- Joined
- May 12, 2017
Remember to fuse Ame no Uzume. Trafuri is your best friend to escape the typically inescapable encounters that you don't want to grind out, and it just so happens that Ame no Uzume is a sort of "jack of all trades," so to speak in that she's a healer, buffer, debuffer, and escape artist all in one demon.
As far as the whole subject of difficulty is concerned, I'll spoiler-tag my thoughts on it.
"Hardest" is subjective. In many respects, Nocturne's hard mode is significantly more punishing than SMT4's Master mode or SMT4A's Apocalypse mode. However, the "difficulty" from Nocturne's hard mode just comes from two things alone: inescapable encounters and triple shop prices. Nocturne Hard mode is fucking cock and ball torture amped up to the logical extreme, don't get me wrong. However, there genuinely are objectively harder games in the franchise.
Perhaps it's the autism kicking in from my attempts at SMT1+2, but those games are the real fucking insane, balls-to-the-wall challenge in terms of overall difficulty. You ever tried managing Magnetite before? You Nocturne and SMT4 whippersnappers don't understand the fucking pain that Magnetite as a system caused to literally everyone who ever played Megami Tensei 1+2 or SMT 1+2.
In the lore of the MegaTen franchise, demons are typically incorporeal and only take form when there's an abundance of a substance called Magnetite, from which they can manifest a physical body. Basically, you need Magnetite to keep your demons summoned with you as you traverse the world. You read that right: you need a diminishing resource to actually move around the game with your demons summoned.
To be absolutely fair here, some of the Famicom/SFC MegaTen games do take into consideration the Magnetite burden, so you don't lose Magnetite whenever you're on the overworld (at least as far as Megami Tensei II and SMT2 are concerned, if I'm not mistaken). However, that still doesn't change the fact that every step you take in a dungeon will actively haemorrhage Magnetite to keep your demons summoned. To make matters worse, the FC/SFC MegaTen games have infuriatingly high encounter rates with overwhelmingly samey maps that you can only look at from a first-person perspective.
Speaking of first-person, it must be said just how much of a paradigm shift that is compared to the typical third-person dungeon crawling used in most MegaTen games from Nocturne-onward. If you were able to look at the maps of SMT1+2 from a third person perspective, they'd actually be incredibly simple and fairly easy to navigate despite the samey tilesets. With a first-person perspective, navigation in a dungeon becomes that much more tricky because you now you have more than just the D-Pad or analogue stick to orient your character around the world with. I can't tell you how many trap tiles in Strange Journey I inadvertently triggered because I forgot the shoulder buttons make you strafe left and right as opposed to orienting the camera.
If after Nocturne, you find yourself unfulfilled due to the challenge that I told you about that you haven't yet experienced, fire up MelonDS and play the NDS version of Strange Journey. The moment you're without your precious press turns, you'll be crying for mercy.
Perhaps it's the autism kicking in from my attempts at SMT1+2, but those games are the real fucking insane, balls-to-the-wall challenge in terms of overall difficulty. You ever tried managing Magnetite before? You Nocturne and SMT4 whippersnappers don't understand the fucking pain that Magnetite as a system caused to literally everyone who ever played Megami Tensei 1+2 or SMT 1+2.
In the lore of the MegaTen franchise, demons are typically incorporeal and only take form when there's an abundance of a substance called Magnetite, from which they can manifest a physical body. Basically, you need Magnetite to keep your demons summoned with you as you traverse the world. You read that right: you need a diminishing resource to actually move around the game with your demons summoned.
To be absolutely fair here, some of the Famicom/SFC MegaTen games do take into consideration the Magnetite burden, so you don't lose Magnetite whenever you're on the overworld (at least as far as Megami Tensei II and SMT2 are concerned, if I'm not mistaken). However, that still doesn't change the fact that every step you take in a dungeon will actively haemorrhage Magnetite to keep your demons summoned. To make matters worse, the FC/SFC MegaTen games have infuriatingly high encounter rates with overwhelmingly samey maps that you can only look at from a first-person perspective.
Speaking of first-person, it must be said just how much of a paradigm shift that is compared to the typical third-person dungeon crawling used in most MegaTen games from Nocturne-onward. If you were able to look at the maps of SMT1+2 from a third person perspective, they'd actually be incredibly simple and fairly easy to navigate despite the samey tilesets. With a first-person perspective, navigation in a dungeon becomes that much more tricky because you now you have more than just the D-Pad or analogue stick to orient your character around the world with. I can't tell you how many trap tiles in Strange Journey I inadvertently triggered because I forgot the shoulder buttons make you strafe left and right as opposed to orienting the camera.
If after Nocturne, you find yourself unfulfilled due to the challenge that I told you about that you haven't yet experienced, fire up MelonDS and play the NDS version of Strange Journey. The moment you're without your precious press turns, you'll be crying for mercy.
