Megaten megathread

rejj

matt How are you finding the encounter rate?

I’ve only just started it myself, wandering through the very first area really. As far as I can tell, there is an icon that changes colour, and once it goes all the way red you will have an encounter.

Or perhaps it is weighing the odds, and the more red it is the more likely you are? I’m not entirely sure. It has seemed somewhat frequent so far, but I’ll at least try a bit more. I generally dislike random encounters also, I want to be able to flop about and run around and look in every corner and waste my time, and random encounters seem to always be a force pushing against that

matt

rejj I want to be able to flop about and run around and look in every corner and waste my time

Yeah! Very much this.

Though it does sound a lot like Etrian Odyssey’s random battle indicator. Figures hah.

fugazi57

I’m 12 hours into SMT 3 and oh boyyyy am I loving it! been a while since a game engrossed me so much! i guess i really like games that stress me out and where the world you inhabit is absolutely shitty and oppressive?? maybe that is cathartic for me because i live in brazil????

anyway i like how the oppressiveness translate into the game’s mechanics IE the battles are hard as shit (but just hard enough so you will die once and then have it pretty much figured out what you have to do next. that owns).

prior to that I tried playing persona 3 fes. I loved it but it was too grindy for me and although i plan to go back and power through to the end some day, I gotta say that SMT3’s dungeon variety just makes it a lot more attractive to me. The fact that SMT3 also has an area specially for grinding is amazing as well, you can level up super fast and I wonder why they didn’t add that to persona 3. Was that in the original release btw? I think the area is called Place Where The Demi-Fiend Was Born or something.

as for the remaster, I really don’t care about the very occasional fps chuckle. i find the compressed 3×4 cutscenes charming because i like old and crusty stuff. i also sincerely dig the lofi aspect of the compressed audio during battles. sounds like a hardcore punk tape you bought at a sweaty venue after a concert

Syzygy

That area was added to the remake. Though Nocturne’s combat is tuned well enough that you don’t need to grind if you have a good party comp.

fugazi57

Syzygy aaah, i see. glad I waited for the remake then. you kindaa have to grind to go against matador I think?? i feel like without a character or two with media and a couple of buffsI wouldn’t have been able to do it, and I had to grind a bit over there to get the party I wanted (which worked out beautifully, it was very satisfying haha)

Syzygy

you kindaa have to grind to go against matador I think??

Definitely not

a couple of buffs

Yeah, buffs / debuffs / status effects are important in Nocturne, Press Turn is only so good because you need to consider non-damaging turns.

fugazi57

Syzygy Definitely not

yeah i just don’t have that IQ level lol. I checked a guide after killing him to see how people usually do it and felt smart cause they said you should get to level 18 but now i just feel stupid haha

matt

SMT4 update: Just want say, the music in this game rules.

sabertoothalex

matt yeah that’s a good ass video game all around if I’ve ever seen one

matt

I’ve been scouring the net, but unable to find anything. Anyone seen/heard any info on dual audio for SMT5?

Syzygy

It’s not something I would expect them to announce this far ahead but all Atlus games of recent years have had it. The Japanese rights-holders who were generally behind its removal in PS2~ era have learned it’s a selling feature, and better region locking stops Japanese customers from importing the cheaper western release (P4A was one of the only region-locked PS3 discs, for example).

matt

Syzygy Yeah I figure it will have dual audio based on releases like P5R, P5S, SMT3HD, P4G PC. Fingers crossed.

2501

I think I overprepared for Matador based on his reputation but also it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize where the Talk and Item commands were tucked away on the menu so I then went back to catch/fuse up some demons to actually have a decent team. All you really need against Matador are one or two demons who block/drain Wind element attacks (of which several should be available through fusion by that point) and maybe someone with Sukunda/Sukukaja to counteract the hit/evasion buff he starts off with.

The game’s tutorials and interface do not explain these things tremendously well so I can only imagine how forbidding the game would seem if I hadn’t already invested several hundred hours learning the battle system fundamentals in Strange Journey/IV!! Anyway, now that I have figured out how to do all the things one expects to do in a SMT in this game it has of course sunk its hooks deep into me in the familiar way and I have already lost sleep this week staying up way too late playing it lmao. It is definitely equal to or better than IV, which was already my favorite game in this series!! (I think it does some things better and other things less-better by comparison.)

Such a cool/eerie setting. Love the animation and entire concept of the Manikins. I think I was correct in my intuition that large amounts of the game’s setting were determined by messing around with PS2 polygon models and going “what could we do with this that was never possible before?”

wickedcestus

I also had the problem of not being able to find Talk on the menu. I assumed for a while that it was going to be a skill I would unlock at a certain level, but then started to doubt myself once a few hours had passed since I met the NPCs who introduced it. felt really dumb when I found it

2501

wickedcestus Yup this was my exact experience. Especially since some features that are available from the start in other entries like the Demon Compendium really are locked away. Not the finest moment for this game’s UI! Oh well.

Syzygy

I can concede on the “Talk” menu placement, but I view the lack of forced tutorializing as nothing but a positive. The descriptions of buffs / debuffs are straightforward “increases defense” and the stat screens have “null: fire, weak: ice”, etc., in addition to the feedback from Press Turn. If their use doesn’t follow naturally it’s because a lot of other RPGs include these systems as unimportant things you can ignore, and that’s not really Nocturne’s fault.

2501

Syzygy Surely you’ll admit that the visually compact elemental strengths/weaknesses chart and attack color-coding introduced in subsequent games was an out-and-out improvement to the player’s ability to efficiently “grok” that vital info. It’s less of an issue when you already know how all the fundamentals work from playing other SMT games/spinoffs - and at that point the game’s hands-off approach becomes a thrill - but I can easily imagine someone playing this as their entry point to the series and getting bewildered because they don’t grasp the full range of options available to them, particularly at the early point when the game throws Matador at you.

Syzygy

2501
Not really! I think icons are a decrease in legibility from plain language and find nothing wrong with asking the player to observe how weak points work during the dungeon and a half before Matador. Nocturne was everyone’s introduction to the fundamentals, because it created modern SMT.

sabertoothalex

A lot of stuff is explained in more detail in the game’s manual. Being a PS2 game it would have been pretty common to be in the habit of checking the manual when you first bought the game, or referencing it as you needed to while playing. This is obviously not something that really exists anymore and exceptionally heavy in-game tutorialization has replaced them.

2501

I feel like sixth gen/2003 was precisely around the period where the “check the manual” mindset was really starting to phase out, and in fact I wonder if player confusion about Nocturne (particularly overseas players) wasn’t a specific contributing factor to subsequent Atlus games going increasingly out of their way to slam the basics into players’ heads. But yeah, that is a valid point.

sabertoothalex

I don’t think overseas reaction to Nocturne made a single iota of difference to how 2003 Atlus was building their games to be honest.

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