As you may or may not know on December 1st the first set of beta invites went out for the English version of Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE, which is the Shin Megami Tensei MMO. I was lucky enough to get in with the first set of invites and have played it enough to give my first impressions on it, so onward!
Yes I stole this picture >.>
Just before I get into the whole thing, I’ll fill in a little history about the game. The game came out in 2007 in Japan and was done by Atlus and Cave. For those of you who don’t know Cave, they are about the Fathers of the danmaku shooter genre (also known as bullet hell and a number of other names). Then it was picked up by the free to play MMO site Aeira. So this really had no big point expect to point out Cave, and I hope to do a post about them soon.
This shows off the neat pentagram that is your target cursor which is cool
Anyway, back to the MMO itself. I have played a few MMOs in my day, the biggest or the ones I played for the longest were Final Fantasy XI and WoW. I played a lot of the free to play ones, but I never really cared for any of them, so I didn’t play them long. When I first saw this game though I was truly excited about because I am a fan of the SMT series.
Enough about that too though, let’s just move into the game itself. Overall, I think it is a really solid MMO. It does a lot of different things so it isn’t just another MMO or trying to be the next WoW. I think the biggest thing done to the gameplay is that there are no classes in this game. Instead you choose from a set of skills and knowledge to tag, and as you use them, they level up. So what they do to have it so you can’t master everything is that each one has its own EXP meter and you can’t have the total EXP of all the skills and knowledge go past this number that grows as you level up. Then it is interesting with the skills and knowledge, skills are what you use in combat and stuff like that. Knowledge though is more experience in areas so you hit harder and are just better in general in that area, like guns, swords, and armor; so it helps you in non attack ways and you get to pick and choose what your want to become really good in.
Oh yeah you get to ride your demons when you get this special item
One of the defining features of a SMT game is the ability to persuade demons to join you and this game is no different. You are able to try to get just about every demon to join you, and this I think is a really cool thing to be able to do in a MMO setting. There are a few downsides to it, you can only have so many, depending on your COMP. Also you are only allowed one out at a time, which is perfectly fine. Overall it is done well enough where it doesn’t break the game and have things be extremely easy by having this demon with you.
The battling is also a bit different than other MMOs, the game reminds me a lot of Phantasy Star Online (which is a great game and I will have to write about it at some point). Even though it reminds me of PSO, it is still different, it is not true real time combat. How it works is that you ready your skills before you use them. It is a really interesting thing in combat where everything has a ‘cast time’, and there are even skills like guard and counter that spice things up. I was also reminded of PSO when I had to create this little dungeon to go through. It was a really cool thing, because not only is there the outside world, but there are these dungeons you create and go though those as well.
Of course Jack Frost is in the game, and...yeah art looks nice
One thing that is kind of out there is the story the game has. The game does go out of its way to make the story more noticeable than about every other MMO. This I think is a double edged sword, while its cool that the story is there and more part of the game than a lot of other MMOs, it kind of gets put down a bit knowing everybody will have this same story line. This was really apparent when due to a story line event you get this one demon, and when you’re just out walking around you see so many people with the same demon. Now to be fair, this might only be something in the beginning, since a lot of the beginning stuff is tutorial. Speaking of tutorial, I found the way it was done in this game was really good. It works in with the story and is practical for the most part, because you go through what is told to you right afterwards, that doesn’t sound right, I mean your told useful thing then you get to do it and see how it is useful right away. With how the battle system is, it was nice to learn the ropes of guard and counter and stuff like that.
Beta servers are not this populated...meh I just needed an image here I have nothing else to say
Really once you talk about what makes a MMO interesting, that is about it. While IMAGINE does have a lot of interesting stuff, it still has all the flaws other MMOs have. Grinding is always annoying, and all those other MMO complaints are here. This is not the best MMO ever, but it is something different. With it being free to play I don’t really see a reason not to try it out, I would say its the best free MMO I have played (not saying much really, but that is the other free MMOs fault). There are a lot of neat things done with gameplay and it is a MMO not in some fantasy world, so that gives it some points from me right there. For fans of the series, you can’t really go wrong with it; Persona fans might wonder why they are not putting bullets in their head for summoning though. Though really it is still in closed beta so things may change, as of right now though its a fun game despite its MMO flaws and beta problems (I know I didn’t talk about them, but that is because they are expected). So, if things change for better or worse I will let you know for it is my duty as a elitist video game fan OF JUSTICE to do so…or something like that.
My character, with my plot demon
Lastly, this is the mark of the start of my epic trip though the Shin Megami Tensei series. I planed to start this before hand and have this be the last once, but one thing came to another and this is how it started. So be on the lookout for that, and that also answers where there is a Shin Megami Tensei category. Also one more random side note, the overworld music for IMAGINE is the same as the SNES game (could be games, can’t remember), it is most excellent though.
[...] posts for the series, so still do be on the look out for that. I have been playing a lot of the MMO I wrote about a few weeks back, and Persona 4 came along to help steal my time. [...]
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