Shin Megami Tensei General Topic

[Arnaham]

That and I know SMT too well to not pick the highest difficulty, really.

[Maniac]

I can't remember, did you ever try to play Nocturne on the highest difficulty?

[Arnaham]

I did a full playthrough with the True Demon ending on the highest difficulty, yeah.

[Maniac]

Huh. I really don't remember that, when was that?

[Arnaham]

Would've had to be at least five years ago.

[Maniac]

binging on endgame content nao. let's see if I can finish SMT4A by the end of tuesday~

also, this thing:

[Arnaham]

They give you access to the optional boss on NG+ as soon as you can go to Mementos, so I decided to go in with my sub-LV20 party and get destroyed. Thing is that I assume you lose access to this fight upon entering the final dungeon, so I don't know what good way there is to level up a lot for it.

[Maniac]

That sounds really stupid. Like, I'm assuming that if you disbanded your party for the not-so-final dungeon and solo'd generic encounters for a while (assuming P5 divides EXP across the whole party like P3 and P4 did), maybe you'd get your MC up to snuff, but there's prolly no clean way to do that for the rest of your party.

Eh, I never really fought the bonus bosses from Persona 3 or 4 anyway -- bonus bosses from the PS2 gen all seemed disproportionately pointless compared to the amount of effort you need to dump into beating them (says the guy who fought almost every fiend in SMT4)

Oh, and for SMT4A Fiends are still dumb in SMT4A, although slightly less dumb. They're all in fixed positions in a bonus dungeon that opens up in the endgame, but they're timesinks with huge amounts of HP (like 50,000+) and a 10 turn limit, which kicks you out of the dungeon if you elapse it, at which point the Fiend will retain most of its damage (and heal some of it) and you go back in until you've killed the guy. Only the first fiend, David, gave me a hellacious experience when it reached near-death and started spamming makarakarn and status ailments constantly every turn that waste your attacks and plug up his weakness. He's not even powerful or dangerous (he does pitiful damage and doesn't have dekaja), I just cannot put in the damage to outpace his turn limit/healing bullcrap with him shutting every option down. Doesn't help that the endgame turns Hallelujah, whose gimmick up to that point had been to nullify status ailments, into a magic nuker who constantly spams Megidolaon instead of blocking statuses anymore. Like, why can't you just make the fiends fight the exact same way as they did in SMT4? They were pretty damn fun boss fights, just fix the encounter shit (and they did) and they'd be hot to trot!

Oh, and speaking of Hallelujah, who was the dipshit who thought that was a good idea? "Hey, here's a really nuanced partner who is generally not all that useful, but has his place every now and then. Let's just overwrite that role he played with a role that another partner, Isabeau, played!" ffs. I can't wait for my rematch with Krishna -- can't wait to get shut down for good because some worthless assclown of a partner is now too busy spamming Megidolaon to protect me from status ailments.

[ganonfloyd]

i spent way too much time resetting the game to fight fiends so part of that sounds solid, ten turns thing is weird but i usually got eviscerated in the first turn anyway if i wasn't going to win so there's that i guess

Just made it to Sky Tower. I suspect Medusa will be here shortly with the "LOOK AT THE STATUES" camera pan. I liked that they gave Shesha the two "sound cool but don't do anything" moves like they did with Masakado. It always gave me the sensation of fighting something so vastly out of my league that it didn't even need to exert its full effort to wipe me out.

[Maniac]

and i just got my ass kicked at the last second by a boss ~15 levels under me

[ganonfloyd]

good stuff

[ganonfloyd]

Medusa was a big softy just like last time. I've seen some friends who always compared her to Minotaur in difficulty and that always floored me. I guess it might be because I always have Zan spells since I like green things but I unno.

Finally fused my first wiener demon so the game has truly begun.

[Maniac]

Having a lot of Zan moves would be it; Medusa in SMT IV was pretty much no more or less difficult than Minotaur, really. Force tends to be the least represented element in any given party I use in any given SMT game really (except Nocturne, where Tornado has the highest damage output of anything you get for a long time), so she was a road block of greater difficulty than Minotaur. Of course, both of them are undeniably the hardest bosses in the game until like, Kenji lol. That game's balance was so unrelentingly awful.

Meanwhile in SMT4A, Medusa is the exact same boss who comes in when you're over level 30 and thus have enough MP to reliably buff/debuff, and have just been given a partner that nulls her Marin Karin. lolwhoops

[Maniac]

Atlus, I could write better AI for the partners than whatever the fuck you set for them. Here's a normal encounter with like, 100 HP left. Have my partner fucking attack them! Whatever the hell you do, don't program them to use concentrate or Enduring Cheer or whatever useless support skill when I'm gonna kill the enemy in one more attack! You clearly have a script that determines if an enemy is at critical condition, their bodies flash red when they are at critical HP! This shouldn't be rocket science, I'm a dipshit novice programmer and even I can correct your code using scripts I know for a fact are in your game!

[ganonfloyd]

Having a lot of Zan moves would be it; Medusa in SMT IV was pretty much no more or less difficult than Minotaur, really. Force tends to be the least represented element in any given party I use in any given SMT game really (except Nocturne, where Tornado has the highest damage output of anything you get for a long time), so she was a road block of greater difficulty than Minotaur. Of course, both of them are undeniably the hardest bosses in the game until like, Kenji lol. That game's balance was so unrelentingly awful.

Meanwhile in SMT4A, Medusa is the exact same boss who comes in when you're over level 30 and thus have enough MP to reliably buff/debuff, and have just been given a partner that nulls her Marin Karin. lolwhoops

i didn't even know she had marin karin this time around so double whoops