smt strange journey pix

first of all, a little boring personal update :p

i hate being sick... it's really nice out today (super sunny and perfectly cool) and i'd love to go out, at least go to the library or something, but this respiratory infection moved into my right ear (the same one that was infected for months in spring) and now sound is really painful q_q the last thing i want to do is get on a loud train. plus, i have a long shift (~10+ hours) on sunday, so i need to conserve energy. waste of a nice day :(

what have i been up to... i can tell i'm really sick because i spent 2 entire days just doing the kh2 xaldin fight over and over and over and over xD only when i'm sick can i focus on stuff like this. i have a video of it but i'm not sure how interesting it will be to watch. my summary would be... xaldin is basically a souls boss. it's exactly why i love kh combat so much. lots and lots of timed blocking! very fun to perfect. his chain attack glitched a bit on the gate and got me hit, and i panicked near the end, but this was a pretty good run.

n-e-way... brace yourself for some camera photos of a ds.

this is my new game+ of strange journey. this time, i'm going chaos for

strange journey is kind of interesting because the chaos route is more idealistically anarchist instead of pure might makes right chaos like usual. side games get weird. for example, the chaos route of devil survivor is basically "me and my evil cousin obsessed with me will RULE DA WORLD!!!" (and some cain and abel stuff)

i like strange journey a lot. combat is super easy (i will explain) and it's a traditional first person dungeon crawler (my favorite style of game), so i can kind of play it with my brain off. the ui is basically the same look as in the psp releases of persona 2, but, weirdly, i really like it in this lower resolution, whereas i totally despise it in the psp games (it got to me to a point where i ragequit and restarted on my ps1 lol)

this is my character. i went with the vitality option during the personality quiz at the beginning. i did the magic one during my first playthrough, as i usually go with mag when it's an option (not always so in smt), but because you just use magic with your gun, i got bored of it. the spells depend on your gun, but guns also have stats, you know, so you kind of get stuck in a rut using the "best weapon" and have to play for ages with the same 3 spells.

plus.. i got sick of it because elemental magic is super op in this game!!!!! because of "demon co-op". basically, whenever you hit the weakness of an enemy, all your party with the same alignment will do a group attack that cannot be resisted. you basically skate through the entire game on this.

and it's not just that co-op is unblockable or whatever, but it's also way easier to figure out an enemy's weakness in this one than it is in basically any other smt game. first of all, during combat, the bottom screen of your ds SHOWS YOUR ANALYSIS OF THE ENEMY. usually in smt games, you have to memorize the enemy's weaknesses, or, if you're in a game that lets you, you use up a turn pulling that data up. a lot of the time, you have to waste a skill slot on "analysis" too, and keeping that skill through all your fusions can be difficult. in strange journey, it's right there in front of you at all times.

on top of that, they dumbed down strengths/resistances in this game to a crazy level. for example, apsaras. in nocturne, she absorbs electric damage and is weak to fire. you'll basically only find that out through trial and error. in strange journey...

she's blue so she's an ice demon that's weak to fire xD it's so fucking stupid. the whole game runs on pokemon logic like this. that's what i mean by "i can turn my brain off."

i'm in the 3rd dungeon, carina, the giant gross shopping mall. i really like the visual design of this dungeon. it's my second favorite after eridanus. the walls are covered in pictures of meat and ammunition and all kinds of products, BUY, SELL, CONSUME! the music is good too. not the best in the game, but still fun.

this dungeon also has darkness sections and phase-shifting puzzles that swap out sections of the map to change where you can go and what you can access. i think feeling your way through the dungeon in those darkness sections is kind of fun, but it also gets boring fast. luckily, as you progress, you unlock apps for your armor that give you vision in those sections. phase-shifting is fine, i guess. it's a puzzle for your brain, but it kind of annoys me that i can't just look at the map and see if i have completion - i have to walk all the way over there and go through each phase option to make sure i finished them all -_-''

after the joy that is mitra (i love mad scientist types!! humans, how do they work? let's pull them apart to find out, right?), the boss of this dungeon is kind of boring. it's a straightforward chef pig type thing, because BUY, SELL, CONSUME!

okay... :I

the next thing i have to do is... i have to go talk to that fucking guy.

ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this fucking GUY

he's so slimy... in fact, i got so mad at him that i took ten billion pictures, so i'm going to split this post here and make a mastema focused post later.