'EL ELOHIM ELOHO ELOHIM SEBAOTH'

'ELION EIECH ADIER EIECH ADONAI'

'JAH SADAI TETRAGRAMMATON SADAI'

'AGIOS O THEOS ISCHIROS ATHANATOS'

'AGLA AMEN'

This is a favorite series of a few friends of mine that I've always been too intimidated to touch. The SMT series has always seemed super hard and unforgiving in ways that have made me too scared to engage with it, but I finally decided to take the plunge and see just why my friend likes them so much. With lots of pointers from my friends DogStrong and Fii, I was able to make it through to the end of the Japanese version of the game. It took me about 40 hours to beat the game with the neutral ending. I played it on the Switch Online Super Famicom service with liberal usage of rewinds and save states, because heckin' damn does this game hate you sometimes XD

SMT is the third game in the series but it's the first in the series (as I understand it) to take the concept and tell its own story rather than be beholden to the original books in a meaningful way. You start out as just a normal teenager in Tokyo who wakes up one day to see a message on your computer from Steven [Hawking], who has discovered demons living in the internet and has made a program to allow people to befriend and summon them. From there, a whirlwind of things happen (you're falsely arrested for murder, the Japanese Self Defense Force initiates a coup, the American military initiates a counter attack, America launches ICMBs and ends the world) that lead you eventually to walking through a ruined Tokyo trying to make sense of exactly what these forces of Law and Chaos are doing and how you can affect it.

While I could spend all day explaining the details of the story itself, the broad strokes of the story are a combat between the forces of Law and Chaos for control of a world gone to ruin. You can alter your alignment via certain story actions, and where you ultimately end up decides which fate the world will take. Law, Chaos, or a neutral route siding with neither. SMT 1 does have characters other than yourself who have important roles, but none of them really have arcs or meaningful character writing. The bigger narrative in SMT is the philosophical discussion at hand between the forces of Law and Chaos, and how your actions determine which side of that equation you fall on. It's a really interesting and deep game for 1992, and I found it very engaging, even if character writing is much more usually my thing.

The gameplay of SMT is that of Megami Tensei but more refined, that system being that which originated monster catching and fighting. You have your main character (whom I named SMTCHAMP) who can summon demons but not use magic, and then you have several other NPCs who join and leave your party throughout the story who learn a bit of magic instead of having your computer powers of summoning demons. It has a simple armor and weapons system, melee weapons for single targets and guns (and different types of often status-inflicting ammo) for groups, and a leveling system where instead of gradual stat increases, you pick one of your six stats (strength, intelligence, magic, vitality, agility, and luck) to put a point into to raise your stats a certain way. This leads to level ups not really being that important in and of themselves, but ultimately having a lot of influence on your power level.

Your level is also very important because it affects which demons you can summon and fuse, as that's a lot of the bread and butter of the game. Most demons you encounter can be engaged with in conversation instead of fighting them. Once you talk them down, you get to a negotiating menu where you can ask for all sorts of things (money, friendship, magnetite (which we will get to later)), and they generally want some kind of currency or amount of healing items to join your party. Once they join you, they are in a stagnent position. This isn't Pokemon. A demon is exactly as powerful when they join you as they will ever be. You get level ups; they don't. What you do when you want stronger demons but don't want to befriend new ones (or abandon old friends) is go to the demon summoning Dark Church, where you can fuse demons into new and more powerful ones. SMT overall isn't a super hard game compared to a lot of the later (and earlier) games in its series, but making sure you have the right demons for the fight at hand is key to victory in many fights, especially in the early game.

The fights themselves play out surprisingly well for a game this old. Enemies generally only appear one type at a time but with several members of that group of demons (one to eight members). You can't specify which of these you want your party to attack, but the allied AI is often very good at focusing down wounded enemies, avoiding enemies who are stunned or have a status making fighting otherwise impossible for them, and there's even feedback on the screen to show you which of the enemy mob in particular are being damaged. It's a really well done battle system that I was routinely surprised by the robustness of. There's even an auto-battle system to help you through the game's absolutely nuts encounter rate (which is often pretty brutal), and the auto battle even remembers if you last used melee or guns to keep fighting like that!

The main meat of the gameplay outside of combat is first-person dungeon crawling. Now I know that sounds like somewhat of a nightmare, especially given that virtually all areas in a particular dungeon don't look terribly memorable or distinct from one another, but the game does the best it can to mitigate that. As you go through an area, you fill out an automatic map in your arm-terminal computer that you use to summon demons. You can check this map whenever you want, and it helps a lot with getting lost. Checking it is a bit cumbersome, but it's certainly better than having no map at all.

The game, however, has a fair few issues that make it pretty difficult to go back to if you aren't using rewinds and save states. Demons can only be summoned and befriended if you're the right alignment. Law can't summon Chaos and vice versa, but neutral can summon anybody. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so hard to change your alignment or check what actually influences it (alignment management is one of the most important reasons to have a reference guide open for the game, imo), so you can suddenly be Chaos and not even realize it because you did one thing wrong, and there are only so many scripted opportunities to shift your alignment again before you're just out of options and stuck on the route you're on. Thankfully, you can check your alignment on the overworld whenever you want by checking which way your little marker is spinning (or wobbling in place, if you're neutral), but alignment management and the way it affects gameplay is a bit of a pain.

Another BIG problem is player information. Spells have effects, weapons have complicated stats (how many times they hit, what statuses they do or don't inflict, whom they can be wielded by), and items have effects to. There is not a single mechanism in-game for you to learn what ANY of these things are. Giving the player the information they need to even make basic choices outside of sheer trial and error is a remnant of design philosophy from when this game came out that I am SO happy has died out of popular usage.

Another big issues is that the game can just be very mean when it comes to punishing you for mistakes you couldn't have seen coming. The start of the game in particular (basically until the ICBMs drop) is a really rough time where getting ambushed by a group of tough enemies that happen to hang around Shinjuku means you're just dead unless you run (if you even CAN run). The dungeons in the game can also be really mean in how they put floor traps, invisible pit falls, and invisible teleports around. The dungeon design can be very mean in how they mostly just seem put together to waste both your time and resources before you can get to the big boss at the end. These points of meanness don't exactly make it unique among JRPGs at the time, not even close, but it's one more thing that makes this a pain to go back to in 2021.

The presentation of the game is very nice, if a bit simple at times. The game doesn't have many musical tracks, but what's there fits the dreary, desolate tone well. The graphics are very nice in some places, and more boring in others. Environments are generally very dull and repetitive, while monster designs are often very cool and distinct, especially when it comes to bosses. You can tell Atlus is still getting its sea legs in regards to the Super Famicom, but they're already more than halfway there to a winning formula.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a mean game that is also super cool and fun when it isn't making you curse at the pitfall you just fell down or the paralysis trapped you just stepped on for the third time. The philosophy in the story is engaging and the monster fights and capturing are unique and fun, and if you can get past just how much of a bully the game can be at times, there's a lot to enjoy here. These days, I think the most easy way to enjoy the game is to be able to save state or rewind to brute force your way through those pit falls and traps whenever you want, but to each their own on that point. SMT is a series I was scared to ever try, but after how much fun I had with it, but I'm really glad I gave it a shot, and you just might be too~