Shin Megami Tensei Throwbacks

Shin Megami Tensei as a JRPG series didn’t really get much traction outside of Japan until comparatively recently, with my own first exposure to the series being Persona 3. I’ve played a bunch of the games since then, but have primarily concentrated on the PS2-era-and-later material which has gained traction with English-speaking audiences. For this article, I’m going to cover a couple of games from earlier on in the series to see if they still hold up, or whether you’re really better off going with the series’ later iterations.

Shin Megami Tensei (SNES)

The original Megami Tensei CRPG on the NES from 1987 was an adaptation of the novel series Digital Devil Story by Aya Nishitani, and was enough of a success for Atlus to prompt them to produce a sequel in 1990. This had an unrelated plot, and indeed subsequent Megami Tensei games have taken only the general idea of the demon-summoning computer program from the novel series and, alongside their shared pantheon of demons, don’t necessarily have that much in the way of plot connections to each other.

In 1992 Atlus put out Shin Megami Tensei for the SNES, which was largely an enhanced remake of the second NES RPG. It was successful enough that Shin Megami Tensei is now regarded as the mainline series in the franchise, but unlike many other SNES RPGs of the era it didn’t get an official Western localisation save for a decidedly janky iOS release in 2014.

The first Megami Tensei-related game to get an English-language release was Jack Bros., a platformer for the Virtual Boy using the titular cutesy-poo demons, and the first of the RPGs was actually the original Persona, which inaugurated that particular side-series; Western audiences wouldn’t get to enjoy an official localisation of a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game until Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (AKA Lucifer’s Call), which would also be the first one to be released in the European market. A concerted fan endeavour, however, has produced an English patch for the original Shin Megami Tensei, so obviously you can use that with your (entirely legitimately sourced) ROM (derived from your entirely legitimately sourced cartridge) to run on your SNES Mini or your SNES emulator of choice.

Square and Nintendo’s Adorable Divorce

The SNES was blessed with a truly bountiful crop of JRPGs, with the greater technical capabilities of the 16-bit era giving rise to games that enjoyed more refined game mechanics, more extensive stories, and much more charming graphics than their 8-bit counterparts. And a big part of that story was Square, who’d effectively developed exclusively for Nintendo systems since 1987; the SNES era saw them really take the Final Fantasy series out of the shadow of the first game, whilst also creating well-regarded non-Final Fantasy JRPGs like Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger.

The next console generation would see Square shift loyalties, producing the vast majority of their remaining games for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 before their merger with Enix to become Square Enix, the final boss of the JRPG industry. In 1996, the next generation was on the cusp of supplanting the old; sure, the 3DO and Sega Saturn might have performed disappointingly, but the PlayStation was generating a real head of steam.

The SNES had done well to stay in the game as long as it had – in part due to developers finding ingenious ways to get the most out of the hardware, like how Rare used prerendered models to give Donkey Kong Country a 3D look which the previous accepted wisdom said the SNES shouldn’t have been able to handle. However, with the Nintendo 64 due out that summer it was inevitable that the new console would become Nintendo’s flagship product and the SNES be relegated to the same legacy product status that it had previously inflicted on the NES.

That may be why there’s a sense of a last hurrah about Super Mario RPG. Sure, Square would release a couple of lesser-known games on the SNES after it came out, and Nintendo would keep a trickle of content coming out for the SNES for the rest of the decade, but Super Mario RPG was arguably one of the last truly notable games for the platform, certainly the last major Mario-themed release for it, and as a Square-Nintendo collaboration it finds the two companies celebrating the legacy they had created on the SNES by creating a game that simultaneously delivered and lampooned both the colourful, cartoonish world of the Super Mario franchise and the game mechanics and genre conventions of JRPGs.