In a Shin Megami Tensei game the monsters are demons, angels and gods taken from the world’s religions and myths, and the player can stop a fight to talk to them. Say the right things, or hand over enough money, and a demon joins the party; put two together and they can be fused into a stronger one. Reviewing Nocturne in 2004, Edge summed the result up in a caption as “Pokemon with Tarot cards”. The other thing that set the series apart was its moral choices. Edge noted that Nocturne had “no ‘good’ or ‘evil’, just different ideologies”, and that the series let the player “throw your lot in with any of the game’s disparate dogmas or strike out on your own moral path”.
Megami Tensei
The series grew out of Digital Devil Story, a set of novels by Aya Nishitani. In 1987 Atlus developed Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei for the Famicom, and Namco published it. Recruiting demons and fusing them were already part of the first game. Megami Tensei II followed in 1990, again under Namco’s name, on a cartridge with Namco’s 163 sound chip. In a 2006 readers’ poll in Japan, printed in Edge, it still came 58th in a list of the hundred best games.
Shin Megami Tensei (1992)
Shin Megami Tensei was published by Atlus itself, for the Super Famicom, in October 1992. It starts in Tokyo in “199X”, where, in Gematsu’s summary, “a mysterious murder leads to the emergence of demons and an escalating global conflict”. The city is destroyed in a nuclear attack, and the game picks up again thirty years later in its ruins. The forces fighting over what is left are not good and evil but Law and Chaos, and the player’s choices decide which side, if either, the hero ends up on. The demons were designed by Kazuma Kaneko, the series’ long-serving artist. In the same 2006 poll Shin Megami Tensei came 59th, one place below Megami Tensei II.
It was converted to the PC Engine and the Mega-CD, remade for the PlayStation in 2001 and released on the Game Boy Advance in 2003. None of those versions left Japan. The first official English version arrived only in March 2014, for Apple’s iOS devices, 22 years after the original.
Too Japanese to export
The series’ subjects made it a hard sell abroad. Retro Gamer pointed out that Japanese role-playing games such as Shin Megami Tensei were “rife with risqué humour, irreverent use of religious symbols, and blunt depictions of murder”, and that Nintendo of America’s content rules meant Japanese games of the time were often cut or changed. When Nocturne was finally confirmed for America in 2004, Edge listed what it expected to put people off: “devils, deaths and gods from every possible religion, a tyrannical creator and a slightly sympathetic portrayal of Lucifer Morningstar”. The first Megami Tensei game sold in America was a spin-off, Revelations: Persona, in 1996.
Nocturne and after
Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne came out in Japan in 2003 on the PlayStation 2, and in America in 2004. As Edge‘s review put it, “Twenty minutes into Nocturne, the world ends.” The hero is reborn alone in a ruined Tokyo of desert and broken buildings, where nearly everything he meets is a possible companion: once “recruited, seduced or bribed” into the party, demons could be “crossbred with others” into new ones. Battles turned on hitting enemies’ weaknesses, which earned extra actions while misses cost them; Digital Devil Saga carried the scheme over as the Press Turn system. The bosses could be brutal: Edge warned that many could “destroy an unprepared party in a single disastrous turn”. The American release was based on the expanded Maniacs edition, with a guest appearance from Dante of Capcom’s Devil May Cry. Edge gave it 7 out of 10.
Atlus kept adding branches as well as numbered games, among them Soul Hackers and Digital Devil Saga. In Digital Devil Saga the young soldiers of the party turn into demons themselves; Electronic Gaming Monthly’s reviewers liked its “speedy, simplified battles”, though one missed “chatting with and fusing demons myself”. Persona became the best known of all.
The main series went on with Shin Megami Tensei IV on the 3DS (2013), whose English release Retro Gamer reported among Nintendo’s announcements that year, and Shin Megami Tensei V on the Nintendo Switch in 2021. An expanded version, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, followed in June 2024 on the Switch, PlayStation, Xbox and PC, with a new storyline alongside the original. By then Atlus belonged to Sega.
Sources
- Edge issue 144, Christmas 2004, p. 87: review of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (US release; “Twenty minutes into Nocturne, the world ends”; “no ‘good’ or ‘evil’, just different ideologies”; recruiting and crossbreeding demons; “Pokemon with Tarot cards”; extra actions for weaknesses; the bosses; Maniacs and Dante; 7/10).
- Edge issue 138, July 2004, p. 59: Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne preview (the series’ “traditional cast”; Kaneko; the freedom to choose a “moral path”).
- Edge issue 162, May 2006, pp. 24–25: a Japanese readers’ poll of the top 100 games (Megami Tensei II 58th, Shin Megami Tensei 59th).
- Retro Gamer issue 12, 2005, p. 43: Nintendo’s content rules and games “like Shin Megami Tensei”.
- Retro Gamer issue 116, July 2013: the English release of Shin Megami Tensei IV among Nintendo’s announcements.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 191, May 2005, p. 132: review of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga (the Press Turn system carried over from Nocturne; the reviewers’ comments).
- Edge issue 68, February 1999: Kazuma Kaneko as designer of Megami Tensei and Soul Hackers.
- GamePro issue 97, October 1996, p. 49: Atlus’s advertisement for Revelations: Persona, the first Megami Tensei game in America (see Atlus).
- NesDev Wiki, “Namco 163 audio” (web, secondary): Megami Tensei II among the cartridges with the chip. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Namco_163_audio
- “Original Shin Megami Tensei coming to iOS in English”, Gematsu, 27 February 2014 (web, secondary): October 1992; the story summary; the first release outside Japan. https://www.gematsu.com/2014/02/original-shin-megami-tensei-coming-ios-english
- Wikipedia, “Shin Megami Tensei (video game)” (web, secondary): the release date; the nuclear attack and the years after; Law, Chaos and Neutral; Kaneko; the PC Engine, Mega-CD, PlayStation and Game Boy Advance versions; the English iOS release in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Megami_Tensei_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “Megami Tensei” (web, secondary): Aya Nishitani’s novels; Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (Famicom, 1987), developed by Atlus and published by Namco; recruiting and fusing demons in the first game; the main series’ later games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megami_Tensei
- Atlus, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance official site (web, secondary): release on 21 June 2024; platforms; the new storyline. https://atlus.com/smt5v/