Shit like this is why SMT will never become a popular series

Why is this bad? This is what I want from dungeons in big budget 3d games, too. Dungeons aren't fun to explore if they are just safe little lines.

Because this is just a bunch of nonsense shat out onto grid paper without any rhyme or reason.
Actual quality dungeon design has purpose and an overarching theme rather than being pure chaotic crap.
Go play Wizardry Gaiden to see what I mean.

This has plenty of purpose and design, you're just a fucking retard. There is a sensible way though the floor in question, but you don't actually play RPGs, so you wouldn't know.

Bonus: Japanese Dungeon Crawlers only have a 33% chance of including a skill/ability that allows you to step on trap tiles without taking damage.

This has plenty of purpose and design

lol. lmao.
DRPiggies will slurp up literally anything because they themselves can't even identify when they're being bullshitted by absolutely dogshit design.

Not him, but can you tell me which game has a good dungeon and specifically what parts of that dungeon make it good and well designed?

Wtf you just sold me on smt

Mogs your EO clone dungeon in your path

How do you respond without sounding mad?

I can tell just fine. This isn't one of those cases. You're just a fucking idiot.

I wish it's lack of popularity meant I could get more dungeons like these instead of the threatless hallways of SMTV.

I wish the game had EO's map shit so I didn't have to walk on damage tiles for that shit

posts a game that is over 15 years old

do fucks really do love just playing the hits don't you
what have you been doing since 2020

This map is pretty approachable once you understand it's 4 small levels crammed into one.

Has any other good classic dungeon crawler come out since 2020

I fully cleared Strange Journey and I fucking DESPISE this map

Now now, no brain usage here. Iust get scared by lots of teleporters and call it bad.

Shut the fuck up, American dungeon crawler are far more bullsiht cough cough wizardry 4 cough cough.

the guy is saying the series is bad because it's like this, he clearly has no interest in classic dungeon crawlers
and smt has not been like this in nearly 2 decades
why is he making threads like this? what games has he been playing? does he even keep up with the series anymore? or any game?
it just seems like he's trying to beckon to a time when this game was more in the Anon Babble zeitgeist. just a nostalgia fags, but nostalgia for Anon Babble threads. as to why i'm saying he likes to "play the hits"

Can you name 1 single American-made dungeon crawler anywhere near the difficulty of Wizardry 4?

I'll wait.

for me it's making my own maps

confusing puzzle and encounters every 10 seconds

I wanted to enjoy the gameplay of nocturne but fuck that

Dungeons like these didn't exactly make the game popular either

EXCUSE ME! I DON'T LIKE THIS GAME SO YOU SHOULD STOP MAKING IT OKAY!

JUST STOP IT! STOP RIGHT NOW!!!!

What causes this brand of autism?
I don't like shmups or fighting games, but I don't piss and shit myself when a difficult shmup or hardcore pandering fighting game comes out. In fact I hope the people who do like shmups and fighting games get lots of cool games for them to play and enjoy.
What's wrong with just not playing a game if you don't like it?
No one in the world has enough time to play every single game that comes out anyway

What game is this one?
Strange reminds me of Ginza in SMT 1

Strange Journey is the exception not the rule.
All the modern SMTs are nothing like that.
(which is a bad thing)

yea, that's SMT 1 ginza and some other places

I was just wondering if there was something I missed

Tile based > Not tile based

the entirety of 4th Brane is skippable

I still don't understand this

This is literally THE image that makes me want to play Strange Journey

I bet you hate real life mazes too

This isn't as bad as it looks but yeah, SMT is a dungeon crawling series and if you think THIS is bad then please never play SMT If... You'll literally shit yourself and die from outrage.

I like this exactly because women and younger generations literally CANNOT play these games. Their spatial abilities are fucked and their brains short out even in games with automap and clear navigation. Most complex spatial challenge they can take is interconnected hallways ala metroid.

doesn't the game have a built in automap?

There's nothing hardcore about mazes. They're tedious. They're fighting your own sense of boredom. SMTfags are such fucking fags.

Why are you bitching about games you've never played?

I have played and dropped SJ. I completed IV and V because they're actual games.

4 has a shit ton of mazes though. They're just not grid based.

And not even half as tedious. Oldschool SMT is just masochism.

You completed them because they had way simpler level design that your tiny brain could handle.
The definition of filtered.

Tokyo backtracking is impossibly more tedious than your usual floor in SJ.

There is nothing that my brain couldn't handle in that maze, I just felt the tedium and the sadism coming from the devs. You can't feel that because you're a slave morality retard.

Sector E isn't even remotely as bad as anything EO makes you go through on the 6th stratum.

It looks bad at a glance but you're doing this first person and slow, uncovering the map one bit at a time, it's not that bad. I don't think I've ever been lost in a drpg and I have fuck-all for sense of direction.

claret halow's teleport maze

Shit was fucked up.

filtered by amala labyrinth

i did this shit when i was 13 anon

huh. so SJ really is the best one in the series. thanks OP!

EO's FOE puzzle spam and easy shortcuts are still baby shit in comparison to real blobbin'

This can't be happening. Difficulty needs to be carefully dealt out in just enough small doses to keep me engaged but never actually stump me or force me to sit down and develop a method through. This should be a straight line with occasional paths that branch back to the main line with zero dead ends or loops, with two minibosses placed directly after save points. Yesterday I saw a Sodoku that only had two numbers filled in at the start, what kind of sick f*ck would make such a tedious bullshit puzzle

if you played redux you didn't play strange journey

Map spell in MT1 has it show up in the corner so you can continue to walk around

Map spell in SMT 1 shows it in a different menu

What the shit were they thinking

sit down and develop a method through.

You mean walking into every dead-end? Incredibly hardcore gameplay.

The real problem is that you need a database for the demon fusion system.
It's supposed to be a handheld game that you can play comfortably on the bed, but every 15 minutes you need to get up to look up stuff on your PC.

Redux makes the story not retarded, so it's worth it.

b-but my por-

Don't care. The damage the game did to the series can not be understated and it's why the alignment paths are fucked in SMT4 as well. Thank god they course corrected.

b-b-but I like everything but neutral being shi-

Not a real SMT fan.

They fixed it in the PS1 port.

gee wiz when you gonna see one of the OG dungeoncrawler maps from Wizardry or so

Every single SMT player uses that GitHub resource, sick of them pretending otherwise. Yeah, following a resource for the entire fucking game sure is hardcore. You didn't do the code snooping to learn this, you fucking vultures.

redux is better if you play on the intended difficulty
sj is a broken simple casual game

Incredibly hardcore gameplay

this but unironically

just negotiate every demon and fuck around bro it's not hard
negotiations sucks baals though kinda wish every game starting with IV had desu's auctions

You really don't need to optimize demons that much until maybe meme aleph or shekinah.

baal

Fuck off, judaized retard.

Thread theme: youtube.com/watch?v=DVap9Z4Z82I
I got stuck on this floor for hours because of one of the scannable walls I've missed near warp 21 in that image. I didn't want to consult a guide whatsoever, but had to because I was just wasting my time. I think it had to do something with the rare forma right next to warp 21? idk that was years ago

Excuse you, I just guessed and fused/negotiated random shit until I ended up with some half decent stuff and just played the game with that.

What is the intended difficulty?

And you use it to find the fastest route to Matarukaja or whatever the fuck. You know it's true.

Expert.

Not trying to be argumentative, but why do you think it's Expert vs, say, Easy/Normal mode, or even if there's a harder one? (I haven't played it, but I own the game and was thinking of starting it up relatively soon.)

Do not believe his lies

I'm not saying impossible because that's NG+ only difficulty. If you're not playing SMT games on the hard mode whenever available you're not playing them right.

he didn't figure out how to fuse high level demons on his own with shit demons

just buy the cheapest demons and figure it out from there dude.

Impossible, but you'll have to do an Expert playthrough first.
Impossible has modifiers impacting demon co-op and making the critical rate higher all around. That leads to much better balance, though with the advantage of a fleshed out comprendium and some other bonuses the game can still feel too easy. Redux as a whole is better than the original when it comes to balance (you can solo bosses in SJ if you know what you're doing, and that's not intended), but Normal is nowhere near scary enough to actually bring out the game's atmosphere.
Usually other SMT games with difficulty settings devolve into press turn abuse, but the beauty in Strange Journey is that there's none of that and the system meant to sort of replace it forces you to actually explore the whole repertoire of demons available depending on what alignment you're on. I still like IVA because it's kind of like digital crack, but the game is pretty fucking dumb all the way through.

redux is better if you play on the intended difficulty

Normal mode instead of hard? I still need to get around to Redux but I usually play SMT games on hard mode when I can.

I know this will just be filed as cope but Wizardry was often actively fucking with people. Barely counts.

Wizardry 2

nice bait now kill yourself

I hear this bullshit all the time for almost every SMT/Persona. Let me tell you, as someone who has played a lot of these games on release, you never need to do autistic fusion chains for min/max demons and you don't need hyper specific demons outside of maybe super bosses. Basic pattern recognition and negotiating with shit demons that have abilities you want for future fusions go a long ways.

Interesting

you don't need specific demons for super bosses either because pretty much every demon in the late game is a rape machine all too easily built

The thing that prevents me from playing impossible is the forced 0% escape rate in a game that does not have trafuri. This is the dumbest shit atlus does on higher difficulties.

Strange Journey isn't even that hardcore when it comes to dungeon design. You can easily keep your party healed up, hardly any traps, random encounters are easy to avoid, etc.

Nethack is pretty up there if your eyes aren't glued to the wiki.

It also has the benefit of clarifying what a bunch of moves do, instead of just giving you a vague notion ("severe" damage, but it's actually less). When the game itself fucking lies to you, you need that resource to even know which moves are worth keeping.

just do hours of experimentation

No, fuck you.

We used to do hours of experimentation in front of our CRTs right after school. It was the best.

we

(((Narrative spinner))) detected.

Potato Flowers in Full Bloom came out in 2022

Really wish Steam's tags didn't suck so much. Why isn't there a DRPG tag? Why is the bullet hell tag the vampire survivors clone slop zone?

Over 1 million copies sold, not counting Vengeance.

The wind puzzle at least asks you to use your brain instead of just walking into all the dead-ends to confirm that they're dead-ends.

Outside of SMT V's unique moves what game has this issue? Usually the light, moderate, heavy, and severe fall within a ballpark range of damage (e.g. light will be 80-100, heavy will be 120-150, etc.), but the tier above is always stronger than the tier below or at the very least better than the move within the same category. For example severe from gun might be lower than severe from an almighty spell, but is better than all gun heavy attacks.

I even checked the wiki for a few of the games and this is a consistent thing for them.

The challenge in blobbers isn't so much singling out bad ends as it is keeping track of the right path through increasingly complex layers of bullshit.

Everything from If.. feels like a blur, but I remember the upper levels of the school being fucking torture
That and fusioning and gathering tons of magnetite until the fucking students are done digging their stupid fucking holes
I have Ginza's theme burned into my brain

Well, you see,

Everything from If.. feels like a blur, but I remember the upper levels of the school being fucking torture

Endless teleport mazes as far as the eyes can see.
I don't know who the level designer was for that game off the top of my head but I hope he got help and is in a better place now. Because dude was clearly lashing out about something.

This post makes me feel like you can't even hope to design a good DRPG without losing your kids in a divorce or something. Good advice.

Fucking endless
There is also those 2 IDENTICAL rooms with teleport tiles in the section where your map is disabled
I remember being baffled for so long on that shit
I still don't understand why I even liked If... most of my memories are of frustration
World of Greed has a fucking cool song though

is there stat and level drain i have only played 3 and 5

I still don't understand why I even liked If... most of my memories are of frustration

There's a lot of little cool things in there but yeah, I have zero desire to ever replay it.

I still never actually did Akira's route
It's the only thing I'm missing from the classics
Well and the OG devil summoner, IF THEY EVER FINISH THE TRANSLATION
I might have to learn spanish of all things since the spanish translation is the one that's closest to release

bro I just wanna crawl let me crawl in peace
youtube.com/watch?v=hfYDQIfoE1w

what's keeping the devil summoner 1 tl? saturn hacking? they shoud do the psp port anyways

only time I ever really use the fusion chart is if I NEED specific things, otherwise I just wing it.

SMT2 PS1 english translation WHEN? I just want better shop UIs man

Pff i would kill for a porting of the nintendo hostaged smt or just a new good old style dungeon crawling.

What are some games like this with huge tile based/grid based maps
Obviously SMT and EO but any others?
In game map or expected to make my own are fine. Ideally turn based if possible.

drpgs are their own genre
dungeon travelers 2 and 2-2 are pretty nice. 2 was even published by atlus.
elminage is also pretty good but pretty hardcore. stranger of sword city is pretty nice too or labyrinth of refrain/galleria if you want something milder

The term you're looking for is dungeon crawlers or bloopers.

My favorite dungeon crawler is Grimrock 2

Might and Magic series (before 6)

Class of Heroes 1 and 2 are on steam and Switch with better localization than the original PSP. Hopefully we'll get 3 too one day.

Why bother the famicom is the better version anyway.

the shop UI sucks shit. examine these nuts if you want to know how much damage they do bozo

A small flaw against litterally everything working perfectly and in any case better than the ps1 version. At this point look for a mod or some ui fix i can be sure there is something out there for someone who had your problem.

Hope SMT VI manages to include dungeons more like this

A giant female demon in SMT4 made me sleep in her lap and asked to unbirth me, therefore your opinion is irrelevant.

Jesus christ sh2 and smt V had really shitty (or none at all) dungeon design. They really need to change their mindset.

Why is it always Eridanus when there are worse sectors in the game? You'd think they'd use Grus or something.

Babby's first teleporter filter

You think the shitposters played the game? You're too naive anon.

Chiyoda is extremely labyrinthine. You got lost in it if you actually played it. They did change their mindset: the overworld is now the dungeon.

That's Strange Journey which isn't like other SMT games, though. It's Etrian Odyssey with a SMT coat of paint.
That's part of why I fucking love SJ though, because EO is based.

But this time it actually feels like an organic place that exists rather than a video game maze.

SMTIV already did the overworld is the dungeon thing and it kind of sucked there too. You can definitely have both. It'd be really satisfying to have both. It'd keep the game's design focused just like in 1, 2 and SJ, where it just so happens the overworld is also the dungeon and the dungeon is all that matters.

labyrinthine

Not really, it's more of a different height setup. The location is extremely small even if it's build over four or five macro zones they have 2-3 main roads with some easily spottable shortcuts.
The fact the overworld is the new dungeon is not bad as an idea but a labyrinth is no fun if i can see all the patterns and passages from bare sight.

SMTIV already did the overworld is the dungeon thing and it kind of sucked there too.

Except that was on a handheld, and couldn't be realized even half as much.

inb4 the Switch is also a handheld

It's half console and there are no meaningful console generations anymore.

It's probably when they were filtered.

That's Strange Journey which isn't like other SMT games, though

SMT3 baby, please....

IV's Tokyo actually feels like a dungeon, though. That visual abstraction actually lets designers go even more nuts. It's why grids are also good for dungeon design, for example.

IV's Tokyo is just a map without battles, so I don't know what the fuck you're trying to say. It isn't comparable to V's overworld which has battles.

Shit like this is why SMT will never become a popular series.

and thank god for that.

Oh my god how dare a dungeon crawler have a mazelike and confusing structure for you to figure out!

Puzzles, status ailments, navigational challenges, a complex layout that opens up the more you progress through the game. It doesn't have battles per se but it forces you into certain areas where you do see not only battles but come across organically with side quests, NPCs, etc. Unlike V's map everything about IV feels hostile and out to get you. Your only real break are teleporters you unlock for fast travel, and they're still not gonna get you through all the way..