My Strange Journey through Shin Megami Tensei, Part 2 - Where I Actually Play Strange Journey (Redux)
Spoilers for Strange Journey and Strange Journey Redux, naturally
What a fucking slog!! Ahhh!!!
Rolling back a bit, Strange Journey felt like the natural next step after playing 4-4A-5, or at least to me it feels like the most recent spinoff closest to the "mainline" of the franchise. Well, that and I want to put off playing Nocturne (aka Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call [Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series]) as long as possible pretty much just as a bit at this point.
In the context of these anime JRPGs where you're always some teenager up against the world, Strange Journey's conceit is particularly notable. You're an Adult Male and part of an international investigation task force to pierce the "Schwarzwelt", some kind of eldritch wormhole/dimension that appeared in Antarctica and is slowly spreading to cover the entire globe. Sure, I shot God with my 9mm in SMT4 Apocalypse, but the vibe is different when you're a space marine blasting demons with your assault rifle.
The vibe is also different on a mechanical level. I played the 3DS "Redux" version, but Strange Journey was originally a Nintendo DS game and it really shows. It is nowhere near as ambitious as SMT4, because how could it be? I think with modern hindsight I'd say it feels like a handheld game in the same way that Monster Hunter Rise feels like a handheld game in comparison to World or Wilds. Said handheld-ness aside, it simply feels like an older, weirder game. I wonder if fans at the time thought of it as just, "The Next Shin Megami Tensei Game".
It could be argued that the Press Turn battle system causes any given battle to take too much brainpower, but I was really feeling its absence in Strange Journey. In its place is the "Co-op Attack", where hitting an elemental weakness causes the rest of your party to make a follow-up for extra damage. The wrinkle is that only demons of the same alignment join in, so you're incentivized to pick a route (Law, Neutral, or Chaos) and make sure most of your demons stick to party lines.
It is so much less complex and more boring than Press Turn. Enemy demons can't use Co-op Attack, so if they hit your weakness you merely take more damage rather than the battle snowballing into nearly certain defeat. This removes much of the higher-level strategy in party composition, because only two things really matter: can you hit enemy weaknesses, and can your active team hit the follow-up? I wasn't even bothering to choose moves carefully by the last 5-7 hours, I just held down the A button and let the game fast forward through the commands.
The other major mechanical delineation here is that Strange Journey is still a first-person Wizardry-style dungeon crawler; to my knowledge, the last one in the broader franchise. You've got your grid map on the bottom screen. You pivot precisely 90 degrees to turn, which has become one of my favorite Stupid Video Game Things ever since I played Kowloon High-School Chronicle. You walk through one-way doors, fall down to other floors, take conveyor belts, get teleported, and everything else. This style of dungeoneering isn't inherently a slog - especially now that I'm more used to it - but several of Strange Journey's quirks make it a slog.
There are no towns or hub zones in Strange Journey. You are, again, on a paramilitary task force and drive your gigantic super APC into another dimension for your mission. Said warship - the Red Sprite - is your one "safe" location in the game. It is almost constant dungeon crawling with what feels like no breaks. Combine this with the largely braindead combat and you've got the least fun SMT game I've played yet.
Like, you've just dragged yourself through a bunch of annoying teleport mazes and poison tiles and nonstop enemy encounters for like three hours and limp back to your ship. It's finally time for a break! Except the Red Sprite has a mere four rooms:
- The Mission/Save room (largely obsoleted due to Redux's QoL changes)
- The Medbay/Heal room
- The Lab/Shop room
- The Hangar/Exit room
The cold, metallic walls of this vehicle offer no respite. Your fellow researcher NPCs have dull sidequests and little to no insight to offer. Oh, you beat the boss of this sector? You're headed straight to the next one! You're on a goddamn mission!! Quit wasting time!!! Get back out there, soldier!!!!
"But Iro,", you may think, "You're being unfair! Wizardry's village has a mere five facilities and you return there constantly!" And you'd be kinda right! So I thought on what makes the village in that game feel like a "hub" compared to the Red Sprite, and I think it comes down to the rhythms of how these games handle dungeon crawling on a macro scale.
Treating each sector as "a dungeon", Strange Journey has 8-10ish total that open in sequence and grow in size and complexity as the game goes on. This makes sense to make the game feel larger in scale; after you've blasted through and mapped out Sector Carina, you get a change of scenery and a fresh map to explore at Sector Delphinus. Hooray, it's a brand new area and you don't have to go through that inscrutable teleporter maze again! You generally only backtrack to older sectors for sidequests or to open locked doors now that you've found the key 20 hours later.
When this is the entire game, it doesn't necessarily feel like you're making steady progress towards a goal. It's more like you're being kicked back to square one every five hours. Why even map out these areas if I'm never going to use the map afterwards?
If we look at Wizardry (or a deliberate imitator like Dungeon Antiqua), the dungeon is simplistic. There are only like nine floors; any given sector in Strange Journey is probably bigger than the Mad Overlord's entire dungeon. You're traversing the same terrain over and over and over. You go in, fight until your resources are exhausted and your pack is (hopefully) full of treasure, and climb back out. Maybe next time you'll dip your toes just a biiit further into Floor 7, hoping the ninjas won't kill you instantly like they did to Party A.
It's easy to dismiss this as tedious padding, and I would never deny that there's some truth to that sentiment. You do have to run through the same pitch-black area to reach the shortcut elevator every single time. But by the time you're hitting those lower floors, the loser zombies and goblins now actively flee from your presence lest they drop in one shot. At some point, travelling the same hallways to the same elevators ceases being rote or repetitive and becomes familiar, comfortable. You stop consciously counting the squares on Floor 1 because you know the feel, whether by heart or by your hands around the controller.
(Aside: honorary Wizardry adaptation Dungeon Meshi really nailed this aspect.)
And look, I get it! The Schwarzwelt is supposed to be a strange, stupefying, scary place. You're tired and you want to go home and you can't because even though you warped away from the shitty demonic shopping mall you just ended up in the endless trash heap and it sucks but what else can you do other than slam your head into every single dead end of this maze until you find the one that might take you anywhere else? To some extent, it's pretty cool that the game meshes its mechanics, aesthetic, and narrative to make me feel the way the characters probably feel. But exhausting - even probably on purpose - is still exhausting.
It is, again, a fucking slog. If I wasn't playing the 3DS Redux version or didn't have access to the various release valve DLCs that I definitely legitimately bought and downloaded before they permanently took down the 3DS Eshop, I probably would have just stopped playing around the 60% mark.
Playing Redux also means the obligatory Atlus DLC Girl shows up. Alex is comically uninvolved in proceedings, especially in comparison to how I spent most of Vengeance with Yoko Hiromine actively in my party. Most of the time she just tries to kill you with no explanation. When you finally do get a motive, it's kind of... dumb?
To wit: the Schwarzwelt is a metaphysical phenomenon triggered when civilization becomes corrupt and consumptive to an extent that the planet is in danger. It wipes the slate clean and returns Earth to a primordial state, and this ain't the first time it's happened. Various demons want to use it to spread their influence in the inevitable new world order. Alex claims that she's from the future that had its own separate apocalypse after all this Schwarzwelt business (regardless of which route you're on, somehow) and she wants to avert that. By murdering you.
You're some kind of time-travelling space samurai and killing the only people who can do anything about the Schwarzwelt is the best you could come up with? That's like trying to stop an apartment fire by going back and killing the construction crew. Get real.
Anyway, my understanding is that the new Law and Chaos endings involving Alex are along the lines of SMT:4A, shying away from ideological extremism and opting for more conventionally pleasing outcomes than "delete all free will forever" or "primal murder anarchy". I, naturally, took the enlightened centrist (/s) Neutral route, which arguably has a grimmer outcome with the new inclusions.
Neutral in general feels slightly (slightly) more defensible in Strange Journey due to how the Schwarzwelt is set up as an impending apocalypse. SMT4 and 5 were both decisively post-apocalypses. Civilization is already over, so fighting over the throne of the inevitable new world order makes sense. But here, you inherently have to choose if modern civilization - already so far gone it triggered the Schwarzwelt - is worth preserving.
There's absolutely a draw to the idea of letting everything burn down and starting again. More and more these days, it feels like the systems we've created are fundamentally broken. But I also hear the news and see how harm is being caused right now by president idiot dismantling half the government. I recall a post by the inimitable Shel Raphen from around the time of the 2024 US Election that notes the political role of stability in troubling times, and I think, "Yeah, if it comes down to a bunch of bad options, I'd pick a feckless, unhelpful, deleterious status quo over an actively malicious, hateful one." I guess I'm morally compromised! Sorry!
The regular Neutral ending just has the investigation team blow up the Schwarzwelt and return to reality, preserving the status quo and all its inequalities in hope that humanity will course correct with its newfound clarity. In other words, kicking the can down the road. In the Redux one, the player character stays behind to become an eternal sentry disconnected from space-time, destroying the Schwarzwelt whenever it inevitably reappears. Which will happen first? Mankind actually learning from its mistakes for once, or Shin Megami Tensei Doomguy's psyche collapsing? Seeing as both 4 and 4A's Neutral endings were basically "everybody gets along", it's kind of refreshing to get a relatively bittersweet ending with a tangible cost involved.
More importantly, I get to put the game down and never play it again. I don't know how many more of these (whatever these even are) I have in me.
Next SMT in line: Devil Survivor Overclocked. See you again!
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