I'm a lifelong JRPG fan who's played just about every 16 and 32 bit RPG there is. Massive fan of anything Square, can tell you just about anything about the first 12 Final Fantasy games, etc. I've even beaten some really obscure shit like Paladin's Quest. But one series I never played was SMT.
First off, the only way to play almost all of the games in English is fan translations, and I tend to shy away from that sort of thing because they're often crappy. So if there are any really good translations out there, that'd help.
Second, they had a reputation for being grindy. I can handle a certain amount of grinding. Dragon Quest games are about where my limit is. I like DQ for the most part, but I don't like walking back and forth just outside of town, mindlessly mashing "A" for hours, and most of them devolve into just that around the halfway mark. I haven't played anything newer than 5 though, so that may have changed over time. Basically, if SMT is any less grindy than the early DQ games, I'm good to go.
Third, I don't really know where to start. I've got forty years of content to sift through. Do I play the DDS games? Do they hold up? I'd be playing the SNES remakes, almost certainly. How about the side games like Nine and If?
Oh, and for what it's worth, I didn't like Persona 4 at all. The level design was insanely bland (nothing but identical hallways) and the battles were too easy. But I've heard P4 is the least SMT-like of the Persona games, so that might not be a problem.
Smt V is supposed to be pretty good, I played a few of the smt/Persona games over the years and I generally liked them. I don’t mind grindiness, I’ve 99’d every dragon quest game since 3.
I personally say go for it. SMT 3 Nocturne is a smash hit. It isn't too grindy, but it will punish you of you don't pay attention to weaknesses, buffs and debuffs. The remake is available on multiple platforms.
Other than that the 4th installment was fun and had replayability built into it via its morale system and carrying over your progress if you so choose, but I don't know of you can play it other than on the 3DS.
I haven't played the 5th on the switch yet, but I plan on it eventually.
I've played the older ones before, but if you didn't like the hallways of P4 you probably won't like these either. They're a 1st person perspective so everything feels like a hallway trek.
I've kind of got a love-hate thing going on there. I don't mind first person labyrinth treks because that's the name of the game. It's like when you eat a bowl of Cheerios, you're not really expecting a flavor explosion. Sometimes you just want something bland and wholesome. Persona 4, however, tries to be cool and up to date, but then has the shittiest dungeon design I've ever seen. So it kind of feels like, if I wanted to play Shining in the Darkness, I'd play Shining in the Darkness.
The only thing that bothers me when it comes to very old games with first person labyrinth-style dungeon crawling is a lack of any sort of map. It's why I could never get into Phantasy Star. If I have to get out a piece of paper and draw the map, I'm not interested. And yes, I could just look up a map on GameFAQs or something, but I feel like that takes away the fun of exploring. Automaps are a must. Or something akin to Etrian Odyssey, which I also enjoy. I just don't want to bust out the three ring binder when I want to play a game.
Personally, I think Persona 4 is probably the worst Persona game, but gets this high reputation because it was a lot of normies first step into the non-mainstream JRPGs like FF and the SNES ones of old. Its literally only good if you like to self insert as a Chad Thundercock with no problems and love the color yellow.
As for the non-Personas, SMT 3 is probably the best middle ground to test the waters on if you'll want to go deeper. Its got just enough grind, hardness, and lack of handholding to show you its not quite like other JRPGs but isn't a roughly translated game from an era where suffering was expected.
Well the good news is that isn't usually an option! If you are grinding its very likely that you'll get still having to put in a moderate amount of effort into every fight for your pittance of exp. Either because you don't want to spend your very limited SP (and either lose money on items or have to treck back to recover somewhere) or because they are just that difficult.
The thing is, that only happened years later. It was barely discussed at the time of release because we all just fucking understood it.
The biggest fight then was whether Adachi was a neckbeard (this being pre-incel) loser or a super based prophet. Which still goes on to this day and was strong enough to get him a special ending in Golden.
Ayo, you want the real megoomi tensay? play Ronde for the Sega Satan, best magumbo tennessee I like very much and is the strongest in the sage
I checked out some Ronde gameplay footage, and all I can say is...what in the fuck. It makes me feel like I'm having a dissociative episode.
Comment Reported for: Rule 11 - Spam
It's just a game recommendation, bro
I enjoy the Devil Survivor games. I'm not the biggest fan of the main SMT series, I haven't really tried many of them though. I would also recommend checking out this guy's videos. He does edited playthroughs to give you a bite sized version of some SMT and spinoff games, as long as you don't mind getting spoiled for them.
I've played a decent amount of SMT 3. Haven't beat it but I've not put in the effort either. It's a bit weird in a hard to describe way but at times pulls me in anyway. The dungeons can be a lot of hallway though. Everyone says it's hard but I'd say it's more tedious. Don't expect to spam A. I enjoy the combat more because you don't just hit attack until the enemy "pulls their sword back for a big attack" then you defend. Barely poked into SMT V. It's more of the same really in the first hour or two.
You might try Persona 5. It's SMT lite and the dungeons are some of my favorite. I haven't gotten past the intro of 4 yet it wasn't accessible easily to me until the PC release.
Otherwise I get the idea your experience with l these games is far further fetched than mine. I had to get a bit older before I gave turn based a real chance.
Yeah, I've been playing turn based games for thirty years, and some of my favorite games of all time are crappy, ancient RPGs that are barely more complex than Cookie Clicker. But I also know what you mean about needing to be in a specific "RPG mood". I'll sometimes go four years without touching one, then all of a sudden I'll play ten of them in a year. But when I was a kid, I couldn't get enough of them.
I think I might as a kid, but I had PC and the epic JRPGs of old just weren't on there that much. Ended up in early 3D.games and a lot of the point and click adventure games instead.
RPGs on PC were trash garbage until Might and Magic 3. JRPGs specifically basically didn't exist. Back then, only the very most successful games bridged the console/PC gap, and usually they suffered horribly for it.
But on the upside you got some killer FPS games well before they were even remotely playable on consoles.
Persona 5 Royal might be a good place to start. It's the easiest one to get into and it doesnt have the bland hallway problem of P4 because the dungeons arent randomly generated anymore. That should give you a taste of the franchise without going too hard into it to see if you even like that kind of game. Then you can go on into mainline SMT with SMT 3 4 and 5. Just keep in mind that most mainline SMT games are not as story focused as Persona is and instead focus more on the gameplay and battles and the post apocalyptic atmosphere. Also mainline SMT games are often brutally hard.
Also if you are looking for another JRPG franchise to sink your teeth into try the Trails franchise from Falcom.
I don't mind hard as long as the difficulty doesn't come from sudden, massive spikes in level requirements. There's a difference between "grinding will make this boss easier" and "unless you grind, the trash mobs across this random bridge will instantly destroy you". The former is fine, the latter is not.
So what exactly is the difference between Persona and SMT? From what I can tell Persona is a lot more story-focused, but is that it? Is it like a FF vs. DQ kind of situation where they're basically the same but with some key differences?
You're better off comparing with Pokemon. You capture and make a party of demons with various skills. As far as the Persona vs. SMT difference:
SMT: 1 hero, who is an active battler himself, and a party of captured Demons.
Persona: A party of allies, each with one Demon/Persona bound to them, which (after Persona 3) grow in strength as you deepen your bond with your allies. The main hero is a "Wild Card-" while they do have a default Persona, they are able to switch their Persona in battle. In 3 and 4, demons can be more of an item drop, but 5 brought back SMT's negotiating system since the enemies were the Demons themselves rather than generic Shadows in 3 and 4.
More recent entries in Persona focus on the social sim aspect and the story along with dungeon crawling all with equal focus. Smt on the other hand, focuses pirmarily on dungeon crawling with much less story. Thats not to say smt has no story but story in smt games often takes a back seat for long stretches of time in favor of the gameplay aspect whereas persona games tend to have very long story sequences in between gameplay that ties things together. Another thing is thst often smt games have stories that are more open ended than persona games, with an alignment system (law vs chaos basically) that often changes the final stretches of the game and the endings based on your choice, with no real right or wrong, everything is morally grey. Persona games stories are more involved but they are also more set in stone where you dont have as mich player freedom to change how things play out.
As for the difficulty, smt is known for having the kind of difficulty where you are always one bad turn away from a party wipe if you arent paying attention, even in regular encounters. However most of that can be dealt with as you learn the mechanics. Instead, the main difficulty in smt games come from bosses, where you will frequently get walled by a boss until you figure the mechanics of how the boss works and how to deal with the boss's crap. Its not a level thing so much as figuring out a strategy that works on the boss.