SRPG Game 32 – Majin Tensei II: Spiral Nemesis wrap-up

FACTS

  1. Turn type: Player/enemy turns.
  2. Maps: Medium. Terrain gives bonuses.
  3. Character Customization: On level up, you can assign a point to any stat.
  4. Character Development: Standard XP level system.
  5. Party Size: 16 monsters plus 5 humans.
  6. Equipment: Five equipment slots.
  7. Game Flow: Roughly 50-60 stages, some optional ones. There are multiple paths but only a few stages actually change for that.
  8. Saving: You can save out of battle, and at the beginning of each turn.
  9. Death: If any of the human characters die, it’s game over. Demons who die cannot be revived.

IMPRESSIONS 

I enjoyed Majin Tensei 1 even though there were problems with it, and I would say that generally MT2 improved on it in every way except maybe for the in-battle monster graphics, which I don’t consider a big deal. 
The story barely existed in MT1. The MT2 story does get a little lost in the last part, and involves time travel, but overall it’s entertaining and has some memorable characters. The atmosphere, as usual for MT games, is a change from the typical bright fantasy — you’re in dark, crumbling areas of Tokyo and eventually on different planes of existence.

The gameplay is similar to MT1; I do like that the monster recruitment is easier and doesn’t depend on picking basically random choices from a talk menu. It seemed generally like it was easier to keep the enemies from swarming my guys although you do have to be careful of the long range birds and such.

The multiple paths in the game are the usual Law vs. Chaos. As I said in my last post, I think that taking the Law-Light path with the recruitment items gives you a team that’s so powerful you no longer need to bother with monster recruitment or fusion. The Neutral path offers the best opportunity to fully exploit that aspect of the system. The fact that you have to have a high levelled human character to get good units means you can’t spread the XP around to all the human characters and you’ll inevitably end up with 3-4 of them being useless.

A big complaint about this game was the long enemy turns. I found that in BSNES even just with a x3-4 speedup it was more than enough that I never noticed this.

So overall this was a good game; this has a fan translation and it’s definitely worth a play.

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