Developer: Atlus
Publisher: Atlus
When a mass of black energy called the Schwartzwelt appears in the south pole and threatens to engulf the earth, the government sends an team of soldiers and researchers into the dark void to discover its origins, and hopefully stop the destruction of the planet. You are a part of the elite strike force sent into the Schwartzwelt, equipped with a special military-grade exploration suit called the Demonica, which allows you to survive your new surroundings and interact with its inhabitants. The Schwartzwelt is crawling with demons and other creatures of myth, and in order to accomplish your mission, you must forge contracts with them and have them fight for you.
Negotiations will be your main asset towards bolstering your ranks. First, you must defeat a demon in order to identify it, after that, the demon will become visible and you can negotiate with it. Each demon has an alignment, which affects the mood of the demon based on your own alignment. Demons that share your alignment make it easier to talk with the demon, and will ask for less when negotiating. There are demons of a certain sect where negotiation will be impossible, and as the game goes on, you will encounter these demons with more and more frequency. Unfortunately, there is no way around this, the best you get is two Demonica add-ons that allow a slight chance to circumvent this. One allows you talk to demons during a full moon, when demons would otherwise go berserk. The other just adds a random chance that the demon will join you at the start of battle. The other way to get new demons is to fuse two of your demons into a stronger one.
Many players got their first exposure to the MegaTen series through the Persona games, namely Persona 3. That particular game is a popular starting point for people who became interested in the series. After that boost in popularity, I wondered how future titles would integrate new fans into the notoriously brutal main series? The answer unfortunately is... not all that much.
Strange Journey is a fine RPG, but it suffers far more than it should from Atlus clinging to a lot of the less than pleasant aspects of the series out of tradition. You generally don't want to grow too attached to your demons, as by the time you reach the next area, they will quickly become outclassed. Your demons don't learn new skills as they level up, the best you get is that sometimes a random skill will change when a demon levels up. Even then, the skill you get is randomized, so it's a crap-shoot whether this works in your favor or not. The only other degree of control you get is skill inheritance while fusing demons. You can drop in D-sources (items given by demons that contain their skill sets) for more customized outcomes. It can still be aggravating that a skill you want/need carried over gets snubbed, but it's still better than the hope against hope that used to dominate fusion.
In terms of combat, Strange Journey has the most straight-forward turn-based system I've seen in a MegaTen game. Press turns have been done away with wholesale, hitting an enemy's weakness will initiate a demon co-op attack with demons that share the attacker's alignment, doing almighty damage to the target. It's not as good as the previous system, but fortunately, this is a one-way street as enemies that hit your weakness don't do this. (Looks like even Atlus thought that might be overdoing it.)
7/10
Solid
Thanks for reading!