I'm Just Going To Ask, What's Your Opinion Of Tzaphkiel's Design?

Training with the crew.

With the Meta-Knights being skilled with such a diverse set of weapons, Meta Knight would definitely know a thing or two about them.

neil gaiman is an anti-anti

For those of you wondering if this is a joke: it is not

SMT Boardgame Kickstarter Smells Like Suspicious Fish

There's an SMT boardgame. Curb your enthusiasm, you shouldn't back it. And if you did, lower your pledge to like a buck until they clear things up, because as it stands it seems like an incredibly suspect product.

Checking through the Kickstarter comments and Japanese Tweets about the boardgame makes the entire thing seem poorly planned at best. I'll summarize as best I can;

The designer is incredibly infamous in the boardgame community

Naoki Matsunaga, a self-described "board game sommelier", is the designer. You'll find tweets lamenting that "the board game sommelier is involved". Why is he so hated? This thread goes into detail: co_boze on twitter. Part of it is they bashed Werewolf over one game they saw of it, another is they took on a kind of public-face role for boardgames appearing on late night TV shows to talk about them in ways that annoyed boardgamers. They seem to have designed a boardgame based on "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" which ripped off Sid Sackson's 'I'm the Boss". But it's what co_boze talks about next that's really bizarre. The game was apparently banned from most board game cafes and playing spaces. Seminars where people could play the game were hosted, but the venues that hosted these seminars all closed down.

If you keep looking through comments, you start finding claims that his company does multi-level marketing (ie pyramid schemes). To be honest, I don't know if this is true. But even if it isn't, it is really not hard to find people who know of this guy and would really really really REALLY prefer he was not involved.

"Oh fuck, it's THIS guy" is not a reaction that inspires confidence

2. Questionable development and presentation issues.

A regular collaborator with Atlus recently tweeted "The use of AI in Atlus works or derivative works is stictly prohibited." He responded to a reply asking if this was about a board game.

The staff running the SMT BG Kickstarter later clarified the actual -game- wouldn't use AI graphics... but from the looks of it, the promotional materials do.

Dig that... generic metal pipe aesthetic. Nothing screams MegaTen like black plumbing to nowhere.

In totally unrelated news, a board game manufacturer recently tweeted that a Kickstarter used their name without permission, and they're not sure why.

Quote tweets on the post would suggest it was the SMT board game. The comment they are loosely referring to is this:

In a follow-up post, they do specify "The product figures will be made of PVC." and "We will be manufacturing the games in partnership with a factory in China that has a proven track record... " "Figure director Kimura Yuzuru has over 10 years of experience..." and other boring development stuff that I have no issue with. What I do have issue with is how they can say things like they're "considering" which manufacturer to use and namedropping other companies that they're unrelated with. (While I was typing this post, they posted an update that clarified the CMON issue and literally nothing else: here.)

The boardgame is being presented with machine translated English printed on the same cards as the Japanese. But the actual game will have a translator check everything.

they hire translators to localize all game content

Additionally, there was a week long radio silence on the Kickstarter. For reference, Kickstarters are normally very active with the project planners dropping updates, responding to feedback and clearing up any concerns.

Some of the concerns were "How does the game actually play?", a question that would be best answered by dropping a rulebook for people to look at, or better yet showing them an entire run of the game. The SMT BG Kickstarter has boldly chosen neither. Devs have commented the game is on Version 11 and plays well, which makes it strange that they can't share any of it with anyone else.

Actually, when you compare this to how most Kickstarters are run, it becomes very clear the SMT BG Kickstarter is, uh, kinda failing in all possible regards. The first Backer Goal is "Jack Frost Dice" at 2000 backers (not funds raised, BACKERS). Despite getting 300%(!!!) of the initial pledge needed, there are no bonuses or unlocks.

Mind, this lack of information comes after they already delayed the start to supposedly improve Backer Goals and other aspects.

There aren't a shortage of issues - it's ICREA's first boardgame (but not their first tango with SMT; they made the SMT30th Logo, for instance.) The timeline seems totally wack. The staff have been incredibly slow to respond. Cards with tiny font and two languages printed on them. Etc, etc. Maybe individually these issues wouldn't be too concerning. But all of them combined make the product seem incompetently run at best, and at worst an actual scam.

I'm hardly a big influencer in the SMT scene (my biggest contribution is when that fucking succubus gif gets 36k likes on Twitter every 5 months) but I haven't seen any English speaking sources discuss this in detail, when there really should be at least some noise about all of this. Still. if just one of you end up saving 600 bucks on what ends up being a trashfire carcrash project because of this post, then that'll have made the past 30 minutes of typing this shit worth it.

Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy’s first law of Equivalent Exchange.

this outright looks like it comes from devil children/demikids, hey maybe it WAS a design for aitvaras that would appear in those games but they scrap it and i guess either doi or atlus we’re lazy and just re used it

Aitvaras. A.I.T.V.A.R.A.S AiTvArAs

What the fuck is this

[The sidequest where the player fights Mara in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne has several references to the previous numbered titles.] [The summoning area references the 4 dolls used in a summoning ritual in Shin Megami Tensei II which goes wrong due to the inclusion of “The Dancing Doll” rather than the correct “Sleeping Doll”. The Nocturne ritual also goes wrong, likely for the same reason] [Baphomet’s incantation is taken from the introduction of Shin Megami Tensei, which invokes the names of God as part of its ritual.]

My boy magolor for the ask thing

deceptive wizard time

favorite thing about them - ngl, his personality is a joy. even when he's a huge jerk, he's incredibly entertaining, one of the best written characters in the entire series

least favorite thing about them - id like him to like. actually play a Role in his re-appearances instead of having pointless cameos because he's popular. c'mon hal, you literally brought him back from the dead, use him.

favorite line - "You are such a cool dude!"

brOTP - uh. Well it's canonical fact that he really wants to be friends with Kirby, so let's go with that. I imagine he at least used to be buddies with Marx at some point.

OTP - Marxochilly gang ngl

nOTP - idk honestly? though people that ship him with kirby make me feel uncomfortable

random headcanon - the reason he returned to popstar specifically is that despite him having questionable moral compass, he STARTED to genuinely feel companionship with kirby, dedede, meta knight and bandana dee and wanted to make amends. like his star allies guest star description says, he wants to be friends... and conquer the universe together. he might be shady, but he's hungry for positive social interaction.

unpopular opinion - while i'm all for magolor redemption, people woobify him a bit too much a bit too often. like he did some genuinely shitty things in the past, he literally tried to conquer the universe, he backstabbed people that genuinely trusted him. he should be held accountable because his current attempts at making amends were not the greatest. (gifting theme park is not a redemption)

song i associate with them - "under my control"

favorite picture of them -

WoFF!Magolor :)

It reminds of gabriel from drakengard 3 more tbh

You see the xenomorph orochi?

Yes, it's very much an 8-headed serpent.