Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is an odd one. A crossover between Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei, only the story has nothing to do with SMT at all, and so much liberty has been taken with the Fire Emblem characters that they may as well have not bothered at all. Which isn't to say it's a bad game, mind, or that it doesn't benefit from the franchises it draws from, it's just an odd beast, a union of two franchises with barely anything to do with either of them.
Screenshots nicked from NintendoLife. Thanks mates.
Even though my experience with SMG is limited to about 15 hours or so with the 4th entry on 3DS, I can still tell you that TMS#FE takes more from the Persona spinoff than it does the main series or Devil Survivor. A contemporary setting with heavily redesigned Fire Emblem characters taking the role of character's Personas, and the "Idolosphere" taking the role of the TV realm or whatever else the other Persona games have. I'm working with second-hand knowledge here, cut me some slack. Point is, Navarre fused with some edgelord boy and he is COVERED in belts. Chrom is there.
The Fire Emblem characters retain the gist of their personality from their home series, but they are all secondary characters at best, with the spotlight being shone on the characters they serve. They spend most of their time transformed into weapons for the main cast, a group of kids with various performing arts talents. The story and visuals will likely be the selling point for anyone wanting to pick this up, the presentation is excellent in all regards and the characters are well realised and great to be around. TMS has an amazing and varied soundtrack from many genres and styles of Japanese idol music, that had me eager to progress just to maybe experience another of it's amazing anime music videos.
The plot itself as anime as it gets. In fact, that applies to pretty much everything in this game. Anime as fuck. Characters are archetypical, but unique enough to be memorable, and sometimes a little too keen to hammer home their "thing". I love Eleonora, but I can't recommend you take a shot every time she mentions Hollywood if you value your liver. It's also littered with inconsistencies, like an "episode" ending with a character drawing attention to a specific company as maybe being behind everything, only to be working with said company next episode, the only acknowledgement of the connection being a lone text message from one character. This happens more than a few times, plot points being seemingly forgotten as quickly as they're introduced. But there's nothing that kept me from enjoying it. I love the characters, archetypical as they are, and each episode and side story rightly focuses on the characters above all else. It's that tried and tested action/slice-of-life hybrid where an attack from an otherworldly force is an excuse to learn a tangentially connected life lesson. In this case, life lessons revolving around how to be an singer/actor/model.
All of this bolstered through one of my favourite pointless features ever, the messaging system. Characters will send you messages while you're wandering around and at points in the story, based on a Japanese social networking site. There's very little interaction, I can count the number of times a dialogue choice appeared on one hand, it's mostly just tapping the gamepad screen to move forward a conversation. It's really just another place to put text boxes during conversation and another character development delivery medium, but you know what? It's cute, immersive and stylish, and I love it. It's an inspired use of the gamepad, something you don't see much of in the WiiU's library, and reminds me of Xenoblade X and managing the map during conversations. Which is good, because Xenoblade X is the greatest game ever. I decided that recently. Yeah.
And speaking of Xenoblade X, there are more comparisons to be found. In fact, I've heard a few voices around saying it does a lot of what Xenoblade X does, "but better". But... yeah, can't say I agree. It does do a lot of what Xenoblade X does, sure, and it does it simpler, but I can't say it does it BETTER. It's got a system in place where you can undergo side stories relating to specific party members and characters as you fight alongside them, but as great as these are, the only way to build up these relationships is through battle, while in Xenoblade you could do so by talking to them, making decisions in main and side quests, and making a deliberate effort in combat to help them out. And the missions themselves felt bigger and more important in X, as they were treated like main story missions, while in TMS they feel like a small step up from side quests.
Between Mirage Sessions' story missions you get an "intermission" to freely go about these side stories and side quests, but the side quests are few and far between, and often very threadbare and formulaic. There are highlights, like regular missions where you aid specific performers by defeating sub-bosses, but beyond those I struggle to remember the bulk of what actually happened during these quests. Meanwhile, Xenoblade X is brimming with side quests, and every one of them is memorable. Even Xenoblade's fetch quests are worth doing to see how their stories progress, something I can't say for many other games, and certainly not Mirage Sessions, where side quests are generally just a single goal, with a thank you at the end.
You might be wondering why I haven't talked about the combat or RPG elements a whole lot so far, and I guess it's because they aren't that interesting on the whole. The battle system's main draw is the Sessions mechanic, which to explain using another, more well known franchise, means that when Squirtle uses water gun on Charmander everyone else in your party jumps out of their Pokéballs and starts beating the shit out of Charmander too. There's more, of course, like sometimes moves will become more powerful version o themselves based on a dice roll, but honestly, it all feels very outdated. Very standard. Random battles feel like long, and admittedly rather pretty, stat-checks to see if you've been passing enough stat checks lately. Major battles, when you aren't over/underleveled, sometimes feel more interesting, but still boil down to using whatever skill/item directly fixes your current situation rather than any actual decision-making.
And that old-fashioned feeling extends to a lot else. Games have spent years finding more and more elegant solutions to preventing grinding, but Tokyo Mirage Sessions doesn't bother with any of them. This becomes more of a problem as the game goes on, expecting you to fight tougher enemies more often for less materials needed to level up weapons. The weapon system seemed fun at first, when you could gain all the skills and bonuses from a weapon by using it, and when you gained all you needed from it you'd switch to a new weapon for more. It reminded me of the Infinity Blade series, in a very good way. But then as it introduced more elements it managed to become more standard and more of a chore, making you spend more materials in upgrading existing weapons to power up skills, chewing through resources and dulling the sense of progress that mastering a weapon had before. Even levelling up skills became more of a chore from a nice baseline, where levelling up a character's performance level would unlock new skills that you would activate in a flashy sequence. Even if you're skipping the bulk of the sequence, it makes it feel like a treat, taking the best of mobile game design in a way not unlike Steamworld Heist. Then it went and introduced more material requirements, and suddenly getting new skills is another resource drain, which means more grinding.
If all of this sounds like I'm down on the game, I'm not. Quite the opposite. I really enjoyed my 50 hours with Tokyo Mirage Sessions. But there's very little I can praise without caveats. The presentation is top-notch, from the soundtrack, to the environments, even the menus, but beyond that, every area of it's design feels in someway outdated, and the story isn't exactly going to turn anyone not into anime into a Japan-loving weeb. But for those of you who can still play "classic" RPGs like the older Final Fantasy titles and say they hold up, and who aren't hung up on the minutia of game design and innovation in mechanics, this will likely be one of your favourite games of the year. And even if you ARE like me, and get bothered whenever a game uses systems that were innovated on so many times since they first appeared, if you can look past that there's a really good game here.
So yeah, TMS#FE is a really good game. It doesn't stand up to critical analysis very well, and if you didn't know it was a crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem and were unfamiliar with both franchises, you'd probably never know it had anything to do with either of them until somebody says the words "Fire Emblem" about 40 hours into the story, and you'd never know the Shin Megami Tensei connection at all if you didn't know it's skill naming scheme. But it's good. well worth picking up.
So there's your bonus... whatever these things are. This Thursday I'll hopefully be writing about Hyper Light Drifter, which becomes more and more brilliant the more I play it. Seriously, I never want it to end.
Screenshots nicked from NintendoLife. Thanks mates.
Even though my experience with SMG is limited to about 15 hours or so with the 4th entry on 3DS, I can still tell you that TMS#FE takes more from the Persona spinoff than it does the main series or Devil Survivor. A contemporary setting with heavily redesigned Fire Emblem characters taking the role of character's Personas, and the "Idolosphere" taking the role of the TV realm or whatever else the other Persona games have. I'm working with second-hand knowledge here, cut me some slack. Point is, Navarre fused with some edgelord boy and he is COVERED in belts. Chrom is there.
The Fire Emblem characters retain the gist of their personality from their home series, but they are all secondary characters at best, with the spotlight being shone on the characters they serve. They spend most of their time transformed into weapons for the main cast, a group of kids with various performing arts talents. The story and visuals will likely be the selling point for anyone wanting to pick this up, the presentation is excellent in all regards and the characters are well realised and great to be around. TMS has an amazing and varied soundtrack from many genres and styles of Japanese idol music, that had me eager to progress just to maybe experience another of it's amazing anime music videos.
The plot itself as anime as it gets. In fact, that applies to pretty much everything in this game. Anime as fuck. Characters are archetypical, but unique enough to be memorable, and sometimes a little too keen to hammer home their "thing". I love Eleonora, but I can't recommend you take a shot every time she mentions Hollywood if you value your liver. It's also littered with inconsistencies, like an "episode" ending with a character drawing attention to a specific company as maybe being behind everything, only to be working with said company next episode, the only acknowledgement of the connection being a lone text message from one character. This happens more than a few times, plot points being seemingly forgotten as quickly as they're introduced. But there's nothing that kept me from enjoying it. I love the characters, archetypical as they are, and each episode and side story rightly focuses on the characters above all else. It's that tried and tested action/slice-of-life hybrid where an attack from an otherworldly force is an excuse to learn a tangentially connected life lesson. In this case, life lessons revolving around how to be an singer/actor/model.
All of this bolstered through one of my favourite pointless features ever, the messaging system. Characters will send you messages while you're wandering around and at points in the story, based on a Japanese social networking site. There's very little interaction, I can count the number of times a dialogue choice appeared on one hand, it's mostly just tapping the gamepad screen to move forward a conversation. It's really just another place to put text boxes during conversation and another character development delivery medium, but you know what? It's cute, immersive and stylish, and I love it. It's an inspired use of the gamepad, something you don't see much of in the WiiU's library, and reminds me of Xenoblade X and managing the map during conversations. Which is good, because Xenoblade X is the greatest game ever. I decided that recently. Yeah.
And speaking of Xenoblade X, there are more comparisons to be found. In fact, I've heard a few voices around saying it does a lot of what Xenoblade X does, "but better". But... yeah, can't say I agree. It does do a lot of what Xenoblade X does, sure, and it does it simpler, but I can't say it does it BETTER. It's got a system in place where you can undergo side stories relating to specific party members and characters as you fight alongside them, but as great as these are, the only way to build up these relationships is through battle, while in Xenoblade you could do so by talking to them, making decisions in main and side quests, and making a deliberate effort in combat to help them out. And the missions themselves felt bigger and more important in X, as they were treated like main story missions, while in TMS they feel like a small step up from side quests.
Between Mirage Sessions' story missions you get an "intermission" to freely go about these side stories and side quests, but the side quests are few and far between, and often very threadbare and formulaic. There are highlights, like regular missions where you aid specific performers by defeating sub-bosses, but beyond those I struggle to remember the bulk of what actually happened during these quests. Meanwhile, Xenoblade X is brimming with side quests, and every one of them is memorable. Even Xenoblade's fetch quests are worth doing to see how their stories progress, something I can't say for many other games, and certainly not Mirage Sessions, where side quests are generally just a single goal, with a thank you at the end.
You might be wondering why I haven't talked about the combat or RPG elements a whole lot so far, and I guess it's because they aren't that interesting on the whole. The battle system's main draw is the Sessions mechanic, which to explain using another, more well known franchise, means that when Squirtle uses water gun on Charmander everyone else in your party jumps out of their Pokéballs and starts beating the shit out of Charmander too. There's more, of course, like sometimes moves will become more powerful version o themselves based on a dice roll, but honestly, it all feels very outdated. Very standard. Random battles feel like long, and admittedly rather pretty, stat-checks to see if you've been passing enough stat checks lately. Major battles, when you aren't over/underleveled, sometimes feel more interesting, but still boil down to using whatever skill/item directly fixes your current situation rather than any actual decision-making.
And that old-fashioned feeling extends to a lot else. Games have spent years finding more and more elegant solutions to preventing grinding, but Tokyo Mirage Sessions doesn't bother with any of them. This becomes more of a problem as the game goes on, expecting you to fight tougher enemies more often for less materials needed to level up weapons. The weapon system seemed fun at first, when you could gain all the skills and bonuses from a weapon by using it, and when you gained all you needed from it you'd switch to a new weapon for more. It reminded me of the Infinity Blade series, in a very good way. But then as it introduced more elements it managed to become more standard and more of a chore, making you spend more materials in upgrading existing weapons to power up skills, chewing through resources and dulling the sense of progress that mastering a weapon had before. Even levelling up skills became more of a chore from a nice baseline, where levelling up a character's performance level would unlock new skills that you would activate in a flashy sequence. Even if you're skipping the bulk of the sequence, it makes it feel like a treat, taking the best of mobile game design in a way not unlike Steamworld Heist. Then it went and introduced more material requirements, and suddenly getting new skills is another resource drain, which means more grinding.
If all of this sounds like I'm down on the game, I'm not. Quite the opposite. I really enjoyed my 50 hours with Tokyo Mirage Sessions. But there's very little I can praise without caveats. The presentation is top-notch, from the soundtrack, to the environments, even the menus, but beyond that, every area of it's design feels in someway outdated, and the story isn't exactly going to turn anyone not into anime into a Japan-loving weeb. But for those of you who can still play "classic" RPGs like the older Final Fantasy titles and say they hold up, and who aren't hung up on the minutia of game design and innovation in mechanics, this will likely be one of your favourite games of the year. And even if you ARE like me, and get bothered whenever a game uses systems that were innovated on so many times since they first appeared, if you can look past that there's a really good game here.
So yeah, TMS#FE is a really good game. It doesn't stand up to critical analysis very well, and if you didn't know it was a crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem and were unfamiliar with both franchises, you'd probably never know it had anything to do with either of them until somebody says the words "Fire Emblem" about 40 hours into the story, and you'd never know the Shin Megami Tensei connection at all if you didn't know it's skill naming scheme. But it's good. well worth picking up.
So there's your bonus... whatever these things are. This Thursday I'll hopefully be writing about Hyper Light Drifter, which becomes more and more brilliant the more I play it. Seriously, I never want it to end.
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