bitch. I don't think I was allowed to put that in the thread title.

I recently bought a 3DS for a weeklong trip, and the first game I bought for it was Shin Megami Tensei IV, because it was $20 and had great reviews. I'll be honest, as far as my trip went, SMT did the job just fine. I'll admit that the premise is interesting and the Pokemon gotta collect em all element is always addictive. In fact I stuck with SMT IV for over 30 hours before, just now, I decided it was taking more away from me than it was giving back.

Here are my issues:

• Figuring out where to go is pretty difficult when the map they give you doesn't have any names of places on it, and if you don't use a walkthrough and just wander around a lot, you'll have to fight nonstop
• Encounters that can fuck your team up hardcore if they get the first move or even if you fail to kill them in one turn (likely to happen if you've never seen an enemy before), because the game rewards exploiting weaknesses so strongly which
• Sends you to a game over screen, but wait, you don't just get to hit reload your last save, instead you have to sit through this stupid sequence at the end of which Charon offers to send you back for an exorbitant amount of money, an offer no one in their right mind would take unless they hadn't saved in like an hour because
• If you think money's hard to come by to begin with, see how it feels when you run into the enemy that steals half of your Macca with no chance to recover it.

So, in summary, SMT IV is grindy, opaque, and overtly unfair. SMT IV is a son of a bitch. Why did people rate the game so highly? I've played a lot of Japanese turn-based RPGs, but never one that sent me to the loading screen just for failing to hit the pre-emptive strike on a random battle. Is it just such a niche series that no one plays it who doesn't know what they're getting into?

I haven't deleted the game yet, so if you think you can talk me off the ledge, I'd love to hear your reasoning.

It only really felt "unfair" for the first few hours, when you are at a pretty big disadvantage compared to the enemies. Once you get into the "real" world you have a lot more options at your disposal to make things easier, between apps, various interchangeable equipment, and relatively easy demon fusion. I've actually seen a number of people claim the game is way too easy, which I'm not sure I agree with, but I didn't find the game overly punishing by the latter half either.

It's been awhile since I played it though, so I don't have much explicit advice to give. Other than the fact that people often underestimate the value of demon conversations for tactical purposes in combat. For example, if you have the enemy demon in your party you can completely avoid fighting them if you try to negotiate with them, and sometimes get free items or healing too. It's a great way to reliably avoid obnoxious enemies like those that steal macca.

I stopped having trouble with money when I started selling shit. Also, talk to demons! Also, buffs and debuffs are super fucking important! I'd say more but I'm on a phone.

The last few hours of this game are actually really easy. It basically has a reverse difficulty curve.

It's been a while since I played, but can't you just mash A to make Charon cutscene pass in like two seconds?

@believer258: Yeah, buff and debuffs often get overlooked thanks to other RPGs, but they are ridiculously good in SMT. Arguably mandatory to have access to at least a few.

@zeik: @veektarius: As someone who has played the other games in this series (the mainline games, as well as a few of the offshoots) this one is definitely the easiest, because there are a lot of quality of life changes that the older games didn't have.

With that out of the way, yes, elemental affinities are essentially the backbone to the combat system, learn it or get rekt as some would say. SMT has always been grindy, but once you have a team of demons you've personally fused, you can easily beat down random encounters like you wouldn't believe, Bosses will always test you, unless you find the cheese strats (I recommend you don't cheese until your second play-through). SMT is also not unfair, much like Souls, the game kinda asks you to not rush through and learn each system at their pace, and figure out stuff on your own when possible.

Later on, you'll be immune to Macca stealing and some other "cheap" tactics that the demons use. Always have an A-team and a B-team of demons, along with spares you use to fuse. With higher agility demons in your team, you'll be getting pre-emptive strikes so frequently, you'll forget to count how many battles you end up hitting. Map-wise, you'll learn how to navigate it as you play, every SMT game has been like that.

Is this your first SMT game?

They can seem really hard at first but once you've played through a few of them you'll start to pick up on the nuances of the gameplay and things will start to look a lot easier.

@subliminalkitteh: I've played practically SMT game out there myself, and it is probably fair to see it is the most user friendly of any of them (at least of the mainline SMT games), but they all have some pretty abuseable elements to them that let you breeze through a lot of it. Nocturne had a very similar inverse difficulty curve, where it got way easier in the latter half of the game.

I'll be honest, I never got past the opening hours of SMT IV either, but from what I understand it becomes a lot more manageable after the rather brutal opening.

The first hour or two are pretty brutal, but after getting to the meat of the game it's pretty easy. If you want a game that stays hard and only gets harder, try SMT3. For real.

I wanted to like SMT IV yet I never managed to enjoy playing it. At least in my case the fact that it was hard at first didn't effect me in a negative way. The combat was okay but I just couldn't care about any of the characters. Or the story it was trying to tell. At least it had a ending that fit my view of the world.

SMT3 gets pretty easy too though. Makatora + Mana Walk = Infinite MP. Focus + Freikugel = everything dies. That's also the game with most heavily abuseable buffs and debuffs in general. The main reason it's "harder" is that it's so easy to fuck yourself over if you don't know what to do.

@veektarius: This sounds a lot like the complaints I had of Persona 4 before I got used to the way it did things. I've found Atlus games like to throw medium level difficulty at you right outta the gate, because I guess they figure if you can survive the first few hours, you've got enough mettle for the rest.

That said, I've never played any core SMT games, and I've heard they're a good deal harder than their Persona offshoots. I'd say if you haven't reached a peace with it by the end of the second "main" dungeon - and it sounds like you're way past that - it's time to turn in. Unless you're one for hate-plays. That's usually enough time for the difficulty to balance or for you to get the hang of it.

That game-over thing pisses me off just reading it. Games that have you sit through obnoxiously long death sequences only so you can then sit through a loading screen can blow me.

Man I keep wanting to get back into that game but I was so stuck last time I played and that was months ago. So how could I ever get back into it now.

Its the only 3DS game I own physically.

This thread is making me think I should charge my 3ds cause its been dead for a couple months and I haven't bothered to plug it in.

It's not that I don't understand the systems, per se. As I said, I've been playing a long time at this point. But let me lay out the scenario that made me write this post just as a for example, and you tell me how an expert handles this in such a way that it becomes trivial.

I enter the finals for the hunter tournament, which is, I dunno, 3 or 4 battles with enemies for whom you don't know the elemental weaknesses. First fight I get first strike, so I throw down a little defensive magic, maybe a reflect, poke a little to try and identify weaknesses. I survive the enemy turn unscathed thanks to the reflect and manage to grind my way through the rest of the fight with no casualties.

Wave 2, the enemy gets first strike. Two of his daemons happen to have a gun attack that affects all, and I happen to have a gun-weak daemon deployed. That Daemon gets killed by his weakness, then the enemy gets two extra moves in which they wipe out another of my Daemons as well. I only have two moves when it rolls around to my first turn - I use one to cast Bad Company and replenish the field, and I use my other turn to try and guess the enemies' weakness. I guess wrong. Enemy's turn. They still have four turns and this time wipe out my hero. At this point I'm hosed.

What did I do here that I shouldn't have?

@riostarwind

You're right, the story really doesn't seem like it's worth sticking around for. It's mostly the daemon collecting mechanic that holds my interest.

That's an aspect of SMT games that's existed since the first games. The game can simply fuck you over without warning at spots. Is it fair? Not completely. That said, it rarely happens in such the unavoidable way that you just described either.

Generally, prioritizing ways to fill in the weak points on your demons is enough to ward off such instant deaths 90% of the time.

(There is no excusing that incredibly long and unskipable death scene though.)

I mean, yes, pretty much any well-regarded notoriously difficult RPG can be made into a cakewalk if you go into it knowing exactly what to do (see: The people who think Dark Souls is easy after beating NG++++++++), but the first SMT game any give person plays is going to be pretty hard for that person.

Still, I play far fewer of these games than I did when I was running through Nocturne and Persona 3 and 4 and SMTIV and Digital Devil Saga - they all build off of Nocturne's battle system and once you really have a good understanding of that, then you're probably not going to have as much of a hard time with the rest of them. Digital Devil Saga is the last one I played and I got to the final dungeon way underleveled, I had no problems with anything that happened before that.

I played Persona 4 Golden at Hard, or whatever the difficulty right above normal is called, and that felt pretty comparable to SMT Nocturne. P4G has a smoother difficulty curve than Nocturne, though.

I would have probably saved first, then gone into that tournament expecting to die. Then I would have put together the best party I could and tried again. It's kinda like how in Dark Souls, you should always go through a fog door expecting to die to a boss.

Generally, I try to carry around a party that has a really good mix of skills without many weaknesses - try to be as weak to as few things as possible. Never use a demon that's weak to Hama or Mudo skills, and for some reason being weak to gun skills pretty much means you're going to die if hit with a gun. Whenever I come across a new demon, I usually hit it with every kind of skill - Gun, Agi, Bufu, etc. - just to see what it's weak to and, once you hit its weakness, you'll always be able to check on that particular demon's weakness.

I don't think you should delete it yet, but I do think you should give it a break for a day or two and come back to it later. Don't stick around for the story, though, it's full of metaphysical bullshit.

Plenty of RPGs have systems based on chance. Any turn based RPG will have a "miss" or "critical hit" mechanic, for example. It's what spices things up. It's not unfair, it's just challenging.

I found SMTIV to be one of the easier of the SMT games besides Persona.