Haha SMT If..., more like If... it was good. This SMT entry was made in less than 6 months and it definitely shows. I’ll start by focusing on the two worst dungeons in the game (World of Sloth and World of Envy) to give a good idea of how bad this game is.

World of Sloth: Oh boy... the main gimmick of this dungeon is walking around in circles and each full moon cycle students dig one block deeper, with the ultimate goal to get to the buried ring. How long does this take? Well it took me like 5 hours even on turbo mode..... yeah.... it’s really really bad...

World of Envy: Can’t get worse than World of Sloth right? Wrong! This dungeon has you running around completely blind with the screen being completely covered in blue... Just use your map right? Wrong! You also lose access to your COMP so that means no map... Sure you can use mapper skill but it isn’t useful at all especially when you get to the last area which has you walking between two areas with identical layouts so you never know which you are in (or the fact that there are two). I had to look up a video guide to get past this dungeon and even then it was hard to follow because I couldn’t tell which area they were in and it is hard to follow a video when the screen is blank.

Gameplay wise it is like classic SMT with the guardian system as a twist. Guardians, which would later go on to inspire personas, are given to the player and their companion after a bar is filled up (or isn’t) once they die. Unfortunately, this means if you die before your bar is filled up to a certain amount then your guardian is downgraded along with your stats. This adds extra tedium to an already tedious and grindy game. Save points are also extremely rare (only appearing once in every other dungeon) so don’t expect reloading your save if you get a bad guardian to be a good strategy unless you’re prepared to lose a lot of progress.

Now onto story! Expecting a good story? Too bad! This was a rushed game developed in less than 6 months and reuses all of smt 1&2s assets including its music so did you really think they’d have the time to add a story? The beginning of the game starts off with the protagonist’s school being transported into the expanse by Ideo Hazama, the main antagonist of the “story”. You, the protagonist, and one of the three companions that you choose to determine the story’s route and go into the expanse collecting rings in order to escape. Do note that Charlie’s and Yumi’s routes are just incomplete versions of Reiko’s so if you want the full story make sure to choose Reiko (you’ll have to look up a guide on how to get her it is complicated). After leaving the school building the story comes to a halt until the ending of the game. The main “plot points” during the story consists of Hazama occasionally poping up to say something and the comic relief minor antagonist, the science teacher Otsuki, coming to fight you. Other than that it is pure dungeon crawling with no dialogue outside of bland npcs (not even your partner speaks majority of the game!!). After completing the game you get access to the second campaign through Akira’s route. I only played a couple hours of Akira’s route before dropping it so I can’t comment on it but from what I played it is slightly better than the main routes (which is a very very very low bar).

All in all, I do not recommend playing this game even for sport. If you want to play a terrible megaten game to put yourself through torture (which is weird, why would you want to do that???) there are worse megaten games than this such as last bible special and megami tensei 1.