Tokyo Mirage Sessions - Wii U
Got it on the cheap (18 quid) off Amazon. Figured I might as well give it a go since I've never been disappointed with an Atlus game yet and even though I hate its existence for being such a disappointment from SMT + FE and being the first SMT game on home console since the PS2 era, what it morphed into (a deluge of J-Pop) was not what I want from an SMT game at all. Despite this I thought I should approach this with an open mind since I end up loving Atlus games no matter what. Really glad that I did now since the game is actually surprisingly good. I have to block out the awful story (which is an obvious rip of Persona 4 - it's very much Persona 4 but made on the Wii U as a new IP set against a J-Pop idol backdrop) but everything else about the game is really good. I'm around 10 hours (and 3 dungeons in) in now and really enjoying it.
Biggest surprise about the game is the synth heavy OST, which moves between being bubbly and charming to dark and intense, some of it would fit right in a mainline SMT:
This synthesiser right here is crazy old school (vocoder + piano synth + soft drum beat loops = oh fuck yeah), really would fit in an SMT game:
Then there's the mini boss theme which seems pretty inspired a bit by Meguro's OST work:
Turns out they outsourced the OST for the game for some reason to an anime composer but did a good job. The combat system is very much similar to Persona's "One More" battle system but feels a bit challenging on Hard, the game would be too easy on Normal though, for sure. It's very fast paced and includes all of the MegaTen staples in the battle system such as weakness system that is important to make full use of, a chain attack system and all of the spells you are used to seeing from Atlus RPGs (Zio, Agi etc). Bosses are the best challenge though but I find the game very addictive to play. Game over is harsh, there is no continues, you just get booted back to the title screen (I lost over an hours progress today, just like old times on my PS2). Anyway I'm waffling now and it's not like anybody will read all of this but I'll just say this game is really good, anybody who still has a Wii U should pick it up now whilst it's cheap. Kind of a shame it'll fade into obscurity and its history, if we didn't know it was originally going to be an SMT game it would be so annoying and hated so much since it's actually a better JRPG than Nintendo's other third party JRPG offerings on both Wii and Wii U like The Last Story and Xenoblade! Yeah, I said it.
Atlus just makes great games all of the time.
Looking over the project leads for this game it was headed by the Directors of Radiant Historia, Growlanser series & Langrisser series and Devil Survivor series, so it's got a very talented team of staff who worked on it (which was what i nthe end up convinced me to buy it, to be honest).