Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux director on the remake, relation to main series, more
The folks over at Retronauts recently had the chance to interview Eiji Ishida, the director of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux, the 3DS remake of SMT: Strange Journey. You can check out the full interview on their website; below are a couple of interesting excerpts:
On the decision to remake a relatively new game like Strange Journey:
We decided to remake Strange Journey to make it more widely known. We would like to consider a sequel, and we actually have ideas for the story and a new game experience. Whether we can make it happen, though, depends on how well this game performs.
On the rumor that Strange Journey was originally going to be part of the main SMT series:
To be exact, it was developed as a spinoff from the start. The promotional staff at the time judged the game to have high enough quality to be marketed as a numbered title, so they suggested selling it as a numbered SMT game. Even Mr. Kazuma Kaneko, who worked with us to design the human and demon characters and pen the original story, backed up the suggestion, saying it was “good enough to be called Shin Megami Tensei IV.”
But, because it was conceived as a spinoff, we enjoyed the freedom of going off on a tangent from the mainline games (and the extra pain and suffering from that, haha). Therefore, I felt a strong resistance to market it as a numbered title, and I ultimately rejected the suggestion. I think I would be a little more flexible about it now, but my past self who had just experienced the pain of creating a new title wasn’t as confident, and I couldn’t make that decision then.
On that note, Strange Journey has no chronological relationship to the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei series.
