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Never played one, is it basically Persona minus the life sim parts? How similar is the dungeon crawling/combat? Which one should I play first?

I would suggest either playing Nocturne first if you want a raw SMT experience, or play Digital Devil Saga if you want something of a bridge between SMT and a traditional RPG. Both of them are fantastic games >_>
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Fair warning if youre sensitive to suicide it may not be the game for you. While they arent actually committing suicide it appears that way when they summon in the game.

I haven't played all that many SMT games, but the biggest difference in dungeon crawling is a fixed dungeon design rather than randomly generated. The plots typically seem more serious in tone.

Cal12 posted...

Fair warning if youre sensitive to suicide it may not be the game for you. While they arent actually committing suicide it appears that way when they summon in the game.

I think that's only a Persona 3 thing. Most SMT games use COMPs to summon, which vary in appearance, but most often take the form of some arm-mounted computer.
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Cal12 posted...

Fair warning if youre sensitive to suicide it may not be the game for you. While they arent actually committing suicide it appears that way when they summon in the game.

That's one game in particular (Persona 3)

The dungeon crawling in mainline SMT is more... retro, I'd guess you say. Classically first-person perspective, but IV updated it for 3D walking around more like Persona.

One of the most important gameplay aspects is that the typical battle of SMT is that your "party" is you as the main character and demons you've got currently summoned. You can have a bunch of demons in your stock, but only three at a time alongside you, whereas in Persona you just had one demon attached to your and all your pals had their own demons that couldn't be changed.

In this way there's a lot more freedom in structuring your party, especially when you juggle skills about. The games respond by punishing you HARD if you don't keep your demons to be prepared to deal with most types of encounters.

There's no time-elapsing like in Persona. It's all take as long as you want. There is shifts of the moon through its phases, which effects certain things depending on the game, but it's just all cyclical.

I'd suggest either SMT4 or SMT Strange Journey Redux for your initial one. Or you can wait until SMT5 comes out like the rest of us.

As far as story, the running theme in mainline SMT is "apocalypse" or sometimes "rebirth". Yeah, Persona games usually faced some bad stuff at the end, but in SMT games, the apocalypse usually has either already happened or it will happen in the course of the game and your role is to pick up the pieces afterwards.

EDIT: Also if you've played P5, a fair few SMT aspects were brought into it, so the transition should be smoother. Speaking to demons to recruit them is one of the big ones.
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CyricZ posted...

The dungeon crawling in mainline SMT is more... retro, I'd guess you say. Classically first-person perspective, but IV updated it for 3D walking around more like Persona.

Just chiming in that Nocturne had the 3D walking too.
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Seitar posted...

CyricZ posted...

The dungeon crawling in mainline SMT is more... retro, I'd guess you say. Classically first-person perspective, but IV updated it for 3D walking around more like Persona.

Just chiming in that Nocturne had the 3D walking too.

This is correct, my bad. I keep thinking with Strange Journey as my baseline because that's where I started.
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CyricZ posted...

Appreciate all the detail, definitely cleared things up. I think I'll probably go with IV first. Although I haven't played too many turned based RPGs outside of pokemon and persona and this series sounds kinda complex, does it have a high barrier of entry or do you think I'll manage?

I think the hardest thing to get used to is the fusion system or how unforgiving battles can be if you don't take advantage of weaknesses, but since you've already played Persona, there won't be as steep a curve.
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