some really interesting mechanics to eliminate the need to grind, and is something I hope to see more games explore in the future.

Combat is the core of any JRPG and this one is no different, cleverly mixing traditional turn-based mechanics with some tactical positioning systems.

Since this is a JRPG, I feel like I should start off with combat as it was and still is one of the strong points of this game.  Radiant Historia pretty cleverly mixes pretty standard JRPG mechanics with a very tactics-styled positioning system into a quick hitting system where the focus becomes trying to maximize stacking of enemies to allow for multiple hits in one attack.

While the core system has your standards (basic attacks, magic attacks, heals, buffs/debuffs, etc), the real core of the system is in repositioning attacks.  Pretty early on all the party characters gain attacks that can move enemies around the board.  Enemies that are repositioned into each other are then treated as single units for purposes of attack location, allowing for stacked enemies to all be damaged at one time.  This then combines with turn order manipulation, either via speed stat, skills to delay turns, etc to chain friendly attacks, and the real focus comes down to basically trying to stack all enemies at once into a single spot and unleashing hell.

As an example, in the screenshot above, I could use Fire Storm to move the whole back line forward, then use line attacks to kill all 4 enemies at once.  Alternatively, I could push the front guy back and do the same against the full back line.  Other bonuses come into play (front line takes more damage but also does more damage) to allow for more nuanced strategies over the course of a full fight, but the core is in smart positioning for maximizing damage output.

All of these things elevate what would be a typically standard battle system into something truly special, and even in the grindy areas of the game allow for a lot of fun, particularly with the on-the-go nature of the DS family, allowing for a few interesting battles in a few minutes if that’s all the time the player has.

The core of the game is about free wheeling through time, with events in one timeline causing ripple effects on the other.

On the story side, this game is entirely about manipulation of time.  The game takes place in a split timeline where you have unlimited attempts to set things right, so dying is really not a huge deterrent.  However, each timeline has its own problems to solve, and problems that can unblock progress in the other timeline.  In addition, there are distinct losing points (red nodes in the above) where the story progress effectively ends, forcing a restart at the nearest chapter.

Overall this works as a good way for the player to have freedom in their choices.  Hit a block in the story and can’t figure it out? Find a spot where a new side path can be completed elsewhere in the timeline, and you might be able to unblock things.  Difficulty spike means you need to level up a bit? Jump back to an earlier point in the timeline where battle grinding is more practical.  The freedom of choice to jump around like that is a thing that a lot of JRPGs don’t really give, and its an effective tool here when combined with the story background of jumping through time.

The Dunamis runs the set of side histories, adding new potential futures for the characters, as well as some additional back story to the world.

This is all maintained really well in the remake, and is padded by some additional new content both in the main timeline and in a new set of side stories labeled as possible histories.  For returning players, this is the bulk of the content that they’ll be coming back for.  While these aren’t story bits tied to the main line, they’re an interesting look at what could have been within the overall structure of the world.  In addition, the woman running the Dunamis also provides a path to learning more about the history of the world the game takes place in, opening a path for some more interesting lore.  However, this alone wouldn’t have been enough for me to come back for more grinding.  The addition of Friendly mode was the real thing that brought me back.

The entire idea behind Friendly mode is that it provides a path for the player to skip unimportant battles.  In the base game, if the player hits a unit on the field, they gain a preemptive strike to allow them to attack first in battle.  While this was helpful, it didn’t eliminate the need to spend resources while grinding.  Friendly mode takes this one gigantic step further.  In this mode, if the user strikes an enemy in the field, they automatically win the battle, gain XP, and gain all relevant resources that would have normally dropped.  The end result of this is that the only combat the player ever takes place in will be for boss battles and story-relevant battles, leaving the rest of the game to exist as a way to enjoy the story and figure out the time-based puzzles.

I’ve seen this mode described as the visual-novel version, and I think that’s about as close to accurate as I could come up with.  The game becomes significantly shorter in this mode, and the story comes at a much more rapid pace, so I found myself being significantly more involved in enjoying the story as it came at me, rather than having huge grinding delays between story segments.  It then felt even more important to be in battle, as it always felt like it served the story at that particular time, rather than being a consequence of needing to level up the party.

End of the day, I think this is something that more JRPGs should explore as a core feature going forward.  The reduction in grind meant the game flowed much quicker and I never lost the story.  If I WANTED to battle, I could also simply run into an enemy on the field and start battle, but it was a conscious choice.  The one real downfall of Friendly mode is that it was also combined with an extremely lowered difficulty.  Ideally, the Friendly mechanics would be combined with boss battles that are tied to the selected difficulty, leaving the challenge there where the player wants with the streamlined battle selection.  However, for a returning player simply wanting to see the story, I think the lowered difficulty ended up being pretty ideal for me in most areas.

I guess this is a pretty easy one for me.  This was a great game when it originally came out, and it’s a great game now.  The problems that existed are still there, so if you’re a new player be ready for some grinding.  If you’re a returning player, this is a <20 hour run with the addition of Friendly mode, allowing for the focus to be on enjoying the narrative.  However, I think there’s enough there for anyone to enjoy to generally recommend it, assuming of course you haven’t sold off your 3DS.