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.

The new version of Breath of Death VII is up! The system should automatically prompt you to download the update next time you try to play the game.

This new version doesn’t add any new features, it just fixes some bugs that were discovered after the game went up. Oh and saves from the previous version should work fine with the new version.

The top downloads haven’t been fixed, but I did get an email from the XNA team with a spreadsheet with Breath of Death VII sales data. Assuming I’m reading this thing right (it’s in a different format than the usual sales data we get) and it’s accurate, this is what we’re looking at:

4/22 – 5/1 Breath of Death VII data

Worldwide
3744 Sales
7687 Demos
48% Conversion Rate

On the one hand, we were expecting a bit more demos and sales. It’s impossible to say how much the Top Downloads not being updated affected us, but I’m sure it had a part. I really hope we can sell 30k by the end of June, because that means I could start working on game development full time (which would not only make my life a lot easier, but it would also mean higher quality games in less time).

On the other hand, that’s an insanely high conversion rate. Most games have conversion rates under 10% early on and then slowly go up over time so to have a conversion rate of around 50-50 right off the bat is crazy. Not only that, but if you just look at US figures, the conversion rate is even higher – a whopping 59%.

So we’re going to be watching the sales data very closely over the next few weeks. If sales stay steady for a long time, this could be very profitable.