It’s hard being a hipster pile of garbage. I grew up dabbling in obscure PS2 games that nobody else in my life had ever heard of. I loved nothing more than gothic, edgy romps where teenagers with sick hair would blow their own brains out to summon evil monsters. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Shin Megami Tensei comes more naturally to me than Persona ever has.
I detest hardcore fans who feel like Shin Megami Tensei games are the true form of this top-notch formula, when, in reality, it’s incredibly similar to its successor Persona, albeit with some extra challenge or a few extra features depending on the game. Just look at Shin Megami Tensei 5, which launched for the Nintendo Switch a couple of years back and didn’t hesitate to kick your ass even on the standard difficulty.♛ It’s a tough, morbid, yet utterly fascinating game which stays true to its roots even if, at times, it proves a detriment. It felt like many of the obscure PS2 games I grew up with. To thi💃s day, I can’t remember how I even got my hands on the damn things.
Aside from Digital Devil Saga, I wouldn’t say no to fully-fledged remakes of the original ဣPersona and 𝔍its sequel. Both are dark, brilliant, and challenging RPG gems.
The PS2 was home to everything from Devil Summoner to Nocturne, not to mention the first releases of Persona 3 and 4 before they’d been ported and improved upon for years to come. It was always a console haven for RPG fans, providing Japanese dev🎃elopers with massive audiences and competent enough hardware to experiment with exciting ideas. It was seen in every game Atlus would release for the platform, even if, in hindsight, some of them were either flawed or fiendishly diꦑfficult. The duo of Digital Devil Saga games sit firmly within both camps, but I still love them.
Digital Devil Saga puts you in the shoes of Embryon, who operates within a fictional realm known as the Junkyard, as you battle against neighbouring factions. Your job is to emerge victorious in battle and eventually ascend to a mysterious plain known as Nirvana. During the second game, you eventually leave the Junkyard behind, only to emerge in a ruined version of the real world, filled with themes of identity, self doubt, and what it means to be human in a seemingly digital realm. It’s tremendously dark, having quite a bit in common with anime like Serial Experiments Lain and Ghost in the Shell. The comparatively sleek visuals of the PS2 contrasted with themes of suicide and ultraviolence unsettled me as a child who had yet to play and fall in love with any of the mainline SMT or Persona games. Looking back, I realise this was my first exposure to this type of RPG outside of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy. And boy, it doesn’t ❀mess about when it come𓃲s to throwing you in at the deep end.
My memories are cloudy, but all the Shin Megami Tensei hallmarks remain. It still has you using many of the same spells and summoning awesome-looking monsters to fight it out in dungeons, and most of the main characters are moody teenagers with a shedload of problems to work out. Having to shoot themselves in the head to summon demons to do the🌱ir bidding is the least of their worries right now🥂. I haven’t played it for over a decade, but Digital Devil Saga’s presentation and mechanics were so pronounced I still think about it.
Unfortunately, it’s one of many cult classics that are sadly tra♛pped on original hardware. It didn’t receive a digital release on PS3 or PS4, with physical copies becoming increasingly harder to track down in the modern era. It’s well on its way to becoming a piece of lost media, so it’s high time we received a remaster or, at the very least, a shiny new port. Or perhaps Sony could just make its consoles backwards-compatible ✅and we wouldn’t need to lose any of the original ‘00s charm.
Persona has long been considered a gateway drug for Shin Megami Tensei, easing in the newcomers as they jump into games like Tokyo Mirage Sessions or the recently remastered Nocturne. In the moಞdern day, Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 wouldn’t be considered as weird and esoteric as they originally were, and would likely pull in a contemporary audience quite easily.ܫ Why not embrace this and spoil us with a couple of remasters for classics that have long struggled with obscurity? I’d like to see how fellow Persona fans at TheGamer react to something so similar but also fundamentally alien. After Reload, let’s dig even further into the past.
