I've already talked a bit about how hard Shin Megami Tensei IV was on the default difficulty—and how the game makes you humiliate yourself in order to switch to easy mode. But if even easy mode is still too much for you, you can always download the first DLC dungeon. It completely breaks the game.
Inside the 250 yen (about $2.50) “There Are Also Affairs of Hell That Depend on Your Level” DLC, you gain experience points hand over fist. The entire DLC is actually just a single room. Each of the devils you encounter in it drop one of two items. One, when used, gives you 1/6 of the needed XP to reach your next level. The other one simply gives you a full level straight up. After each battle, I would get between two and six of the former. The latter was a bit rarer drop—I only got one about every other battle. To put it another way, with these items, I was able to level up nearly once per battle.
To put this in perspective, after fifteen hours in the normal game, my main character was level 16. After two hours and fifteen minutes in the DLC dungeon, he was level 99. Yet if anything, I was a slowpoke as reports across the Japanese side of the net say it can be done in even less time: about an hour.
But more than just having one strong character, I suddenly had access to the game's entire devil-filled library. Normally, when you are constantly catching and fusing new devils, you are not allowed to fuse devils that are a higher level than your character's level. However, once you power level him to level 99, you can basically fuse any devil in the game—as long as you have the proper devils to combine anyway.
This DLC seems designed solely for power leveling in this way. After all, even on the easy, Shin Megami Tensei IV is on par with Persona 3 difficulty-wise. This DLC may just be Atlus' way of giving the game a “super easy mode” for those who just want to experience the story without the hassle of grinding for hour upon hour in the game.
Shin Megami Tensei IV was released on May 23, 2013, for the Nintendo 3DS in Japan. It will be released in North America on July 16, 2013.
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