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• Spoiler-Free Content

  • Acquiring Shin Megami Tensei: NINE
  • An Overview of NINE
  • Additional Links

Acquiring Shin Megami Tensei: NINE

First, make sure you have the Cxbx-Reloaded emulator. Then, follow this link to acquire Shin Megami Tensei: NINE for the XBOX. It is currently untranslated.

An Overview of NINE

Below is an overview of NINE from someone who played it, mirrored from here:

• i finally managed to get an old Xbox to power up without freezing and stuff and since it was softmodded, i decided to put my SMT NINE import disk in it: it worked, even if during the videoclips it stutters a little, but that's not important. The game itself is..weird, weirder than any other SMT game i've played before; to be honest, it barely even feels like a SMT game. I wouldn't say that it's bad like a lot of people do, but it's definitely not for the general fans of the series. Im not trying to be some kind of elitist, what im trying to say is that the game is different, overly complicated and clearly lacking some stuff that was meant to be there.


• Introduction
• The game starts in the real world, where you and your family (you get to choose name and gender of your MC) are, like the other survivors, sheltered underground in vault-like room with an huge ass computer in it: your mother asks you if you could get a reference number for a shop and so you dive into Ideaspace, which is a virtual reconstruction of Tokyo before the nuclear apocalypse. I won't be spoiling much just in case someone wants to play it on its own, but from what i could understand, pretty much you and your friend Haraki get recruited into Debuggers, which it's a local force that acts like the Ideaspace's police, only that instead of solving problems between citizens, it deals with Noise, which is the codeword for demons in this game. The game also has some clothes shop for costumizing your avatar, which was part of the online functionality that the game was supposed to have: thing is, it failed, xbox live wasn't able to handle it i guess and they left the game without the main feature: this is why it looks like some kind of early 2000's chat room. There are also bars, which are TOTALLY empty, not even NPCs, which i guess were supposed to act as chat areas: it feels extremely eerie to go through this game like this.


• Battles
• This is where it gets weird: battles are, not just in real time ("real time" like Final Fantasy with the ATB system, not like Raidou), but completely automated and in my opinion, mostly optional since you don't actually gain EXP from battles. You can choose the moves and the spells (there's no normal attack, only special moves that consume MPs, so this is why shops sell Hiranya and you HAVE to stock up on those), or otherwise you can let the AI do that for you: normal battles are like 10 seconds long if your demons are strong enough so yeah. Demon recruiting works pretty much the same way; you can also get benefits from meeting the same demons that you have in your party i think.


• Party and RTS
• The party is composed of 5 demons (even if you have two other free spaces, i dont know if you'll use those later or in special occasions), but there's this weird thing called capacity which every demon carries in their digital DNA: capacity it's like a number value that decides how "heavy" the demon is: you can reduce capacity through Jakkyo by using compression (there's also encryption, but i can't remember what it's supposed to do at the moment; it's explained the first time you walk in though), and in that way you can also add little expansions pack to your demons which i guess will teach them more abilities that the demon doesn't have naturally. The game also has those RTS sections which holy shit, are really hard. Basically the real first RTS section (not counting the chapter 1 tutorial) happens on chapter two (which is where im right now), where, if i got that right, you're supposed to defend an adult shop from an hack attack. Yeah. There's this huge map with routes and control points which you and your allies are supposed to conquer (you can turn the control points into healing points and other stuff) and you're also supposed to cover those routes by just walking over them (they go from red to green): obviously you're not alone, there are demons which will attack you and your allies; the battles are automated, like you dont even see them (it just gives you a quick digest of what's going on IN ENGLISH, dont ask me why) unless you press X which will take you to the battle where you can issue commands. Of course it's called RTS for a reason, because everything happens AT THE SAME TIME and it isn't turn based like a board game for example, which makes it even harder for people that read slowly such as myself) In this particular section, if demons destroy your command centre or beat your ass in battle, it's game over. (To destroy a control point/command centre you're supposed to stay there for a lot of turns, you can see your progress because the point's HP go down, but it clearly leaves you exposed to attacks) It's hard, i've tried once and i got killed because my party sucks, but i'll try again later and see if i can get past it.



Anyway, here's a picture i took a few days ago of the game. I was in a training dungeon in the Ueno area, with Caith Sith set as my navi. The dungeons seems to be all the same by the way: just long, bland corridors, no maps, no chests..ugh, i really hope they will change during the game, but for the moment the only two dungeons that are avalible to you are like the one in the picture.

Additional Links

• NINE Strategy Database
• NINE Strategy Guide
• Shin Megami Tensei NINE Strategy / Exchange Bulletin Board (obviously not used anymore, more of a historical curio)
• Shin Megami Tensei NINE Deluxe Data Sheet