Megasushi

This game is making my forehead bleed.

The full name is Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, and it’s probably one of the more difficult RPGs I’ve come across in the last five years. The name, which is difficult enough to keep in my head, has more or less become reduced to “Megasushi” thanks to the fiance.

It starts at a place that most RPGs never want to go; with the complete and total destruction of the world. In its place, a small inverted (As in the liveable surface is on the INSIDE of the sphere) “proto-world” made up of fragments of Tokyo has arisen, populated by demons and the lost souls of those who died in the apocalypse. This world, known as “The Conception” is the place where those with ambitions to remake the world, ally themselves with demons and collect enough of a substance (which comes from human souls) called “Magatsuhi” to summon up a god. Whoever gets sufficient quantities of Magatsuhi first to appease the god can then have their particular ideology granted to them by that god, and thus the world will be remade in their vision.

So essentially, the story is “The world is over and now you, yes YOU, will determine whether the next world will be better, worse, or similar to the one that came before it.”

Pretty heady stuff for an RPG, but I’m grokking it in a big way. When I’m not tearing my fingernails out over how damn hard this game can be. The one thing I really like so far is that all the monsters/demons you come across have all been researched and are all based on folklore/myth from around the world. So far I’ve encountered–in no particular order–the four horsemen, the three sisters of Fate, members of the fairy entourage from Queen Mab to Oberon, and… wait for it… GHOSTRIDER! Whoo!

The other neat part is that this story doesn’t start off with a brave warrior, his friends and the usual foray into magical lands. The hero (Named by you) is a seemingly ordinary Japanese student in modern day Tokyo with a couple of friends, neither of whom end up in your party blessed with magical powers. Instead, they become almost rivals since their world views are pretty far apart and they’d kind of like you to side with them (Which of course is entirely up to you). No, the members of your party are the demons themselves that you encounter. I’ve already got Ghostrider and Queen Mab in my party, and there are many other deities and supernatural creatures (If you’re thinking “Gee, this is just like some kind of Jungian Pokemon! Gotta’ Catch All The Archetypes!” you wouldn’t be that far off) available for recruitment, and recruitment runs the gamut from outright bribing them with gifts to answering ethical questions to determine whether you and the demon share the same ideology.

All this wild n’ whacky gameplay however, his complemented by some very challenging fighting and leveling. The bosses in the game are hard. Some of the puzzles and mini-games are excruciatingly hard, and it’s advisable to spend some time “grinding” (ie, the gamer tendency to find a nice place with good experience point creatures and just mindlessly bash them to level up) and recruiting higher powered demons as you progress if you want even a shred of hope to stay competitive. Usually when I play RPGs these days, it’s smooth sailing except for possibly one or two bosses along the way. This game, almost every boss has given me some kind of trouble, since the combat system, for all its simplicity, will punish you pretty badly for not giving your next move some thought. When you exploit a demon’s weakness (Say it’s a fire based demon and you hit it with an ice-spell) the game rewards you by giving you an extra turn or two by taking it away from the victim. Unfortunately the same holds true for you, and so if you’ve got a demon weak to electricity and the enemy zaps ‘em with lightning, that next turn you were going to use to heal your party is suddenly gone and the demon lets loose with some apocalyptic spell that finishes you off.

This is the first time in a loooooong time, that an RPG is really making me earn every victory. I’m not used to it, but I’m digging it.