Shin Megami Tensei (the 1st one) out on iOS

At the moment, I'm playing the first Shin Megami Tensei game. It's out in English on iOS now, available on iTunes.

First there was "Megami Tensei"; it was a 1980s game based on a novel, and I've got (and seen) an OVA related to it - demons come out of computers... btw that OVA wasn't very good.

But based on that idea, some other folks created "Shin Megami Tensei" on the SNES, and it eventually SMT started spawning spin-off series (e.g. Persona) and the franchise became massive.

The key features of the overall series are:

• Someone will manage to connect to the demon realm by writing computer software
• There's an epic battle between demons and god, and you represent the humans caught between, and can join one side or the other; or do your own thing.
• It does branching storyline right. The choices are fairly clear, and the outcome really affects the story in a meaningful way, with really different endings possible.
• It's set in contemporary Japan turned to chaos, rather than some fantasy world.
• You can recruit your enemies and have them fight alongside you (they were doing this before Pokemon!)
• The world will probably end, but shopping mall buildings and underground rail stations will probably remain intact (how depressing, humankind's legacy!)

This iOS version is actually based on the later enhanced Gameboy Advance release of SMT, so it's got little extra features above what's in the SNES English fan-translation. So I get to watch bonus cutscenes... actually, in this first clip, you get to see how a loved one died; is that really such a reward?

Considering how many games there are in the extended series with spin-offs and such, I haven't really played that many of them. I've played quite a long way into SMT III on PS2 (that was a long time ago!), a spin-off called "Demikids" on GBC (that was even longer ago!), I started Persona 3 but never got along with it enough to continue... started an MMORPG called SMT: Imagine (but not for long), and recently played through Devil Survivor Overclocked on 3DS, which seemed to take me about a year - mainly because I took myself down a route that made it a really really tough game. However, Devil Survivor Overclocked is my favourite RPG on 3DS (sorry Pokemon). It's really good!

I'm really enjoying SMT. Every time I play one, it seems so fresh and atmospheric. I love the fact you can have little conversations with the demons to try and recruit them; the way you get a feeling for their personalities, and the way they are so inhuman in their responses and behaviour. Demons are psychologically interesting! I like the way that it's set in Tokyo so the recognisable world is warped - somehow the world of 1990s Japan overrun with demons and full of cults, bars, and fierce weaponry... is more believable than a fantasy world of "normal people".

I also really like the way the hero characters have swords and guns and magic, where swords and guns are different weapon slots with different use, rather than just having "attack" and magic.

I really wish this wasn't on iOS though. For one thing, I'm borrowing an iPad again, then on-screen controls emulating a joypad make my hands feel weird after a while. I wish this had been ported to 3DS (with in-game maps on the lower screen) or on Vita (because the storage capacity on the device is better and there's a better user accounts system on PSN).

Still, I hope this does well enough that they decide to localise the iOS version of SMT II into English.

I just bought myself an American 3DS XL on import (it's a gold Legend of Zelda special edition I found 2nd hand on Amazon.com) so I can eventually play SMT IV - because it seems like it's never coming out in Europe. I already have the special edition of the game which comes in a nice box with strategy guide and CD. It's not set in a contemporary period, but I expect it to be great.

One thing I do worry about a little; as well as playing SMT, I've been playing Disgaea 3, watching Highschool DxD, watched another OVA based on SMT (called Tokyo Revelations) and just got a copy of Tecmo's Deception IV for Vita in the post... perhaps I am spending too much time with demons, I'm tending slightly towards the chaotic...

Banshee's Last Cry / Kamaitachi no Yoru

An app came out on iOS a few weeks ago called "Banshee's Last Cry", it's published by Aksys and is described as "a thrilling visual novel that takes readers on a deadly thrill ride of murder and deception". It's a free download where you pay £2.49 as an in-app purchase to unlock the full game.

It's actually a localisation of an old game by Chunsoft for the Super Famicom, called "Kamaitachi no yoru", or "Night of the Sickle Weasel". I guess they primarily called it "Banshee's Last Cry" to make it look a little bit related to "Virtue's Last Reward" - well, enough to lure fans into spending their £2.49.

They've changed the location of the original story from a ski lodge in Japan to a ski lodge in Canada, made some technological changes to bring it into 2014, re-recorded the soundtrack (some music is the same, some different - some so it doesn't sound so traditionally Japanese, I suppose), gone to an actual Canadian ski lodge to take pictures to replace all the original background images, changed all the names of the characters, and changed the folk mythology from Japanese to Irish.

I've been reading it, and here's what I have to say:

The story is perhaps more "Choose Your Own Adventure" than you might expect from something described as a visual novel. It's what they used to call a "sound novel" - basically a light novel with atmospheric background images, music and sound effects. No character portraits or voices.

The main story really feels like a murder mystery from the 1990s. The murders and descriptions are really quite gruesome sometimes. The plot actually seems really familiar to me, perhaps similar methods were used in some Kindaichi manga I read, or some Detective Conan anime I watched. As such, it was fairly easy for me to pinpoint the correct suspect and details about the initial murder (though I certainly didn't get it on my first play-through). The main difficulty for me was finding the choices in the story where I could express my thoughts in order to trigger the ending.

Another comment on the 1990s feeling of the game - the attitude of the male protagonist and other characters is pretty much that females in the story only exist to be protected. They're rounded up together, and the way they don't seem to be suspects seems dismissive. Any attempt by them to be useful on their own ends up disastrous. I don't think they really even notice.

After my first play-through, certain new options appeared in the game, which is an interesting way of doing things. Your reasoning in previous play-throughs brings you closer to being able to solve the mystery. However, the player does not know - if I use this option it appears to be a short cut of a few pages, but is that relevant to any in-game path change?

Having said that reasoning brings you closer to the correct mystery ending... it's also the case that some endings completely diverge; one ending you can trigger very early in the story has you leaving before any murders take place - and so in that timeline the murder doesn't take place that night (why is that?). In the very worst ending (which is also the first one I saw), I still don't fully understand who committed all the murders at the end.

After I solved the main murder mystery and the credits rolled, a lot more options open up in the game. They lead to far more light-hearted stories, joke endings, and a lot of puns on the word "banshee". It is clear why they are not present when the game is first started. Two of the new endings also had end credits rolling, so they must be the "Occult" and "Spy" endings mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Kamaitachi no Yoru. One is just funny, the other a secret code message which I managed to decode straight away (but it was still fun to read the story). There's also a path with a reference to Chunsoft's "Mystery Dungeon" line of games. Oh it would have been nice if there really was a roguelike built into the app, hahaha.

Issues I have with the localisation - very few. One comment near the beginning about how silly it is to say "cheese" for photos because people end pulling an "ooh" face only really works if you consider the Japanese pronunciation of "cheese" ("chi-zu-"). There are some errors; in the "Snow Maze" path, there's a mistake where they give the incorrect name for one of the characters, accidentally marrying her to the wrong character ("Colleen Buchanan"). In the end of the path with the secret code, the font size messes up and you're left scrolling the page left and right to read.

It would have been nice to have something telling me which endings I've seen so I know if there's anything left to aim for. It would have been nice if like the original Super Famicon version, we could see silhouettes of each character in order to feed the imagination. It would have been nice to unlock some sort of diagram of branching paths for the after-story so I can see the last few things to do. It would be nice if there was a "clear data" option in the menu so I could compare the options available at the start to the ones available after many play-throughs.

Best of all, it would have been nice if it was on Android so I didn't have to borrow an iPad to read it! (I think that's "coming soon").

But overall, it's been a fun read, it was a good price, and it's been a pleasure to experience this little piece of sound novel history so long after the game originally came out. I hope they decide to bring more visual / sound novels out in English on mobile / tablet devices, because it's a very convenient platform for reading interactive fiction.

Demon's Score (iOS app)

I got Demon's Score on iOS (my boyfriend carelessly left his iPad in my house, you see....), mostly because:

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/09/12/square-enixs-demons-score-features-all-star-composers/

AMAZING composer lineup.

Includes: Naoshi Mizuta (Final Fantasy XI), Yoko Shimomura (Mario & Luigi games, Kingdom Hearts), Kohei Tanaka (Sakura Wars, One Piece, Gunbuster), Keiichi Okabe (Tekken, Nier), and 2 members of Zuntata (Taito game composers).

You can hear some clips of it here:
http://www.square-enix.co.jp/smart/demons/en/#!/character1

Official Promo video

And...

1. It's got really annoying voice acting, oh my, that's so annoying. Is that teddy bear supposed to be a Gilbert Gottfried impersonation or something?
2. The story is "so bad it's funny", it's a hoot. Nothing astounding, very stupid. XD
3. I don't like the heavy rock tracks much.... which unfortunately is the opening music and tutorial level... there's some nice violiny tracks after that... then some funk... it's quite a mix. Listen to the samples on the official site. I really wish there wasn't so much of this heavy rock though, it's pretty uninteresting.
4. The gameplay suffers from the same problem that Ouendan has. There's a bunch of stuff going on as you play - a story is taking place.... but you are too busy prodding a screen and putting your hands in the way to pay attention.
5. On the bits where you need to rapidly tap the screen as much as possible, the obvious thing to do is take advantage of the iPad's multi-touch capabilities and use 4 fingers at once. Unfortunately, if you do that and slide, it takes you out of the app... which makes you restart the level. Grr! That's what you get for trying to be smart
6. And this is a big one.... it's a game you pay for, it's £4.99 which is kind of a lot for an app. That's not the problem. The problem is the unlockables - when you defeat a demon you are supposed to be able to sign a pact with it in order to use that demon. Each has its own defense and experience stat. However, after each level beyond the first one, when you go to sign that pact it pops up something to say it'll cost you £1.99 to unlock that. This adds up to a lot of money and seems really unfair considering you just laid down some money for the game.

Other than that, it's a pretty fun game, though nothing outstanding. It's fun and quite ridiculous. Could do with more morale boosting from a team of male cheerleaders though. No way am I going to buy any of those extras; even if they seemed worth it, I would feel bad supporting this kind of payment scheme.