Strange Journey

A man, a suit, a black void: Strange Journey

Persona 4 was an amazing game.  So good that I have to diligently keep myself from writing fanfiction for it, or creating music videos of the love I see between MC and Chie set to a Leona Lewis song.  That game made me nerdibly obsessed in a way I hadn’t felt since I was seven and discovered ant colonies.

Persona 4’s main effect on me is that any game bearing the Shin Megami Tensei title I assume to be amazing and eagerly pick up.  I was greatly disappointed by Devil Summoner–seeing Tam Lin as a demon again and inheriting familiar skills through fusion wasn’t enough to actually make the game fun.  I worry that p4 was the anomaly of that group, like a spectacular single on a suckass album.

This is a long introed way of telling you I picked up SMT: Strange Journey, and that’s what I’m playing this week.  And so far, it’s pretty fantastic.  Nothing like P4 at all, except for familiar demons and a fusion system, but it has a charm that’s hard to define but makes it wonderful to play

Strange Journey has a soft sci fi story about a void appearing in Antarctica and threatening to take over the world in inky dead blackness.  You are part of a science team sent to investigate.  The void is the entrance to the demon world, where you can either fight the demons or recruit them and so on. The sci-fi element is over-excited pastiche, like kids pretending their barbecue is a spaceship dashboard, moving things around and yelling, “transfer data! Transfer data! The event horizon is closing!” without knowing what any of it means.  I find this thematic element really appealing though.  Having a ship with a sickbay and laboratory, and traveling to the different dungeons through quantum tunnels and all the mission objectives being sent to your suit interface electronically make it unique enough and visually compelling.  This science stuff mixed with the game being a straight 3D dungeon crawler makes the game feel lost and old.

More specifically:  My dad had a friend from college who as an adult got really into computers and computer games.  He was quiet, skinny, and bearded and probably had a primitive network set up in his house so he could make his three computers talk to each other.  He’d send us games for our Apple IIe, like Fat City or a text adventure Spiderman, that he had coded so it had his “crystal dreams” logo on each title screen. I have one isolated memory of his house: dirty shag carpets, beige computers with green and black screens,  banners on the wall made by printing long, pixelated art onto one continuous ream of dotmatrix paper.  Strange Journey brings up the memory of his house every time I play.  It’s my SMT: Madeleine

The main story isn’t too dramatic and often repetitive—a new dungeon opens up, there’s an evil demon running the place, the dungeon represents some sin of humanity and has a special ore that will help us get to the next dungeon, but the ore is inside the evil demon boss so we have to fight him to get it.  What I’m really digging about Strange Journey is all the incidental dialogue and side stories.  Talking to crewmen, the npc villagers of the game, is actually fun and builds up the texture of the world.  The game is thematically a colonist and natives, strange new world game.  The other crewmen are fighting demons as well, but they seem mostly fascinated with the place and will tell you all the strange things they’ve seen like they’re pilgrims talking about buffalo or WWII marines in the Phillipines trying sushi for the first time.  One of the side missions I’m currently playing is about a fellow crewman falling in love with demons he meets, so I have to talk to Leannan Sidhe and see if she remembers him.  Because she is a demon, she does not(demons are SLUTS).  The demons are equally fascinated by me, and so all the negotiation to get them to join my party are conversations about Earth and how humans and demons are different.  The conversations are consistent with the demons, so that if pixie shows up I know I just need to flirt hard with her and she’ll like me.  In demon summoner I would literally have conversations that went like this:

Demon: This makes me hungry.  Green cargo pants.  Are you staring?

Me: A: yes.

B: I’m thinking of my father.

C: stare silently

And every answer would result in the demon surprise attacking.  In Strange Journey they’ve built the story into these small interactions, so it doesn’t feel like useless rpg grinding.

The battling is straight ahead SMT turned based battles with elemental weaknesses.  In this version, exploiting the demon’s weakness makes all demons in your party that share your alignment gang up for a group attack.  This encourages you to fill your party with demons of equal alignment, which adds a nice strategy to fusing and negotiating with demons.

The alignment is a cool bit of the game.  Based on conversations you have throughout the game your alignment changes between lawful, neutral, and chaotic.  My only complaint with this is I wish they used different words.  These descriptions sound so generic and dumb.  Mass Effect had Paragon and Renegade.  Both have that middle hard G that makes saying the word feel cool.  I don’t want to be lawful or chaotic, because I’m not playing 1^st edition DandD.  I want to be either paladin or libertine, or something else cool sounding.

The alignments seem to switch quickly, but you don’t get much opportunity to have conversations to switch them.  Maybe it’s built subtly throughout and I haven’t realized, but I was neutral though most of the game and then a demon said humans polluted a lot and made a mess of the earth, and I said, “you are right.” And now I’m chaos and can’t find a way to switch back.  This would be fine, except all the chaos demons really suck, but I fill my party with them because it makes me stronger in battles .  They all are weak to everything it sems and have, like, poison as their main power.  One of my guys is an imp with a gun that when he shoots has the possibility of causing fear, but he misses every fucking time.  So he’s a cowardly mugger basically, and I’m the leader of a pathetic streetgang of bullies and toads.  And I keep running into Lawful demons with names like PRINCIPALITY or DIVINE POWER and they’re all giant angels with humongous swords, but none will give m the time of day  because my partner is shouting demonic racial slurs at them and pretending the gun is his penis.  I don’t know when I’ll get a story chance to change my alignment, but I will most definitely say I hate jaywalkers, love god, and believe in cops—whatever it takes to distance myself from these chaos losers.

I’m about halfway through the game now, I think, and really digging it.  I’ll tell you more when I’ve finished.