![]() Much like in the Pokémon games, almost all the enemies you fight can also become your friends with a little persuasion. In practice, this leads to a battle system that’s quite simple to understand, but also requires you to ‘keep your eye on the ball’ if you want to prevent your team from wiping in one turn. This is especially true when you consider that enemies can also hit your weaknesses, thus earning them more turns to bring even more pain. This means that you can potentially double your party’s output if you’re smart about how you respond to the enemy, and it pushes the player to think more about building teams around elemental weaknesses. The ‘Press Turn’ system gives each of your party members one turn per round, but if anybody manages to land a critical hit or an attack the enemy is weak to, one more turn will be added to your party’s bank. Combat is a real highlight, as it plays out like a more polished take on the standard turn-based system used in many JRPGs. There’s an overworld which serves to connect various dungeons and towns together, and you bounce from one place to the next as the story dictates. In this regard, the narrative of Shin Megami Tensei III could absolutely be described as interesting, but it would be a stretch to call it gripping.Īs you wander between locales in search of the next plot device or person needed to move things forward, gameplay plays out much akin to a standard dungeon crawling JRPG. There’s not much in the way of meaningful or emotional interaction between characters, and though everyone but the Demi-fiend has a goal, these parallel subplots never consolidate into an overarching plot that makes you care about what happens to the world or its inhabitants. The Demi-fiend’s journey is a lonely and meandering one, and what little character development exists in this story only occurs in the various supporting characters who come off as barely more than walking ideologies. This focus on high-concept ideas is interesting in its own way, but it seems that it comes at the cost of actual plot. After all, there isn’t even really a world left to save here. consequential ethics debate, the narrative nonetheless feels a little more highbrow than the standard ‘save the world from evil’ song and dance that many JRPGs roll with. ![]() ![]() Ruminations on the importance of control and freedom in the lives of sentient beings are par for the course here, and while it’s not exactly an exhaustive lesson on the nuances of, say, the deontological vs. This is where a great deal of the philosophy of Shin Megami Tensei III comes in, as nearly all of the important NPCs you interact with each represent a different school of thought, none of which are any more right or wrong than the others. Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) Instead, it’s more like the world is trapped in a limbo state, and what the ‘new’ world will look like is ultimately decided by your Demi-fiend’s actions. There is a modicum of hope, however, as the world is technically not destined to stay ruined. That’s just the first hour.įrom there, the Demi-fiend wanders the resulting wasteland with a harem of demons in tow who help him fight off the hordes of other demons that now roam free and bask in the chaos of this awful new hellscape. ![]() Your character-an everyman sort of guy who’s referred to as “The Demi-fiend”-has the privilege of watching the apocalypse happen in a terrifying cosmic event called The Conception and is subsequently transformed into a demon-human hybrid when Satan himself forces him to eat a worm. ![]() Shin Megami Tensei III is not a feel-good game by any means the whole thing plays out a bit like how you’d expect the optional ‘bad ending’ of a typical JRPG to go. The unique mixture of a dark atmosphere, heavy religious themes, and punishing difficulty is simply unlike anything else out there, and it’s the sort of thing that can become quite enchanting once it hits its stride. Sometimes that feels like a good thing and sometimes it doesn’t Shin Megami Tensei III hasn’t aged as gracefully as some may have hoped, but it also is quite easy to see that this has all the elements of a pretty great RPG. Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster is exactly what it sounds like, a prettied-up and slightly modified take on this oft-forgotten sixth generation RPG classic. ![]()
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