Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey for Nintendo DS Reviews & Ratings by IGN

If you've never dug into the franchise before, Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on DS will be a pleasant surprise. It's a hardcore dungeon crawler overflowing with content that can easily take up to 70 or 80 hours of your time, and likely more if you really get into it. The game pits you against hordes of demons that can be recruited to your side, leveled up, and fused with each other to produce even more powerful creatures. In addition to plenty of fights and customization options, you'll also find a surprising amount of character interaction, personality, and strong thematic elements that do a decent job of preventing the experience from turning into a wearying grind-fest. If you've been looking for a new and well-crafted epic role-playing game experience on your DS, you'll find it here.



The action picks up at the outset of the 21st century where a mysterious void appears over Antarctica. Called the Schwarzwelt, this anomaly is expanding and gobbling up anything that comes into contact with it. You're sent in as part of a strike team to investigate, and once inside you discover it's overflowing with demons.



While initially it seems like it'll be a simple tale of killing baddies to escape, the story gains traction and deeper meaning as you move through the dungeons. What's initially a scramble for survival amongst team members who outlasted the rough landing in the Schwarzwelt turns into an examination of temptation and overindulgence, a clash of supernatural forces, and environmental responsibility, which is fleshed out through lengthy dialogue sequences between characters as well as between your party and other demons in the field.



The theme is also tied to the look of the dungeons, as this demon realm isn't simply a land of fire and brimstone but built to poke fun at human wastefulness and excess. You'll wander through towering trash heaps and shopping malls from a first-person perspective, tangling with foes in random battles, discovering hidden doors and passageways, and uncovering new layers that keep dungeon exploration interesting. Members of your squad wear a suit called a Demonica that lets them survive in the hostile environments, and as the game progresses more functionality is added to keep the experience from growing stale. For instance, when you first start out you can only open basic doors and move around. A few levels later, you'll have gained clearance to move through previously impassable barriers, activate secret passages, see in the dark, and detect a range of hidden enemies and special items. This gradual pace of ability unlocks encourages exploration, adding an incentive to return to earlier areas.



Main quests are doled out mostly by the artificial intelligence running your ship, which also serves as your upgrade, healing, and save center. His name's Arthur, and as he frequently reminds you he's incapable of making decisions colored by emotion. As a result, he serves as a stabilizing force for the rest of your team, many of whom are completely freaking out over the fact that you're stuck in a demon realm. Part of the fun of the game is slowly chipping away the mystery, exploring the passageways of a new zone, learning new abilities and crafting new equipment from the items you find, and eventually encountering a level boss, each of whom is given a unique personality and place within the story.



During your journey you'll be frequently squaring off against demons and taking part in turn-based combat with a four person party. Or, to be more accurate, a one person party with three demon companions. There are hundreds of demons to find, and recruiting and fusing the best and strongest is a large part of the drive of Strange Journey. You can keep on playing with the same party and level them up, but really the fastest way to progress and minimize the amount of grinding you need to do is to combine demons to create new types. Thankfully the game makes this process fairly convenient, letting you toy around with fusion as much as you want provided you're able to pay a fee.



Before performing any fusion, you'll need to recruit demons during battle. Instead of fighting with a foe, you can choose to engage them in conversation, with topics ranging from appealing to a demon's sense of vanity to the nature of humanity and its role in the preservation of Earth. If you pick an answer the demon likes, it's possible to get to a stage where you can ask them to join you. If successful, you can then head into menus, add them to your active party, utilize their skill sets and level them up, or register them in your demon database. Once the demon's information is locked in, you can then recall them at any time while in the field for a price, which means you don't have to go through the trouble of recapturing them if you want to use them in a fusion process down the line. It's a system with a lot of depth and flexibility that extends into what demons are set in your active party.



Each demon type has an alignment , and ideally you'd want all three of your companions to match your own. That way, if you hit an enemy with an attack type they're weak against, it'll trigger a demon co-op attack that'll deal additional damage to the target. If you hit an enemy that's weak against guns with a gun attack, all demons in your party who share your alignment will then gang up for a co-op strike. This means it's best to head into the field with demons of matching alignments, but also limits you to using demons that match your own alignment. It's a minor annoyance, especially considering how it isn't made especially clear how to go about shifting your alignment until after you're well into the game, so a little more transparency in this area would have been useful.



Outside of tweaking your party to maximize demon co-op attack effectiveness, there isn't a lot to the combat that's novel. It's a more traditional turn-based affair where you'll input attack and magic commands, buffing, debuffing, healing and reviving as necessary. Though there are random encounters, there are many ways to avoid fights like upgrading your Demonica's functionality or taking advantage of the reliable retreat option. Expect to be doing quite a bit of fighting, because the dungeons get larger and far more complex as you progress. They can feel unnecessarily irritating to move through later into the game, particularly once you start having to deal with one-way moving floors and trap doors that return you to earlier sections, giving exploration an unwelcome trial and error quality.



Exploration does yield plenty of rewards, however, as you'll collect items known as forma to use to unlock weapons, armor, items, and Demonica applications, as well as encounter new demon types to use for fusion. You'll also come across a number of demons floating around that offer side quests, some of which actually have implications beyond the quest reward item once you've completed their task. In other words, there's plenty to do in the world of Strange Journey beyond the main quest, which can add significantly to the amount of time you spend with the game if you're not in a rush to get to the end.



As demons level up, you'll also find their development isn't strictly limited to higher statistics. They'll offer up demon sources as they gain in power that can be used to add skills to new demon fusions, and their skill sets will also occasionally evolve. This skill evolution system can be disappointing, however, as the new skill that replaces the old one isn't necessarily better. It seems best to never evolve a skill you use frequently, since you won't necessarily get as valuable a new skill. It's not a quirk that ruins the fun of combat, however, because chances are you'll be fusing new demons to replace party members within a few hours time anyway.



Considering how many demons are in the game, the enemy designs are surprisingly well done and distinct, ranging from blindfolded angels to gigantic hulking monstrosities. The environments themselves won't blow you away, but the action is quick, menu navigation is crisp and responsive, and transitions between battle and exploration are swift, limiting downtime and making for a smooth experience. Regarding the soundtrack, it feels almost too ambitious, with chanting, horns, strings, and pounding drums all crammed into the same tracks. Overall it's great for mood, but for effects like the fuzzy, distorted chanting, you wonder why they bothered.

©2010-04-01, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved