Published 10/04/2025

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux

In the last year, Shin Megami Tensei has been creeping into my bones - or, more accurately, Atlus’s brand of RPGs as a whole. I’d messed around in the franchise before; I carved a decent way through Shin Megami Tensei IV a few years back, and I reviewed the first game in the series over on my Game Boy Abyss site, but it wasn’t until last year that I actually beat one of these games, the fantastic SMT V Vengeance. Since then, Atlus games have been all I can think about, and so in an attempt to get through my Mariana Trench-esque backlog, decided to take a focus on the Atlus games in that collection, starting with the one likely most tailored to me especially - the nexus of Shin Megami Tensei’s past and present, infused with a little bit of it’s sister series, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux for the 3DS, a remaster of the original DS title. As a dungeon crawler fanatic, this game fires on so many cylinders, boasting a rock solid story, solid RPG combat, and the ever-addictive demon collecting/fusing that’s core to Shin Megami Tensei as a whole. Unfortunately, certain inherent issues - namely a lack of balance, born from the inclusion of Redux’s genuinely strong added content, and a general sense of fatigue from the sheer length of the experience.

Whilst many Shin Megami Tensei games opt for lonelier, more sparsely populated stories, Strange Journey bucks this trend with a fairly heavy clip of story, character interactions, and lore coming in near constantly. Taking place in the near future, a vast dark dome-like structure has appeared across Antarctica and is slowly spreading in all directions. As a member of an organized, multi-national response force, you join an expedition into the dome, suffering catastrophic losses in the process, cut off from the Earth, and trapped with your comrades in a world filled to the brim with demons. The player character, a military officer, alongside fellow operatives Jiminez, a brash, cocky man who delights in allying with demons, and Zelenin, a woman who is rescued from demonic imprisonment, step into the Schwarzwelt to drive back the oncoming demonic horde, save the Earth and - god willing - find a way home. As with other Shin Megami Tensei games, the game’s key characters exist to represent the alignments of Law, Neutral, and Chaos. Whilst some games in this series embody this ideal to the character’s detriment, turning them into walking exposition machines, the characters in Strange Journey thankfully diverts from this idea. Jiminez and Zelenin, whilst coming to pretty heavily embody the concepts of Chaos and Law, respectively, feel like fully formed characters who become the aforementioned embodiments for very understandable reasons that makes them delightful to hear from.

Strange Journey’s story is most intriguing because the inherent causes of the demon invasion are actually occurring in our own reality. Humanity has broken the world, and this is reflected within the various zones of the Schwarzwelt; overconsumption, greed, the destruction of nature, climate change - all this is reflected in the many dungeons you’ll be invading throughout the Schwarzwelt’s various tiers. For example, the first dungeon, Antlia, represents a world torn apart by war, whilst the third, Carina, takes place within a gigantic supermarket, representing humanity’s endless need for consumption. It is a bit heavy handed, no doubt about it, but I found it an effective way to convey its somewhat (non-pejorative) B-movie premise. Encountering these dungeons for the first time were some of my favourite moments in the game; wandering into Eridanus’s Garden of Eden-esque pathways or the mind-bending, reality warping locales of one of the laters dungeons were fantastic. Despite being a remaster, Strange Journey Redux doesn’t feel like a massive jump over the original version, and it doesn’t really compete with Atlus’s other dungeon crawlers natively made for the 3DS. But the old-school vibe is just that - an excellent vibe, and despite being occasionally thrown off by the 2D sprites of the demons early in the game, the game’s generally weaker graphical fidelity doesn’t hurt the game too much.

But back to my verdict on the story - Honestly, despite Strange Journey being frequently cited as having one of the best stories of any Shin Megami Tensei game, I found it… just fine, to be honest. It’s has a fantastic premise and general framing device, but the first half to two thirds of the game feels like preamble, with the cast just struggling to survive and escape, with little attention giving to the gravity of just why the Schwarzwelt is creeping across the Earth - it’s not into a certain suit-garbed legend pops up that the story really begins to really kick in. The ending, in particular, is very, very bold - especially if you ignore Redux’s new ending (which isn’t remotely bad, just a little more ‘happy’).

Generally, Strange Journey’s narrative just kind of takes a backseat to the dungeon-crawling, but occasionally I just found it kind of getting in the way; there’s far too many times when Arthur, the AI who essentially is leading the expedition into the Schwarzwelt pretty much orders you back to your ship hub for exposition or to get a particular upgrade - I much preferred long stretches of dungeoneering, then getting interrupted halfway against and again. That last note also contributes to making the game feel quite a bit longer than it really needs to be. Across the game’s nine or so dungeons, each of which is longer than the last, the experience begins to drag as you near the finish line, as the naturally repetitive nature of classic JRPG combat can grow quite stale after so many hours and so many battles and all the tricks the dungeons have on offer.

Strange Journey, being one of the premier monster collector games in the industry, presents you with hundreds of demons to recruit and fuse, all to battle alongside your player character. Combat is pretty standard JRPG fare, with your squad of yourself, along with three demons, using skills of various elements and properties to carve through the opponents of various dungeons. Seriously, if you’ve played any RPG, you know what’s up - generally, I’ve found SMT games at a baseline to be not much more complex than Dragon Quest, though not in a bad way. Much of the complexity really comes in min-maxing your teams with particular demons for particular situations. The biggest twist SMT has always had on everyday RPGs is the ability to converse and recruit the various demons you’ll be encountering them, serenading them with correct answers to their questions to get on their good sides, and then giving into their demands to have them join your party. This goes for every SMT game, but there is nothing more delightful than getting a new demon in your party - working out their movesets, but more importantly, finding out what stronger demons you can fuse them into. For the most part, any two demons can be fused together to typically make a stronger, higher level demon who is totally new, though they’ll typically have one or two abilities from their progenitors. Even bosses, the demons stalking the player and his crew across the game, aren’t protected from being wielded by you - defeating a boss unlocks them as a ‘special summon’ made from specific demons.

The game’s major battle gimmick draws from the franchise’s iconic Alignment System, where dialogue choices you make in the story alter your character’s moral alignment, pushing you towards a certain ending. Here, Alignment plays a simple, yet critically crucial role in battle; when any member of your active party performs an attack that their target is weak to, all active members of the party of the -same- alignment will perform a Co-Op Attack, dealing a very sizable amount of bonus damage to their foe. One downside to this system, if you were to optimize yourself, is that depending on which alignment your character is, you’re really encouraged to only focus on utilizing a third of the game’s roster - which is still a sizable amount, but it still feels limiting in a rather frustrating way.

All demons have their own inherent set of skills, but there’s some leeway to be had in molding a demon to be exactly the warrior you need to be. Chiefly, if you recruit a demon and raise their Analysis Level to max - raised by using or defeating other versions of that demon - you’ll earn a Demon Source. Upon fusing any two dungeons, you’ll have the option to add a Demon Source to them, giving them a selection of several skills associated with that demon. Basically, if you fuse and earn the Sources for a large selection of demons, you’ll have far more flexibility in needing a demon to have a certain skill to fill out their moveset. The amount of times my choice of top demons for my level didn’t have a certain element, or healing, or the right buff/debuff was almost always saved by having the right Demon Source. This feature is also great because even if it isn’t optimal to use them, getting the Sources of demons not on your alignment will still pay off massive dividends. Obviously Pokemon and Shin Megami Tensei aren’t one to one comparisons, but Pokemon WISHES you could have the flexibility Strange Journey gives it monsters - though the lack of a multiplayer battle modes probably makes it easy to ‘balance’ (read: if you know what you’re doing, you can break this game wide open).

Outside of battle, Strange Journey employs a mix of the older-style of Shin Megami Tensei games with Atlus’ other major (I like to think it’s major…) dungeon crawler, Etrian Odyssey. You’ll be navigating maze-like dungeons, each with their own suite of dangers, puzzles, and demons. Whilst engaging with these puzzles is fun enough, I’d say that few of them are complex enough to really feel satisfying to conquer, with only towards the very end of the game that I found myself truly impressed by the game’s originality. Many of them basically boil down to teleporter mazes, navigating without visuals, or identifying which trap floors you need to fall through to progress. The focus is very much on the combat - which comes in constantly with the game’s high encounter rate - but I was never unhappy to engage with the puzzle-side of this dungeon crawler.

These dungeons can vary heavily in quality, though I’d say none of them approach the realm of bad; for an example, I really enjoyed the vertical design of the second dungeon, which just used a lot of smaller floors, but the third and fourth dungeons, both thematically and puzzle-wise (one focussing on navigating in pitch darkness, the other dealing with conveyor belts) felt a bit flat to me overall. Notably, the game’s fifth dungeon, Eridanus, is constantly signalled out for being weak due to its reliance on teleporter puzzles, but I really didn’t mind it all, especially with its beautiful, Garden of Eden-esque visuals. Just goes to show how opinions on dungeons can vary to each player’s taste. Redux’s largest addition comes in a sort of ‘parallel’ dungeon, the Womb of Grief, that presents

Rather then the traditional JRPG staple of having stores to buy equipment and items from, Strange Journey opts to lean into its isolated, survival themes with all your equipment coming in the form of a crafting system. No, no, it’s not like every bloated RPG from the last decade. Throughout all the dungeons, you’ll find various items strewn randomly across its long corridors, the majority of which are Forma. Forma, which comes in the form of random item pickups and enemy loot, are essentially crafting materials to create new weapons and armour for your player character, and consumables for your entire party. It’s kind of nice that you very rarely feel the need to active grind or hunt down specific Forma for pretty much anything; as long as you’re always picking up the Forma you’re finding at your feet, and completing more encounters, you’ll get everything you need in the way of equipment, and with the amount of items you’ll wrack up from demons gifting them to you later in the game, you won’t need to spend pretty much any Forma on items at all. This also helps you save on currency, the majority of which I found ended up going to re-summoning old demons for various fusion shenanigans.

Now, I like Strange Journey - there are parts of Strange Journey that I really, really like, but those opinions have been marred by some pretty core frustrations, namely with the game’s sense of balance.

I might’ve left Strange Journey as positive as I went into if it had been a generally more balanced experience. Now, in my opening ten-or-so hours with Strange Journey Redux, I had a pretty challenging, but not frustrating time; I’d be constantly trying out new demons, and be employing new strategies to take down bosses. But cracks in the balance begin to show once you unlock Redux’s biggest new addition - a large-scale, parallel dungeon called the Womb of Grief, which expands the game’s story and endings. Now, the way the Womb of Grief is unlocked is that you more or less unlock each successive floor - each one the size of several floors of a main story dungeon - once you complete a total main story dungeon. Beat the second dungeon, you unlock the first floor - beat the third, the second floor of Womb of Grief unlocks. So on and so forth. The Womb of Grief itself is a very fun dungeon to tackle, full of large-scale puzzle styles you don’t see as often in the main game, but it breaks the balance of the game pretty intrinsically. If you follow the pace roughly encouraged by the game, jumping between main dungeons and the Womb, you’ll be far stronger then the main game’s difficulty curve. If you ignore it, whilst the main dungeons will - hopefully - maintain their difficulty curve, the Womb of Grief becomes a ridiculously easy experience, even for the bosses. I opted for the bouncing back and forth method - which was a mistake, as this turned the third through fifth dungeons into jokes, and even after that the following content really wasn’t that difficult either, even on Expert.

Well, almost.

This awkward sense of balance culminates in the final two bosses of the game - the former of which was the original releases’s final encounter, and the latter of which is the new ‘true’ final boss if you complete the Womb of Grief - which present such incredible, brutal, frustrating walls to all but the best players it almost soured me on the game as a whole. Even after completing nearly all other content in the game up until that point, these encounters were so much more difficult then everything else, conquering them didn’t feel satisfying in the least. To make matters worse, they’re not just difficult in a numerical, damage and HP level sense. Now, you remember how I said that much of the game’s combat revolves around the alignment system, with demons of the same alignment being able to do Co-Op attacks? Well, after dozens and dozens of hours of the game drilling into you that same alignments = big damage, the final two bosses have major mechanics that absolutely *punish* you if you just didn’t happen to be building out top level demons of other alignments. It’s a baffling decision that I would’ve been more forgiving towards if it appeared in one of the bosses of the early game; at least then I’d know to have it in my back pocket.

Surprisingly for a SMT game - or an Atlus game in general, for that matter - I’m not super hot on Strange Journey’s soundtrack. It’s certainly not bad, with not a single song that I could signal out for being off poor quality, but much of it is very… forgettable, to say the least. There’s a lot of the same repetitive, drum-like beats, unclear, deep chanting and dramatic strings and leitmotifs. On the other hand, I’m a bit more fond of what I now know as the new songs added to the Redux version of the game, particularly the battle themes The Great Sign and the new final boss theme. It simply could be that they’re a little more varied and apart from the somewhat monolithic sound design of Strange Journey, but they make me have that feeling in my chest I can’t really describe when I hear really banging JRPG music, and the new songs deliver that in spades. Like I said, it’s 100% not a bad soundtrack overall, just a very forgettable one at odds with the usually high quality stuff Atlus put out.

There’s a lot to love about Strange Journey Redux, especially if you’re hardcore into the dungeon crawler genre - there’s a very solid story on offer, SMT’s staple combat is as satisfying as ever, and exploring the game’s myriad of dungeons and creating the perfect demonic legion for you.. But inherent cracks in the facade begin to appear the further you march on into the Schwarzwelt’s depths - the game rarely maintains a healthy balance of difficulty you seek to engage with all it has on offer, either swinging too easy or too difficult, culminating in some of the most unfun boss fights I’ve played in an RPG in some time. And this comes after over fifty hours of playtime where, despite still having a pretty good time, I was ready to wrap up my time with Strange Journey. As it is, I wouldn’t recommend this as someone’s first foray into Shin Megami Tensei as a whole, both for its twists on the core experience, and for its inherent balance issues. But overall it’s still a strong entry in the oft-forgotten grandfather of RPG, especially for the more hardcore, dungeon-crawling addicts like myself - just don’t feel bad throwing the game down to Casual if you find yourself getting a bit stonewalled.