Stop me if you've heard this part before: The whole world is in a state of chaos. Crime and war runs rampant, resources are dwindling rapidly, and the planet is becoming increasingly more uninhabitable. Still with me? Okay, there's this tiny blip that appeared on the south pole with black hole-esque properties, and it's slowly but surely expanding, threatening to swallow the planet whole. Government officials from across the globe band together and decide that their best course of action is to send their best military and scientific minds into this vortex, dubbed "the Schwarzwelt". As you might assume, everything goes horribly wrong, and our intrepid heroes find themselves on a very strange journey as a result.
The Schwarzwelt is full of unknowns. Areas that seem to reflect the sins of humanity, materials unfamiliar to man, and in typical Shin Megami Tensei fashion, demons. None of this operation would be possible without your handy-dandy Demonica suits, allowing the users to breathe in this foreign atmosphere, and making the invisible become visible. Even new demons show up as visual noise until you defeat them at least once. They also let you equip sub-apps, which give you a variety of benefits in the field. Some apps heal you every few steps, others tell the random encounter rate to calm down. Each app has a point value equivalent to how useful the ability is, and since you only have 10 app points, you really have to think about which ones you need for any given situation.
Strange Journey uses the DS's hardware to present your perspective in a creative way. It's a first-person dungeon crawler, but you're always wearing your Demonica suit, and the UI reflects that with a stylized HUD in the corners of the top screen, and detailed information on the bottom screen, like you're looking at your wrist computer. Also, I am enamored with this game's soundtrack. It's loud and bombastic, like government officials with self-importance on a death march, and the sounds of the Schwarzwelt are these overbearing chants, as if the areas themselves are alive and antagonistic. It's thematically appropriate, but it's definitely much harder to listen to for extended periods of time. Other SMT games lean harder into grungy rock music, and it's music that I listen to outside of the games frequently. Strange Journey's soundtrack starts to make me feel insane after a certain amount of exposure.
Post-Nocturne SMT combat is pretty recognizable, so leave it to Strange Journey to throw me some curveballs in that department. The "press turn" system is absent, and we have "demon co-op" in its place. Whenever someone exploits an enemy's weakness, other party members of the same alignment perform a bonus attack, with more party members equaling more damage. Yep, the law-neutral-chaos alignments play more than just a plot-related role in this game. Along with your own alignment, every demon you encounter falls somewhere on this spectrum, to the point that some will outright refuse to talk to you (just like real life). It adds an interesting twist to the usual team building and weakness exploitation of SMT, even if it's really only an extra step to consider.
After much deliberation, despite being pretty fond of first-person dungeon crawlers, I may lowkey hate this game. Out of all the SMT games I've played, I think the labyrinth gimmicks are the most obnoxious they've ever been in this game. I can turn a blind eye to funny nonsense like pitfall traps or floor that damages you. Where I draw the line is when the game asks me to navigate chunks of areas in complete darkness, leaving the map unmarked the whole way. Then you demand I navigate conveyor belt mazes under complete darkness. Then you finally give me an upgrade that lets me see in these dark areas, and immediately invalidate it with a different type of darkness in the next area! Followed by a gigantic unmarked teleporter maze! Etrian Odyssey came out two years before Strange Journey, and that game's whole gimmick is drawing your own map so you know where everything is! Why does the ATLUS game where you wear hi-tech future armor not let you manually edit the map?!? Strange Journey has all these cool mechanics that are wasted on navigation that feels tailor-made to annoy you.
All Shin Megami Tensei games center around a clashing of ideals, "law vs. chaos", that sort of thing. I think it's truly poetic that for one of the stronger, more character-driven plots in an SMT game, they contrasted it with some of my least favorite gameplay to grace the franchise. How's that for law vs. chaos?
The Schwarzwelt is full of unknowns. Areas that seem to reflect the sins of humanity, materials unfamiliar to man, and in typical Shin Megami Tensei fashion, demons. None of this operation would be possible without your handy-dandy Demonica suits, allowing the users to breathe in this foreign atmosphere, and making the invisible become visible. Even new demons show up as visual noise until you defeat them at least once. They also let you equip sub-apps, which give you a variety of benefits in the field. Some apps heal you every few steps, others tell the random encounter rate to calm down. Each app has a point value equivalent to how useful the ability is, and since you only have 10 app points, you really have to think about which ones you need for any given situation.
Strange Journey uses the DS's hardware to present your perspective in a creative way. It's a first-person dungeon crawler, but you're always wearing your Demonica suit, and the UI reflects that with a stylized HUD in the corners of the top screen, and detailed information on the bottom screen, like you're looking at your wrist computer. Also, I am enamored with this game's soundtrack. It's loud and bombastic, like government officials with self-importance on a death march, and the sounds of the Schwarzwelt are these overbearing chants, as if the areas themselves are alive and antagonistic. It's thematically appropriate, but it's definitely much harder to listen to for extended periods of time. Other SMT games lean harder into grungy rock music, and it's music that I listen to outside of the games frequently. Strange Journey's soundtrack starts to make me feel insane after a certain amount of exposure.
Post-Nocturne SMT combat is pretty recognizable, so leave it to Strange Journey to throw me some curveballs in that department. The "press turn" system is absent, and we have "demon co-op" in its place. Whenever someone exploits an enemy's weakness, other party members of the same alignment perform a bonus attack, with more party members equaling more damage. Yep, the law-neutral-chaos alignments play more than just a plot-related role in this game. Along with your own alignment, every demon you encounter falls somewhere on this spectrum, to the point that some will outright refuse to talk to you (just like real life). It adds an interesting twist to the usual team building and weakness exploitation of SMT, even if it's really only an extra step to consider.
After much deliberation, despite being pretty fond of first-person dungeon crawlers, I may lowkey hate this game. Out of all the SMT games I've played, I think the labyrinth gimmicks are the most obnoxious they've ever been in this game. I can turn a blind eye to funny nonsense like pitfall traps or floor that damages you. Where I draw the line is when the game asks me to navigate chunks of areas in complete darkness, leaving the map unmarked the whole way. Then you demand I navigate conveyor belt mazes under complete darkness. Then you finally give me an upgrade that lets me see in these dark areas, and immediately invalidate it with a different type of darkness in the next area! Followed by a gigantic unmarked teleporter maze! Etrian Odyssey came out two years before Strange Journey, and that game's whole gimmick is drawing your own map so you know where everything is! Why does the ATLUS game where you wear hi-tech future armor not let you manually edit the map?!? Strange Journey has all these cool mechanics that are wasted on navigation that feels tailor-made to annoy you.
All Shin Megami Tensei games center around a clashing of ideals, "law vs. chaos", that sort of thing. I think it's truly poetic that for one of the stronger, more character-driven plots in an SMT game, they contrasted it with some of my least favorite gameplay to grace the franchise. How's that for law vs. chaos?