I need to try to find the post on Neogaf where someone listed all the companies that Index (atlus' parent company) owes money to. I am pretty sure Nintendo was the third money on the list. Not sure how this works, but if Index owes debt to Nintendo, that puts Nintendo in a very good place to buy Atlus, a move I WOULD LOVE!

here is the article i was mentioning dualshockers.com ran the story.

"Looks like Index owes money to quite a few partners involved in ATLUS’ business. The numbers are indicated in thousands of yen.

Production IG (44,100)
ASCII Media Works (31,521)
Aquaplus (24,120)
STUDIO MAUSU (17,314)
Nintendo (13,599)
Pony Canyon (12,373)
Shueisha (11,395)
Enterbrain (6,166)
Fuji Television Network (5,525)
M-ON! Entertainment (5,040)
JASRAC (3,528)
GREE (2,506)
SEGA (2,454)
Movic (2,412)
YOMIKO (1,890)
Aniplex (1,862)
WiZ (1,737)
Tomy (1,370)
T.O Entertainment (1,260)
TV Asahi (1,218)
Taito (1,113)
Gakken Publishing (1,071)
Tatsumi Publishing (1,050)

Apparently those spiffy animated cutscenes made for the games we all know and love costed a fair bit, but what’s probably more interesting is seeing ASCII and Nintendo near the top of the list, as the two companies might leverage their position as creditors to make a bid on ATLUS."

I'm not sure where I am at in terms of progress, I'm about 19 hours in. At some point I overshot Shinjuku and had to go back, and right now I'm in the middle of taking care of some corpses.

The game rules, but I'm starting to take seriously a tip I read on Destructoid: look at an actual map of Tokyo to find your bearings. It will actually help.

That kind of makes me think how awesome it would be to have an RPG in a setting I'm familiar with (Montreal). Could be cool to see what they do with actual landmarks.


Does anyone read the demon descriptions? Some of them are pretty messed up. The Ubu for instance, that upside-down baby head with spider legs? *shudder*

I am liking the game, but I wish it was moving a bit faster. I am so afraid of going in to an area and getting stomped because I am not a high level; therefor, i force myself to grind. I am still on the normal difficulty.

Are there any story ramifications for me dropping down to easy? There is a lot of game here and I do not want to be hindered by grinding; however, I do not want to miss out on the story for choosing an easier difficulty...

No penalties whatsoever for dropping to Easy. You don't miss out on story and you get as much XP and money.

@Scrawnton

The game says the story remains the same. And even if you do land in an area with higher level monsters, the experience bonuses are insane. I've fought battles where I got 3000-5000 experience per fight. Totally worth it

@Guillaume is there a big difference between the difficulties? Such as, can I walk through areas with minimal grinding and beat bosses as long as i use my brain and have a good strategy?

@Scrawnton

There's a pretty big difference. But it's hard to tell if that's because I'm over-leveled or if it's because I dropped it down to easy.

I enjoy the game more than I did on Normal, personally. You can always change it back to Normal if you don't like it.

@Guillaume alright, I will push it down to easy. My main concern is finishing the game in time for pikmin 3 to come out... Once pikmin comes out, there are bigs games i want pretty much every two weeks. Pikmin leads to Mario and luigi which begets final fantasy 14 (which i will play all fall) but that leads to w101 and gta6, which leads me right in to pokemon and wind waker hd, which carries me into the launch of ps4 and mario 3d world.... oh and zelda link between worlds.... TOO MANY GAMES!!

I don't find the game too hard if you actively search out quests and complete them. You usually gain a good enough advantage over your enemies by the time you complete them and if you do create a good variety of demons, you can face up against different types of battles. The extra challenge is nice once in a while and having the ability to save anywhere/revive after death (as long as you have the funds of course) can prevent some frustration too.

@Guillaume
I just started last night and haven't seen any difficulty option. Where do you select that at?

@DeputyVanHalen

The second time you die.

@GuillaumeOK, thanks. I've only died once so far, on the second or third battle I fought.

Recently I've checked the 3-4 streetpasses I've gotten for this game, and got a message saying that so-and-so played Etrian Odyssey 4. The game then gave me 40 AP for streetpassing a "veteran".

Which is cool, I guess, but between this and the paid DLC that yields extra AP, this game can't be very well balanced.

If anyone plans to buy this game (at retail) and not buy Fire Emblem Awakening, I'll trade a Club Nintendo code or two for this game's code.

Figured I might as well bump this since I just finished my first playthrough!

I decided to just go with my own decisions this time through, and wound up with the chaos ending.

And for those still early on in the game; while it's definitely difficult at first, try your best to keep the difficulty on Normal. Once I hit the half way point in the game, everything became pretty easy. After I had Megido on my MC, mobs stopped being a concern at all; and once you have a solid team of demons set up, bosses have no shot of exploiting weaknesses like they can at the beginning. After beating the final boss on my first try, I couldn't help but wonder how even more boring it would have been on Easy, heh.

Since there's a New Game+ mechanic, I'll probably one day playthrough it again using a guide this time so I can get the Neutral route, but for now I can move onto the many other games I need to get to ;p

I just started this game last night, the intro was really long and confusing and it literally put me to sleep, I'll probably just start from scratch again because I had no clue what was going on, it felt like an acid trip, and then Nate Drake showed up!

So, I just started this game today, and after an hour of play, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. This is my first game in the SMT series, but I decided it was time to dive in considering I love JRPGs and have heard so much praise for this series.

The first tutorial/dungeon was... interesting. I didn't particularly enjoy how, just when I was trying to recruit my first three demons, a demon could refuse, then basically demolish me in one hit. And after I got a demon or two and was going for a third one, there were still a couple of times where my entire team got wiped out. The game really makes you hit the ground running, huh?

Once I did manage to get my three demons though, combat was a lot more fun, and I started to figure out how the battle system works. Battles go quickly and are engaging, and all the different demons are really interesting.

One of my questions, though, is what should be my general approach to getting demons? Should I try to get one of every single demon I encounter? Is there any benefit to recruiting multiples of the same demon? Is this like Pokemon where I should just kinda build a balanced team and stick with it the whole game, or do you swap demons in and out depending on the situation quite frequently? If so, doesn't that make it difficult to keep them all leveled appropriately?

Basically, any tips you guys could provide would be very welcome!

roykoopa64 said:

I'm really interested in this game but I always prefer playing previous games in a series before jumping this late in the game. Based on the wikipedia entry for the series as a whole... it's confusing, especially with all the spin-offs and such (Devil Sumoner, Devil Survivor, etc.).

As an owner of Nintendo systems only, are there any recommendations for previous games to play in the series? Or should I just jump into IV?

If you can get your hands on a copy of SMT: Strange Journey for the DS, that's a good one to play. It is very much the same style as SMT4 (except you explore in traditional 1st person dungeon crawler style). In fact, Strange Journey could have been a main line SMT sequel, but I have read that it wasn't numbered because it is tradition that mainline SMT games happen in Japan. I think Strange Journey was actually harder than SMT4 is.

I think I'm past the "alignment lock" (finished Blasted Tokyo and Infernal Tokyo) and I'm on the neutral path. Nice!

However, apparently now I'm required to do all the sidequests I ignored. This is something I really hate about JRPGs: you're ready for them to be over, but they put forced padding in there before you can complete it. So many RPGs do this: you're rushing toward a conclusion, but at the last minute it comes to a grinding halt and you're forced to do errands for hours.

I still plan to finish the game, but this is a very disappointing turn of events.

@Guillaume

Yup... absolutely horrendous design there. I was about ready to give up and just not beat it because of how bad it was. Maybe I should have checked a guide to make sure but do they really have you doing everything? Maybe certain quests trigger you to move on? It ended up lasting me so much longer than it should have cause of the neutral path.