14 DAY TRIAL // Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey was officially announced for the US, but there's still a long way to go until March. In Japan, the game was launched almost two months ago, so there are a lot of pieces of information regarding the actual gameplay. But the Famitsu magazine wanted to hear the developer's side of the story, so it invited producer Kazuma Kaneko and director Eiji Ishida to a powwow. The first question the magazine asked was probably one that sat on the top shelf of our minds as well.
Asked why the developer chose to release the first installment in the future Shin Megami Tensei series on the DS, Ishida said that it seemed like the best choice, considering its resources. "The first thought was to make a large-scale on the RPG, which can be done with a relatively small dev team. From there, Kaneko wrote a pitch to make a DS game in the Shin Megami Tensei series, the game that got him to join the company in the first place."
"I think one of the best things about the DS is the way it demands your concentration as you hold it in your hands," Kaneko explained. "It fits well with SMT, which is all about monster data and so forth. Since the new game's for the DS, we wanted it to be fresh and we wanted to open it up for new users, so we tried to make things simple. People always think SMT is hard -- maybe it's because we don't have any cute art!"
The one thing that stood out to Famitsu was that the title had more of a sci-fi flavor to it than the previous games. "You have the Red Sprite and a lot of other sci-fi elements here," Kaneko added, "but from my perspective, SMT has always been about demons, the occult, these un-scientific things clashing with the state-of-the-art in technology. In that respect, I don't think Strange Journey is a departure at all for the series."
"I mean, to some people, a Web URL is like a weird mishmash of numbers and letters, right? It's not entirely unlike some kind of magic incantation. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,' and I think the essence captured in that quote is still the same."
When asked about the demon-trading system, Kaneko explained that, "We had discussed fighting demons against each other, but that doesn't really match with the game's atmosphere. Instead, we decided it'd be better to let people put up passwords on the net and get whatever demon they liked the most that way. If you make a powerful demon, you can't help but want to show it off, right?"