I’m in the home stretch on Etrian Odyssey IV (look for my review Monday! Only on IGN.com), and already I’m looking forward to the next dungeon-crawling venture. Not that I know for certain that Shin Megami Tensei IV will be a dungeon crawler. Or that it’s coming to the U.S. But still:
Fancy visible gear! Yeah, we’re at a point now where 3DS games are looking better and meatier than PlayStation 2 games.
I keep thinking, “I should be playing more current-gen games and gushing over the next gen.” But then I see stuff like this and realized, “Nope. I can’t be arsed.”
Man, I LOVE visible gear. I know it’s dumb paper doll stuff, but I love seeing my guys all wearing some fresh duds.
I’m not the biggest fan of visible gear. IMO – part of good character design and making characters memorable is having them look unique and distinguishable. When you can throw all manner of different clothes onto a character, then I think that takes away the personality of a character and makes them into another generic dress-up puppet. Now, that might be fine for certain games where the point is to provide the player with an in-game avatar. But in some games that strive to have a strong story where the main character isn’t just a wallflower for the events of the plot, I don’t think visible gear benefits that. Now, if visible gear was limited so that say, certain characters only wore certain styles of clothing or always retained certain visual motifs, then maybe it could work. But that’s not what most games do.
Also, current/next gen games are highly over rated. I’m a firm believer that handhelds > consoles, because the (relative) lack of production overhead means developers can concentrate on making the actual mechanics and story of their games interesting and engaging.
Well, there’s always Soul Hackers…
And if they’re localizing that, I’d say it’s a safe bet we’ll also see SMTIV. And I don’t know if you’ve played them or not, but Persona 3 and 4 are well worth your time.
By the way, how’s the 3D on EoIV? I almost never use it, but it seems suited for a dungeon crawler. On the other hand, it’s definitely not feasible if you’re constantly looking down at the bottom to screen to draw your map.
“Yeah, we’re at a point now where 3DS games are looking better and meatier than PlayStation 2 games.”
I don’t know, Snake Eater looked pretty dang good.
I am curious to know if the 3DS is indeed comparable to the PS2 in terms of specs. I’d like to think a hendheld released in 2011 would be more powerful than a console that came out in 2000, but it is Nintendo.
The music quality is an enormous step up from the DS if EO IV is anything to go by. I was shocked to hear such good music coming from my Nintendo handheld.
Guess there’s always the Xenoblade approach to visible gear: make the same piece of equipment look completely different depending on who’s wearing it.
Talking of the new gen, EO seems like a good fit for the Wii U.