Developed by: Cave Published by: ATLUS Aeria Games Entertainment Genre(s): Role-Playing MMO.

Shin Megami Tensei Online Imagine PS4 Xbox One

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A player by the name of COMP Omega had been tinkering with such a server about two years after launch, and when both official servers died, they immediately took the project public and posted it on GitHub.

MMOs were being released by the dozen every couple of months, with such memorable titles as Asda Story, Elsword, and Tabula Rasa all launching at or around the same time.

The only one of these you probably recognize is Tabula Rasa, and only because Richard Garriotts name was slapped on the cover.

You had the big names too World of Warcrafts The Burning Crusade launched in 2007, as did The Lord of the Rings Online and Warhammer Online.

Despite the official server of IMAGINE having long since shut down, however, you can still experience the game right now, thanks to a group of dedicated fans and translators.

But why go through the trouble of reviving a decade-old MMO To answer that question, we have to talk about evil, greed-driven monsters, and also demons.

Shin Megami Tensei Online Imagine Series Is Known

Foregoing the usual turn-based combat that the series is known for, it instead opted for a cooldown system similar to Final Fantasy XI or World of Warcraft.

What made IMAGINE unique among the chaff, however, was its demon fusion and rebirth system.

These negotiations have a chance to fail, but if successful, they reward money, items, or even the demon itself as a partner.

The demon fusion chart lists how you can create these demons, and is extremely in-depth.

Ive seen Angels (a relatively low-level demon) with endgame type abilities and stats, made possible through fusion and rebirth, a system where you continually reset your demon to level 1, with higher base stats and stat growth.

Players had to work together to figure out the system and master its nuances.

People would even work on fun, comparatively pointless projects that pushed the limits of the system, like the aforementioned Uber-Angel.

But this is where things started to take a turn for the worse.

MMO equipment has stats in almost every game, but no other MMO that Ive played before or since IMAGINE has had the audacity to make the best gear exclusively available through a random gachapon.

Fortune Card spins cost about 1 USD per roll, with certain rarer Fortune Cards costing about 2 a roll, which is admittedly quaint compared to todays mobile game gacha costs.

The international server did not receive content updates often outside of the occasional new gachapon, and when it did, they were often plagued with untranslated text and bugs, many of them game-breaking.

Add that on to four years of existing buggy content, and anti-free-to-play measures that were added in, and IMAGINE soon began to hemorrhage players.

Despite the new management, only two major updates Diaspora Shinagawa (an endgame dungeon) and Ikebukuro Casino made their way to the global server.

Meanwhile, there were still numerous untranslated lines in the game from earlier patches.

And after Ikebukuro, no updates came except for the usual rotation of Fortune Card gachapon.

In 2014, Marvelous USA shut down, dropping the international version of IMAGINE by the wayside.

CAVE kept the JP server running for an additional two years after the international server died, and many rolled characters there a task that was extremely difficult if you didnt read Japanese.

English patches were eventually created, and players were able to enjoy IMAGINE all the way up to its last days.