I picked up Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey for the DS a few weeks ago and it just hasn’t been doing it for me. This surprised me, because I’m usually a huge fan of the series and its miscellaneous spinoffs. Strange Journey took the series gameplay and combined it with some elements of the Etrian Odyssey (another favorite) so why was I so meh about the game? Then I realized what was missing – consistent character customization.
In Strange Journey, you have no real control over how your character progresses. In SMT: Nocturne, you were in complete charge of your main character’s growth – his stats and his abilities. Not only that, but your allies progressed in an orderly fashion – they’d gain new abilities as they leveled up, some of them evolved into different monsters, and you’d combine them to create new monsters who would inheret some of their abilities.
Contrast that with Strange Journey where your stat gains are mostly random and your abilities can be changed simply by changing your equipment. Allies don’t seem to get new abilities as they LV-Up (although they might randomly mutate an existing ability) and ability inherentance isn’t as important due to demon sources and the new password system. The result is a game where your characters don’t progress and evolve so much as they’re replaced periodically with new characters.
Because of the lack of consistent character customization in Strange Journey, I feel no attachment to my characters in the game. These aren’t characters I’ve carefully built up over time – they’re just the characters I happen to have at the moment. I can’t really strategize how I’m going to progress with my party in the future, because there’s not really any sort of longterm strategy to bear in mind – when I get to the next area, I’ll grab the equipment that I feel is the best for the main character and I’ll grab the monster allies that have the best stats & abilities for my character’s LV.
In a genre that is built upon character progression, feeling detatched from that element is a critical flaw. Although the rest of the game is done expertly, I’m not sure that I’m going to keep playing through the end.
