If you look up discussion of these games in forums or reddit, you’ll often find people asking if they’re worth going back to or if they’re a good place to start with the series, and obviously, gamers being gamers, the answer is always a huge “no.” I never see anyone ever recommending these games, even these SNES remakes. Always described as too clunky, too difficult, simultaneously too simple and too opaque, just all around too old. And it’s true on some level that if you’re used to most post-nocturne SMT games then I don’t think that what you get in especially Megami Tensei I is going to particularly resemble the series you love. If, however, you’re a fan of WIZARDRY, well then do I have a very cool little evolution of that strand of late-80s famicom RPG design for YOU.

The Megami Tensei duology exists in such a weird little liminal period in time for Megami Tensei The Franchise, and it shows in the game itself. It’s popularly known that this franchise in general pulls its aesthetic and setting inspirations from Nishitani Aya’s Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei novels, some of which have complete fan translations and are totally readable if you want to seek them out! They’re kind of sick! People don’t really like them these days and I do understand why; they’re unabashedly trashy in all respects, and the main character is pretty genuinely repulsive and not in a sort of “ah this boy will learn to be better” sort of way. It’s also easy to see why they were such a big hit in Japan, though. Certainly they were part of a larger boom of overtly horrific occult-based media at the time, and they were part of a larger planned multimedia push that included a now-famous OVA adaptation and finally, of course, these games. But they are themselves brimming with a weird energy, mixing the vibes of a transgressing western-style anti-christian occult sensibility with classical mythology with modern technology in a schlocky soup that any teenager would be happy to slurp down. The OVA captures this vibe and translates it perfectly into the kind of bristling erotic violence that OVAs of that era are now infamous for.

So it’s interesting that Digital Devil Story Megami Tensei The Video Game kind of doesn’t even try? What we get is something I might call “loosely inspired by” its namesake rather than an adaptation of it. You have the same main characters in roughly the same roles – the same people act as reincarnations of goddesses, Cerberus and Loki and Set are here being Important Guys, but beyond these superficial trappings there’s nothing else really anchoring us to the original premise of “kid with school shooter energy summons demons and ruins everything instead of doing a school shooting, slow-motion tragedy unfolds.” It’s not quite doing its own thing either, though; only two of the original three novels were out at the time this game was released, and dialogue here suggests this is kind of an original sequel capstone to those books? Maybe even just the first book. Characters at the very least seem to be familiar with each other, and based on how heroically you behave in the game I guess we’re kind of massaging Nakajima’s image too. It’s all very strange, taking a story that’s about a gross, pulpy horror scenario playing out mostly inside of a school building and instead making it an epic quest to destroy Lucifer inside of his massive labyrinth in the demon world.

That’s not to say I don’t LIKE it though. As we have established, I looooove Wizardry, and this game makes explicit a lot of the shit that early Wizardry asks you to kind of do the mental legwork on yourself. The entire game takes place inside this evil labyrinth and it’s stacked with weird fuckers to hang out with. There’s whole towns inside the labyrinth, and all these cool little details about the kinds of people and demons you’ll meet in there, not all of whom will be hostile regardless of your recruitment game mechanic. Deeper down these towns stop being safe zones from random encounters, but they’re still often populated by guys who might have crucial advice or shop stock or hints for you.

Otherwise it’s a pretty smooth ride. Gameplay is simply for anyone with a passing familiarity with RPGs, with ultimately every single fight in the game ending up as a sheer contest of who can make the biggest number the fastest, but there is satisfaction in being the guy who can make the biggest number the fastest. I love Wizardry but I also love Dragon Quest 1. Eventually you have to be able to cover yourself from things like level drain and instant death spells but that’s about as complex as magic gets here beyond healing and occasional status afflictions that rarely have huge impact on a fight.

The Kyuuyaku versions at least (idk about the famicom original) do have the magnetite system, where you gain a second currency by winning encounters that drains with every step you take based on the number of demons in your party and how high their levels are. Once it runs out your demons will start taking damage every step instead, and MP is a precious resource so you really can’t have that. I find this system frustrating because the balance never feels quite right – ideally for something like this you would be feeling some pressure about it, like you need to weigh your options and figure out whether pushing it too hard will tip the scales away from you. Here though I feel like I’m always either completely in danger of tapping out or I’m so abundant on the stuff that I’m not even checking it. Ultimately it’s not a huge deterrent and there are plenty of ways to get powerful demons when you need them but I do think ditching this system later on and letting player level be the determining factor in how fucked up of a guy you can make was a wise move.

I imagine that the biggest barrier to these games for many people will be the dungeons themselves, but I think a lot has been done in these SNES versions of the games to make them pretty smooth. The auto-map feature is a game-changing addition, and when the late game dungeons start adding things like teleporters, one-way doors, and illusory walls it goes from necessary convenience to essential feature. When you can be punted as many floors as this game is willing to fuck you with I can’t imagine having to chart your own shit. There’s also a series of backtracking-based quests to find hidden items associated with every boss that will make them significantly easier to fight, and it’s actually required to do this in by far the most difficult area of the game to be able to kill the final boss at all, which is, I’m not too proud to admit, very tedious when you feel the end coming up in your bones.

I did like Megami Tensei I and I’ll admit that I’m really easy to please when it comes to the kind of very straightforward blobber that it succeeds at being, but the real star of this package is the sequel, which starts directly after the ending of the first game, no credits, no booting you back to the menu, just the ending screens for the first game, following by one of the most startling nuclear apocalypses in games. A flickering, screaming facsimile of a human face flashing in monochrome under an image of the missiles striking. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Now everything you were doing only moments ago seems smaller. Oops! You got some Shin in my Megami Tensei! Fully leaving any pretense of the novels or their original premise behind, the team behind the original game leap the story ahead 30 years to post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where humans live in underground bunkers, fearful of the demons that rule the wastes, or aboveground in cities where they live in communities that serve and worship cults and armies of demon warlords.

Your characters here are Gamers, who accidentally unleash the demon Pazuzu from the video game he was trapped in by the demon Bael (lmao). He says hello everyone I am PAZUZU and I work for GOD from THE BIBLE don’t worry about it I’m super chill and since you freed me you must be THE MESSIAHS please go kill Bael and don’t think about how he’s the most powerful demon in Tokyo and if he was dead I would be the most powerful demon in Tokyo okay see ya later. And your characters are like yeah that checks out I guess we are the saviors of the world! They’re so fucking stupid it rocks. It’s not until the third main character shows up and is like “have you guys considered that Pazuzu is obviously turbo evil” that you are even given the option to be like oh yeah shit that’s so true but even then your buddy will do the classic megaten move of breaking up with you and threatening to kill you next time you meet. Pazuzu even gives you Orthrus to hang out with! That’s Cerberus’ evil pallet swap! MR POLICE I GAVE YOU ALL THE CLUES, and other things of that nature. This isn’t the only time your protagonist demonstrates the brain power of my recently deceased pet cats either, like another time in the middle of the game you have to go get a thing and the thing is inside of the mouth of a big evil statue with blood all over it and you stick your WHOLE ARM IN THERE, and not only that but the arm that has your demon summoning computer and everything!!! And the statue of course fucking bites it off!!!! OBVIOUSLY. But you do get the status effect LOSARM out of this whole situation, as you have to scrabble your way back to the local mad scientist so he’ll make a robot arm for you, taking damage every step and unable to fight or summon new demons until you do. This whole sequence takes maybe fifteen minutes but it’s all time good SMT shit for me. This is also the diagetic way that the game comes up with for upgrading your demon capacity. You got more ram in your robot arm I guess.

Considering that Megami Tensei I is such a clear first run at an idea that feels very within the scope of what one might imagine both a first run at this franchise to look like and also what that would look like on the famicom, it’s kind of wild that Megami Tensei II just IS essentially a modern Shin Megami Tensei game almost fully formed from the ether. The setting is here, you’ve got your shitty friends who stick with you or ditch you based on your alignment choices (although the alignment system for the player character isn’t actually here yet – you’re essentially playing out a scripted version of what would today be considered a sort of combination neutral-law story), the ending is affected by key decisions that would be a little esoteric if they weren’t so obvious, Lucifer is here and behaving much more in tune with how he’s gonna act in almost all of his future appearances – a frustrated guy who sees humans as similarly beleaguered to his own people, if not still generally at the bottom of the worth-pyramid according to his own personal philosophies (in early games, at least). The kitsch comedy is dialed up, the mad science and esoteric fantasy are more heavily emphasized, and the horror is less overt and more ambient, based more in the smog of having the curtain peeling back on the knowledge that your existence isn’t your own and that resistance to the power that governs life is nearly unthinkable. But also like 70% of sapient life would be down to eat you. Both things.

There’s a degree to which SMT as a series but especially the core entries are just telling the same stories over and over again, filtering characters and details but with core identifying elements and story beats and character archetypes, to in my opinion a much greater degree than a lot of series that do a similar sort of thing. I might have expected a kind of bare take on that framework from a Famicom originator of many of those ideas but even today Megami Tensei II feels pretty fresh! In particular I like what the first half of the game is cooking, the post-apocalyptic Tokyo here being the domain of demon lords all jockeying for power against each other in a perpetual status quo rather than there being a real sense of alignment-based organization between the forces of law and chaos. There’s no big war happening right now, the war’s over, this is just the way things are at the moment, especially with no leaders present for most of the game, so it makes sense that it’s only when Pazuzu arrives on the scene to scam a bunch of idiots into starting shit with the biggest guy in town that things really start to spiral out of control. Pazuzu himself is the most interesting character in the game, because I leave it all genuinely uncertain about whether he actually is a representative of God or not? It initially all seems like a scam, one that he has other demons in on like Orthrus, but he DOES give you that special ring to signify your party’s places as messiahs, and later on an angel does speak fondly of him. He does seem to be mostly interested in seizing power for himself though, and for a demon to switch sides with an ulterior motive is equally interesting. The game leaves it ambiguous, or at least I didn’t talk to the right people to know for sure, and I think it’s really cool! There are a lot of NPCs with a ton of personality in this game, enough for the world to feel rich, to have me doing things like speculating on motivations and making observations about cultures and laughing at individual quirks of specific guys. Really impressive stuff.

This kind of early, wizardry-like first-person dungeon crawler exists in a tough spot, where for people who really like the genre and play a lot of these games I think these remakes that simultaneously preserve the really old, simple mechanics but also provide a lot of quality of life improvements, might be a little too simple to hold interest from a play perspective, even with the demon summoning and negotiation element grafted to the top. For players familiar with modern SMT or who are more general RPG fans though, I think even these simpler, easier dungeon crawlers might be a little bit more opaque and unforgiving than they’re used to and comfortable with and I understand that being a turnoff, even if I do think it’s a hump worth getting over (I did and I’m having a wonderful time exploring this genre). Megami Tensei’s personality is truly the thing that sets it apart; visually, sonically, personality-wise, there wasn’t much else even trying to do this kind of shit at the time and it still has a strongly individual vibe, strong enough that I think this collection is totally worth looking into, even if you skip to the second game. But if you’re already a fan of the series, I can’t emphasize enough that it’s really a nonstop parade of treats. I’m begging everyone to play old games. They’re so cool. Everybody wins.

     「イザナミの優しい瞳に暖かみさが次第に戻って行く。」

By 1987, the Japanese RPG had several sub-categories, each represented by iconic titles: Dragon Quest (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987) were establishing a new standard for the genre, while Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished (1986) followed the formula of Hydlide (1984), with its action-RPG overtones. Alongside these new game design explorations, a series inspired by the novels of Aya Nishitani was born. ATLUS's Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei is not, unlike Telenet's eponymous computer game, an adaptation of the light novels, but their sequel. Similarly, the gameplay between the two games is quite different, as the Telenet title opts for a hack-n-slash concept similar to Gauntlet (1985), while the Famicom version is in the pure Wizardry tradition. In this seminal opus, the player takes on the role of Akemi Nakajima and Yumiko Shirasagi, two high school students who team up to eliminate the demons that have invaded the Earth, after Akemi had summoned them with the help of an elaborate computer program. In the novels, the two heroes had already triumphed over Loki and Seth, but they have been resurrected by Lucifer, the game's main antagonist. The quest begins in a large pyramidal building, apparently a kind of kofun for the Shirasagi family. Underneath this structure, a labyrinthine network of catacombs, brimming with demons, unfolds. Nakajima and Shirasagi's mission is to free the goddess Izanami, a captive of Lucifer, and to put an end to the evil yoke.

At first glance, the title plays like a Wizardry game. The player must explore the catacombs further and further, acquiring equipment and experience along the way. But Megami Tensei quickly stands out because of the specificity of its characters. While Yumiko is the only one who can use magic – and therefore heal outside of combat – Nakajima has the COMP action, which allows him to recruit and then summon demons to facilitate the progression. A novelty for the time, this mechanic forces the player to find a new balance in their exploration, as they will necessarily have to visit certain places to find specific demons: to acquire the most powerful creatures, demons must be merged, a task that can prove difficult without a guide. While this mechanic provides significant flexibility in dungeon exploration, it comes with its own constraints. Merging demons only works if Nakajima's level is high enough, thus making the exploration of certain areas strictly dependent on an experience grind, as demons are an essential part of the team's firepower. Furthermore, when demons are summoned into the team, they consume a certain amount of Magnetite for each step. To keep this resource afloat, it is essential to fight regularly, at the risk of seeing the demons lose their HP little by little, if the reserve is empty. These features make Megami Tensei a title that, even more than other entries of this era, makes grinding a central component of its gameplay loop.

As in Wizardry, exploration is divided into several phases. In the first one, the player will map their environment – this is highly recommended, as the title has no automatic mapping –, in the second one, they have to accumulate enough experience to go through the corridors smoothly, and in the last one, they need to reach the dungeon boss and kill them. In the case of Megami Tensei, most of the time will be spent in this second part and it can become very lengthy. Farming sequences have to be interspersed with regular breaks to Micon or Bien, disrupting the progression pace. It is perhaps during the Rotten Sea of Flames segment that the frustration builds up most dramatically, as the return trips tend to be quite protracted. Also, in contrast to Dragon Quest, farming is not such an automatic activity, as some enemies may prove too powerful for the group, due to some of their attacks. Early on in the game, the player learns to avoid as much as possible the demons that can paralyse or turn team members into stone, as this means a mandatory retreat to a town. In the second half of the game, enemies that can permanently remove levels pose the greatest hazard to the group and there is little choice but to flee. It should also be noted that misallocation of attributes during the level-ups can cause some temporary difficulties. Not investing enough in vitality comes at an immediate cost and underestimating Yumiko's Attack or Nakajima's Wisdom proves to be a mistake towards the end of the game.

This cruelly tedious nature is nevertheless compensated for by a unique atmosphere for a console RPG of that era. Admittedly, for obvious reasons, the demons are often rather underwhelming colour swaps and they don't yet reach the eerie esoterism of later installments: but the title manages to have some surprising moments. During the first excursion into Mazurka, the music becomes more ponderous and accompanies the much higher difficulty. This tension culminates in the exploration of the Rotten Sea of Flames, where the walls have an unintentionally very organic texture. The fire damage taken with each step accentuates the viciousness of this place and reinforces the urgency to save Izanami. The final dungeon, meanwhile, has an arcane quality to it, with an all-blue palette that gives way to a dirty red in the final stretch. The various demons and NPCs complement this ambience: the different shops run by humans always impress with their pixel art, which thematically enforces a mood. The equipment shops emerge as restful havens with the fluctuating benevolence of the warm, brown torches. Meanwhile, the healer and especially the House of Heresy play with their purple and green colours to create a sickly impression around the wizards, whose cryptic arcanas cannot be deciphered by the protagonists. It is perhaps the vision of the imprisoned Izanami that contributes most significantly to this eeriness, as the mask that wraps her head draws on the organic imagery of Japanese horror fiction.

This atmosphere helps to make Megami Tensei distinctive and very gritty. With some effort, the player understands what is expected of them and the importance of choosing demons, but the title remains merciless. Unlike Wizardry, whose dungeon is built in a linear fashion, Megami Tensei revels in its convoluted nature. While Daedalus remains classic, it serves primarily to filter players. For those who triumph over the Minotaur, the real challenge now begins and the next sequence opens with a dilemma. Two areas can be explored: Valhalla and Bien. The latter is technically the prime objective, in order to liberate the city and secure a new base of operations. But it is likely that foes within the area are still too powerful, so a preliminary exploration in Valhalla, a region that meanders between two floors, is necessary to acquire better demons. However, venturing too far into Valhalla may prove to be a mistake, because of the walls that can only be crossed from one side. This difficult choice gives an insight into the difficulty of the title and is repeated over the course of the game. Yet Megami Tensei balances the difficulty with its Game Over system, which is very similar to Dragon Quest's, as the player resumes the adventure directly in the first city, only stripped of half of their money. Later on, the different regions also have two entrances, one accessible by piloting Bien's Sky City to land atop the dungeons: this second point of entry eases the exploration and shortens the back and forth to heal one's team.

Despite its very harsh difficulty, Megami Tensei can be tamed by patient players who are not put off by the fusion system. The title has some gentle accents amidst the harshness of its atmosphere and making progress through the various puzzles always brings great satisfaction. Undoubtedly, the title is not for everyone, but rather for the most ardent fans of the franchise or for those in need of archaic dungeon crawlers. For them, Megami Tensei would be a more subtle title than it seems, featuring a very unusual bestiary, its creatures coming from all the mythologies of the world. It is true that the scenario is still very simplistic, but the series proved more ambitious with its sequel, released three years later.

Gorgeous looking and sounding remake of what is already one of the most important video games of all time. Not getting a western a release despite jrpgs peaking in popularity there during the snes and psx eras was a huge missed opportunity and if it weren't for the upcoming hd-2d remake it might've been the last chance it could've gotten to really get the appreciation it deserved. This is the best version by a pretty wide margin but the gbc and nes versions are still great, though if you only want to play one version absolutely make it this one. GBC dq3 is basically the same as the snes release except it's a bitcrushed (albeit impressive) handheld port with a bonus dungeon that's not worth unlocking but it's the best for solo hero runs which is what I'll probably do next. Snes version is worth it alone for the spritework and soundtrack like damn if the overworld theme wasn't called "adventure" already i'd still probably assume that's what it was called and I mean Adventure with a capital goddamn A because I've never had urges this big to blast video game music through my headphones and run through a big ass open field god I wish dragon quest was real

Games are often limited by their need to be “fun.” Despite video games being the only medium with interactivity—an aspect that should be ripe for all kinds of exploration—we are mostly limited to things that are entertaining on some level to our brains. Games are not designed for sadness, hatred, anger, or a litany of any other emotions as their primary motivators, as these are antithetical to the “fun” designers desperately need to find and the conventionality that audiences crave, despite their protests otherwise. Further, games are often heavily concerned with coherency and reaching standards of “good”-ness. That is: a story should be mostly understandable on some level; production values should be high and apparent; and said production values should contribute to the player’s enjoyment in some way. Games desperately want to be liked, and so they cling to these ideas in the hopes of audience validation.

Drakengard cares not for any of this. You roam through gray hazes of environments, cutting down endless hordes of mindless enemies, in the hopes of increasing in power until the very act of playing the game becomes meaningless. Broken music accompanies your rampage while characters shout vague probings of human nature and desperate attempts to contextualize the battles you fight. Your brief respites are inscrutable cutscenes that are meant to tell some semblance of an utterly hopeless and miserable story as you are flung wildly from beat to beat with little in the way of build-up or logic. You descend further and further into this hellish nightmare of absurd imagery until, miraculously, it ends. You awaken from your fugue state and attempt to comprehend what you’ve experienced.

Well, here’s how I see it: Drakengard has the unique ability to radicalize the player so that they completely reconsider what video games are and what they value from them. Whether this is intentional or not on its part is entirely irrelevant—although its brilliant soundtrack lends some credence to that vision—because it is such a fundamentally bare and broken experience that the only option is, ultimately, to project onto it. Drakengard martyrs itself in order to question the very construction and presentation of video games. It hands you the scalpel and then slowly brutalizes itself to death in front of you, with the hope that whatever conclusion you come to in the autopsy is a valid one. There’s a disturbing smile on its face that invites you to revel in its self-destruction.

There are some games that just sort of exist in the video gaming world that feel like they've just always sort of been there, and Out Run is one of them! Ultimately, I think that's just a long way for me to go to say, "I've seen a lot of Out Run screenshots and it was seemingly aways on Sega Channel and I never played it for some reason".

I was just thinking on that reason while I was kinda zoning out playing it just now and I don't think it's complicated: I didn't "get" Out Run. It's not hard (I don't think anyway), and I don't think racing enthusiasts (pronounce that "en thoo zee assts" for the extra affect there) would get much out of it in that context. Out Run is a vibes game, and my little 7 year old self didn't understand those vibes.

I don't entirely get them now, but I can dig it!

Also, you can maybe forget everything I just wrote, because something I didn't learn until I almost just put it away for good this time is that you can shift. Turns out you need to shift. My little 7 year old self didn't get that so she wasn't going to be able to drive for more than 70 seconds anyway. Dummy.

Anyone who's played this game probably knows how good it is. The level design is probably the best in any 2D Mario game I've played, and honestly one of the best 2D platformers I've ever played as well. The sprites are very charming and still hold up to this day, and the game has a lot of stuff that I can sum up with one word: unique. The levels don't follow the basic themes like desert or ocean or ice land and instead try and do more unique things, like the Forest of Illusion that requires you to find a secret exit in a level to escape. The bosses have different ways of beating them like pushing them into the lava or jumping on them when they appear on the right pipe. The difficulty of the game is just right, some levels feel really hard but not impossible. The only frustrating levels other than some later ones are the Ghost Houses, but those are usually frustrating anyway. Overall, I'd definitely recommend playing this game as it does live up to the hype it gets.

This was a game I had on my actual NES as a kid and for years could never beat. Finally beat it without save states, and it surprised me how actually well thought out and ingenious the design of this game is for the time of release. A lot of levels that were excruciatingly hard actually had solutions built into the item drops and level design that took me a while to figure out, which made it a lot more satisfying to complete. In my opinion, its better than any of the classic NES MegaMan games including MegaMan 2.

This game is fascinating for many reasons. It's not a traditional game, but rather a collection of various musical toys. Yet it's also not like a music creation program as making any semblance of a complete song would be extremely difficult in any of these minigames. This game is really about the curiosity of discovering what sounds can be made in the minigames, and messing about with them. Definitely not something for everyone given the lack of direction/substance, but I was absolutely fascinated by each of the minigames and enjoyed my time.

Final Fantasy VIII is a game with a lot of neat ideas, but with slightly poor execution. The Draw and Junction system is super interesting and allows you to pull together really interesting builds, but drawing the actual magic feels needlessly grindy (unless you utilize GF abilities that can get you magic from items). But this is also an open ended system that lets you really break over your knee which I love

Some parts of the story feel underdeveloped, the world feels lacking in its details and the way how everything is told can get confusing at times, the scene in the orphanage was a sticking point in particular. The cast also feels underutilized, but at the same time I really liked Squall and Rinoa and I'm also a sucker for this kind of love story so I ended up loving it in the end

Whether this is your favorite or least favorite game in the series, I can totally see why for both sides. The highs are pretty high, but the lows can sink pretty low too. But I think we can all agree that the soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu is an all time classic