Finished Strange Journey. I'd give it probably a high 7 or low 8 out of 10. Was expecting more out of it. I ended up going the neutral route in the end.
Anyways, to review the game's elements:
>Gameplay
Its alright, The dungeon crawling aspect was annoying, not really my thing. It turned into a slog. Wasn't really difficult so much as tedious and time-consuming. The amount of traps that existed purely to troll you and waste your time was really irritating. (See: traps that warp you to the farthest point away, or drop you down to the longest walk back in a lower level) The worst one was the Eridanus teleporter maze. Everything else was largely manageable, just annoying. Second worst was probably Delphinus's darkroom conveyer belt maze but it didn't come close to the first one. I think I just don't really care for first-person dungeon crawling. I'm more a fan of top-down roguelite dungeon crawling like PMD Explorers, or isometric stuff like Diablo 1. I haven't seen a first-person dungeon crawling game that has interested me like those kinds of games yet.
The actual combat was fun enough, as expected of an SMT game. Fusing demons, becoming more powerful, uncovering higher tiers of skills in your squad, its a satisfying gameplay loop. The final boss was hell and took way too long for me, but finally beating her after all that grueling effort was such a satisfying moment. Aside from the final boss, and those few occasional difficulty spike bosses, it was pretty easy goings.
The final boss was a ridiculous difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. I only remember about 3-4 difficult bosses in the game, but nothing really compared to the final boss which was insane. I had to grind for a bit and fuse a new demon for it, and even then it was extremely hard. One of my failed attempts involved me using nearly all of my healing items I saved up throughout the entire game (As in, over 100+ items used), and I still lost because I failed to do enough damage to the boss that it couldn't just heal up. Figuring out a solution and actually overcoming it was great though. I felt I made some pretty damn strong demons, was a good feeling.
>Story and Character Writing
The premise and some of the ideas were interesting, but ultimately leave a lot to be desired with its execution. So many holes, threads and other things that didn't really go anywhere, or led to something unsatisfying in the end. It also just felt lacking in terms of content, it needed more period, it feels only a bit more than barebones, like they planned out some interesting scenarios, but didn't think much else through beyond those to properly connect them together.
Some examples:
Louisa Ferre having almost no real impact on the story from what I saw.
Mastema being a very vague entity whose motives you apparently only find out in the Chaos route, and it turns out to be lame as fuck.
The Three Wise Men kinda just being... there, I guess?
Jack's squad was a very interesting element to add to the Schwartzwelt, but once their plot thread is over, it feels like a "whatever" kind of thing.
Jimenez and Zelenin were interesting, but just needed more with them, period.
It was hard to feel any connection with Arthur, which is a shame since he's ostensibly the neutral route guy.
Commander Gore just felt like kind of a bad joke by the developers, honestly. Guy started out as some incredible soldier and turns into a clown who doesn't really know where he's going by the end of the game
The game also beats you over the head with the whole "humans bad" thing in the dungeon design and by telling you over and over, but they never really show you why or how humanity was actually bad in the world, its kind of an abstract "Oh isn't this part of humans bad", but when its violent demons who want to kill you telling you this, why the fuck should you listen? The intro at the beginning of the game is hardly enough, you don't actually know how good/bad the world is. A few newsreels doesn't really tell the story of humanity. Plus demons complaining about humanity while simultaneously relying on them, its kinda like "eh". Definitely takes some of the bite out of the story.
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