Breach: Awakening

...I figured I might as well fess up to the inspiration for the game.

Originally, the ally recruiting/creation worked a lot differently. I thought up the systems with the intent of having it be a cyberpunk theme. You would decompile hostile programs in the 'net and make your own attack ware and barriers. Eventually, those ideas splintered off into a different game and I decided to try something else with this.

I figured I would change the enemies into demons. The player either summons or captures them, and could train them as well as extract their energies to give new skills to other units or just build new forms.

My backstory was that a huge corporation (I kept some of the cyberpunk theme) tried to create a teleportation network and instead opened a dimensional portal that allowed demons to flood into the real world. The main character was originally designed as a bounty hunter that took contracts from the company, capturing demoniac essence in prismatic orbs (materia rip-off... I know) that allowed them to summon their skills during battle against other demons.

I was talking with a friend about my ideas for the game and she said that except for the bounty hunter and orb things, I'd pretty much come up with a lot of stuff from the Shin Megami Tensei universe.

Aside from reading a magazine article on it back when Nocturne came out, I was shamefully unaware of the SMT games.

Between then and now I've played Innocent Sin, the SMT translation for the SNES, and started Nocturne and P3:FES. Unfortunately, my PS2 died out on me so I haven't been able to finish that last two. I even dabbled with SMT:Imagine for a while, but I lost interest around lv 30 or so because the people I usually grouped with moved on to different games.

Why not do a straight fangame then? Quite simply, I don't know enough about the SMT universe to do that. I don't want to research chronology and nest the game into an established universe since pretty much the only benefit to my project would be people raging at me for all the things I got wrong.

So instead, now that I am aware of the SMT games, I cite them as an influence/inspiration. This is my take on that type of game.

For anyone who has played an SMT game, there should be plenty of familiar things around. There is demon capturing and summoning. Demons can absorb weakened enemies to gain energy that allows them to learn the consumed enemy's skills in time. Elemental weaknesses are a big part of winning battles.