This is the 546th original article of the Old Boy Game Box, by @Overlord Crab
In the original issue of 538, we talked about two extremely hardcore and unpopular JRPGs "Goddess Rebirth" on the red and white machine, and at the end of the last issue, it was said that the newborn Atlus broke away from Namco and began to fly solo, at this time the game console also entered the 16-bit machine era, and Atlus, which has a deep relationship with the FC platform, decided to land the new "Goddess Rebirth" series on the Super Nintendo SFC console. Although the brand "Goddess Rebirth" was withdrawn, in order to bid farewell to previous eras, the new "Goddess" series of games was named "True Goddess Rebirth".
Today we will talk about the story of the "True Goddess Rebirth" series, and what is its relationship with "Persona"!
True goddess reincarnated
The fantasy plots of the two old era "Goddess Rebirth" are already like watching a thriller movie in the eyes of players, but this freshman work is even darker and grotesque in terms of plot.
As soon as "True Goddess Reborn" begins, the protagonist learns from his mother that an incredible event happened last night, and then learns from passers-by that there was a hunting and murder last night, and the deceased was the protagonist's classmate. What's more terrifying is that our front foot is still looking for NPCs to inquire about intelligence, and the strange man we encountered in a narrow alley on our back foot turned into a humanoid monster, and the protagonist was lucky to avoid the disaster and get a dagger as a weapon.
When I finally returned home, I found my mother strange, and finally found that my mother had been skinned by a monster and disguised as a human!
It can be imagined that such R18 settings can also pass the review system of any hell, it can only be said that the inclusiveness of that year was still very high, compared to the current "political correctness" in the game industry, I don't know how many times to civilize.
In addition to the weird to extreme plot, "True Goddess Rebirth" also introduces the low order, neutral neutral, Chaos chaos camp selection system: low order represents discipline, obedience, servility; Chaos represents freedom, unrestrained and innovative; Neutral represents a strong sense of self, pitted against the first two forces, and choosing different factions will not only lead to branching endings, but also have an impact on the overall game as a whole.
It's a pity that the actual game experience of "True Goddess Rebirth" is very dragged on, the development of the early plot and map exploration is a little boring, and the final maze "Great Sacred Church" with steep difficulty in the back should be a lingering nightmare for players who have played this game. There are also Low, Neutral, and Chaos branch routes, although the idea is very good, but each route to obtain a unique middle demon also makes the game balance completely collapsed, especially the Neutral route is very difficult to fight. In addition, "True Goddess Rebirth" is also full of common and vicious bugs of small factory games, resulting in the reputation of this work in the player group has not reached the height of the previous work.
It is worth mentioning that in "True Goddess Rebirth", the demon summoning program entrusted to the player is Steven Stephen, a mystic scholar in an automatic wheelchair, in fact, everyone can understand after seeing this image, isn't this just pinching his Dr. Stephen Hawking!
In addition, the scene of the goddess bathing in the dream at the beginning of the game has quite a sense of déjà vu of "Fairy Sword 98" crossing to Japan - dare to love so many fairies in ancient and modern China and abroad, all under the open-air bath, is there no bathroom in the fairy palace of the goddesses?
True Goddess Reincarnation 2
After experiencing the immature predecessor, "True Goddess Rebirth 2" painstakingly learned various lessons and finally achieved a classic RPG that shocked players and the industry.
"True Goddess Rebirth 2" is very unconventional in terms of setting, which involves a variety of profound themes of modern society, including but not limited to: dystopia, Z Governance Imprisonment, Cyber Network, Brain in an Urn, etc., even now I have to sigh that many classic plots of "True Goddess Rebirth 2" are extremely advanced.
The plot of "True Goddess Reincarnation 2" is inherited from the final flood of the previous game, and the newborn human race built the magnificent mechanical city "TOKYO Millenium" under the leadership of the previous heroine "Madam (Madame)". The protagonist of "True Goddess Reincarnation 2" is a teenager who has lost his memory and tries to train and fight in the arena every day in order to gain access to the upper residential area "Valhalla Area", but when he actually enters Valhalla, he discovers that Madam is actually controlled by the Messianic Church. As for the previous generation of protagonists, although they became the legendary savior, they were actually missing, and their truth was confusing.
After experiencing all kinds of stripping, the protagonist discovers that the thousand-year-old Tokyo is just a false utopia, and the so-called upper-class people who enter Valhalla are just cyclical and enter the computer virtual world and live a false life that they think they are happy. As for the real purpose of the Messianic Church is to forbid the human mind, make a man-made savior and use it as a prop to facilitate the command of the human mind, the protagonist is the so-called savior cultivated through artificial cultivation. After learning the truth, players still have to face the choices of the previous game's branches: Low obeys, Chaos breaks, and Neutral breaks the path of his own will.
True goddess reincarnation if
Just seven months after the release of True Goddess Rebirth 2, True Goddess Reincarnation If landed on SFC.
When "True Goddess Reincarnated" was first made, the producers put forward a hypothesis: if the world in the game did not experience nuclear war, but there were demons, what kind of sparks would this setting collide? As a result, "True Goddess Reincarnation IF" came into being, becoming a "if" game of the nature of a gaiden.
Since it is an IF story, this work is completely different from the catastrophe setting of the previous "Rebirth of the True Goddess", the game focuses on the incredible events encountered by multiple boys and girls in a certain college, in which various secondary and secondary elements such as campus bullying, adolescent budding, parental divorce, and social barriers are used as the main color.
"True Goddess Reincarnation IF" begins when Weifu Sama, a high school student addicted to the occult, is bullied by the school and decides to use a magic array to summon demons in the gymnasium to retaliate, but accidentally links the school to the other world, causing the entire school building to disappear from the human world. At that time, many students in the school and Sayama could not return from the otherworld, and our protagonist naturally became one of the students who were imprisoned in the otherworld. "True Goddess Reincarnation IF" advances the plot through multiple companions, chooses multiple lines, and finally defeats the culprit of this incident, Sasama's classmate who calls himself and changes into the "Demon God King", and finally returns to the real world.
Such a story loses the apocalyptic huge world view condensed by the "Goddess Rebirth" series, and the production team has long been prepared to be scolded, but unintentionally inserting willows, it is such a "Shinji"-style campus tragicomedy that has unexpectedly won the affirmation of many fans. Perhaps many teenagers in Japanese society at that time were already experiencing various troubles of adolescence, and how could such a game close to their hearts not resonate with seventeen or eighteen-year-old players?
It was such a game that was continued in the following PlayStation era, becoming an important branch of the Goddess series, the Persona series. The series was born out of "True Goddess Reincarnation IF", after five works, and finally grew into "Persona 5", which is known as the "world's first" RPG in the player group, and its vigorous vitality has made the series evolve again, giving birth to sound games, fighting games, songs, dramas, etc., which can be said to be a comprehensive hit out of the circle, and has formed a noisy trend.
Looking back at the thirty years of the "Goddess Rebirth" series, as the origin of works such as Persona, players may be quite unfamiliar with it now. However, it is precisely because of such a once brilliant seed that it has developed into today's entire "Goddess" universe. In this crab's view, players' preferences for art such as games often have a strong personal opinion, although the purpose of writing this article is naturally to give Amway to players who have this hobby, but Old Crab also knows that the deep, grotesque plot of the "Goddess" canonical work is really not suitable for the public taste, just to have fun is very satisfying. In fact, there are other "Goddess" derivative works on the SFC and GB platforms, due to the limitation of space, I will not talk about them, and interested friends can search for "Demon God Rebirth" in this self-media.
Next time, let's talk about the real pinnacle double-wall "True Goddess Reincarnation 3" and "Digital Demon Legend" in the Goddess series!
Author: Overlord crab An old crab shell that has been playing for more than 30 years, and the game life pays attention to the game humanities
Editor: Xiao Lei