“Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine” Impressions
I recently saw on West Karana that the Shin Megami Tensei MMO had gone into beta in the US. Being that thousands of beta keys were being given away and Asian MMOs tend not to be to overcrowded with people wanting to beta, Rynala and I each got a key, installed the client and gave it a go. I don't plan on playing this game beyond these initial impressions, but I do want to share what I thought of it.
The install went smoothly, but when I loaded the game up, I noticed that the fullscreen mode only went up to 1280x1024, offering no widescreen support. I didn't watched stretched models so I forced myself to play in windowed mode.
Character creation was very basic. There was no help or information on any of the options, but I had played a couple Asian MMOs before, so I was used to this. Rynala was a bit frustrated by it. Graphically, the characters looked about on par with PlayStation 2 quality in my opinion.
They hit you with story right from the beginning cutscene. Demons started plaguing Japan. Wars broke out. A tidal wave wiped out most of Japan and most the demons. Hundreds of years later, people are living in underground bunkers and demons are starting to come back.
Loading in, I found that I had the red shirt was the current fad. This was troublesome. Our skill bars started out with a couple skills on them that we wouldn't get explained to us for another half hour. The only other thing that really bothered me about the beginning tutorial section is that you cannot group for it. In the start area, you can see other players, but then you can't group with them so Rynala and I had to run and do it separately.
After the intro tutorial, you're shown a cut scene that doesn't seem to be translated and then given some more story. Translation does seem to be a bit of a problem currently. A lot of things are mistranslated ("Mordiceius throwed down a dice.") or in skill descriptions having one word broken across two lines.
Combat is fast. You have a lot of different abilities to use right away. A quick attack, a mutli-target attack, a guard break, a guard and some other skills beyond that. You have to use these skills fast and quickly change your strategy. While neat in concept, it didn't really work well for me. I don't know if it was just lag or glitches in the UI but skills would often say they were firing and not fire, or not even charge to fire at all.
Even though it did have some nice tutorials to explain the skills eventually, I feel that this game is just another by the books free-to-play Asian MMO. For about the two hours I played, all the basics were there: clunky UI, unintuitive menu system, very grindy quests, poor translation, and plenty of items with no explanation. I do have to commend it for pushing forth a story heavy game (even if at some points the cut-scenes are untranslated).
All in all, if you enjoy the free-to-play Asian MMO style like Maple Story, ROSE Online, and the like, you should enjoy this. Otherwise, it's just another in the fold.