Anybody have any tips for the Fiends? I know the spawn rate is ridiculous, but if you have a piece of DLC it makes it slightly less of a pain for some of them (speaking of which, I bought the XP DLC after beating the game for this purpose...holy hell that breaks the game). I'd really just like to understand their weaknesses since I don't want to enter the fight, lose but learn their weakness, and then spend hours upon hours trying to get them to respawn again. I really don't have THAT much time to spend
If you lose against them, but pay to be resurrected, you can fight against them right afterwards again. The battle will stay "triggered" until you beat it, as long as you just don't reset after losing.
I keep reading they spam Almighty skills if meet some conditions, but they aren't clear. Is it:
- One demon nulls phys + the fiend's element
- All demons null phys + the fiend's element
- One/All demons null phys -OR- the fiend's element
Woah the Bay area on the world map is pretty big. And I think it's all optional, though it might be required for the Neutral route. The entrance is past a tunnel near the red tower at Roppongi.
If you lose against them, but pay to be resurrected, you can fight against them right afterwards again. The battle will stay "triggered" until you beat it, as long as you just don't reset after losing.
It's
All demons null phys OR all demons null the fiend's element.
Why exactly are the tournament matches necessary? I didn't end up doing them before Tsuji and the button has been pushed so I don't think I can backtrack to it now.
Well they're necessary if you want to complete the neutral ending of the game. If you're worried about route lock, don't worry it hasn't happened yet. And that's all I'll say for now
It's not really losing a round, especially when you factor in the benefits. Let's say you have a 40 MP spell which does 500 damage normally. If you cast it twice, you'll do 1000 damage, but it costs you 80 MP and two turns. With Concentrate, you'll do about 1200 damage, at the cost of 50 MP and two turns.
That's not really how it works. You can't stack Concentrate. You can only cast it once before casting something else. And yeah, you're spending that turn casting Concentrate. That being said, if the normal damage were, as you said, 1000, it would probably be more around 2300 with Concentrate. That is, of course, dependent upon your Ma stat. Mine is now over 300, so yeah, it's ridiculous.
That's not really how it works. You can't stack Concentrate. You can only cast it once before casting something else. And yeah, you're spending that turn casting Concentrate. That being said, if the normal damage were, as you said, 1000, it would probably be more around 2300 with Concentrate. That is, of course, dependent upon your Ma stat. Mine is now over 300, so yeah, it's ridiculous.
I think you misread that. He says if you cast a spell twice, you have to spend that MP twice. Whereas if you cast Concentrate + the spell, it's just the Spell's MP + 10, AND you get slightly more than 2X damage.
About the Challenge missions for the neutral route, do they only unlock after you're locked in, or are the required missions gradually unlocked over the course of the game?
About the Challenge missions for the neutral route, do they only unlock after you're locked in, or are the required missions gradually unlocked over the course of the game?
For Beelzebub what you want are demons who have high HP and are immune to sickness. For your MC, you either want an accessory which can block sickness, or stock up on Dis-Poisons. Then it's just a process of Doping -> Luster Candy -> etc. Stack buffs, heal to stay alive, deal as much damage as possible while avoiding Death's Door. With the right set up, it's not too tough.
For Ginza, all you need to do is grind relics. There are good relics around Ginza itself, but there are also good ones in the two optional Shelters in the Bay area. It's not going to be easy getting money to buy -everything- either way. So just focus on what you need.
EDIT: Rather than explain the timing and location of each spoiler tag, I'm going to give a general warning here that the tagged stuff might be considered spoilers, so don't read unless you've finished the game.
I finally decided to finish the game this morning. What follows are my scattered impressions. If it seems like many of them are negative or nitpicky, bear in mind that I ultimately adored the game, and I can’t remember the last time I was so reluctant to put down an RPG.
I’ll start with graphics and music because they don't require much explanation. SMT4 looks and sounds great. The environments are not terribly large or complex, but some areas have a nice amount of detail if you bother to play around with the camera, and the towns are credible as post-apocalyptic Tokyo. The dungeons are rarely as extravagant as SMT3’s, which is a bit of a disappointment, but the artists do go for broke whenever there is a narrative justification for it. Doi’s character designs are all pretty effective. Sadly, I can’t say the same for the guest artists’ demon designs. With a few exceptions (notably,
Minotaur
), these are outright embarrassing. The Kamen Rider brigade could not be less interesting,
Medusa
looks like a rough sketch, and god only knows what’s going on with
Pluto
. I can understand the impulse to redesign certain returning characters
given their prominence in this story
(although I personally think keeping the designs would have resulted in more excitement for those who had played earlier SMT games), but the redesigns lack the clarity and focus that helped define the characters in previous installments. One late-game boss’s design is nearly incomprehensible (and not in a good way). Of course, the vast majority of the demon designs are as compelling as ever, so demon design on the whole remains a selling point for the game. But the bad ones do stick out.
The music is very strong. I’ve registered my belief that "sdds IV" is one of the best videogame songs of the year, and by the time you get to Tokyo, the BGM becomes a key component of the game’s distinctive, retro atmosphere. Hearing the Tokyo map theme while wandering around Ueno for the firs time was when I fell hard for the SMT4.
As others have pointed out, the arrival in Tokyo really is when the game begins. I’m not a huge fan of the slow opening, but it does have the advantage of turning the initial Tokyo expedition into a revelation on par with escaping Midgard in FF7 or, I don’t know, discovering Alefgard in DQ3 (okay, maybe not quite that big, but it’s still awesome!). The general game flow of semi-open exploration and challenge quests is just right for an RPG of this scale. I felt like whenever I picked up the game, there was something interesting for me to do—whether I had fifteen minutes to spare or an entire afternoon to invest in the world. I strongly preferred the challenge quests featuring one-off fights to the collection quests, but the latter were largely unobjectionable as a way of obtaining extra resources (and drop rates were so high that I almost always completed the quest the second I accepted it). I liked when the quests contributed detail to the setting, and I hope Atlus pursues that kind of storytelling with future sidequests.
On that note, I have to say that the NPC dialogue in SMT4 was excellent. Talking to NPCs after major events gave a much fuller picture of the setting and the story. I think writing for NPCs like that is the best way to encourage exploration and to reward players who play these games for more than just combat. I wish every videogame did it as well as SMT4.
I have kind of a hard time understanding some of the pre-release criticism of the story. SMT4’s story is hardly minimalist. Even apart from the context you can pick up from NPCs, there are tons of traditional story sequences that both advance the main plot and develop the relationships among the characters. The opening feels a bit tired, and the end is undeniably anticlimactic,* but for 35 of the game’s 40-60 hours, the story is perfectly capable of driving your interest in the adventure.
*Story spoilers:
The White are conceptually underdeveloped and so feel both like a cliché and like an arbitrary way of motivating the time/dimension travel and the main characters’ choices. Worse, the story basically ends when you return to Tokyo. On neutral path, you don’t encounter Walter or Jonathan again until just before their respective boss fights, and even then you just get one or two lines of dialogue. There is effectively no pay-off for the developments that the game spent 30+ hours setting up! Seeing a resolution to the mystery of Stephen and the little girl is nice, but it’s ultimately so straight-forward that it can’t sustain the last act on its own. I am also disappointed in the game’s old-school handling of the LNC trichotomy. I thought SMT3’s reasons, and especially Devil Survivor’s attempts to ground the paths in believable human behavior, were a more promising direction for the series. If it’s got to be LNC, then at least try to surprise me with the arguments for each side and probable consequences of adopting one. Law and Chaos being total assholes just doesn’t make for a very interesting experience.
Now I want to talk about some more problematic (not necessarily unsuccessful) aspects of the game. First, the battle system. I love press-turn as much as any battle system this side of the strategy RPG subgenre, but I do not think SMT4 showed the system in its best light. Too many early-game encounters turn on who attacks first, and too few late-game encounters require skillful manipulation of the system instead of the enemy's AI. The lack of a defense stat really hurts the early-game because there is just no way (until later on) to guard against catastrophe if an enemy gets the first attack.* Deaths feel like bad luck rather than a learning experience, and the difficulty feels abusive rather than rewarding. I think Atlus could have alleviated (not solved) two problems at once by consolidating the MC’s equipment into one slot rather than head, upper torso, legs, etc. (no more picking mismatched clothes just because the better look has worse stats), then giving each set a defensive bonus and a wider variety of modifiers. For example, some sets would be defensively weak but come with better resistances or even attached skills. This would give the player a better incentive to actually buy different sets of armor and think tactically about equipment choices (instead of wearing the white armor for 90% of the game). It would also potentially allow for the MC, at least, to survive some early-game back-attacks long enough to sub-in appropriate demons and fight back. But maybe I’m not considering something.
*While I am nitpicking, I will reiterate my dislike for SMT4’s encounter system. Being chased by ghosts adds a stress I don’t need, and there are probably more encounters on the whole than there would be in a random encounter system. Estoma is fine on the world map, but in dungeons you’re often not positioned to hit an enemy before it reaches you, and in any case there are the times when the game calls up six demons to surround you and force an encounter. The map icons give only partial information about the enemy you’re about to face, so you don’t get the full benefit of targeting a particular group for recruiting or killing (except with the special “red” enemies, which could exist independent of the general encounter system). I preferred random encounters with the probability indicator.
The late-game battles are a smaller problem that ought to be easier to fix. I get why the optional bosses need to punish tetrakarn and null-all teams. With the current fusion system, the assumption has to be that players are going to craft teams that can null/repel/drain whatever the boss wants to throw at them (short of Almighty attacks). Unfortunately, SMT4’s approach seems to favor abuse of the AI rather than creative use of abilities. One boss, as soon as I subbed in a character who nulled sick, went into a pointless loop of his least effective abilities. If I tried to nullify his attacks or buff/debuff beyond +/-2, however, he launched a triple Megidolaon salvo that not even my doped up demons could survive. I don’t think this was a bad fight in itself. But I would much rather they gave the boss some allies with different abilities/weaknesses or introduced more situationally-effective abilities like Death’s Door to spice things up.
Anyway, those are my initial impressions on finishing the game. SMT4 is easily my favorite game on 3DS, and if it’s not the landmark RPG that SMT3 was, well, it’s still one of the best RPGs I’ve played in years. I hope it does well enough that Atlus can make more like it.
I think you misread that. He says if you cast a spell twice, you have to spend that MP twice. Whereas if you cast Concentrate + the spell, it's just the Spell's MP + 10, AND you get slightly more than 2X damage.
It's not really losing a round, especially when you factor in the benefits. Let's say you have a 40 MP spell which does 500 damage normally. If you cast it twice, you'll do 1000 damage, but it costs you 80 MP and two turns. With Concentrate, you'll do about 1200 damage, at the cost of 50 MP and two turns.
I think their choice of handling the alignment splits in the last part of the game was definitely mistaken. Completely omitting resolution for parts of the storyline from different paths is just an odd decision. Not even the more story-light SNES games did that. It just makes the last part of the game seem rushed to most people, rather than an incentive to replay the entire game.
Messialyzer (don't know the English name, it heals all HP and ailments) on Flynn and keep Beelzebub fully debuffed while keeping my party fully buffed. I gave Flynn an item to protect him from confusion so that he could always heal the party. The demons focused on de/buffing and attacking. I made sure they all nulled or reflected shot attacks and Mudo. The result was that Beelzebub rarely landed a hit and often lost his turns. Don't use skills or items to reflect all physical or magic attacks, or he'll Megidolaon x3 you.
Catching up on quests is definitely worth it. I was kind of ehh on sidequests at first, but when I was clearing the quest log at the end of my Neutral playthrough, I discovered that you can get some great items and demons out of them.
Messialyzer (don't know the English name, it heals all HP and ailments) on Flynn and keep Beelzebub fully debuffed while keeping my party fully buffed. I gave Flynn an item to protect him from confusion so that he could always heal the party. The demons focused on de/buffing and attacking. I made sure they all nulled or reflected shot attacks and Mudo. The result was that Beelzebub rarely landed a hit and often lost his turns. Don't use skills or items to reflect all physical or magic attacks, or he'll Megidolaon x3 you.
Since I beat the game I decided to setup a demon to put into the DDS/Streetpass thing and the minute I go to set it up is the one time I actually get a streetpass for this game. Oh well. I feel kinda bad that I had no demon to send over since it otherwise takes up a slot in your stock.
I think their choice of handling the alignment splits in the last part of the game was definitely mistaken. Completely omitting resolution for parts of the storyline from different paths is just an odd decision. Not even the more story-light SNES games did that. It just makes the last part of the game seem rushed to most people, rather than an incentive to replay the entire game.
I think it was the right choice. You shouldn't know anything you didn't directly see as you are the protagonist so narrator omniscience doesn't make sense.
I think it was the right choice. You shouldn't know anything you didn't directly see as you are the protagonist so narrator omniscience doesn't make sense.
But the game is not exactly as short as a regular VN, not mention that the Challenge Quests are encouraged (some of this quest can ruin your alingment) but the price is still losing time unless you get/want Neutral. Is specially annoying because the lock is less than intentuive...
(also, you can explain a lot of narrative reasons without the need of the omnipresent narrator or DLC : p )
First SMT ever. Started this game on sunday. So I just killed a lion that had a high damaging fire spell. And got wiped on my way out =/. Anyways the lion was easy to deal with when I noticed he only had fire attacks and a normal attack, got lucky with a fusion that nullified fire damage and got a fire resistance armor on the main char. Interesting game so far.
She's also rather cute in the Neutral path (one of the best things in it, actually.)
Anyways, I think they made a HUGE mistake not to give percentage to compendium or giving incentives to complete the whole book like in Nocturne. It... seriously hampers my desire to chase after the demons I haven't gotten yet... what was they thinking?
I got lost in Jujo Base at level 20. I ended up having to draw a map from the boss because I was lost for about an hour, I think I walked out of there at level 26.
If you want to power level, go to Jujo Base haha (top left of the map)
So after about 13-14 hours in, the only thing I don't like that much is the Scouting system. It's so random that its a chore. I'm really bad at fusing too, but that's my own issue.
I know even if I can't play right now I will at some point.
