Shin Megami Tensei Group Playthrough!
Why a Group Playthough?
Back in December, our group gathered to play 7th Saga (Elnard in Japan) together. Obcure-ish games like 7th Saga are often played alone, not shared by many people at the same time. The idea behind this playthrough was to experience this somewhat forgotten world together. 7th Saga isn't a welcoming game on its surface, especially not with the changes to the North American release that haphazardly raised the difficulty in many sections. Braving the desolate terrain of Elnard as a group added a lot of warmth to the game as we enjoyed the best and worst of the game. I don't want to spend too much time talking about our past playthrough, so here are some articles by Sraëka bookending the beginning and end of our journey. The point is that we liked this experience so much that we want to do it again!
How's this Going to Work?
February 15th will be the start date for our playthrough. The pace in this group is relaxed, so there's no pressure to start on Valentine's Day. Everyone is encouraged to play at their own pace, and you don't need to play to completion to participate. The discord server we used for 7th Saga will be open for people to talk about their experiences with Shin Megami Tensei. This will be a space to discuss, share advice, and vent frustrations about the game (I am told the game is quite harsh). We had quite a few people creating fanart and music based on our experience with 7th Saga, and we welcome anyone to do the same for SMT. We hope to add something to the experience of playing SMT by sharing each other's company. Any amount or form of participation is valuable.
Here is a link to the discord server.
How Should I Play Shin Megami Tensei?
Any way that works for you! The game released on quite a few platforms, though the official English releases are tough to acquire. The method that myself and others seems to be going with is playing with Aeon Genesis's English patch of the SNES game, along with Orden's bug fix for it. If you have a SNES ROM of Shin Megami Tensei, patching it is fairly simple to do, though do make sure you have the specified 1.0 version of the game. You can ask in the discord if you need any help with this. If you find another way to play the game that works for you, whether you find a different translation or play the game in Japanese, by all means go for it. It's nice to see the perspectives of someone playing a different version of the game. Maybe you could read the original Megami Tensei novel if you're compelled to...
What Should I Expect from Shin Megami Tensei?
Personally, I have no idea. There is an article by Hardcore Gaming 101 that gives a nice introduction to the themes and context of the game. Keeping with the communal atmosphere of our playthrough, we've had a few people from the 7th Saga discord server write their own small pieces to introduce the game and share their own past experience with the game. Thanks to nurvuss, Katterson, and nilson for sharing their writing! Before getting into that, I'd like to thank Sraëka for putting together this group, and thank everyone in the group for coordinating for this next playthrough. The 7th Saga playthrough was a great time for me and I'm excited for this next adventure.
P.S. If you have interest in playing 7th Saga, whether you are just hearing about it now, started it with us and never finished it, or had it on your list anyways, our channels for the game will still be open and people who have played it will still be around to talk about the game.
-Mauve
nurvuss
Gods. Demons. The endlessly recurring battle between Law and Chaos for the fate of Tokyo, and the world itself. Shin Megami Tensei, or MegaTen, is as esoteric as it is beloved, frequently coming in third place behind only Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy in Japan's favorite JRPG rankings. Long before the runaway success of the Persona sub-series, the franchise began humbly as a Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei: a trilogy of science fiction novels by Nishitani Aya. The series' overarching concept is that all religions and myths are true, and all gods, deities, demons, fae, monsters, and what-have-you lurk in an unseen plane of existence. The novels concern the ongoing adventures of bullied teenager Nakajima Akemi as he, in an attempt to enact revenge on his enemies, unwittingly welcomes the trickster god Loki into the human realm via his computer. Alongside his love interest Shirasagi Yumiko, Akemi ventures into a vast subterranean labyrinth to right his wrong. The pair eventually learn they're the reincarnated human forms of the married deities Izanagi and Izanami, and Yumiko's awakening as Izanami is the event to which the title Megami Tensei (lit. "Goddess Reincarnation") refers.
The novels proved popular enough to garner a hyper-violent OVA, followed by a handful of games: a little-known, Gauntlet-inspired microcomputer game from Telenet; and a pair of Famicom dungeon crawlers from Atlus. Among the earliest (if not *the* earliest) RPGs to embrace the sort of monster collecting/raising that Pokémon would eventually borrow to take the world by storm, it's this pair of obscure games that would eventually inspire the cult hit franchise known today.
Shin Megami Tensei, the 1992 Super Famicom release, is where the series truly came into its own: Technically the third game in Atlus' franchise, the Shin in the title denotes a hard reset for the series: a bit of wordplay that can mean both "New Megami Tensei", or "True Megami Tensei". Set in 90s Tokyo, an average high school student finds himself caught up in a demonic invasion. The world ends...but he survives. Now wandering the irradiated wastes of what was once Japan, it's up to him to forge a new future for human- and demon-kind alike.
Our hero has but a scant few human allies; his party consists primarily of demons with whom he's managed to forge an alliance. However, it's not as easy as trapping a weakened monster inside a PokéBall: the player must negotiate with the demon with whom they wish an alliance, answering their questions correctly and plying them with bribes. While each race, or subset of demon, has its own personality, there's a degree of randomness to negotiation, and the same actions won't always result in the same outcome. Any given demon is just as likely to get pissed off and attack, or just up and leave, as they are to join forces. Furthermore, the hero has his own alignment: Law, Neutral, or Chaos, which is initially fluid and dependent on the choices made by the player throughout the story. Depending on this alignment, demons (and human characters!) of an opposing philosophy automatically view him as an enemy. Naturally, the protagonist's alignment come the third act determines a different ending, each with its own exclusive antagonists.
It's an iconoclastic tale, and one no doubt inspired by Japan's own political unrest; the existential, generational dilemma posed by the bursting of the 80s' economic bubble; and, perhaps most notably, lingering post-nuclear anxiety. Early on it's revealed that the American military are literal agents of the Judeo-Christian God, willing to nuke Japan once again to enact their Thousand Year Kingdom—American exceptionalism taken to its logical extreme, years before George W Bush's infamous statement that the Iraq War was a "mission from God".
How can one save the world from annihilation once the button's been pushed? Well, one simply can't. But Shin Megami Tensei is not about saving the world: it's about what comes after the end. With a new beginning sprawling before us, the opportunities are endless.
Katterson
So... We're moving on from the contemplative barrenness of The 7th Saga to Shin Megami Tensei's frantic, hyperviolent demon apocalypse. Having greatly enjoyed some of the later entries in the series, I'm always hungry for more of Megaten's trademark "make your own morals" gimmick. The stark aesthetics at play bring the dilemma to life in a way that's always just enough to make you *really* think about what you're doing. But don't think too hard; part of the fun can be to just pick an extreme and see it to its bloody conclusion.
Secondhand knowledge of the game leads me to believe that SMT's environments are merciless, difficult to navigate and flat-out unfriendly, which has kept me at arm's length in the past. Our current frame of play, however, makes me think it's going to be a piece of cake.
After contributing with others to mollify The 7th Saga into what turned out to be a surprisingly approachable experience, I'm excited to put this dynamic to the test in a game that has more moving parts. Megaten games are often labyrinths in every sense of the word, with an overabundance of choices to make, and there's something exciting about the idea of exploring one with a group of friends, covering more ground at one time and illuminating every corner.
nilson
Shin Megami Tensei is not fucking around.
It might be the most serious of all 16-bit JRPGs. It certainly has one of the coldest, realest color palettes around. It features one of the most dire, conflicted endgames, and has a string of indiscriminate hell-dungeons. It doesn't care if you can get through it or not.
It's not quite as demonic as its 8-bit forebears, but it's still powerful. It's the kind of game as a child in the late-90s I imagined existed but didn't actually know about yet, haunted software made in a faraway place that I was too young to play. Satanic panic here in the States reached Pokemon, a cute kids' math puzzle, but I had a feeling something actually demonic existed elsewhere, something too brutal for us American wimps, something Geoffrey the Giraffe wouldn't sell us at Toys R Us.
In reality, in the comfort of my own young adulthood, I know SMT isn't underground magazine level or anything (lol). It's a kids game, too, really, albeit a much more complicated one than Pokemon ever was. That being said, SMT and its siblings are, I think, the most seinen Super Nintendo games, at least that I've played.
A handful of sequences stick out in my memory, but I don't want to spoil anything (omg there’s some great stuff in there). I'd say one of the things that sticks with me the most is the pearl-colored walls and featureless red floor of one of the final areas, a dungeon reminiscent of a hospital, or maybe representing heaven and hell. I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the implication of open flesh, or the reality of an opulent and medieval carpet thick with dust (I unfortunately know it's the latter).
We're going to start playing Shin Megami Tensei on Valentine's Day 2021 <3. I am usually thinking about dating sims (I recently finished watching Tim Rogers' six hour review of Tokimeki Memorial), and I'm often thinking about myself as a dating sim character (lol)... and I truly believe if you wanted to score the most points with me, you'd pick "let's sit in bed and start a game of SMT" for our Valentine's date…
Okay,
well, let's
get into
it.
"Play By Your Own Runes”
~ nilson