My username stands for "Megami Tensei Fake Fan" and I have technically never beaten this game.
I'm an arcade gamer at heart. I play until I get bored, then the next time I decide to give it another go I delete the save file and start over. So the furthest I've made it was the final dungeon. This suggests two questions: (1) why did I get bored? (2) why did it take so long?
I got bored because the combat system is terrible. If you went to the drawing board and tried to come up with a design where you would never be encouraged to adapt to anything mid-battle, where success or failure was determined solely by comparing your party setup to the enemy's, you'd end up with Nocturne's "Press Turn" system. Within a battle, everything is built on positive feedback loops: if you use the right attack, you get to use another for free; if the enemy has two turns and misses its first attack, it doesn't get a second.
But the game is fun because of the resource constraints this imposes. You only get a few party members, and they need to be equipped with the right skills to handle every battle as cleanly as that, or else you'll quickly Game Over. This turns out to be harder than it sounds. Only a "bad" combat system with so few ways of working around a problem could gatekeep the player into actually engaging with this.
There is a story to go along with this. It's written with more care, compassion and self-seriousness than I'm used to in video game stories. This disarms me to the point that I work through whole essays' worth of thoughts before I realize it's just a simplistic Christian fable about rejecting temptation and embracing the gift of free will.
An endnote/desperate plea: PLAY THIS GAME ON THE "HARD" DIFFICULTY, NOT "NORMAL". The international release was balanced around this setting, which matters more than usual because this game is all about its mechanical rigor. I suppose this would be fine if Normal were insufficiently easy, but as it stands it never lets you experience the intricacies. You'll get some extra Games Over on Hard, but we all do. It's a sign that you're playing the game, not that you're bad at it.
I'm an arcade gamer at heart. I play until I get bored, then the next time I decide to give it another go I delete the save file and start over. So the furthest I've made it was the final dungeon. This suggests two questions: (1) why did I get bored? (2) why did it take so long?
I got bored because the combat system is terrible. If you went to the drawing board and tried to come up with a design where you would never be encouraged to adapt to anything mid-battle, where success or failure was determined solely by comparing your party setup to the enemy's, you'd end up with Nocturne's "Press Turn" system. Within a battle, everything is built on positive feedback loops: if you use the right attack, you get to use another for free; if the enemy has two turns and misses its first attack, it doesn't get a second.
But the game is fun because of the resource constraints this imposes. You only get a few party members, and they need to be equipped with the right skills to handle every battle as cleanly as that, or else you'll quickly Game Over. This turns out to be harder than it sounds. Only a "bad" combat system with so few ways of working around a problem could gatekeep the player into actually engaging with this.
There is a story to go along with this. It's written with more care, compassion and self-seriousness than I'm used to in video game stories. This disarms me to the point that I work through whole essays' worth of thoughts before I realize it's just a simplistic Christian fable about rejecting temptation and embracing the gift of free will.
An endnote/desperate plea: PLAY THIS GAME ON THE "HARD" DIFFICULTY, NOT "NORMAL". The international release was balanced around this setting, which matters more than usual because this game is all about its mechanical rigor. I suppose this would be fine if Normal were insufficiently easy, but as it stands it never lets you experience the intricacies. You'll get some extra Games Over on Hard, but we all do. It's a sign that you're playing the game, not that you're bad at it.