Shin Megami Tensei begins with a freaky dream sequence. First, you meet a featureless man on a crucifix, than someone being mauled by a beast. The vision ends with a beautiful naked woman named Yuriko, who pledges to be your eternal partner...

And then you wake up. This is modern day Japan, in the Kichijoji district of Tokyo, but things are just a little bit weird. Your neighborhood is being blocked off, due to a series of strange murders. Demons are beginning to roam the streets, and people begin mysteriously disappearing. What's more, the people you see in your dreams start appearing in reality. Soon, you are wrongfully arrested and tossed into jail, where you meet your first companions. You learn that a scientist has been conducing experiments on teleportation, and in the process, accidentally opened up a portal to the demon world. Not only are the monsters roaming free, but certain factions want to use those demons to seize power. Unfortunately, it seems like no matter happens, Tokyo is doomed - missiles from the United States are already flying towards Japan to eradicate the menace before it spreads, and Lucifer is manipulating the Japanese government to stage a coup d'tat. After surviving the destruction of your city, it's up to you and your compatriots - including a gorgeous woman who is a leader of the resistance against General Gotou and his legions of demons - to ally yourself with whomever you chose and decide how this post apocalyptic city will be ruled. Although your characters are unnamed by default, the strategy guide for the PlayStation remake includes "official" names for your party.

Character Artwork

The Megaten series has always been pretty low-tech, but in some ways, that adds to the nightmare-like creepiness. You spend much of the time navigating gigantic mazes, all of which have the same, nondescript blank wall. You never see characters until you're right next to them, and they just pop onto the screen. And, of course, there's the constant flood of demons out for your blood. This being an older RPG, it is quite difficult. Enemies have a nasty tendency to cast status effects on your party that petrify them, usually resulting in an easy slaughter, and save points are spread pretty thin. This may have been designed before the advent of survival horror games, but Shin Megami Tensei can get disturbingly frightening. So despite the difficulty, if you've got the muster, the amazing story and deep monster fusion system should keep you entranced. Besides, any game that lets you fuse a demon with your pet dog - and create a Cerebus from it - is already incredibly awesome for that fact alone.

Originally released for the Super Famicom by Atlus, it was ported shortly thereafter to the PC Engine Super CD. Unfortunately, there's a lot of missed opportunity here - it looks and plays almost exactly the same, only adding a little bit of voice in the dream sequences. Nearly all of the music is chip based, and despite being arranged by Hitoshi Sakimoto, it suffers from the original version due to the inferior sound hardware. There's an Analyze option that lets you look at monster skills, but otherwise not much is different.

SIMS also brought Shin Megami Tensei to the Sega Mega CD, actually remaking it in the process. Using the scaling capability of the system, this version actually features smooth scrolling instead of the jerky movement in the other games. It's a little sluggish though, and can be turned off. All of the graphics have been redone with more detail, and while they look far better, they're also quite pixellated. Other graphical touches have been added - character portraits are added to all conversations (some are clearly digitized people, others are artwork, which is a little strange), you can actually see multiple demons on the battlefield instead of just a single one, and there are some new graphics for some voiced cutscenes, most notably the intro. Much of the music is also remixed CD audio, and is quite good. The text font is larger, allowing for the use of kanji. Overall, definitely a nice port.

Character Artwork

Fast forwarding to 2002, with the announcement of a Shin Megami Tensei III for the PS2, Atlus began rereleasing the original games for the modern audience. The first of these re-releases was for the PSOne. The interface has been given a slight overhaul to make it look more like Shin Megami Tensei II. The static backgrounds are now much more detailed, and all of the textures have been completely redone, although they're still mostly featureless. The movement is smooth scrolling, and it looks much better than the Mega CD version, moving at 60 FPS. The higher resolution allows the use of kanji for easier reading, and there's even an easier difficulty mode to ease in newbies. While these are welcome additions, it still seems like they could have done more. The music has been remixed, and while it's decent, it sounds very MIDI-ish and lacks a lot of the grittiness of the Super Famicom tracks. Why not create more detailed textures? Why not use full screen graphics a la Persona or Devil Summoner? the dungeons still look incredibly boring and repetitive. Why not add more artwork from Kazuma Kaneko for character interaction?

Shin Megami Tensei was also re-released for the Game Boy Advance. The graphical look is much the same as the PlayStation version, although without the smooth scrolling. There is no easier difficulty level, although the game has been slightly toned down anyway from the SFC version.

There is some strange censorship between the versions. Early in the game, you dream of a strange ceremony with a priest and bizarre guards. In the Super Famicom, PlayStation and Game Boy Advance versions, they're clothed, but are completely without pants in the PC Engine and Mega CD versions. While most of us Americans are used to seeing games censored when they're localized, it's interesting to see it happen among different platforms in its home country. Apparently Sony and Nintendo are still rather conservative.