 Megami Tensei is a hugely popular series that continues today on 8th generation consoles including all sorts of offshoots and substories, but it got its start all the way back on the Famicom with Digital Devil Story before making its way to the Super Famicom in 1992 with Shin Megami Tensei and continuing later with Shin Megami Tensei 2 and the spin-off Shin Megami Tensei If. And those are the three games I'll be looking at in this video, and all three have English translation patches that are available on romhacking.net. Bear in mind that all three games have since received ports or remakes on everything from the Game Boy Advance to PlayStation Network to the Wii U. Alright let's just get right to it, these games have some very distinct strengths and weaknesses that are either going to make or break the experience for you folks watching. So let's just discuss those right now before we go any further. First all three of these games are turn-based RPGs in the horror genre, and they are horror games through and through. There's some really strange, interesting and unique imagery throughout, and the game does a great job conveying an unsettling vibe, especially with the music. In that way I liken these games to something like Secret of Evermore, in that yeah that game has its share of flaws, but I've played a gazillion 16-bit games at this point, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and as a result I firmly believe that there is no other 16-bit game like it, nothing comes close to the atmosphere or the ambience of that one. I think the same applies to all three Shin Megami Tensei, Super Famicom games. They're strange and unusual in the best possible ways, so if you're a horror fan, that alone is going to be a selling point right there. But unfortunately these games all have one major flaw, and that's that they can be pretty dang frustrating for the wrong reasons, even for role-playing games. Part of that is because this game can be somewhat grind-heavy, Random Battles are a deal-breaker for some people, and another part is what the game refers to as the Demon Summoning Program, and I'll get into that later. But first, let's take a look how the first game starts out so you can decide for yourself if this is something you want to get into. You begin by wandering this strange hallway with suitably creepy music playing and this face confronts you, then you're prompted to give yourself some stats. All I can say for first-time players is, put a good amount into speed so you can dodge attacks and run away from battles if you need to, and also put a good amount into intelligence since that'll come in handy later. And don't bother with magic or luck, your character can't use magic and luck is just random anyway. From there, you keep walking around finding new people that are evidently new party members that you can name and distribute stats to, all while enjoying this incredibly bizarre imagery before, yep, you guessed it, it's all a dream. You wake up and get on your computer, man, it's like nothing's changed at all in the last 27 years, only to find a friend has messaged you a Demon Summoning Program that enables you to talk to demons and maybe even recruit them to fight for you? What? No, this isn't a Nigerian Prince scenario, it's legit. From there, you can leave the room, go outside, wander around, and talk to people and find out what's going on. It turns out a girl has been murdered and your neighborhood has been sectioned off by a police investigation. As you can see, this game is pretty open-ended for a 16-bit game and you can explore stuff mostly at your own pace. You can go into this building here where you end up in a confrontation with this guy with a knife before he gets his throat ripped out by a demon, whoa. You go back home, you go back to sleep and have another strange dream. You wake up and before you know it, more and more of what you're seeing in your dreams starts to become reality. And now when you go outside, you begin to run into random battles and yeah, for the most part, it's typical turn-based combat only from a first-person dungeon crawler perspective, of course, with the twist here being that you can actually talk to and negotiate with some of these demons. But this is where the game really shows its age, the worst in my opinion, because the combat here really isn't all that interesting. All the typical items, armor and weapons are here and like I said, there's a lot of random battles. There is an auto battle button, but still, the combat here is just time consuming. And the negotiations here, so to speak, are pretty dang limited, at least at first. Your intelligence stat helps a lot in recruiting, so you're gonna wanna bump that up as much as you can. Demons cost money, so currency is really important here for more than just buying the typical items and gear. Demons also cost Magnetite, which you collect and accumulate from winning battles. Later on, you can even fuse demons together to create stronger monsters that'll help you out, but early on, you'll hit quite a few speed bumps getting there. Bear in mind, there's hundreds of demons here, which is pretty dang cool, and there are eventually demons you can recruit that actually help you mitigate the number of battles you fight, but getting to that point may take a while. Also, there's a lot of management involved here since demons don't level up or anything, so you gotta be constantly adding new demons and removing older ones. That's where the fusion system really comes in handy. The major thing these games have going for them are the stories and the themes. The world here in the first game, and in all three games for that matter, is rooted in an ongoing conflict between order and chaos. There's people that wanna summon the God of Law to the Earth because if everything's orderly, then everyone's happy. Then there's the opposing group who wanna stop that from happening and summon the God of Chaos, who will grant everyone free will. So yeah, two opposing sides convince that their way and only their way is the true path to happiness. This conflict will not only bring destruction to the Earth, but also a rebirth, both on an individual and societal level. I mentioned earlier how these games are all open-ended and the structure isn't just open-ended for the sake of being open-ended, there are consequences for the decisions you make, and they lead you down one of those two paths. But what's a really nice touch is that in addition to that, you can also go a neutral path. Yeah, that's right. You can basically tell both sides to F off, although that's by far the toughest path to take. But each of the three paths will lead to different boss fights and eventually different endings. Playing the original Shin Megami Tensei reminds me a bit of playing a game like Sim City for Super Nintendo versus, say, city skylines on modern systems in that it can be tough to go backwards just because of all the functionality you're losing out on. In the case of Sim City, sure, city skylines is obviously way more in-depth, but the SNES Sim City still has that relaxing, easy-going feel to it that still makes it approachable and playable today, regardless of how outdated the gameplay is. I feel similarly about Shin Megami Tensei. Yeah, the negotiation stuff is rough around the edges and you may be used to much better in later games, but the rest of this game makes up for it. In the visuals, the music, the weird story centered around law versus chaos, plus the fact that it's an open-ended, non-linear JRPG made in 1992, which is pretty uncommon. Also, this game does a great job combining the surreal by placing it in a modern-day setting and you can't say that about too many other 16-bit JRPGs. A couple other things I should mention is that there is an iOS version out there that's based on the Game Boy Advance remake and it has an official English translation. Otherwise, if you're playing this on the Super Famicom, just use the translation on romhacking.net. I should also mention that there's one important quality of life improvement patch that makes this game easier to play. It's called the map button hack and it simply lets you access the world map by pressing L or R instead of going through all the cumbersome menus. So yeah, if you wanna go back to the first Shin Megami Tensei, make sure to weigh the strengths versus the weaknesses here. The strengths are the art direction, the music, which is so good and does an awesome job dictating the atmosphere. It really doesn't sound like any other game. There's the open-ended structure, there's the story with the three different paths you can take depending on what decisions you make, and there's the themes here. Good versus evil isn't just surface-level stuff in these games. If all that sounds like it's up your alley and you don't mind tons of random battles, a steep learning curve and a wonky demon summoning system, then you'll enjoy Shin Megami Tensei. The sequel simply titled Shin Megami Tensei 2 came out a couple years later. In some ways this is a true sequel since it's got similar gameplay. It's still a dungeon crawler first and foremost, but it's much more polished. The stats are the same, the stat distribution is mostly the same, and the user interface in particular is a bit easier to use. You don't need a patch to route the map to the L and R buttons anymore. This game's already got it there, thankfully. The demon summoning system is a lot more flexible, but at the same time, there's a lot more variables to account for. It's simply just a larger dialogue tree to work with. I would say the second game is a little more forgiving as well. There's a gauge that shows you how close a random battle is lurking, and overall the game is a little bit less grind heavy. The themes of law versus chaos are still here as well, allowing your choices to affect how the game's story progresses. So yeah, the same open-ended structure is here with a lot of exploration, but unfortunately with exploration comes tons of random battles and tons of backtracking. And again, that's gonna be a deal breaker for some of you out there. So from a gameplay standpoint, it's certainly an upgrade, but the story is totally different. You play in a post-apocalyptic world as Hawk, a gladiator who's lost his memory, and gladiators are seen as only that, just fighters, they aren't citizens, so you fight as Hawk to win the right to become a citizen. Once you get out of that sequence, the world really opens up and you start gaining more party members and finding out you're the quote unquote chosen one and all that. And just like in the first game, there's heavy religious themes here. I'm talking straight up God versus Satan, Law versus Chaos, all that good stuff. I don't wanna spoil anything. I'll just say that if you like to the first game, then you'll definitely dig the second game. I can say the same thing about Shin Megami Tensei If, which just got an English translation patch last year. And yeah, once again, it's just more dungeon crawling, more combat, more random battles, more demon management. All that stuff is a bit more polished than previous games, but again, the real difference here is the story. And while you don't necessarily have to play the first game to enjoy this one, it's considered a spinoff of that game, a what if scenario where none of the events in the first game happened at all. The story features Edeo Hazama, a high school student who's fed up with being bullied, so he decides to perform an occult ceremony in the high school gym to get revenge on everyone. It kind of backfires and the entire school is drawn into what's called the expanse or the demon realm, where Edeo declares himself king. Sure, okay. You play as a nameless kid who bands together with friends with the difference you're being that your path depends on who you pick as party members. If you pick Shinji, you'll just abandon everyone else and go home. If you pick Yumi, you go the route that saves the rest of the school. If you pick Reiko, it's similar to Yumi's route, but with a few extra dungeons. And there's also Akira, who becomes available via New Game Plus, which again is more dungeons, but also with a cool twist that I won't spoil here. I'll just say it's the most interesting path of the four. Fans of the series might be interested in knowing that this game's story is set in the same continuity as the Persona series. In fact, it's considered to be the precursor to Persona, so if you dig those games, you might be interested in checking this one out, just as a curiosity. So yeah, to sum up, the gameplay of all three is pretty much the same. They're all first-person dungeon crawlers with turn-based combat, and the demon summoning system is pretty rough in all three games, especially the first game, but it's a little more polished in the sequel and an if. The obvious differences in the games are in the stories. I personally liked the first one the best, but the stories in all three games are well told, and they're definitely something different for the time. In addition, I don't think you necessarily have to play these games in order. It's in the same boat as, say, the Breath of Fire or the Lufia games, where, yeah, there's little things here and there you might miss out on, but ultimately, playing them in order is not a requirement. So if you can stomach all the random battles and the time-consuming backtracking, then you're gonna like all three Shin Megami Tensei Super Famicom games. All right, I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.