The last of the (non-remake) Super Famicom Shin Megami Tensei games, if... (hereto referred to as "IF" because typing "if..." is annoying to type and difficult to parse) was released a scant SEVEN months after SMT 2. That said, it nonetheless manages to both stand apart from its predecessors as well as pave a brave new direction for the series that would end up defining SMT for the next five big games Atlus made (all the way until SMT 3, basically). It took me 32 or so hours to play through Reiko's route (the longest and most complete of the three available at the start) on the Switch Online SFC service using copious save states, rewinds, and online maps (because hoooo boy, is this game a doozy).
Taking a huge step back from the larger philosophical dissections and discussions that SMT 1 and 2 partake in, IF has a much smaller story set in a high school. You're a Japanese high schooler whose school suddenly gets sucked into the Makai (where all the demons live). You soon find out that your classmate Ideo Hazuma is behind it all (he even brags to you that he did it before the game starts), and you can choose to buddy up with one of three of your classmates (Charlie, Yumi, or Reiko) as you brave the perils of the Makai to save your imperiled classmates and get everyone (or not) out of the Makai and back to safety.
This is a game with a much more different story structure and tone from the previous games. It opens with a very silly personality quiz it uses to determine what sort of character you are (but we'll talk about that more later), and you can even pick your gender (which makes this one of the first and only SMT games to do that). Your classmate companions (Charlie, Yumi, and Reiko) all offer respectively longer and longer paths to the end of the story, but with very different outcomes, and in fact alignment doesn't dictate your story path at all. Once you pick a partner at the start (Charlie's being the shortest and easiest, Reiko's being the best and most complete, and an extra & very different fourth, Akira, being available after you beat the game once), that's the story path you're on.
It's a much lighter and sillier story in the smaller beats of it (your continuously self-augmenting and very eccentric science teacher as a recurring boss being one of my favorite parts of it), but it also does actually get serious in a way I really liked. It doesn't dwell on it a ton, and it's only in Reiko's route, but the way they go about humanizing but not excusing the antagonist's behavior was something that was surprisingly well done given the quality of Atlus's character writing up to this point. The high school setting and more character driven story became the impetus for the Persona series (and the female protagonist of this game actually appears in Persona 2~), and with character writing like this, it's not hard to see the connective tissue, even if it's relatively quite simple and brief here.
As far as mechanics go, this thing is HEAVILY built onto the skeleton of SMT 2, so a lot of features from that are effectively identical here. The general way that combat and navigation is the same, but there's a lot that's polished up and new despite how similar things are. For starters, the UI has been even further polished up and made faster, amking for a generally nicer and more quick play experience. Demon negotiation has been improved significantly from SMT 2. It's still not nearly as delightfully simple and rewarding as in SMT1, but it's nowhere near as frustrating as SMT 2 can be. Another good thing is that SMT 2's horrid mangnetite (the secondary money-like resource you need to keep demons summoned and in your party) has been solved too, and I basically never felt like I was running out. Instead of slowly getting upgrades for your arm computer, it comes fully featured right off the bat (so you can befriend 12 demons and analyze items right from the start). But there's also a LOT here that's very significantly different from how SMT 2 is constructed.
First of all, you have the significantly changed way alignment works. Choices you make in the narrative now don't make any change to your alignment, and your alignment doesn't affect the narrative's path at all. Now, your alignment is something that changes dynamically depending on what demons you have summoned. Have too many Chaos-leaning demons summoned and you can't recruit or summon Law demons, and vice versa. It's nice to not have to worry about messing up your path through the story just because you picked the wrong dialogue option at a story part, but it's also a bit of a pain to need to constantly worry about having a team you can actually have summoned all the time. It's not an awful thing, but it's not all around good either.
Then you just have the general design of the game. Whether on one of the initial three routes or the extra fourth route (which is completely different and basically a whole new adventure, albeit one that leans very hard, even compared to the main game), there is no overworld at all. The main game has a hub from which you go to different towers based on different deadly sins, and the bosses and encounters you experience there are based off that particular sin in some fashion. Some of these places aren't the best designed (particularly the one that has no boss and you just need to wait an age to finish it), but no genuine fast travel nodes and no overworld is a huge change to get used to. But that unfortunately relates to just how much of what's new may be novel, but is just also not very well polished or designed.
For starters, they just imported the weapon list from SMT 2 has more or less just been imported as it was. Now this isn't a problem on its face, but you need to consider that you can actually choose your gender in this version, and SMT 2 is balanced for a male main character and a female NPC partner. If you chose a female main character and a female partner like I did, you will not be able to use ANY of the scads of male-exclusive equipment, particularly the loads of really good weapons that only guys get to use. It's really cool that you can choose to play as a girl in this, but I just wish they'd made more of an effort to balance the game around that. This is also a big reason beyond Charlie's route being significantly shorter (he doesn't even fight the final boss) that Yumi and Reiko's routes are so much harder, because they can't use a lot of the best weapons in the early, mid, or late game. The game is generally really good at giving you player information and being very candid about upcoming traps or trials, and just how poorly it communicates what is effectively its difficulty modes (choice of gender and choice of partner) is really unfortunate in how it can sour the experience.
But the biggest bugbear in the room is also one of the most significant parts of the game: The Guardian Spirit System. This game is actually super forgiving compared to most SMT games in that it has no hard game overs. When you die, you just get kicked back to the start of the tower you're in, which sucks, but at least you don't lose all your progress with EXP and money. You're also given a new Guardian Spirit, and they're actually REALLY important. As you kill enemies, you rack up points for a new Guardian Spirit, which is just a particular demon from the game. When you die, depending on which of the four character types you are (as determined by the quiz at the start), what gender you are, your level, and your number of Guardian Points, you get a particular new Guardian Spirit. This spirit gives stat boosts or nerfs to the character player depending on how the demon's stat's compare to yours. When your partner dies, they come back immediately after the battle with a new Guardian Spirit of their own, but their Guardian Spirit impacts what spells they get/have, making it super important to whether or not your one party member who can learn spells (your main character still can't. They have the demon summoning computer after all) will or can actually have the spells they need.
And therein lies the critical and immensely frustrating flaw with the Guardian Spirit system: The player has heck-all control over it. Dying can be an absolutely debilitating penalty despite not having hard game overs because your new Guardian Spirit may take away a really good spell your partner had or give you WAY worse stats because the demon's stat comparisons really penalize the kind of min/max-ing that you're encouraged to have for the main character (the level up system where you just put a point into one of your six main stats from SMT 1 and 2 is back again all the same here). There were tons of times I'd dread dying and coming back because I'd be given yet more nigh useless INT and Magic stats and my super valuable Speed stat would be dropped even lower. You also can't see a numerical representation of your Guardian Points, as it's just a bar that fills up, so trying to get a specific demon by dying at a certain point is nigh impossible. While it was the inspiration for the eventually much better designed titular system of the Persona series, just how uncontrollable the Guardian Spirit system is makes it worse than nothing, and makes an already hard game even harder.
That's another sort of problem with this game. While SMT 1 and 2 are hardly easy games, IF cranks things up significantly. Dungeon design is way meaner, with far more teleporter mazes, labyrinths of total darkness, pit fall traps, and no-map or computer areas to give you an absolutely nightmarish time. There are also far less demons to recruit in this game. While there are a surprising number of brand new demons, in general the demons you run into will be from demon families that can never be recruited, so taking advantage of the ones you can actually recruit is a must do. The early game is also really hard even for an early SMT game, with the Zombie-chan school girls in particular being a really nasty enemy. Most of these awful enemies can't be recruited or even fused into, so you're forced to just have to fight them or try (and likely fail) to run from them. They also make shops and towns much more spread apart and difficult to get to due to the lack of a world map, and that problem is amplified even more by two more really mean new changes.
First of all is that this is the first game to make melee attacking from the back row completely impossible. In SMT 1 and 2, you got a significant damage penalty for melee attacking from the back row, but you could still do it. Now you need to either be casting magic or firing guns or you have to just sit on your hands in the back row. This is compounded by an even more evil new change: Guns now have limited bullets. Before, bullets just acted as a damage type modifier for your guns. Now, you need to keep your inventory stocked full of stacks of 99 bullets of the most advantageous (sleep and charm bullets are still your best friends) bullets you can get your hands on. This is made EVEN worse by the fact you can't just buy a whole stack at once. You've gotta tap right on the D-pad 99 damn times to buy a stack, and you've gotta do that one at a time. Hand cramps from buying bullets were a very constant element of my time with SMT IF. While in some segments the enhanced difficulty made for some more fun and challenging boss fights, by and large the added difficulty in IF is achieved by doubling down on the worst and most frustrating parts of earlier SMT games, and I am absolutely not a fan of it.
The presentation is one of the things that makes it most clear that this is based so heavily on the bones of SMT 2. There's very little new music, for one, as most of it is reused from SMT 2. Now it's still the same nice atmospheric music that worked well in SMT 2, but it's reused nonetheless. There are also a TON of reused demon sprites and attack effects. Now this isn't a huge issue as far as playing the game goes, as all the bosses are still new and there are a really surprising amount of new demons on top of the old ones, but there's still a lot reused here. At the very least basically all of the environments have been redone and look very nicely detailed and scary. They add great flair to each of the different parts of the Makai they grace.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Although I did ultimately enjoy my time with SMT if... more than I did SMT 2, the sheer length of this review should speak pretty clearly to how conflicted my feelings on it are. This is a game that would be absolutely miserable to play without save states or even online maps, as it's just way too in love with being mean and punishing you very hard for just getting unlucky. It's a game of lower lows but higher highs, and while I wouldn't say it's a better all around product than SMT 1, I'd still say it's worth trying if you're a fan of the series and don't mind either using save states like I did, or don't mind a LOT of punishment and trial and error ^^;
Taking a huge step back from the larger philosophical dissections and discussions that SMT 1 and 2 partake in, IF has a much smaller story set in a high school. You're a Japanese high schooler whose school suddenly gets sucked into the Makai (where all the demons live). You soon find out that your classmate Ideo Hazuma is behind it all (he even brags to you that he did it before the game starts), and you can choose to buddy up with one of three of your classmates (Charlie, Yumi, or Reiko) as you brave the perils of the Makai to save your imperiled classmates and get everyone (or not) out of the Makai and back to safety.
This is a game with a much more different story structure and tone from the previous games. It opens with a very silly personality quiz it uses to determine what sort of character you are (but we'll talk about that more later), and you can even pick your gender (which makes this one of the first and only SMT games to do that). Your classmate companions (Charlie, Yumi, and Reiko) all offer respectively longer and longer paths to the end of the story, but with very different outcomes, and in fact alignment doesn't dictate your story path at all. Once you pick a partner at the start (Charlie's being the shortest and easiest, Reiko's being the best and most complete, and an extra & very different fourth, Akira, being available after you beat the game once), that's the story path you're on.
It's a much lighter and sillier story in the smaller beats of it (your continuously self-augmenting and very eccentric science teacher as a recurring boss being one of my favorite parts of it), but it also does actually get serious in a way I really liked. It doesn't dwell on it a ton, and it's only in Reiko's route, but the way they go about humanizing but not excusing the antagonist's behavior was something that was surprisingly well done given the quality of Atlus's character writing up to this point. The high school setting and more character driven story became the impetus for the Persona series (and the female protagonist of this game actually appears in Persona 2~), and with character writing like this, it's not hard to see the connective tissue, even if it's relatively quite simple and brief here.
As far as mechanics go, this thing is HEAVILY built onto the skeleton of SMT 2, so a lot of features from that are effectively identical here. The general way that combat and navigation is the same, but there's a lot that's polished up and new despite how similar things are. For starters, the UI has been even further polished up and made faster, amking for a generally nicer and more quick play experience. Demon negotiation has been improved significantly from SMT 2. It's still not nearly as delightfully simple and rewarding as in SMT1, but it's nowhere near as frustrating as SMT 2 can be. Another good thing is that SMT 2's horrid mangnetite (the secondary money-like resource you need to keep demons summoned and in your party) has been solved too, and I basically never felt like I was running out. Instead of slowly getting upgrades for your arm computer, it comes fully featured right off the bat (so you can befriend 12 demons and analyze items right from the start). But there's also a LOT here that's very significantly different from how SMT 2 is constructed.
First of all, you have the significantly changed way alignment works. Choices you make in the narrative now don't make any change to your alignment, and your alignment doesn't affect the narrative's path at all. Now, your alignment is something that changes dynamically depending on what demons you have summoned. Have too many Chaos-leaning demons summoned and you can't recruit or summon Law demons, and vice versa. It's nice to not have to worry about messing up your path through the story just because you picked the wrong dialogue option at a story part, but it's also a bit of a pain to need to constantly worry about having a team you can actually have summoned all the time. It's not an awful thing, but it's not all around good either.
Then you just have the general design of the game. Whether on one of the initial three routes or the extra fourth route (which is completely different and basically a whole new adventure, albeit one that leans very hard, even compared to the main game), there is no overworld at all. The main game has a hub from which you go to different towers based on different deadly sins, and the bosses and encounters you experience there are based off that particular sin in some fashion. Some of these places aren't the best designed (particularly the one that has no boss and you just need to wait an age to finish it), but no genuine fast travel nodes and no overworld is a huge change to get used to. But that unfortunately relates to just how much of what's new may be novel, but is just also not very well polished or designed.
For starters, they just imported the weapon list from SMT 2 has more or less just been imported as it was. Now this isn't a problem on its face, but you need to consider that you can actually choose your gender in this version, and SMT 2 is balanced for a male main character and a female NPC partner. If you chose a female main character and a female partner like I did, you will not be able to use ANY of the scads of male-exclusive equipment, particularly the loads of really good weapons that only guys get to use. It's really cool that you can choose to play as a girl in this, but I just wish they'd made more of an effort to balance the game around that. This is also a big reason beyond Charlie's route being significantly shorter (he doesn't even fight the final boss) that Yumi and Reiko's routes are so much harder, because they can't use a lot of the best weapons in the early, mid, or late game. The game is generally really good at giving you player information and being very candid about upcoming traps or trials, and just how poorly it communicates what is effectively its difficulty modes (choice of gender and choice of partner) is really unfortunate in how it can sour the experience.
But the biggest bugbear in the room is also one of the most significant parts of the game: The Guardian Spirit System. This game is actually super forgiving compared to most SMT games in that it has no hard game overs. When you die, you just get kicked back to the start of the tower you're in, which sucks, but at least you don't lose all your progress with EXP and money. You're also given a new Guardian Spirit, and they're actually REALLY important. As you kill enemies, you rack up points for a new Guardian Spirit, which is just a particular demon from the game. When you die, depending on which of the four character types you are (as determined by the quiz at the start), what gender you are, your level, and your number of Guardian Points, you get a particular new Guardian Spirit. This spirit gives stat boosts or nerfs to the character player depending on how the demon's stat's compare to yours. When your partner dies, they come back immediately after the battle with a new Guardian Spirit of their own, but their Guardian Spirit impacts what spells they get/have, making it super important to whether or not your one party member who can learn spells (your main character still can't. They have the demon summoning computer after all) will or can actually have the spells they need.
And therein lies the critical and immensely frustrating flaw with the Guardian Spirit system: The player has heck-all control over it. Dying can be an absolutely debilitating penalty despite not having hard game overs because your new Guardian Spirit may take away a really good spell your partner had or give you WAY worse stats because the demon's stat comparisons really penalize the kind of min/max-ing that you're encouraged to have for the main character (the level up system where you just put a point into one of your six main stats from SMT 1 and 2 is back again all the same here). There were tons of times I'd dread dying and coming back because I'd be given yet more nigh useless INT and Magic stats and my super valuable Speed stat would be dropped even lower. You also can't see a numerical representation of your Guardian Points, as it's just a bar that fills up, so trying to get a specific demon by dying at a certain point is nigh impossible. While it was the inspiration for the eventually much better designed titular system of the Persona series, just how uncontrollable the Guardian Spirit system is makes it worse than nothing, and makes an already hard game even harder.
That's another sort of problem with this game. While SMT 1 and 2 are hardly easy games, IF cranks things up significantly. Dungeon design is way meaner, with far more teleporter mazes, labyrinths of total darkness, pit fall traps, and no-map or computer areas to give you an absolutely nightmarish time. There are also far less demons to recruit in this game. While there are a surprising number of brand new demons, in general the demons you run into will be from demon families that can never be recruited, so taking advantage of the ones you can actually recruit is a must do. The early game is also really hard even for an early SMT game, with the Zombie-chan school girls in particular being a really nasty enemy. Most of these awful enemies can't be recruited or even fused into, so you're forced to just have to fight them or try (and likely fail) to run from them. They also make shops and towns much more spread apart and difficult to get to due to the lack of a world map, and that problem is amplified even more by two more really mean new changes.
First of all is that this is the first game to make melee attacking from the back row completely impossible. In SMT 1 and 2, you got a significant damage penalty for melee attacking from the back row, but you could still do it. Now you need to either be casting magic or firing guns or you have to just sit on your hands in the back row. This is compounded by an even more evil new change: Guns now have limited bullets. Before, bullets just acted as a damage type modifier for your guns. Now, you need to keep your inventory stocked full of stacks of 99 bullets of the most advantageous (sleep and charm bullets are still your best friends) bullets you can get your hands on. This is made EVEN worse by the fact you can't just buy a whole stack at once. You've gotta tap right on the D-pad 99 damn times to buy a stack, and you've gotta do that one at a time. Hand cramps from buying bullets were a very constant element of my time with SMT IF. While in some segments the enhanced difficulty made for some more fun and challenging boss fights, by and large the added difficulty in IF is achieved by doubling down on the worst and most frustrating parts of earlier SMT games, and I am absolutely not a fan of it.
The presentation is one of the things that makes it most clear that this is based so heavily on the bones of SMT 2. There's very little new music, for one, as most of it is reused from SMT 2. Now it's still the same nice atmospheric music that worked well in SMT 2, but it's reused nonetheless. There are also a TON of reused demon sprites and attack effects. Now this isn't a huge issue as far as playing the game goes, as all the bosses are still new and there are a really surprising amount of new demons on top of the old ones, but there's still a lot reused here. At the very least basically all of the environments have been redone and look very nicely detailed and scary. They add great flair to each of the different parts of the Makai they grace.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Although I did ultimately enjoy my time with SMT if... more than I did SMT 2, the sheer length of this review should speak pretty clearly to how conflicted my feelings on it are. This is a game that would be absolutely miserable to play without save states or even online maps, as it's just way too in love with being mean and punishing you very hard for just getting unlucky. It's a game of lower lows but higher highs, and while I wouldn't say it's a better all around product than SMT 1, I'd still say it's worth trying if you're a fan of the series and don't mind either using save states like I did, or don't mind a LOT of punishment and trial and error ^^;