168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Persona 5 was the first time that an entry in the venerable Shin Megami Tensei series dropped the franchise's moniker - unless you count DemiKids, that is. It was a pretty major move for the spin-off, as it firmly established the Persona games as their own thing, separate from the rest of Atlus' flagship role-playi🌃ng games.
But if you've already mastered Persona 5 and torn through Royal, you're probably wondering: what's next? While it's tempting to recommend the last two Persona gam⛎es, there's so much more to this franchise than those. Plus, I'm an insufferable contrarian🃏, and I want people to broaden their horizons.
So if you're looking for more games in the franchise to dig into before next month's big Persona announcement, read on!
See Where Persona Started
Full disclosure: I prefer the first Persona game over most of what followed in the franchise. While Persona 3 and Persona 4 will always hold a special place in my heart, there's this beautifully morbid atmosphere that permeates the first game that only Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment managed to recapture.
B🗹ut what's up with the first game, anyway? It kicks off like any good '90s horror movie, with a group of kids playing a hokey fortune-telling game in a classroom. The game is called Persona, and as the kids play, they ▨haplessly summon a creepy, spectral figure into their school. This draws the protagonist into the realm of a mysterious entity, who gifts him netherworldly powers and tells him to ready up for an upcoming battle. Shortly thereafter, the physical manifestations of Mikage-cho's citizens inner demons are set loose, and begin to besiege the Japanese city.
Persona is a first-person dungeon crawler, which falls in line with most of the '90s entries - barring one-offs like Revelations: The Demon Slayer. There's not really any of the trappings found in later games, and it's much more of a traditional JRPG than anything else. But it's an exception𒁏ally good one of those, ꧟with a beautiful art direction, tight combat, and an astonishing macabre narrative.
How To Play It: Thereꦦ's a PSP remake that I consider to be the best way to play it, and is pretty widely available. A truncated PSOne port came over, too, and was recently put on the PlayStation Classic.
Check Out The Persona 5 Director's Early Work
Katsura Hashino worked on the MegaTen games for a long, long time. He started way back on the Super Famicom with the solid Shin Megami Tensei If..., which was actually a massive precursor to the Persona franchise, with its focus on🍃 a small setti💖ng and a high school cast.
But the problem with If... is that you can't actually play it in North America - not legally, that is. The earliest Hashino work available in the West is Soul Hackers, a 1997 spin-off and one of the very best JRPGs of its era. The game concerns a rogue group of hackers squaring off against the sinister Algon Soft, a tech company hellbentඣ on expanding their hi-tech virtual reality program across all of Japan. It's up to you to sabotage their efforts and uncover their nefarious plot that may or may not have to do with demons.
The game is a compelling cyberpunk thriller by way of a first-person dungeon crawler, scored with chilling, drone-y synths and accompanied by a gorgeous vaporwave aesthetic. Hashino was a designer on this one, as he wouldn't actually direct a title until 2003's Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (which you should also play.)
How To Play It: Atlus put out a wonderful 3DS port in 2013 that's re🎐adily available onli😼ne.
Get Into The Mainline Series
But wait, these are all spin-offs - what about the main entries? Well, uh, only two of these actually came over to the Americas.ꦦ There is an iOS port of the original game, but it's a less-than-optimal way to experience it. So, if you want to play the earliest ones, emulation's your friend. No, I won't show you where, because I don't want an angry email from Atlus.
Don't despair, though, as the two console games that came over are some of the best JRPGs out there. Nocturne's had plenty of ink spilled on it by better writers, so I'm throwing my hat into the ring for Shin Megami Tensei IV. Aღm I doing that because it's my favorite role-playing game of all time? Who's to say!
The 3DS game follows a group of young samurai living in the medieval Mikado Kingdom, as they clash with demons and prove their worth to their rulers. However, as they poke and prod at those rulers, they realize that they've been lied to their whole lives. Their decidedly feudal existence has actually existed atop the ruins of Tokyo, which has long since been besieged by demons, and its impoverished inha🍸bitants left to rot by the sinister Angels.
Shin Megami Tensei IV is practically a 🎐perfect game. It's a riveting third-person dungeon crawler with the most intuitive UI I've ever used in a role-playing game, bolstered by the most addictive demon-fusing mechanics in the franchise and a decidedly political narrative that's ultim⛎ately about the evils of gentrification and the validity of radicalism. There's nothing else like it on the market.
How To Play It: It's a 3DS game, so it's readily available at secondhand retailers🅘 and through the eShop༒.
Step On Up To The Plate, It's Time To Make History, Yeah!
But perhaps the best way to experience Shin Megami Tensei, ultimately, is to find the game that's right for you. I started with Raidou Kuzunoha vs the Soulless Army back in the day, way before I knew anything about the series. I mainly played that because the cover art was sick as hell and because the subject matter grabbed me.
That's what rules about Shin Megami Tensei, as I've stated before: that diversity. These games all have similar elements, but practically no two are alike. Want to see teens take on social media? There's Devil Survivor. What about a detective story set in the roaring '20s? Raidou Kuzunoha's got you covered. Love movies like The Thing and Event Horizon? Strange Journey's been released twice and y'all didn't play it. Point is, there are so many of these things that you can comb th☂rough𓆏 them all and find one that fits you.
Shin Megami Tensei is one of the most influential gaming franchises of all time, very much birthing mechanics that would give rise to the mega-popular Pokemon. It'๊s also my personal favorite gaming franchise of all time, and it makes me happy to see it getting showered wi🔜th so much love in recent years.
With Shin Megami Tensei V on the horizon, and Persona 5 still on gamers' mi🍌nds, there's never been a better tim🍨e to give it a shot.