Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine: the free-to-play MMO (developed by Cave), based on Atlus's Megami Tensei series of RPGs is now in the process of being localised to English by Aeria Games, and is now in closed beta. Actually, it has been since the beginning of December but I didn't get round to installing it until this weekend (I've been busy!)
Although it's a closed beta, Filefront are giving away 20000 free access keys, so it's not very closed if you want to join in! I got one of those keys last week, then got sent an invite from Aeria games on Friday via email, so now I have the access key spare. :/
All character data is going to be erased when it goes to open beta, so I'm hesitant to put much time into it. All I've done so far is create a character, follow the tutorial and do the first mission. My character is level six.
I was thinking, from the MegaTen games I've played, and from people's descriptions of the game, that it would be kind of like an online and demon-filled, dark, grown-up version of Pokemon. The reality is that it feels like a cross between Phantasy Star Online and playing as a beastmaster in Final Fantasy XI, and I get the feeling that the game may have borrowed some of the stylistic elements from the .hack games/anime. Well, I don't know really, since this MMO fits in the storyline between the 1st and 2nd SMT games and I only started playing at the 3rd game, so I don't know the style of those older games.
It seems that you can only summon one of your demons at a time, and you fight alongside it. You choose how to allocate stat points to your character as you level up, and which skills to train up in as you fight, and in this way you mould your character into a melee fighter, long-range shooter, or magic user. I'm completely undecided as to what I'd like to be at the moment! Before I started playing, I was under the impression that I would be controlling the demons, not both the player and their summoned demon both at once.
There's only one server (Cerberus), containing several "channels", and their load has always been labelled "sparse" when I've gone in, however it's still a bit laggy (sometimes it becomes somewhat unplayable), and there's something on the front of the site saying that everyone should suffer fewer disconnect issues now. Another issue - I did notice that during the tutorial mission, the final cutscene was subtitled in Japanese rather than English (NB: it is easy to work out what happened even if you can't understand the language). So it's definitely a work in progress. But, worth a look if you're at all interested at getting to play this part of the MegaTen series, and it's free! :D
