The tagline for Ridley Scott’s Alien, ‘In space, no one can hear you scream,’ beyond being an indicator of what the movie is about (it’s a horror movie! in space!), also works as an ethos statement for the general genre of sci-fi horror. Having gone through… quite a bit of works in that vein over the past few months, a lot of what the genre tries to evoke is a sense of… wonder fueled by human technological advancement versus a fear of the unknown: humanity breaking through the frontier into a brave new world, only to find something far, far beyond comprehension on the other side — with themes of trying to understand the core of humanity as it faces against an existential threat. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is an ode to the sci-fi horror films of the 80s, particularly the works of John Carpenter, and… while it does harken to a lot of familiar tropes from its parent series — the end of the world, the fabled war between the forces of God against their demonic brethren, and a featureless player-insert choosing just how humanity continues on — blends these ideas with those proliferated in sci-fi horror in a way that feels… honestly seamless in how it’s portrayed, a change in tone and presentation that doesn’t sacrifice any of the core ideals that define what Shin Megami Tensei is about.
The story is set in some approximation of the present or the near future. Humanity is booming with unchecked prosperity when one day, a black-hole-esque growth comes out of the south pole and starts rapidly spreading across the surface of the Earth. With all attempts to research or halt it failing, the United Nations decides that they’re actually going to do something about the apocalyptic threat (the most sci-fi thing about this tbh) and send four teams into what they dub ‘The Schwarzwelt,’ each equipped with the most advanced technology humanity can offer. What they find, upon delving in, is a world of demons based on mythology, built off of humanity’s failings and fashioned after their sins. Three of the four teams are annihilated upon attempting to enter. The last — a ship called the Red Sprite — now faces impossible odds, having to push further and further into the Schwarzwelt, commune and battle with the angels and demons inside, and hope, maybe, that there’s a chance for humanity lying at the end of it.
It’s… a simple plot — one that almost feels episodic, in ways, as you solve problems, then find more problems to solve, then solve them, then find more problems — but it works, which is a lot of the game’s ethos with its writing. The crewmates of the Red Sprite… are mostly just one or two personality traits given a face and a name, but they’re written pretty well for that: they’re fun and likable and I always made sure to talk to all of them while I was on the ship just to see if their dialogue updated. What happens outside of the ship… the game doesn’t really hold back. It conveys the feeling of fighting the hopeless fight really well. Every single mission is this relentless push deeper and deeper into the Schwarzwelt, with no guarantee that you’ll reach your goal or make it back. A good amount of the strike team with you are basically red shirts — even if they get names there’s no guarantee whether they’ll make it through or become a demonstration for how dangerous the next area is. A good amount of the time you don’t even get the privilege of trying to advance your goals: some unprecedented disaster will happen to the crew and it’s up to you to prevent total wipeout. There are characters you meet who pretty obviously don’t have your best interests at heart, but you’ve got no option but to go along with them because you don’t have other options to go with. Throughout the game, you don’t even know whether going through the Schwarzwelt will actually save the Earth — your only choice is to try to progress and persevere and try and see if there truly is a way out. It’s simple (and this writeup excises some of the more spoilery things that happen) but it’s effective, and really works to make you feel the odds you’re going against on this mission.
Gameplay is kind of like… the edgy adult Pokemon game all those nerds on Reddit could only dream of. At its core, it's a monster collection RPG: the demons you fight are also the party members you recruit, whether you get them from a conversation minigame or by fusing other demons together. Unlike Pokemon, however, you can’t keep the same team through the whole game — demons can’t learn skills bar certain circumstances, and the exp requirements often make trying to level up your demons seriously grindy past their first few, requiring you to constantly iterate and fuse new demons to keep up with the arms race of the level curve. Shaking up your team is made more worth it by D-Sources — items you get via using a demon enough that lets you add its skills to any one demon you fuse in the future. There are also special fusions you can perform to get bosses or powerful demons unavailable regularly, which creates a fun, if sometimes drudgey hunt for whatever ingredients you need, made worth it by how strong and customisable these demons tend to be at the time you get them.
Team composition is consistently important, if less because of how specific encounters require specific strategies and more because of the game’s type chart. Each demon has its own elemental weaknesses and resistances, and in addition has its own alignment, one out of Law, Neutral, or Chaos. Should you find out what the given weakness of a demon is, and hit it, all demons matching your alignment will also strike it for more damage than they’d all do individually. This creates a challenge in team-building: both to create a crew that covers all elemental bases, but also to keep in mind alignments so that every demon on your team can take advantage of these co-op attacks. It’s simple — and from what I understand a lot more so than most other SMT games — but it's the right kind of grindy: addictive, but with enough depth and requirement for thought that it doesn’t feel shallow at all.
I also loved exploring the Schwarzwelt. It’s a first-person, grid-based set of dungeons, and ones that just seem to get larger and larger the more you explore them. By exploring — whether by progressing the story or by collecting materials off the ground — you gain these little ingredient materials called forma, and with forma you gain Sub-Apps, passive upgrades to yourself, little ways to alter your party, and, most importantly, ways to open gates, get past barriers, and allow you to explore even more of the Schwarzwelt. It almost feels like a metroidvania, in ways — upgrades you get allow you to access hidden parts of earlier areas, often containing their own challenges and giving rewards that… are either obsolete (whoops, should’ve come back here earlier) or give you something absolutely worth coming back for. Across the world, also, are sidequests you can seek out, encouraging you to explore more or do battle — either with tough opponents or tough restrictions. Your rewards are often material, and worth doing the quest for, but a lot of the virtue for me in doing them was just to enjoy the snippets of writing that go along with them — isolated episodes unrelated to the greater plot which often give the game an excuse to have some fun with its regular enemies and one-shot characters, in turn making the world of the Schwarzwelt feel so much more full.
I’d also like to shout out the way this rerelease handles its extra content. Oftentimes, when Atlus ports or updates one of their games, whatever new content is added is usually… contentious — Persona 4 Golden and Catherine Full Body, in particular, getting scrutiny for the way the new content and characters mesh/get in the way of the original narrative. Strange Journey, from what I understand, got that same criticism from gamers (for… some reason), which kind of surprises me because honestly the inclusion of a new dungeon in the Womb of Grief and the new endings felt totally smooth, mostly because of how it… doesn’t really overwrite the original game at all. The new dungeon, and the story content associated with it, is completely optional aside from when it’s initially shown to you (to the point where you can just ignore it and complete the game without touching it), but even beyond that… I honestly liked going through the new content?
Specifically, I kinda like how they used it as a way to iterate and address issues with the original 2009 release. I’m aware that there was pretty major criticism of the way the original release handled your alignment, and I like how the game addressed that with the new endings, both functioning as a continuation of the original game within the rerelease, and as a way to go for Law or Chaos without explicitly getting a bad ending. In addition, a lot of the extra sub-apps that you get from this dungeon seem to be quality-of-life improvements meant to help out with annoyances present in the original game: finding invisible floors or pitfalls, being able to find hidden doors without looking directly at them, etc. I… don’t think these should have been relegated to the bonus content — as that means someone who elects to skip it has a much rougher time with the main game — but it’s neat how this bonus content has been used to help address both story and gameplay concessions. Beyond that, though, even if you’ve never played the original, I still really enjoyed going through the Womb of Grief as a gameplay experience. It’s a dungeon that effectively expands with each new gadget you get in the main story and is host to some fun characters and some fairly tough challenges. I do question how much doing the Womb broke the balance of the main game — it seemed once I started I definitely stayed ahead of the curve level wise — buuuuuut that wasn’t particularly a dealbreaker for me, and I still felt the challenge was pretty appropriate even with the extra content added.
I do have complaints. While I was… surprisingly okay with how mean the game could get with its dungeon design I do wish it varied up in method more: the first teleporter maze was fun and cheeky, but I really started to get annoyed (and not in the intended way) when they appeared in basically every dungeon and eventually every dungeon floor afterwards. For as much emphasis as the game puts on mapping the Schwarzwelt the touchscreen features felt lacking compared to, say, Persona Q: I would’ve liked to draw my own map, especially when certain rooms made the auto-map not work. The previous two problems kind of get combined with some of the metroidvania elements — sometimes you’ll get an upgrade that solves a navigational issue but then… run into that exact same navigational issue and be told you need a better version of the upgrade you just got to get through this particular edition of the problem. Some of the final bosses straight up read your inputs in a way to limit your options and make entirely valid strategies arbitrarily invalid: I noticed one of them liked to open with a full-party magic blast, so I bred up something fast with a magic reflecting spell to get some extra damage in… and then every time I tried the boss decided that actually, they’d just use a different move (or even later, where I got hit with an immediate unavoidable OHKO move for daring to fight the boss a different way). I… okay maybe this one goes under ‘skill issue’ or ‘me problem’ but I also wish the game had an autosave? At multiple points I’d get unlucky, die… and then because I forgot to save manually I lost literal hours of progress in either sidequests or the main story, with getting back to the original point feeling like an utter slog. I get that this is a rerelease of a game in a particular design era for RPGs where autosave isn’t common, but… for a series like SMT where high difficulty and a low tolerance for mistakes, I do feel like actually dying should be more of a slap on the wrist than a major setback.
Other than that, though, I really enjoyed my time with Strange Journey! From a story that manages to blend the tropes of its parent series with that of a completely different genre, and with gameplay that’s… super addictive in how simple yet complex it is, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey really does a lot with a little, and, with the new content added in the Redux version, does a lot to improve upon the interesting, but flawed game it used to be. 8/10.
The story is set in some approximation of the present or the near future. Humanity is booming with unchecked prosperity when one day, a black-hole-esque growth comes out of the south pole and starts rapidly spreading across the surface of the Earth. With all attempts to research or halt it failing, the United Nations decides that they’re actually going to do something about the apocalyptic threat (the most sci-fi thing about this tbh) and send four teams into what they dub ‘The Schwarzwelt,’ each equipped with the most advanced technology humanity can offer. What they find, upon delving in, is a world of demons based on mythology, built off of humanity’s failings and fashioned after their sins. Three of the four teams are annihilated upon attempting to enter. The last — a ship called the Red Sprite — now faces impossible odds, having to push further and further into the Schwarzwelt, commune and battle with the angels and demons inside, and hope, maybe, that there’s a chance for humanity lying at the end of it.
It’s… a simple plot — one that almost feels episodic, in ways, as you solve problems, then find more problems to solve, then solve them, then find more problems — but it works, which is a lot of the game’s ethos with its writing. The crewmates of the Red Sprite… are mostly just one or two personality traits given a face and a name, but they’re written pretty well for that: they’re fun and likable and I always made sure to talk to all of them while I was on the ship just to see if their dialogue updated. What happens outside of the ship… the game doesn’t really hold back. It conveys the feeling of fighting the hopeless fight really well. Every single mission is this relentless push deeper and deeper into the Schwarzwelt, with no guarantee that you’ll reach your goal or make it back. A good amount of the strike team with you are basically red shirts — even if they get names there’s no guarantee whether they’ll make it through or become a demonstration for how dangerous the next area is. A good amount of the time you don’t even get the privilege of trying to advance your goals: some unprecedented disaster will happen to the crew and it’s up to you to prevent total wipeout. There are characters you meet who pretty obviously don’t have your best interests at heart, but you’ve got no option but to go along with them because you don’t have other options to go with. Throughout the game, you don’t even know whether going through the Schwarzwelt will actually save the Earth — your only choice is to try to progress and persevere and try and see if there truly is a way out. It’s simple (and this writeup excises some of the more spoilery things that happen) but it’s effective, and really works to make you feel the odds you’re going against on this mission.
Gameplay is kind of like… the edgy adult Pokemon game all those nerds on Reddit could only dream of. At its core, it's a monster collection RPG: the demons you fight are also the party members you recruit, whether you get them from a conversation minigame or by fusing other demons together. Unlike Pokemon, however, you can’t keep the same team through the whole game — demons can’t learn skills bar certain circumstances, and the exp requirements often make trying to level up your demons seriously grindy past their first few, requiring you to constantly iterate and fuse new demons to keep up with the arms race of the level curve. Shaking up your team is made more worth it by D-Sources — items you get via using a demon enough that lets you add its skills to any one demon you fuse in the future. There are also special fusions you can perform to get bosses or powerful demons unavailable regularly, which creates a fun, if sometimes drudgey hunt for whatever ingredients you need, made worth it by how strong and customisable these demons tend to be at the time you get them.
Team composition is consistently important, if less because of how specific encounters require specific strategies and more because of the game’s type chart. Each demon has its own elemental weaknesses and resistances, and in addition has its own alignment, one out of Law, Neutral, or Chaos. Should you find out what the given weakness of a demon is, and hit it, all demons matching your alignment will also strike it for more damage than they’d all do individually. This creates a challenge in team-building: both to create a crew that covers all elemental bases, but also to keep in mind alignments so that every demon on your team can take advantage of these co-op attacks. It’s simple — and from what I understand a lot more so than most other SMT games — but it's the right kind of grindy: addictive, but with enough depth and requirement for thought that it doesn’t feel shallow at all.
I also loved exploring the Schwarzwelt. It’s a first-person, grid-based set of dungeons, and ones that just seem to get larger and larger the more you explore them. By exploring — whether by progressing the story or by collecting materials off the ground — you gain these little ingredient materials called forma, and with forma you gain Sub-Apps, passive upgrades to yourself, little ways to alter your party, and, most importantly, ways to open gates, get past barriers, and allow you to explore even more of the Schwarzwelt. It almost feels like a metroidvania, in ways — upgrades you get allow you to access hidden parts of earlier areas, often containing their own challenges and giving rewards that… are either obsolete (whoops, should’ve come back here earlier) or give you something absolutely worth coming back for. Across the world, also, are sidequests you can seek out, encouraging you to explore more or do battle — either with tough opponents or tough restrictions. Your rewards are often material, and worth doing the quest for, but a lot of the virtue for me in doing them was just to enjoy the snippets of writing that go along with them — isolated episodes unrelated to the greater plot which often give the game an excuse to have some fun with its regular enemies and one-shot characters, in turn making the world of the Schwarzwelt feel so much more full.
I’d also like to shout out the way this rerelease handles its extra content. Oftentimes, when Atlus ports or updates one of their games, whatever new content is added is usually… contentious — Persona 4 Golden and Catherine Full Body, in particular, getting scrutiny for the way the new content and characters mesh/get in the way of the original narrative. Strange Journey, from what I understand, got that same criticism from gamers (for… some reason), which kind of surprises me because honestly the inclusion of a new dungeon in the Womb of Grief and the new endings felt totally smooth, mostly because of how it… doesn’t really overwrite the original game at all. The new dungeon, and the story content associated with it, is completely optional aside from when it’s initially shown to you (to the point where you can just ignore it and complete the game without touching it), but even beyond that… I honestly liked going through the new content?
Specifically, I kinda like how they used it as a way to iterate and address issues with the original 2009 release. I’m aware that there was pretty major criticism of the way the original release handled your alignment, and I like how the game addressed that with the new endings, both functioning as a continuation of the original game within the rerelease, and as a way to go for Law or Chaos without explicitly getting a bad ending. In addition, a lot of the extra sub-apps that you get from this dungeon seem to be quality-of-life improvements meant to help out with annoyances present in the original game: finding invisible floors or pitfalls, being able to find hidden doors without looking directly at them, etc. I… don’t think these should have been relegated to the bonus content — as that means someone who elects to skip it has a much rougher time with the main game — but it’s neat how this bonus content has been used to help address both story and gameplay concessions. Beyond that, though, even if you’ve never played the original, I still really enjoyed going through the Womb of Grief as a gameplay experience. It’s a dungeon that effectively expands with each new gadget you get in the main story and is host to some fun characters and some fairly tough challenges. I do question how much doing the Womb broke the balance of the main game — it seemed once I started I definitely stayed ahead of the curve level wise — buuuuuut that wasn’t particularly a dealbreaker for me, and I still felt the challenge was pretty appropriate even with the extra content added.
I do have complaints. While I was… surprisingly okay with how mean the game could get with its dungeon design I do wish it varied up in method more: the first teleporter maze was fun and cheeky, but I really started to get annoyed (and not in the intended way) when they appeared in basically every dungeon and eventually every dungeon floor afterwards. For as much emphasis as the game puts on mapping the Schwarzwelt the touchscreen features felt lacking compared to, say, Persona Q: I would’ve liked to draw my own map, especially when certain rooms made the auto-map not work. The previous two problems kind of get combined with some of the metroidvania elements — sometimes you’ll get an upgrade that solves a navigational issue but then… run into that exact same navigational issue and be told you need a better version of the upgrade you just got to get through this particular edition of the problem. Some of the final bosses straight up read your inputs in a way to limit your options and make entirely valid strategies arbitrarily invalid: I noticed one of them liked to open with a full-party magic blast, so I bred up something fast with a magic reflecting spell to get some extra damage in… and then every time I tried the boss decided that actually, they’d just use a different move (or even later, where I got hit with an immediate unavoidable OHKO move for daring to fight the boss a different way). I… okay maybe this one goes under ‘skill issue’ or ‘me problem’ but I also wish the game had an autosave? At multiple points I’d get unlucky, die… and then because I forgot to save manually I lost literal hours of progress in either sidequests or the main story, with getting back to the original point feeling like an utter slog. I get that this is a rerelease of a game in a particular design era for RPGs where autosave isn’t common, but… for a series like SMT where high difficulty and a low tolerance for mistakes, I do feel like actually dying should be more of a slap on the wrist than a major setback.
Other than that, though, I really enjoyed my time with Strange Journey! From a story that manages to blend the tropes of its parent series with that of a completely different genre, and with gameplay that’s… super addictive in how simple yet complex it is, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey really does a lot with a little, and, with the new content added in the Redux version, does a lot to improve upon the interesting, but flawed game it used to be. 8/10.