This town has been taken over, too. By countless, faceless ghosts. ▋

The Silver Case at its surface is a story of what can happen when you try to kill your past. Can you kill the past? Play the games and find out, but it is an indisputable fact that attempting to do so will lead you into strange directions, which is what lies beneath the surface. More likely than not your past will end up changing you. Consumed by the past. Consumed by the darkness. This is why it has to be killed, or else it kills you.

The 25th Ward is a twist in perspectives of how the past is tackled by different people. Some face it head on, some have to find it, some are so consumed by it that they are unaware of what it truly is. These are Matchmaker, Placebo, and Correctness respectively (at least that’s how i interpreted it). Just like the original game, all of the storylines bounce off one another while still filling in each other’s story gaps in a focused on-the-edge-of-your-seat way.

I’m gonna be real with y’all I have almost no fucking idea what to write next. I broke up my play sessions to give myself time to absorb the story. I spent two days after finishing it contemplating what the hell I was even going to write, and now I’m here. Sitting alone in my living room listening to Phantogram’s Eyelid Movies in somber over a video game. I still don’t know what to say. Video games have impacted me heavily in the past but none as strangely and uniquely as the Kill the Past series so far. The 25th Ward is the perfect embodiment of Suda’s expression in the industry and how far he can go. A complexity of ideas and themes intertwined to articulate, at its core, human ideologies. It’s all paced so well that when I reached the end I thought, “That’s the end?” but not necessarily in a negative way at all. Every point the game strove to get across was proven effectively, I was just a bit sad to see one of my favorite video game stories come to a close. I wanted more because it was so amazing. Admittedly I also wanted more time to figure out what the fuck had happened for the last 13~ hours lol. I wish I could go more in depth but if I did I would probably be spouting nonsense regarding spoilers and whatnot.

What I CAN explain though is the expertly arranged presentation and soundtrack. The boxed-in contemporary style of the original game is modernized and accentuated to an extreme. This could possibly be my favorite visual style of any video game. Background elements are now more distinctly interesting and support the themes of the current chapter even better. The color palettes used are also a lot more colorful which I’m absolutely down for. The artists for each of the storylines did spectacularly; I especially love the art style used for Correctness with its black and white pastel tones accompanied by infrequent splashes of color to make everything pop. Everything is just a marvel to look at. The typewriter sound is unchanged just the way I like it. I find it to be an insanely satisfying sound that’s just the cherry on top of everything else the game has to offer. The soundtrack is exactly what I love in electronic music and it's incredibly fitting. Love beat bumpin’ shit like the classic Metropolitan Edge and groovy Galaxy Glitch Groove by Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame, while also vibing hard with Sandalwood and DRIFT. Every track hits me in the feels in incomparable ways. All of this is in tandem with one another becomes, what I feel to be, an unparalleled artistic composition in gaming.

The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is a wildly intense game that will continue to float around my brain for a long time. If you couldn’t tell already, this is everything I loved about the original Silver case and more. There’s honestly nothing I would change about it. Every character is identifiable and the writing stays consistently engaging throughout. Love Jabroni, love Tokio (as usual), love Osato (he’s a little bit of a quirked up white boy). This is a video game for me. It doesn’t conform to industry standards and does its own thing in an astounding manner.

I wish a great rain would fall on this town. And that everything would melt in the rain and be washed away. To the bottom of the ocean. ▋

I just do not understand how this game gets so highly praised. Whether it's group hype or fan loyalty, neither would distract me from genuinely believing this is one of the worst games I've played of all time. It does not help that the only other MT game I beat was Devil Survivor, which I do not favour either.

I was wanting to write a full review at some point, but it's all so tiring. There is no point. The game started off compelling at first, and just became a generic JRPG adventure the rest of the way with horrible systems in place and an entirely immemorable, meaningless journey - in which the final section of the route I was on was the shortest bit, offering me no meaning to the finality of the story I chose. I think nothing, I feel nothing, and I do not like this nothing.
I do not like getting stuck in places for a long time with very little clear navigation or hints at where I must go, all within the same areas. I do not like (personally) spending hours in menus cherry-picking demons for very marginal gain. I do not like the illusion of side quests, equipment, and such JRPG extras if they are practically worthless. I do not like being introduced to characters only to find them less relevant in length to my last night's dinner and having less than the amount of dimensions there are to Terraria. I do not like dealing with battles every coming moment where I must examine tight surroundings, I do not like dungeons that look the same, I do not like mazes, I do not like repetitive music, and most of all, I hate it when games pretend that you're immersed.

SMTIV's story - not gameplay - moves around at a "rapid" jumpy pace, so I can barely remember the several events that happen, all blurring together. None of these beats are connected in the grand scheme of things, and they all feel like minor sidequests. Every time I ended up thinking an interesting segment would occur, I would be let down, usually just to find some boringly morbid result such as death (wow!). The writing is bland and your enemies are no better at not sounding like pushovers who looked in the Anime Quote Dictionary. There is so much you can do to offer up an atmosphere that SMTIV tries to give you only for the game mechanics and generally jank RPG nature to screw things over, once again thanks to encounters, poison, and some stupid events.

Before the final battle's terminal in my route you encounter a strange man there who is simply silly for the sake of being silly. How is he there? What is his purpose? Did I miss it somewhere? For my experience, there is no meaning behind it, like many other events in the game, characters that come and drop like nothing. Likewise there is no meaning to you, the player - it's a journey that pushes you along without feeling like you're a real part of it, and eventually I just couldn't give a damn about any of the other characters or whatever happens to the story at that point. There is no interesting backstory. There is no thrilling conclusion that awards my patience and hard work trying to sift through the game's difficulty (attributed to many resets). A short credits scene and a tiny generic epilogue... There is just... no meaning. To me it seems that fans try to pass this off as deep and intelligent, but maybe that's a special kind of intelligent. Maybe I didn't see all the endings and see everything there is to see, but I don't see the worth in replaying the entire game with pacing that's either a slog in the overworld, or with rocket-tag battles that might end your long playing session simply due to the fact that random crits or OHK moves sweep your team like dice rolls that sum up to "should've had a perfect team for the job" when part of the gameplay is trial-and-erroring weaknesses and strengths. I don't see what strategy there is aside from min-maxing and spamming de/buffs. It entirely works once you have access to all these skills, but it takes a while to get there in which the rest of the game feels like a JRPG snowball.

I already wrote too much but I just have nothing really good to say. Maybe two or three tracks are good with the other majority getting on my nerves for being too short and constantly tempting to stay in this retro, synth style that just doesn't match with the rest of the gloomy surroundings. Not to say it's awful, just very, very droning and repetitive and not music that I can "enjoy". I mention gloomy, and yes, some of the tracks feel like downers, but for this reason I don't like to passively listen to them. In other regards, Yume 2kki, for example, is a series of experiences that can make you feel, ponder, and think about things, all with most of them not being remotely entangled with each other, which is thanks to each section clearly having an identity, a place in its setting. SMTIV tries to etch together something, but it feels like a clustershit of the different ideas of 100 people who just found out about religion or theology but don't have anything to add to it. There's clearly a somewhat consistent theme, but the building blocks are made of play-dough, not bricks. I do not have any immersion to the characters, attachments to the world, and I certainly have not heard of any counterpoints or explanations for why the game itself is actually good on an analytical level. I don't claim my thoughts are very in-depth either, but that's because there's a lack to talk about for me.

So, that said, I have the unpopular opinion - thing is, though, I always used to bash Persona fans too despite not playing either series, but I spoke way too soon. It could be that both series suck after all and that Atlus should return to the Trauma series - despite that, I am incredibly certain Persona 4 is tons more interesting to look at, listen to, and probably follow along than whatever the hell you call SMTIV (which I am never going to follow up on for the other endings).
Play a real peersohna game, I guess.

MUCH better than what I was expecting. Extra was half funny (Fucking initial d guy) half boring (Fucking lacrosse) and I can't quite say I liked it. 'Dramatical' scenes aren't for me.

Unlimited on the other hand was fun. The whole military training thing didn't bore me at all and was quite easy to read. Also It made me want to read Alternative asap.

Yeah for zero expectations they weren't "roadblock" or "filler" but I need to read Alternative before making assumptions