Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei [NES]

I have recently made the very poor decision to try and tackle the spiraling clusterfuck of MegaTen in chronological order, landing me here at the beginning with the original Megami Tensei. I'm an English-only speaker and rely heavily on the restless work of fan translators, and they have gone HARD busting their ass to reveal this series to us Westerners as it was meant to be. However, the only English version of the original Megami Tensei games are the SNES remasters on the compilation Kyūyaku Megami Tensei [旧約・女神転生], so that's the version I'll be referring to for the rest of this review.

Megami Tensei is a rather pure old-school dungeon crawler RPG with some odd core mechanics that help set it apart from others of the day. The first is the theme of a modern-day apocalypse, wherein malicious demons are set upon the earth by a computer program written by one Akemi Nakajima. Stricken with guilt, he and his magical friend Yumiko descend the Tower of Daedalus to defeat the demon lords Set and Loki, recently freed, and Lucifer himself. Pretty strange setup, but that's all from the manual. Outside of a few minuscule morsels of NPC dialogue and the appearances of the bosses themselves, it's hard to tell that this is what's going on. A lot is left to the imagination, and to say there's a plot of any sort is pretty generous. The world itself is fairly unique thanks to some strange enemy design and themes, but it's all sort of jumbled together.

Monsters pop up with random encounters, but you aren't required to fight them. Many can speak, allowing you to convince them to walk away or join you. The system is incredibly barebones and a few options, such as smiling or walking towards them, do nothing at all. Recruiting demons either boils down to purchasing their services or just outleveling them so bad that they join out of fear. A few interesting scenarios arise from this, namely the fact that speaking with a group of demons of the same type as one you've already recruited ends the confrontation peacefully, sometimes with some rewards. You can also be mislead by some of the trickier demons, who will feign interest in joining to rob you of your resources and leave. This negotiation system is helpful when you run into posses of demons that pose a significant threat to your party, and prevents a lot of headaches, even with its simplicity. Fighting on its own isn't too interesting, however, just simple turn-based action with physical and magical attacks, but you don't pick which demon you target which can lead to some annoyances in terms of target prioritization. The biggest encounter frustration has more to do with the overall pacing, though.

Like many NES-era dungeon crawlers, you're left to your own wits about how to proceed through the mazes before you. There are some elements of complexity to the layout, especially with how they utilize vertical forks in the road, but the big hangup is how little there is out there to discover. Treasure is exceedingly rare and the maps are riddled with dead ends with trap encounters - a few leveled so high that your party's wiping is nearly guaranteed. This is counter-intuitive beyond all belief, as it disincentives you to look around each corner. Mercifully, the SNES version has an automap, but the original won't even spare you that, which is another level of sadism I wouldn't be able to put up with. The environments are also all nearly identical, making it tricky to get your bearings. I cannot deny that the act of simply filling the map out is satisfying unto itself, but the pace of exploration you're going to want to make is completely at odds with the leveling progression the game expects. When I first encountered the Minotaur at the bottom of the tower, my party was level 11 with two major demons recruited at levels 10 and 17, respectively. The boss, however, was level 27, and was able to wipe my party almost instantly - and that's with the entire map uncovered and multiple trips made back up top to the town to upgrade equipment and fuse demons. The amount of pointless grinding MT1 dawns on you is nothing short of cruel, and it undermines the fun of uncovering the map to begin with.

In all, the most fun I had with MT1 was seeing the stylistic and mechanical origins of a really interesting series and filling out a map that wasn't even available in the original. I can enjoy a simpler RPG experience like this from time to time, but MT1 seems discontent with you making your own fun. The game really wants you to waste your time with arbitrary spikes in difficulty and as a result I can't recommend this, the context of its existence as compelling as it is. Hopefully things turn up from this point for 90s MegaTen.