Shin Megami Tensei 4

I got a 3DS for Christmas and it's been my system of choice for all of 2013. It's probably logged 100 hours of gameplay since I came into possession of it. Animal Crossing New Leaf has had almost 80 hours logged between Kelly and myself playing that one.

Last weekend, I purchased a copy of Shin Megami Tensei 4 for the system. This is the series that the Persona games were born out of. It's a very old school dungeon crawler and it's very difficult. I've probably died 5-6 times in the first couple of hours. This has gotten better as I filled my party out and managed to gain a few levels. It's still tough but I have enough firepower to outlast most of the enemies in battle. My first mini-boss fight was really tough but I managed to come out of that with no deaths though my party was totally drained of resources.

The cool aspect of this game is that you fill your party out with monsters you encounter in the dungeon. You have a talk option and you open negotiations with the monsters. If you're successful they will agree to join you. This is challenging as you can make missteps during this process. But it seems to be a consistent process so you can learn from your mistakes with the same monster. This adds some nice variety to the battle system.

The story hasn't progressed much. I've essentially gotten through the tutorial and have just started the early goings of the real game. So I don't really have a lot to say about that aspect of the game. The graphics are nice and the voice acting is acceptable.

The only real issue I'm having is money is really hard to come by at times. I just added the ability to ask monsters for it in combat, otherwise it just seems to be awarded for completing quests. I'm a little worried about that as I could be under geared the entire game and constantly struggling because of it. I'm hoping that will get better now that I'm into the actual game.

So far I'd give the game a solid B. Really fun if you like old school punishing dungeon crawlers.