What Did We Play Yesterday?

After poking at a few of the SMT games and reading about how they're designed and QOL issues, I decided to try the more recent games and work my way backwards, if so inclined. I'm starting with Persona 4: Golden, which centers around a small town murder mystery.

This game has 5 difficulty levels and I chose the easiest one on the assumption this game has a lot of turn-based battles and I'd rather breeze through those. So far, the gameplay has been more like a visual novel. The protagonist (who has no default name) is switching to a school in a small town to live with his uncle, who is a detective. Right now, I'm slowly meeting the students and getting the town's vibe. The game has a day structure like a VN.

Decided to poke at some of the other SMT games, including the first game on PSX. No hand-holding here. They drop you into a new world and expect you to figure it out. The room-to-room navigation can be a little disorienting, but the overall weirdness appeals.

A guy you meet at the beginning of the game, Hijiri, helps you get through the Amala Network by opening doors, but you have to reach "good connection" points to do that.

Sometimes when you try to negotiate with a demon and there is more than one of the same kind, the other demon will butt in and cut you off. I haven't been able to recruit any demons lately (I tried multiple times with the mop-looking guys but I always manage to answer their questions incorrectly and piss them off).

This dungeon area is kinda boring so I buzzed through it pretty fast. Even the souls don't have much to say. The general weirdness of the game and the atmosphere have kept me engaged, but the encounter rate (which many players complain about) and the boring dungeon aesthetics are definitely a weak point.

Encountered a shop with magatama, and got in on that action. Now I've got fire and support. Also encountered the Amala Network. Immediately got Lost Woods vibes as a wrong-turn sends you back to the beginning of the area. One guide describes this dungeon as tedious, so I took the liberty of sketching out a map for next time.

Figured out the map situation, and I've continued onward, meeting the Lady of the Fount (who is hot) and getting an explanation of the Kagutsuchi. I'm grateful that I have emulator save states because save points have been few and far between, and I might bail otherwise. Also, linking the hotkeys because I keep forgetting them.

A busy day left me with low bandwidth, so I piddled around on my farm. Since I was playing later at night, I got a few visitors, including a lovely visitor who left a very nice guestbook message but decided to replant some of my fields with the wrong crops. I have a carefully terraced grape area and alas, they did not plant grapes there. They also messed with my tomato color coded rows.

Witness the horrors (chickpeas in my tomato beds).

Now I know how this makes me feel: itchy. Lol. You can buy crop instruction signs that only allow a certain crop to be planted in an area, so if it keeps happening I can either do that or change my farm permissions, but I'm gonna TRY to be a little more flexible here. It's probably good for me.

I finally unlocked the first type of water lantern, so I began refining my hatchery and you know, I REALLY don't like those seasonal tree rows I planted, but I think I might like them better after I fully pave and decorate the area. IDK. Most of my crop unlocks are to the grindy phase (level 50 cosmic carrots, level 80 peanuts) but what really needs work is my orchard.

I beat the first boss, a demon hanging around the hospital lobby. I've enjoyed recruiting demons (gotta catch 'em all) also. I'm finding map navigation a little confusing, but I'll figure it out.

The game doesn't explain the orb in the top left corner (or if they did, I missed it). I looked this up on the off-chance it was something important. The Kagutsuchi phase impacts your ability to negotiate with demons, items in chest, and something about fusions. If it's full, it's harder to recruit demons, but chests contain more valuable items.

I fired up Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which I actually played a lot more than I blogged about, but it's been long enough I had no idea where I was or what I was doing (I need the mist ability to progress, and hell if I know where to find it). Soooo I decided to try something new instead.

I've been wanting to play a Shin Megami Tensei game but was never sure where to start. Players look favorably on Nocturne, and I understand the somewhat recent remaster wasn't very good, so I got PS2 running on my SteamDeck and gave it a whirl. Until now, I've mostly limited emulation to pre-PSX for the most part, so being able to dig more into PSX and PS2 really opens up my options to explore.

I went into this not knowing what to expect beyond "demons" and it's pretty damn compelling. The graphics have aged well and the atmosphere and mood is awesome. I wanted to set expectations, so I read a little more and according to HLTB this is about a 50-hour game. It has multiple endings, and the dungeon crawling is very crawly, and I think people got annoyed about getting a mediocre ending which, for a game of this length, is very understandable. Definitely not a "put down and come back 2 weeks later and still know where the hell you are" type of game. My gaming threshold tends to be 30 to 40 hours at the very best of times, so we'll see how it goes!

I picked up a couple of Suikalikes I thought might have interesting mechanics. I'm on the fence about Spicy Fruit. I really like how the fruit's facial expressions change, but the gimmick--feeding a fruit a chili so it becomes spicy, so merging gives bonus points--is kinda eh. If you can manage to merge 2 chilis (which requires spicy-fying a fruit, then dropped 2 chilis on top of it, which isn't as common as I'd like) it becomes a hungry fruit and it grows and creates explosions until it eventually pops and sets everything on fire.

The game is super polished, runs great on Steam Deck, and has a bunch of different themes. So if you just wanna Suikaround a bit it's a solid choice. But there's not enough going on there to keep my interest beyond the occasional "my brain is too fried for anything else" play.

I finished Golden Krone the first time on easy mode with the soldier disguise. When you reach the 11th floor, you're advised you can't enter without four rings. The rings are obtained from the various side areas. A couple of those battles, especially the sirens, were pretty tough, but timely switching between human, vampire, and werewolf forms served me well.

I uncovered additional lore, including that when vampires marry they exchange 5 rings. The lore books are permanently unlocked, so you can go back and read through it at any time.

The game gives a lot of little hints as to the relationship with Arobase and Fane, so I wasn't surprised by the reveal, but I WAS surprised by the fact that I was locked in a room with him and apparently had no option but to attack. I actually looked up a Let's Play to see if I did something wrong by snatching up all the gold before talking to him, and I'm still not sure.

I can see myself returning to this one to play the many different classes. I like the streamlined aspect and the vampire/human mechanics a lot. I wish the NPCs interacted more, it's always kind of weird to be attacked by a vampire and see a bunch of mercenaries just standing around, but I headcanon everyone's freaked out and just trying to stay not-undead.