Shin Megami Tensei IV | avideogamelife

I’m still alive, I promise! (Persona 4, Shin Megami Tensei IV and more!)

Posted on February 12, 2015 by avideogamelife.com

Hey there, haven’t posted a whole lot lately and just wanted to apologize for that. It’s been a busy week and I’ve been getting dragged into a Persona 4 wormhole of sorts lately. I’m enjoying the game a lot on the Playstation TV and have probably spent more time playing it after work than I should.

I love Teddie’s facial expressions!

I am a bit sad that Persona 4 feels like it’s slowing down a bit now that the game is starting to open up. I miss the fast pace and voice acting of the first few hours. Now all of a sudden most of the dialogue is no longer voice acted and there’s not a whole lot going on. Trying to figure out what to do after school hasn’t really been appealing. I’ve just been doing the first thing available and skipping through dialogue hoping for something cool to happen soon.

I haven’t played any Dying Light since getting sucked into Persona 4, but I hope to spend more time with it this weekend. I’ve played a little Shin Megami Tensei IV and have made some slight progress, but I feel like the game has started to slow down now that I’m in Tokyo and I’m finding it difficult to stay interested.

I have had The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds sitting around for a few weeks and haven’t gotten around to trying it out yet. I also have barely put any time into Fantasy Life, and my town in Animal Crossing is probably burning to the ground right about now.

Consuming Surge and playing Persona 4 has pretty much been my after work routine this week.

There’s been just so much going on and not enough time to get into any of it (besides Persona) lately. I’m taking three weeks of leave starting on February 28th so hopefully I’ll have some time to make some progress on a whole list of things (I really should finish Dragon Age!).

Hopefully I’ll be able to post a few things this weekend! Don’t hate me, okay?

See you soon!

Beat Medusa in Shin Megami Tensei IV and started Persona 4

Posted on February 1, 2015 by avideogamelife.com

I did it! I finally conquered Medusa in Shin Megami Tensei IV!

I spent maybe an hour or two grinding in the area around the boss fight split up over the past week and finally managed to get powerful (and lucky) enough to defeat Medusa.

Raiju’s sukukaja spell which increases hit and evade for your entire party, proved critical to my success. Quite a few of Medusa’s attacks missed after casting it and I was able to use critical wave with my other three party members to quickly knock down her HP and win the fight.

After defeating Medusa I descended into the forbidden lands below, otherwise known as Tokyo.

I was quite shocked to find that the game changes quite a bit once you arrive in Tokyo. I’ve spend something like ten hours in the game so far, so to have a mechanic completely change that far into the game is somewhat strange. Instead of exploring the area by selecting locations from a list, you’re presented as an icon on a top down map and you move the icon around to find people to talk to and locations to explore. There are monsters roaming around the map as well, however you cannot hit ‘X’ to strike at them (causing a preemptive strike) like you can while exploring a dungeon. It’s a little odd, and will take some getting used to.

Shortly after arriving in Tokyo I saved the game and decided to check out Persona 4 Golden (also by Atlus) on the Playstation TV.

Just as with Shin Megami Tensei IV, I’m going into Persona 4 knowing absolutely nothing about the Persona series. After spending twenty or thirty minutes with it so far, I can say I’m a little weirded out but strangely curious at the same time.

Persona 4 definitely feels more ‘Japanese’ or anime like than Shin Megami Tensei IV, at least from the start. Some of the dialogue is downright weird, and I’m not sure how much of that is from the localization of it or if the source material is just as awkward.

So far I can say that the game is very dialogue heavy and I’ve spent hardly any time in control of my character. I assume that this is because the story is just getting set up, but I hope there’s more to the game than just ‘high school simulator’.

I’m looking forward to further exploring Persona 4, but for now I think I’m going to check out Dying Light. If you have any advice for a newbie heading into Persona 4, feel free to leave it in the comments!

Medusa, I will defeat you (one day). Shin Megami Tensei IV

Posted on January 28, 2015 by avideogamelife.com

So a few nights ago I hit my first roadblock in Shin Megami Tensei IV, in the form of the Medusa boss battle. Up until that point I had been cruising along, never facing any particularly challenging moments. I was enjoying the progression of the story and the flow of the gameplay, when all of a sudden the cruel and monstrous Medusa showed up and stopped me in my tracks.

The fight felt like it was going well, until the first dialogue choice came about. Medusa asked my opinion of her statues and I said that they were ugly….Oops! This enraged her, thus increasing her attack power and she wiped out my entire party on the very next turn. Not cool.

So I walked myself out of Hades, determined to put an end to Medusa’s treachery. The next battle went about as smoothly as the first, and when presented with a dialogue option, this time I praised her statues which in turn lowered her attack power. “Hooray!” I thought, this is going to be easy now.

Not so much. I made it to the second dialogue exchange, which from what I understand marks the 2/3 point of the fight (or at least 2 out of the 3 dialogue exchanges) but soon after my character was killed which left me unable to swap my creatures out for fresh ones and also left me unable to use items to heal them. I wiped again.

I tried the fight two or three more times with no success, and decided it was time to grind. I brought all my creatures up an additional two levels (to the 12-13 level range) but fared no better in the fight. So I went back to the grind and got my Gremlin to transform into a level 18 Raiju once it hit 14. I’m hoping this will give me an edge when I return to Medusa’s chamber again later tonight and finally attempt to finish her off. Wish me luck!

I apologize for the glare, was grinding away in my car earlier as I had some downtime and it was bright outside.

Did you get all that? –Shin Megami Tensei IV

Posted on January 17, 2015 by avideogamelife.com

I don’t know what made me want to check out Shin Megami Tensei IV. I’ve never understood the appeal of anime and most of the time try to avoid everything that comes out of Japan like it’s the plague. There’s just a weirdness about most Japanese things that I can never wrap my head around.

Yet here I was last night playing one of the most strange and absurd video games I’d ever come across. I had never even heard of Atlus, the company behind the game. Heck I’d only heard the name spoken once before, and that was while listening to a Joystiq podcast in which one of the podcasters spoke of Persona Q (I think), and games with such weird titles as Etrian Odyssey and Shin Megami Tensei came up in the conversation. Maybe that planted a seed of curiosity?

Somehow or other, Shin Megami Tensei IV made its way into my GameFly Queue and recently arrived in my mailbox. I started playing it, and as much as I detest anime I felt a drive to see what the game was all about. It certainly starts off in a strange manner. Heck, I think the Final Fantasy games rest just barely over an acceptable level of weirdness, so the dialogue and scenes early in Shin Megami Tensei IV definitely rest below my usual tolerance level.

After an hour or so of gameplay, I’m still not quite sure what to think of the game. I think the travel system is a little weird (where you just select a destination from a list and magically teleport there), but I guess there’s a simplicity to it that may actually be appealing. The enemies I’ve encountered in the initiation cave were certainly interesting and the ability to have conversations with the enemies is appealing and entertaining (though the dialogue is off the wall strange).

The game feels like a mix between Pokemon and Final Fantasy which feels a little familiar while also intriguing. Collecting demons to fight alongside you feels fun so far, and I’m interested to see what other types of enemies I’ll stumble across as I progress. I have to admit I’m not very good at video games in general, so after I died a few times I was happy to be presented with the option to lower the difficulty (otherwise I probably would have already given up).

If there’s one major downside to the game so far, it’s Burroughs character / AI / whatever it is. Over and over and over again you’re presented with the same, annoying “Did you get all that?” after every explanation / tutorial item. I’m not sure whether it’s some sort of inside joke, but if not it’s incredibly annoying and downright lazy to repeat the same line so many times.

I’m hoping I can continue to enjoy the game, though I’m a little worried it’ll start to get more complex and I wont have the patience to try to understand everything. Until then I’ll keep chugging along.