Disappointed with Shin Megami Tensei IV

This was one of the games that finally enticed me to buy a 3DS, along with Zelda and Etrian Odyssey IV (both of which I enjoyed immensely)!

I've been playing the game for about 5 hours, and I'm not really getting into it. So far, these are my critical complaints:

* Convincing monsters to join has no rhyme or reason to it. I've answered questions for the same monster the same way and gotten completely different responses. I've answered questions and randomly gotten a monster on my team ("you won his heart") without laying out a dime - on the flip-side, I've satisfied every damn request and the creature just runs off. There has to be more consistency in a major game element like this.

* The hard limits on demon skills makes me feel like I'm not really growing my monsters as they level-up. It feels like two steps back for every step forward. Also, other artificial limits like Demolingual guarantee I will be wasting my EXTREMELY LIMITED supply of App Points on useless shit (or else I will be perpetually bored not talking to the monsters I'm supposed to befriend). And Fundraiser has to be the most worthless waste of my points and time ever (you get maybe 10-20 Macca after wasting 2 minutes of your life selecting the same boring demon interaction options over-and-over again). Sigh

* The weakness-based battle system can be fun, but when I have to walk through weenie central over-and-over again to get to the lower floors, I just don't feel like putting any effort into fighting those battles (why should I have to, they're weenies, right?). But I have to - if I don't, I can get my creatures overrun by weenie weakness combos even when I'm TEN LEVELS HIGHER, because every fucking creature in the game has some critical weakness against a Skill or two, and if the enemy hits you with it, they get extra attacks. Goodby, my sweet creature! And since there's no way to revive creatures in the field, I end up making another trip back to the Barracks, RIGHT THROUGH WEENIE CENTRAL. Again. And Again.

I just feel like there's no real progression in this game. You combine creatures to make other creatures that are *SOMETIMES* better than the ones you fused (not always). The same fucking hard limit on skills STILL REMAINS for more advanced creatures (from what I've seen so far), so it's like forgetting how to walk so you can learn to light a fire. Seriously, we can handle more than 5 things at once

Am I missing something here?

I find it hard to believe that a game consistently rates in the 8-9 range (both US and Japanese reviews) is so marginal. Am I playing it wrong, or does the game get significantly more interesting soon? Because I hate to have wasted my money on a promising JRPG.

It's a very long tail game. It starts EXTREMELY SLOW. Until you get out of the starter area (that being the first 5 floors of the area you're in), it's definitely a grind. After that the story goes through a fairly large plot twist, and the environment opens up a lot, including the use of teleporters in main towns. I don't remember exactly how long it took me to get to where things opened up significantly more, but I did definitely shelve the game for similar reasons you are saying, and only came back to it having played through a few other games first.

Specific to your points:
* Convincing monsters doesn't get any more or less random. It is alleviated somewhat by doing a lot more grabbing and demon combining later on. To some extent you can definitely start to find patterns in the talking as the game progresses, and some of the app point spendings can make things easier. However, there's always ones that flake out and run.

* You end up getting app point purchases to increase available skill slots. It is somewhat of a contrived limit based on strategically using your app points, although the effect is somewhat minimized in the long run. I think I ended up with 6 or 7 skill slots, which across a full party gave me the flexibility I needed. Definitely have to somewhat plan out your app point expenditure, as you start to gain a lot of purchase options in the long run.

* The weakness system is something I kind of ended up getting used to. Again, you get app point purchases to increase the amount of demons you can have in stock, which alleviates issues with individual demons dying. I'm at 16 or 17 stock slots now, so if one dies, I swap it out. At some point they will generally all be dead or low health, and I'll head back for heals, but it's often after a pretty good length of gameplay. That said, a lot of party planning comes into effect where I can typically get 10+ moves in routinely through demon combining, skill selection planning, etc and just not have to deal with demons attacking me.

* Demon combining is fairly significantly more complicated than combine two->get new one. Yes in some respects, it's that simple to get stronger demons. However, a lot of the strategy in the system is in combining to find demons that can't be caught, or are rare to catch, which can then be further combined to find the truly strong or unique demons. In other cases, you're going to be combining to strategically gain moves of certain elements, or combining to make high HP demons, or combining to make high MP demons. It's a lot more of a strategy around how you build out your party, moreso than simply combining to get stronger.

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Overall I wouldn't necessarily say you are missing anything. The game is what it is, it's a fairly grindy, fairly difficult, and very much unexplained game. If you aren't enjoying it, it's very likely that it isn't your type of game. You say you enjoyed Etrian 4, and would likely also enjoy Etrian Untold, which is to some extent similarly grindy, though I would say that one in particular did a much better job of keeping the early pace going well when compared to SMT4.

I remember when I played the game, I had a fairly high success rate by just negotiating as follows:

refuse, refuse, lie(can't remember what the option was, maybe "bluff").

That -usually- convinced them to join me.

I enjoyed it while i was playing it at first. Put quite a bit of time into collecting demons and seeing what they could form until i realized that other each combination of demons wasnt unique. I stopped playing as soon as I got to the overworld, the part where you see the actual map.

VladDracule said:

I enjoyed it while i was playing it at first. Put quite a bit of time into collecting demons and seeing what they could form until i realized that other each combination of demons wasnt unique. I stopped playing as soon as I got to the overworld, the part where you see the actual map.

Click to expand...

That's another thing I didn't like: I saw several cases where wildly different combinations resulted in the same demon. Kinda limits the excitement of growth when your tree is so limited.

Meh.

I have a Masayuki Doi signed SMTIV posted I got from him at E3 last year. I never played a SMT game before, but I just recently got a 3DS and after reading about the series and fan praise I have decided I need to try the game, if only to accompany my posted.