Shin Megami Tensei Throwbacks

Shin Megami Tensei as a JRPG series didn’t really get much traction outside of Japan until comparatively recently, with my own first exposure to the series being Persona 3. I’ve played a bunch of the games since then, but have primarily concentrated on the PS2-era-and-later material which has gained traction with English-speaking audiences. For this article, I’m going to cover a couple of games from earlier on in the series to see if they still hold up, or whether you’re really better off going with the series’ later iterations.

Shin Megami Tensei (SNES)

The original Megami Tensei CRPG on the NES from 1987 was an adaptation of the novel series Digital Devil Story by Aya Nishitani, and was enough of a success for Atlus to prompt them to produce a sequel in 1990. This had an unrelated plot, and indeed subsequent Megami Tensei games have taken only the general idea of the demon-summoning computer program from the novel series and, alongside their shared pantheon of demons, don’t necessarily have that much in the way of plot connections to each other.

In 1992 Atlus put out Shin Megami Tensei for the SNES, which was largely an enhanced remake of the second NES RPG. It was successful enough that Shin Megami Tensei is now regarded as the mainline series in the franchise, but unlike many other SNES RPGs of the era it didn’t get an official Western localisation save for a decidedly janky iOS release in 2014.

The first Megami Tensei-related game to get an English-language release was Jack Bros., a platformer for the Virtual Boy using the titular cutesy-poo demons, and the first of the RPGs was actually the original Persona, which inaugurated that particular side-series; Western audiences wouldn’t get to enjoy an official localisation of a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game until Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (AKA Lucifer’s Call), which would also be the first one to be released in the European market. A concerted fan endeavour, however, has produced an English patch for the original Shin Megami Tensei, so obviously you can use that with your (entirely legitimately sourced) ROM (derived from your entirely legitimately sourced cartridge) to run on your SNES Mini or your SNES emulator of choice.

Back To the World of Assassination

IO Interactive’s Hitman series has always been their bread and butter. After pioneering the game’s classic format with the somewhat shaky Hitman: Codename 47, they really hit their stride with the sequel, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. It’s notable that the original Codename 47 is the only one of the first four Hitman games to not get a high definition rerelease during the PS3/XBox 360 era – the third game, Hitman: Contracts, offered a mix of new missions and updated do-overs of the original game’s best levels, allowing them to benefit from the better controls and other improvements that IO had made, and it is this version which enjoyed more rereleases and repackages whilst Codename 47 sat fallow. Hitman: Blood Money further refined the basic format.

All the classic Hitman games follow the same general premise. You control Agent 47. Cloned by the unscrupulous Dr. Ort-Meyer as part of a nefarious project to create the ultimate killer, Agent 47 escaped his creator’s clutches and eventually found his way to joining the ICA – the International Contract Agency, the favoured assassination bureau of the global elite. 47 (often using the alias of “Tobias Rieper” where a conventional name is necessary) works under the direction of Diana Burnwood, the ICA handler who provides him with his mission briefings and occasionally pipes in with useful intel during his missions. As you might tell from this basic format, we are basically in espionage techno-thriller territory here, with just a whiff of cyberpunk to spice things up.

When it comes to the gameplay, like many great videogames, it’s based around a simple goal that is challenging to achieve, but can be accomplished in a great variety of ways. Each level is one of Agent 47’s missions, during which he must locate and kill his designated target (or targets) and then escape the area, occasionally also carrying out secondary objectives like obtaining valuable information.

Typically, the mission area will have numerous people wandering around, ranging from innocent bystanders to bodyguards to the targets themselves. Whilst many level designs work in cunning ways of accessing and eliminating your target, the best-received levels have always been amenable to you finding your own way and figuring out your own approach, essentially offering you a sandbox in which to devise and enact a murder.

This means that if you want to go in guns blazing, you absolutely can, though it will likely end badly for you; an emphasis is put on stealth and the player is encouraged to go for the “Silent Assassin” accolade, awarded if you complete a level by killing only your intended target (subduing others non-lethally is fine), leaving no evidence behind, and without being observed doing anything seriously dodgy. Often, the process of completing a level will entail obtaining some form of disguise, usually by knocking out someone appropriately dressed and quickly dressing in their clothes, thereby allowing 47 to, say, pretend he’s one of the troops who’s supposed to be on this army base or whatever.

The challenge of attaining Silent Assassin is often the source of much replayability of the levels, but the fact that you don’t need to get it to progress is a big help: it means you can progress in the game and enjoy more of the story without having to do things perfectly. And often things will go awry. Some of my most hilarious memories of playing the games involve operations where everything was going smoothly until the wrong guard saw me tossing his unconscious buddy into a meat locker, and then things kind of snowballed from there and it became a hideous massacre.

How Much Final Fantasy VII Is Enough?

I never played Final Fantasy VII until recently, the only entry in the series I had ever invested much time into being XII, which I stopped playing when I realised I had just ceased caring, and III, which I stopped playing when I realised that there was no way to progress without doing a heap of grinding. As a consequence, I’ve only heard about it second-hand, and I don’t have a great deal of nostalgia about it; I think my biggest exposure to the thing was reading the infamous Final Fantasy VII house story back in the 2000s. However, with Final Fantasy VII Remake kicking off a reappraisal of the game and its spin-offs among friends who had played it, I decided to give it a go.

A note on how I played it: I actually used the PlayStation Classic, AKA the “PS Mini”, Sony’s rather unloved entry into the mini-retro console scene. Whilst some have their issues with this console, I found that playing the game on it worked just fine for the most part, but I did notice some slowdowns in fight scenes. Fortunately, Project Eris has come along and allowed users to add a bunch of useful quality-of-life features to the PS Mini, including a setting which allows you to launch games from the carousel using RetroArch rather than the stock emulator. This works a treat; though it has a bit of a learning curve to it, especially when it comes to changing discs and saving save states, RetroArch has the advantage of being significantly more efficient than the stock emulator on the PS Mini, avoiding slowdowns entirely.

Once you have that under your belt, using the PS Mini is essentially like playing a much more convenient version of the actual PlayStation 1 hardware where you never have to worry about your memory card running out and you can make save states any time you like, which is a real boon when playing a game like Final Fantasy VII which likes to throw long cut scenes at you with long breaks between points where you can save.

Aptly-Titled Shark Game

Maneater is a game in which you play a shark – strictly speaking, two sharks. First, you play a mommy shark (doo doo doo doo doo doo) as you play through the tutorial, then you get caught and killed by a shark hunter – but you were carrying live young, the surviving baby shark (doo doo doo doo doo doo) biting off the shark hunter’s hand and escaping into the sea after being cut out of the mummy shark (doo doo doo doo doo doo).

Over the process of this, the game’s rather fun conceit becomes apparent: it’s framed like it’s a basic cable reality show (called Maneater, natrually) about shark hunters operating in the waters off Port Clovis – a sort of mashup of Miami and New Orleans, in a state which is a sort of mashup of Florida and Louisiana. The shark hunter who killed your mommy shark (doo doo doo doo doo doo) and left you an orphan shark (boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo) is Scaly Pete, the show’s breakout start, his every Cajun quip treated as the producers as potential hashtag inspiration.

Over the course of the game, then, you guide your baby shark (doo doo doo doo doo doo) as she survives and grows, eventually becoming a mega shark (DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO), and seek bloody revenge against Scaly Pete and all his fellow air-breathing assholes. Every so often, you get a cut scene checking in on what Pete’s doing, and your gameplay is narrated by the show-within-a-game’s narrator – Chris Parnell, AKA Cyril Figgis from Archer, whose wry commentary is probably the high point of the game.

A Forgotten Doom

One of the freebies which came with my copy of Doom Eternal was Bethesda’s recent port of Doom 64 to the PS4, and whilst I’m sure I’ll get around to Doom Eternal sooner or later I’ve actually spent more time on Doom 64 of late. Originally released, as the title implies, on the Nintendo 64, this was an iteration of Doom which seems to have been a bit overlooked after its initial release. There’s a bunch of reasons why this is probably the case, but few of them are really the game’s fault.

For starters, you’ve got to take into account the fact that this was a Nintendo exclusive released in the midst of a console generation that the original PlayStation absolutely dominated. Sure, it could be worse – the PlayStation absolutely bulldozed the 3DO, Sega Saturn, and Atari Jaguar, and the Nintendo 64 was the only console which got within an order of magnitude of the PS1’s sales, but when you’re talking 102 million PlayStations sold next to under 33 million Nintendo 64s that’s still a devastating victory for Sony.

Another reason for the game being overlooked is that the market had seen a lot of Doom console ports already by this point in time, and from what I recall the general consensus was that they weren’t that good – usually they were janky ports of the PC Doom which didn’t quite manage to get the controls as smooth as the good ol’ keyboard and mouse, with some levels missing and, in the case of the SNES version, some of the content toned down to meet Nintendo’s guidelines. Overall, when it came to the original Doom, it was agreed that the PC version was the definitive way to experience it.

You could be forgiven at the time for assuming that Doom 64 was yet another port of the original to yet another console platform – particularly since literally the week before Doom 64 got released, a port of the original Doom was put out on the Sega Saturn. This was unfortunate, because Doom 64 isn’t a port of the original at all. If anything, it’s a sort of Doom 2.5 – an original, distinct game set after the end of Doom II and with significant updates to the Doom format, which I’ll get into later.

Another reason why Doom 64 may have been overlooked is that by this point, Doom in general felt a bit obsolete. id Software had, the previous year, put out Quake, which by any objective measure was a massive technical quantum leap forward over Doom and Doom II‘s engine. It was true 3D! You could jump! You could look up and down! You had grenades which went boingy boingy bouncy everywhere to ruin people’s day! id Software had thoroughly moved on from Doom at this point (Doom 64 was developed by Midway Games), and so had a good chunk of gamers. In fact, the Nintendo 64 would see a Quake port in 1998, and I can’t imagine Doom 64 would have seemed particularly cutting-edge compared to that fresh new hotness at the time.

Where the Dialogue Is Stiffer Than the Zombies…

The PlayStation 1 was the victor of its generational console war against the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn for various reasons – not least of which was a bunch of unforced errors on the part of Sega and, to a lesser, extent, Nintendo – but it’s fair to say that the game selection involved was a major factor. Whereas Nintendo and Sega tried to operate comparatively closed shops, with third-party developers expected to toe the line when it came to developing for them (especially when it came to more mature content), Sony went out of their way to make it easy for developers to produce games for the PlayStation.

This inevitably meant that the platform ended up with its fair share of shovelware, along with games which sparked controversy like Grand Theft Auto for its depiction of violence in a close-to-real-world setting or Tomb Raider for its shameless male gaze-y handling of Lara Croft, whose polygonal boobs were frequently treated as the game’s main selling points. Part of the reason Nintendo and Sega had been careful about third party software for their systems came down to fear of just such quality control issues or media backlashes, after all.

Fun To Dip Into and Immersive While It Lasts

The Sinking City, developed by Ukrainian outfit Frogwares, casts the player as troubled private eye Charles Reed. After a poorly-remembered encounter with (maybe) Cthulhu during his Naval service in World War I, Reed has had certain abilities which aid him in his investigative work, but also suffers from nightmarish visions which have sapped his sanity – to the point where be spent a chunk of time after the War confined to an asylum.

Now it’s the mid-1930s, and Reed has not only discovered the existence of other people suffering from the same visions as him, but he’s also found a strange link between them – they’ve all gone missing in the general vicinity of Oakmont, a Massachusetts city which has curiously managed to avoid being put on many maps. Oakmont is an insular, xenophobic town where lower is held in the hands of a few great families who conduct themselves as little more than gangsters. It’s also faced various upheavals in recent years. First, there was the influx of refugees from Innsmouth, fleeing the Federal raid on that town; then there was the utter disaster of the Flood, which even years later has left significant areas of the poorer section of the city waterlogged. The richer districts are not immune from the Flood’s effects either, especially when those consequences include roving monsters which seem drawn to sites of atrocity or extreme negative emotion.

Soon after Reed arrives he becomes embroiled in the affair of the Throgmorton expedition – a jaunt to the bottom of the sea near Oakmont which, in its search for the causes of the Flood, has stumbled across something appalling. Is there some connection between the Flood, the expedition’s shocking discoveries, and Reed’s visions? And if there is, is there anything Reed can do to resist this terrible confluence of forces?

Piercing the Veil

It’s 1924. Edward Pierce came back from World War I, the last survivor of the Lost Batallion, with a hole in daddy’s arm where the money goes a drinking problem that’s well on the way to destroying him. He’s set himself up as a private detective, since that’s a profession where there’s a certain acceptance that people will get plastered and fall asleep on their office couch from time to time – but that hasn’t stopped him being assailed by bizarre dreams.

Then it comes – the big case. Specifically, it’s the case of one Sarah Hawkins – a gifted artist famous for her macabre, surreal works. Sarah had married Charles Hawkins and moved into his mansion on Darkwater, a lonely island off the coast of Boston, and was apparently happy enough turning out additional work and being a parent to her and Charles’ little boy. Then a terrible fire broke out in the mansion, and all three were reported dead.

Sarah’s dad, however, smells a big fat rat. For one thing, very shortly before the fire Sarah had arranged to send him a painting – one suggesting that she was feeling threatened. And the police report has these odd inconsistencies – like how they go out of their way to insist that Sarah was mentally unbalanced but also that the fire was an accident. (If it were entirely accidental, why would they comment on her mental state at all?) Sarah’s father is convinced that the official report is at best bungled, at worst a cover-up, and hires Pierce to go to Darkwater, uncover the truth, and thereby salvage Sarah’s reputation.

At Darkwater, Pierce finds that Prohibition is being openly flouted, a gang of bootleggers is occupying the main town, and the locals are feeling surly and demoralised. Once upon a time Darkwater was a major whaling centre, but these days it’s slim pickings out there – almost like the whales have been consumed or driven away by some apex predator. It’s not like it was back in 1847, when the celebrated Miraculous Catch saved the island from famine and made the fortunes of the major local families. All interesting, all apparently disconnected from the Hawkins case… but as Pierce investigates, he discovers that Charles Hawkins had a very special interest in the Miraculous Catch legend indeed – and, more particularly, the deity the islanders thank for the Miraculous Catch… whose call resounds in the dreams of Darkwater’s inhabitants, inspired Sarah’s talents, and provides the game with its title.

Shadow of WTF

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

When we last left the story of the Ranger Talion in Shadow of Mordor, he’d started his day being murdered by the forces of Sauron and then things just kept getting worse. Given a strange sort of half-life by being fused with the spirit of Celebrimbor, the legendary elven smith who had forged the Rings of Power with Sauron, we followed their journeys together as they began their guerilla war against Sauron, using the power to control orcs’ minds to turn the Dark Lord’s forces against him.

All this Grand Theft Mordor shenanigans was fun enough, but whilst the original Shadow of Mordor was like the Saint’s Row of Middle-Earth, Shadow of War is its Saint’s Row 2: it takes the gameplay of the original and injects it with a hefty dose of absolutely bizarre nonsense that makes a farcical cartoon of the whole thing.

Soma-ch For All That

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Having developed a reputation for extremely spooky first-person hide-and-seek-em’-ups like Penumbra and Amnesia: the Dark Descent, Frictional Games’ latest offering in this vein is Soma, a return to the more science fictional bent of Penumbra. The player is cast as Simon, an average guy of the present day who has been suffering from a nasty brain ailment after a car accident. You play through the process of Simon going to an appointment to undergo an experimental technique of non-intrusively scanning a subject’s entire brain, giving a perfect picture of their neurological state at the time of scanning, the idea being that this could then be used to devise a customised treatment plan to save Simon.

At the moment the scan takes place, Simon finds himself apparently transported nearly a century into the future, and trapped in the mysterious undersea base Pathos-II. Naturally, because even if Simon is a chump who takes way too long to think through the implications of what he has been told most players soon as hell aren’t, you can quickly infer that the original Simon is long dead, and you are actually playing an activated copy of Simon produced using the scan somehow. What is less apparent why there’s this glowing masses of electronic pseudo-flesh growing and spreading across the complex, or what disaster has overtaken the crew, or what research was going on down here, or what tragedy has occurred to mean the surface road isn’t going to be sending help any time soon. That’s all for you to discover as you explore Pathos-II and try to eke out some sort of meaningful point to your unasked-for resurrection – and, ultimately, to establish some sort of lasting legacy for humanity in general.