The game follows 32-year-old Vincent, who has no ambition either in work or love. The other character, Catherine, is a stylish 22-year-old with the charms of a young girl. One day, VIncent runs into Catherine and then he ends up having nightmares. The nightmares will serve as the action/progress component throughout the game featuring an unending stairway. Vincent will have to make it to the top of the stairs in his nightmares or he won’t awaken.

Producer Katsura Hashino spoke in a staff interview saying since this was the team’s first HD title they were excited to try something new instead of an RPG. He says this game will be more adult oriented than the team’s past titles, and that there will be plenty of gameplay as well as some shockingly adult scenes. Composer Shouji Meguro pointed out that the game’s music can be summarized in three key words: “classic,” “adult oriented” and “erotic.”

One last interesting tidbit was a possible Persona 5 hint from Meguro. He says due to Catherine, the team can’t be asked about their next title. Fortunately, some time next year he’ll be able to respond “Regarding the RPG, Hashino and I are…”

The ultra rare dream simulator LSD is also available and its only 600 yen ($8), way less than 18,000 ($210) on Yahoo Auctions.

Other (mostly obscure) Game Archives titles on PlayStation Network include Marionette Company, Ano ko Doko no ko, Love Game’s Waiwai Tennis, Dokapon! Rage of the Iron Sword, 0 Kara no Shogi, and a ton of budget games games like Simple 1500 Series: The Kendo plus Superlite 1500 Series: Hooockey!!.

SMT: Persona was well-received in North America, gaining multiple positive reviews. Our own Samuel Evans said of the game, “Persona is a classic game and while the Playstation version has become a hard to play relic, this remake is easy to pick up and play.”

Completely remastered for the PSP and now finally available in Europe and Australia, SMT: Persona boasts a fully redone English localization, all-new music from composer Shoji Meguro, beautiful new animated sequences overseen by famed artist Kazuma Kaneko, and enhanced graphics optimized for the PSP system’s widescreen aspect ratio.  With new content, adjustments to game balance, and a number of technical and design improvements, this is the definitive version of one of the most sought after RPGs of all time.

If you’re new to the Persona series, getting into the swing of things can be pretty intimidating. The Persona games belong to the Shin Megami Tensei franchise of videogames, and the original Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 came out on the PlayStation 2 back in 2007. In 2008, publisher Atlus released an enhanced version of the game titled Persona 3: FES, which not only featured a handful of notable improvements but it also boasted an entirely new chapter of the story known as the Answer. Both titles were fantastic Japanese role-playing games which balanced social interaction and classical sim elements with traditional dungeon crawling and turn-based battles.

Now, the Persona 3 experience has almost arrived on Sony’s little black (or white… or silver…) handheld in the form of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable. The game takes almost all the content from the original Persona 3 and comes with a few of the tweaks from FES (though it doesn’t pack in the Answer chapter). With only a few omissions made, the developers have squeezed an awful lot of the PS2 experience onto one UMD.

As was the case with the original, Persona 3 Portable is set in modern day Japan. You’ll balance out living life as a student in high school while spending nights vanquishing the forces of evil. Yes, there are ample evil forces to vanquish, as every night at midnight the world enters a strange phase called the Dark Hour. During this time in between one day and the next, normal people are unknowingly entombed in coffins and dangerous Shadows roam the streets. The heroes of Persona 3 Portable are special, though; they do not transform into coffins and instead use the power of the Persona to fight the Shadows and unravel the intrigue of the Dark Hour.

The biggest addition in Persona 3 Portable is an entirely new playable female character. Although the story and gameplay will remain fairly unchanged, the female character will give players a different perspective on the events of Persona 3, which is an enticing reason for gamers that finished the first Persona 3 to go back and play through it again.

After choosing your character, you’ll soon find that Persona 3 Portable is a bit different from its older brother/sister. Instead of anime cutscenes, there are more in-engine cutscenes, as well as still pictures. These changes make sense, considering the size of the original Persona 3 and the addition of the new main character, but it was still a little disappointing.

Another notable change is that certain exploration segments, like wandering the high school and dorms, is now done on a static screen with points of interest marked by icons. Some players might lament the loss of free movement here, but on the other hand it’s a lot easier to move from one place to another and all the dialogue is still there.

Dialogue is an extremely important part of Persona 3 Portable. By building your character’s Social Links (a fancy way of saying “makin’ friends”), the power of your character’s Persona will grow. These Personas are physical manifestations of a character’s mind and give the character abilities that they wouldn’t normally have access to in battle. So during the day, players need to build social relationships, attend school and lead a normal life. But come night time, the members of your party will head to Tartarus.

During the Dark Hour, a massive, haunting tower called Tartarus erupts from underneath the party’s high school. By exploring Tartarus every night, players will experience the dungeon crawling portion of Persona 3 Portable. Players must take a group of three students up the tower, floor by floor, and conquer the increasingly resilient Shadows that occupy the tower’s blood-stained halls.
The tower of Tartarus will challenge you.
Participating in a battle is fairly straight-forward, though there’s a lot of strategy in combat. But at its most basic, Persona 3 Portable battles are turn-based affairs where you directly control your main character and AI patterns handle control of the other two. By attacking with your currently equipped weapon and using your Persona to cast spells, you can defeat all the super creepy-looking Shadows that want you dead.

One of the best parts about Persona 3 Portable is the collecting of Personas, which have some of the coolest designs around. By collecting (and subsequently fusing) Personas together, players can give their characters a whole boatload of different abilities. And with an entire school year to play through and a dark tower to thoroughly explore, this has to be one of the most robust PSP games yet.

Persona 3 Portable hits store shelves and the PlayStation Network early next month.

More Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable Videos

Strange Journey‘s plot is rather interesting. Like most SMT games, it is about placing seemingly normal people into a strange situation and allowing the players to decide what happens. The Schwarzwelt is filled with demons, but not all of those demons serve the same purpose or master. As players travel through the Schwarzwelt, they will encounter a wide variety of different forces that are competing for control over the Schwarzwelt.
You’ll be asked to make choices that may sway your alignment, which are the sort of ideals you have: chaos, law or neutrality. Don’t assume that “law” equals good, or “chaos” equals evil, though. They tend to skew more toward how much freedom you believe in or your views on power. A character who aligns with law may believe that mankind is incapable of standing on its own and needs to be guided by a higher power to bring about peace, while a chaos-aligned character may embrace survival of the fittest and freedom over social structures.

Unlike many games, however, this isn’t a path to evil, or at least the traditional idea of evil. A player can also choose to be neutral, opting to remain focused on human matters and human goals, although this path has its own difficulties. Your eventual ending and the fate of many characters remain tied to your alignment choices throughout the title. It doesn’t quite make the game nonlinear, since much of your adventure is the same regardless of your alignment, but it does have a significant impact on gameplay. Regardless of whether you choose to follow chaos, law or neutrality, you’ll find that your adventure is different from that of another player with a different alignment.

As far as gameplay goes, Strange Journey has a lot in common with Etrian Odyssey, and for good reason: They use the same basic engine. If you played Atlus’ other dungeon exploration RPG, a lot will feel familiar here, although there are enough twists and difference to prevent the game from being Etrian Odyssey: Shin Megami Tensei Edition. You begin the game on the Red Sprite, which functions as your base and hometown; from here, you can heal, buy new items or accept missions from crew members. When you leave, you’ll be instantly thrust into the monster-filled dungeons, which are large and completely unmapped, so you must explore them to discover the structure. The Schwarzwelt is divided into multiple sections, with a new section opening up each time you defeat a boss character.

Like Etrian Odyssey, mapping is done entirely on the bottom screen, although Strange Journey uses an automap instead of Etrian Odyssey‘s self-mapping system. Every time you step forward, a new square of the map will be unveiled. The dungeons are fairly complex, so don’t think that this will be a straightforward exploration. There are branching paths, hidden doors, deadly traps and annoying pitfalls to be found on every floor. To best deal with the dungeon, you’ll have to make multiple trips into the depths, taking your time and exploring to find easier ways to travel deeper into the dungeon. The dungeon is divided into various strata, and you can only venture into a deeper stratum once you’ve cleared the previous one, which usually involves defeating a boss.

The game takes care of icon placement and wall-drawing for you, which is both a plus and a minus. It keeps the game moving forward so you don’t have to pause to map out a section, but it would’ve really been nice to have the option. There were more than a few times when I was wishing that I could make notes on the map or leave myself hints about something important. One good example of this is a side-quest that involves you finding dead members of the Red Sprite’s investigation team. You encounter the corpses long before you get the side-quest, and it would’ve been useful to mark them on the map instead of having to backtrack to find them. For the most part, the map is perfectly functional and gives you very accurate information about the area you’ve just explored. The lack of note-taking wouldn’t be so noticeable if Strange Journey wasn’t already so similar to Etrian Odyssey, but it can be a frustrating element to lack.

The dungeon design in Strange Journey is phenomenally good. Each section of the Schwarzwelt is uniquely designed and full of traps, gimmicks and enemies that occur only in that area. You rarely feel like you’re wandering through identical dungeons, as each area has a new and unique situation for you. One dungeon may be full of secret doors and teleport traps, forcing you to map your way through a nonlinear area to find hidden items. Another may be full of rivers that carry you in an uncontrolled current to a set location. Yet another is made up almost entirely of pitch-black rooms and forces you to slowly find your way through the maze without the aid of sight or automapping. Some of these dungeons can get a little annoying, but rarely do they stop being exciting to explore. You may feel aggravated when you’re trying to find your way through an invisible maze, but that is easily surpassed by the satisfaction of getting through the traps.

Strange Journey is also very good about placing save points and shortcuts around the dungeons. It’s rare to find a difficult area without a save point afterward, preventing tedious backtracking and the very possible risk of dying and being forced to redo a tough area. With that said, there are some areas that are just annoying. One of the most tedious and unenjoyable sections involves having to track down a series of items in a teleport maze, each of which is scattered in a different location. This means you have to map every single teleporter outcome to find the proper items. Since you can’t make any notes on the touch-screen, this reduces you to memorizing every teleport result or keeping something nearby to map it out by hand.

As you explore the various zones of the Schwarzwelt, you’ll inevitably end up in battles with demons. Your party is comprised of your character and up to three other summoned demons, and you fight in a traditional turn-based style, where you use regular attacks and special magic spells against opponents. There are some differences from other recent SMT games, though. To begin with, every enemy is invisible. Your Demonica suit allows you to see demons, but only as indistinct globs. The first time you encounter a demon, you’ll have no idea what it is. This is the most dangerous time, as any spell you cast has a risk of being one that it can reflect back at you. After you defeat an enemy for the first time, you’ll be able to see its name and picture. Continued fights against the same enemy will reveal its weaknesses and attacks, until you eventually know everything there is to know about it. This can be a bit frustrating, as running into an invisible enemy while you’re weak or low on health can be a potential death sentence, but it also adds an interesting element of danger to exploring new areas. You can’t rely on your knowledge of other SMT games to get you through.

As in games like Persona or SMT: Nocturne, hitting enemy weaknesses is important. However, it isn’t enough to simply figure out which elemental attack damages the enemy the most because weaknesses in Strange Journey only cause a small amount of additional damage. In order to truly exploit weaknesses, you need to take advantage of demon co-ops, which are special attacks that a party member performs if a teammate hits an enemy weakness. These co-ops only activate if the party member has the same alignment as the member who struck the enemy’s weak point, so alignment is the most important part of setting up your party. The more demons you have doing a co-op attack, the more powerful it gets. Three like-minded demons hitting an enemy’s weak point can massively increase the damage you do in a single round, but this comes at a cost. Just because a demon is like-minded doesn’t mean that it’s powerful. You may be forced to use inferior demons to take advantage of co-op attacks, or you may have to sacrifice the extra damage granted by a demon co-op in order to have a strong healer or tank on your side. Party selection requires more thought than in previous SMT games, and it encourages you to think harder about who you’re bringing along.

Demons can be recruited in a few different ways. You can talk to them during battle, which starts a brief dialogue selection minigame where you choose the option that best pleases the demon. Make it happy enough, and it will join you or give you a useful item. Tick it off, and it may storm out of the battle or attack you. You can also fuse together demons to form a new, more powerful demon. These fused demons can be further modified by demon sources, which allow you to give specific spells to demons and limit the need for long fusion chains. The most useful and unique way to get demons is through the use of passwords, which you can use to summon it. This can allow you to summon a demon without needing the source, you can also trade passwords with other players. If you get stuck in a certain part of the game, can’t find the right demon to fuse, or want a low-level demon with high-level abilities, you’ll be able to get these through the use of passwords. This lowers the difficulty of the game, but it also cuts down on the frustration. While there’s a certain satisfaction to creating the perfect demon, it’s tedious to grind when you just want to advance the plot or defeat an annoying boss.

Your main character in Strange Journey is an average person, and his only advantage is the Iron Man-like Demonica suit that he wears. He lacks many of the special powers of characters in other SMT games; he can’t cast spells or use special physical attacks, but he mimics demonic powers through the use of modern technology. He has a series of equipment slots on his Demonica suit: accessory, armor, gun and sword. Basic attacks normally do physical damage, but anything you equip in the sword slot will alter the physical damage that he does. For example, one weapon may hit once for heavy damage, and another weapon may hit multiple times but can inflict a status effect.

Armor changes your character’s strengths and weaknesses, which is, by far, the protagonist’s most useful ability. By default, the Demonica suit is immune to Expel attacks but otherwise has no special attributes, but with the proper armor, you can make him a tank in almost any situation. Accessories give you a special attribute, ranging from improving your Demonica’s stats to nullifying certain kinds of attacks.

The gun slot replaces your magic abilities, but the kind of gun you use can alter how damage is inflicted. A machine gun may be able to hit an entire row of enemies, while a shotgun can hit random enemies multiple times. Each gun has a few different special abilities that mimic magic spells. These spells cost MP, although they are both less powerful and more expensive than a demon spell of comparable levels, so your main character is far more customizable than demons but has difficulty matching their damage output.

In addition to your Demonica suit’s combat abilities, it has passive abilities called applications, which come in two forms: main and sub. Main apps are always available and include the ability to detect rare items, find hidden walls, unlock doors, see in the dark, and many other useful powers. They’re important and are usually required to advance the plot. You’ll usually gain a new main app upon completing a mission or defeating a boss, and they can unlock new areas of the Schwarzwelt for you to explore. On the other hand, sub apps are optional and can do anything from reduce the enemy encounter rate to change the demons you create from fusion. Most sub apps take up a certain amount of space on your suit; the more powerful it is, the more space it takes up, so you can only equip a few at a time. Sub apps can be changed at any save point in the game.

Upgrading your Demonica suit isn’t a simple task. You can switch between weapons and armor you have acquired at any time, but you need to obtain those items first by creating them from Forma — rare materials from demons themselves — that are found in the demon-infested lands of the Schwarzwelt. To find Forma, you must explore the Schwarzwelt and find hidden stashes. Forma are invisible unless you go near them, but once you find them, you can pick them up. Some Forma are best if obtained straight from the source. When you defeat a demon in battle, there is a chance that it’ll drop special Forma, which are necessary to create the best weapons and items in the game.

Once you’ve collected the proper Forma, you can go back to the lab on your ship and convert it into new armor, weapons and items. Collecting Forma is very addictive because each one leads to new items, which lead to ways to make your character more useful and powerful. However, there is a fair amount of grinding involved in getting proper Forma. Item drops are randomized, and getting the proper items for your equipment usually means spending some time negotiating or battling with demons until they give you the proper items. It’s possible to beat the game without buying every available weapon and armor, but those who enjoy having maximum flexibility in combat will spend a significant amount of time farming for rare Forma.

Like most SMT titles, Strange Journey is not very forgiving. Early on, you can burn through fights with your available demons. As the game progresses, you’ll find yourself thinking very carefully about which demons to bring along, especially as your alignment changes. There are certain bosses who are nearly impossible to defeat without at least two other demons of a similar alignment hitting them with a co-op attack. At the same time, you may have a hard time finding a demon of the proper alignment with the correct strengths or weaknesses to survive an enemy’s attacks. This adds a very interesting element of strategy to the game, perhaps even more so than in many recent SMT titles, since your choices depend on more than your most powerful demon. For a good chunk of the game, I was carrying a demon that was almost 10 levels behind the curve, simply because his resistances were so useful. It may be frustrating to gamers who like to use any demons that catch their attention, but it makes the combat a lot more interesting.

Strange Journey‘s only real weak point is its visuals. The dungeon exploration is very much in the same vein as Etrian Odyssey, for all the good and bad that implies. The dungeons have very interesting art design, but much of your time is spent wandering through identical-looking corridors and rooms. Fortunately, the level design is interesting enough to prevent the limited variation in textures from becoming boring too quickly. The enemies are represented by still pictures with very limited animation, rather similar to the Pokémon titles. Combat is little more than basic visual effects appearing over animated gifs; this is an extremely small step up from Devil Survivor, where the monsters didn’t move at all. Like the dungeon design, however, the combat is intense and exciting enough that you’re unlikely to care that this isn’t the prettiest game on the market.

The soundtrack, on the other hand, is perfect. The music is almost universally ominous and somber. The early areas are filled with pounding drums and eerie chanting, and as you delve deeper and deeper into the Schwarzwelt, you’ll find the music alters to match the tone of the area you’re exploring and really set the atmosphere.

The Shin Megami Tensei series has proven itself as one of the most consistently well-made RPG franchises in recent memory, and SMT: Strange Journey is no exception. There are few dungeon exploration games that are as solidly well put-together and interesting. It’s more accessible than Etrian Odyssey while still being very similar, so it’s a good game for dungeon-crawling fans who couldn’t survive Etrian Odyssey‘s punishing difficulty. The dungeon design is top-notch, and combat is fast-paced and intense, especially since your party makeup has such a huge impact on tactics. The plot is engrossing and interactive, encouraging players to carve out their own story and giving their choices actual gameplay effects. Perhaps the only weak point is the unimpressive visuals, which are fortunately bolstered by the atmosphere and a well-crafted soundtrack. The difficulty can be high, especially in some of the later areas, but it’s easy to get help with the password system. If you’re an RPG owner with a Nintendo DS, Strange Journey is a must-have and easily one of the best games on the system. It may not have the visual charm of a Mario and Luigi game or the high production values of a Square Enix title, but it’s hard to name another game as challenging and engrossing as Strange Journey.

Score: 9.3/10

Now, however, we may have something definite, reports Kotaku. Katsura Hashino, who previously worked as producer and director on both Persona 3 and Persona 4, told Japanese game mag Dengeki PlayStation that work was beginning on the next Persona – but that things might be changing up a bit.

“We are preparing to start work on the next Persona,” said Hashino. “I want to add things that are being expected of the series,” he elaborated, but added that he also wanted “to change things that can be changed within those boundaries.”

Smart money says the next game will likely be about Japanese teenagers who have the ability to summon powerful alter egos based on their innermost selves, and who each fall into a different category of the tarot arcana. The power of said alter egos will depend as much on how much time the teenagers spend hanging out after school together as it does on how much time they spend level grinding in dungeons recreated out of the human psyche.

But that’s just a guess. He did say that he wanted to change it up, though. So maybe they’ll be… Japanese college students this time around? What would you like to see in a new Persona?

In other news, Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft has excellent taste in pairing preferences.

“A slowly expanding black spot has begun to cover the Antarctic, and if left unchecked, it could swallow the world. Don your cutting-edge Demonica suit and join an elite group of soldiers tasked by the Joint Project to enter and explore the Schwarzwelt, with the primary objective of destroying it from within, but stay sharp: there are things inside the Schwarzwelt man was not meant to know…”

Strange Journey will be the next game to carry on Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne’s demon negotiation system, which is used to get the various demons you will come across to join as allies with you and help you fight, once you acquire demons you can also begin using the demon fusion system which has always been one of my favorite parts about the Shin Megami Tensei games, as you can merge different demons together and make an even more powerful one, or sometimes weaker ones if you aren’t paying attention.
 

The game released in Japan October 8th last year, and will see its North American release on March 23rd, 2010.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=24nMjEWuFho

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, which already comes with a soundtrack CD packed in a collectible outer box (launch copies only), can now offer décor-concerned gamers who pre-order a copy of the game at GameStop with a nice mini-poster (available online and in stores while supplies last) with which to add class to their living area.

“Some of the best bonus items are the kind you can listen to, hence the soundtrack CD we’re including with launch copies of the game,” commented Aram Jabbari, Manager of Public Relations and Sales at Atlus.  “Still, sometimes you want a bonus item that you can feel, something you can caress gently and hold against your face, something you can take a big whiff of and enjoy.  That’s what the mini-poster is all about.  With its gorgeous aesthetic, courtesy of master artist Kazuma Kaneko, Strange Journey stands out as a unique science fiction RPG experience, and this collectible mini-poster is the perfect way to show your friends that you are onboard for the adventure (and also, that you’re better than them).”

When the black spot appeared in the Antarctic, mankind became nervous; when it began to spread, that anxiety turned to panic. The Joint Project, convened to discuss how to deal with the expanding anomaly, decided to send in four ships carrying humanity’s finest soldiers and most cutting-edge technology. The mission: to investigate what lay on the other side of what had been dubbed the Schwarzwelt and find out if there was a way to stop it from eventually covering the Earth.

You are an elite soldier hand-picked for the Strike Team, outfitted with a Demonica environment suit and posted to the Red Sprite under Commander Gore. Upon entering the Schwarzwelt, the crew finds itself forced to deal with harsh conditions, supernatural interference, and throngs of demons populating the bewildering world. What exactly is the Schwarzwelt? What awaits at the end of this strange journey? It is entirely in your hands to find out…

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey will feature a potent demon password system, allowing players to generate and exchange codes representing their customized demons, and introducing an all-new facet to the franchise’s beloved “collect every demon” gameplay.

Key Features

• Shin Megami Tensei goes beyond — Strange Journey’s game mechanics represent a return to the proud tradition of the all-time dungeon-crawling classic SMT: Nocturne, while its story takes players into the near future on a mission to save Earth and to understand humanity’s position within the larger universe.
• A dark turn into science fiction — Who or what is causing the black hole that is engulfing the Earth? A mission to investigate the cause uncovers a whole world of demons that humans knew nothing about. Do they seek your destruction or will you seek theirs? Will you decide to save Earth or choose another path for humanity?
• Team up with demons — Demons may be friends or foes depending on your ability to negotiate, bribe, and coerce them to join your party. With more than 300 types of demons, you’ll have a huge variety of battlefield encounters and an equally large base of options on which to build your party strategy. 

The “Portable” version of game promises a new player-controlled female protagonist, dozens of additional hours of content – in addition to the 100 hours of total play time found in the original game, various improvements and enhancements to streamline play on the PSP, and a whole lot more to be announced.

SMT: Persona 3 Portable is currently scheduled for release on July 6. For more information, visit the official Persona 3 Portable website at www.atlus.com/p3p.

Much like The Last Remnant, Amazon Japan has suddenly just listed a Shin Megami Tensei game for PlayStation 3, the publisher being Atlus.

The title of the game on the listing reads: “Shin Megami Tensei (working title)”.

Are we getting closer to a Persona 5 announcement? We can only wait and see.