I managed to get in one more game for this month's TR, and it happened to be another SMT spin-off, and by the same company that made SMT: Devil Children as well! That said, as you may've noticed in the title, this isn't actually even an SMT spin-off. Coming out only a scant couple of months after SMT 1 in 1992, this is old enough to be a Megami Tensei spin-off, not a Shin Megami Tensei one! However, no matter which part of the series it claims to spin off from, this game has a TON setting apart from the proper SMT games. It took me about 17 or so hours (or at least I guess, since this is another game that doesn't count playtime) to beat the Japanese version of the game on a real cartridge via my GameBoy Player.

You play the main character (canon name El, but you name all three playable characters at the start) just graduating from Zodia's academy of magic, but such is fate that just as you graduate, trouble strikes and monsters start attacking in much more viscous ways than before, even trapping the new trainees on the nearby trial mountain! So begins your quest to figure out just what's driving the monsters so wild as well as what's trying to destroy the world, while also picking up another couple of human heroes along the way. The story isn't nearly as philosophical as its contemporary MT or SMT games, but it was surprisingly deep for what it is. I'll admit that I had a fair bit of trouble keeping proper nouns all sorted (still not sure if it's like, the planet named Gaia or the planet's life force named Gaia or what), but the mystery of just who is to blame for it all, the Zodians or the Gaia Masters, as well as why they're even doing it, was engaging and fun in a deeper way than I expected for a GameBoy JRPG. One final note, other than how I quite liked the dialogue writing as well, is that I have absolutely no idea why it's called "Last Bible". That appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the story or the framing device, and is a 100% ass-pull of a title XD

The mechanics are, like Devil Children eight years later, an attempt to make the more standard Megami Tensei formula much more forgiving and easier in an attempt to make it appeal more to kids (even down to how they're explicitly not demons, they're monsters, as if there's a difference :b). Much like the SFC SMT games, you go around getting in random battles with monsters, and if the monsters are close enough in level to you (in this case, your level + 5), you can convince them to join your side via a negotiation conversation mid-battle. The monster negotiations are easily the worst in one of these games that I've played though. There's only one or two conversation trees, and whether or not the monster joins you is down to whether or not you happened to pick the right sequence of yes/no answers from them. More easily, however, is that you can also have one of your AI companions negotiate with them instead, which effectively just puts it down to a dice roll, meaning that although manual negotiations are frustrating in a way few other games in the series manage, being able to auto-negotiate like that makes it easier than it's ever been (and it's not hard to see why they made auto-negotiating the standard way the games work by the time you get to Devil Children).

The battle system is also very SMT even down to the balancing. While the game is certainly easier than other SMT games, it still ain't super easy, and the difficulty curve, particularly in the beginning, can be pretty brutal. Thankfully, leveling up is a pretty quick process, even though money is earned very slowly and keeping a good cash flow can be a really big problem quite frequently. The way grinding works reminded me a lot of early Dragon Quest in how it can be the solution to all life's problems despite how the game's systems can at times be quite technical. Having a good composition of monsters on your team is really important, but even then, you don't need to try THAT hard to get good random ones out and about, as there are some optional special ones you can get that are REALLY good and perfectly fine to take with you to the end game like I did.

The only other big and consistent problem which impacts basically the entire game, particularly around your monster composition, is that keeping your party healed is a really tough thing to do. Your inventory is VERY small, items don't stack, and healing spells are uncommon and very expensive even in the late game. Bosses tend to be quite easy, only being a little harder than normal encounters if harder at all, but just getting to them in any state ready to fight them is the biggest challenge in the game. Thankfully, the game is pretty forgiving around this as well beyond the aforementioned "grinding solves everything eventually" approach. Dungeons are not first-person, unlike normal SMT games, and are done top-down in the very familiar Dragon Quest-style. They also tend to be quite short, and you can even both save anywhere AND fuse & summon demons anywhere. The game doesn't even have true game overs, as when you die you just lose half your cash (ouch) and get kicked back to the last inn you stayed at. The game certainly isn't a cakewalk, but it's a great conversion to handheld that really respects your time in a way other SMT games don't. It even has a mode that lets you connect to a friend's GameBoy to battle against their monsters! I couldn't test that, of course, but it's still neat that a game so many years before Pokemon was doing something like that in such a similar way.

The presentation is quite surprisingly nice given that it's a relatively early GameBoy game and that this is one of the first games this team made. The monster sprites are really well-detailed, though this admittedly does come at the cost of the game re-using monster sprites pretty frequently. Those reused monster sprites look exactly the same as well, and that's even more of a bugger when these double- and triple-duty sprites are sometimes even found in the same dungeons. It makes it so you need to pay attention to enemy names a fair bit more, but combat is often so simple (just auto-attack everything to death) that it isn't a huge mechanical problem at the end of the day. The music is also surprisingly nice, with quite a few really good tracks out of the relatively small soundtrack.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. For a '92 GameBoy RPG, this is a pretty darn fun one if you're into retro JRPGs. It's not aged the best compared to most contemporary stuff, so it's difficult to recommend if you aren't into retro RPGs at all, but if "easier SMT that plays more like Dragon Quest" sounds like something you'd be a fan of, this is well worth checking out! It even has an official English release on the GameBoy Color, Revelations: The Demon Slayer, so it's pretty painless to check out as well~.