Shin Megami Tensei is, of course, the granddaddy of Atlus dungeon crawlers, and thus I thought it was the best place to start. As of the time of this review, I've yet to play any of the other games
in the series (no Personas or SMTs, though I've seen glimpses of them and I have plans to try both
eventually), so you'll get a pure, unsoiled opinion of how this game
stands on its own.  After playing it, I can definitely say that it truly does show its age a lot worse than other games of its time. It is a Super Nintendo game, and yet graphically, it's not far above one of the more high end NES games, and the mechanics of the game are similar in that regard as well. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's surprisingly a lot to cover for this surprisingly low end game, so on with it.

The story feels less like a story and more like a template for what would form the basis of future Atlus games. It does not even attempt to have any complexity, and given the time it was made, I don't think it would be truly fair to expect it to. Still, it definitely does show more ambition than games of its time, forgoing all pretense and diving headlong into Christian lore, along with Norse lore, Hindu lore, Shinto lore, and about every other religion you can think of. Sensitivity clearly wasn't on the developers minds here, and it does show since the opening of the game involves Tokyo being destroyed in a nuclear armageddon. Bear in mind that this is a Japanese game and that nuclear weapons are quite the taboo in Japan for obvious reasons. If this was some sort of ploy to be controversial in order to attract media attention, I wouldn't be surprised, but I only wish it would have worked more. A more successful Atlus may have created a very different gaming environment than the one we see currently. Nonetheless, for all its exploration of quasi-religious mythology, post-apocalyptic human behavior and thinly veiled potshots at the government, Shin Megami Tensei feels surprisingly "video-gamey" in regards to the rest of its plot (or lack thereof). Consider that your main protagonist is an absolute mute cipher. There is no legitimate reason for this because (A.) this is an RPG that's supposed to have a somewhat more intricate story to distract you from the repetitive gameplay and (B.) One of the main mechanics of the game is negotiating with demons in terms of words, so it makes no sense for him (or her, we never get so much as a character portrait, sprite, or even a name; all the playable humans in the game are named by the player) to be silent in regards to everything else. You receive your game-changing powerups from Steven Hawki- a brilliant scientist in a wheelchair in glasses named STEVEN. You must combine your dog with a demon to have a realistic chance of progressing. The entire second two thirds of the game is more or less just the player character wandering around doing random things to build up either Law or Chaos points; especially notable seeing as the story doesn't have significantly branching pathways for either until the final dungeon. All these things taken together make Shin Megami Tensei's plot feel like it was working against what it was trying to convey. It couldn't stick with silly or serious, so it kind of tried to split the difference and ended up getting nowhere on either end.

But anyway, story's not what you're playing this game for. Let's talk gameplay. Shin Megami Tensei 1's mechanics are a lot like what I've heard other Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games are like: they rely far more on the more unconventional tricks a character in a turn-based RPG typically has. Things like status conditions, instant death spells, and elemental weaknesses are far more at play here than they are in your run of the mill turn-based game. Unfortunately, this can lead to some instances where the game becomes rather... unfair, shall we say. And to be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean it's being unfair to you. Oh no. It's often quite unfair to the enemies if the player knows what he's doing. Several bosses are entirely possible to defeat by simply stun locking them using the Zio spell and using the 5 other characters on your team to simply wail away on them. Which brings me to my next point: the party in SMT1 is unusually large for your standard turn-based game. It's six members total, including however many humans the plot says you should have at the moment and demons making up the rest. So for example, if you have three human characters and one of them drops out, you may simply replace the human with one of your demons in reserve.

Now, we've probably all had our fantasies of using every character available to us to crush our enemies in certain RPGs. Just going by the FF series on the Super Nintendo, in FFIV and FFVI, by the end of the game you had loads of extra characters you couldn't use in your standard 4 or 5 person main team. You wanted to use them all at the same time, didn't you? Or perhaps you played a Pokemon game and wanted to send out all six of the Pokemon you could carry at once? Well, this game kind of shows why that's not really the best of ideas, especially with mechanics such as the ones Atlus comes up with. You see, having that many people in your main party causes problems in that not only do enemy parties increase in size as well to compensate (you'll occasionally be fighting full enemy parties of 8-10 demons), you also arbitrarily have loads more to keep track of. Six health bars, six sets of spells, six sets of stats, etc. Fortunately, you do not have six sets of equipment to keep up with because the demons are rather simplistic. You can't equip anything to them, they don't level up, and they can only have three unique moves (either spells or special attacks). However, where it's easy to lose track of things is in the face that on the battle screen, your party has absolutely no character sprites to themselves whatsoever. You're going purely off of text names. And that's what most of the game is. Text. It all feels much like a text-based adventure game with combat. But anyway, the fact that you have six active party members does sometimes make resource management a real issue. Your main method of recovery will of course be healing spells, but the problem is that you don't ever seem to get enough mana to cover the entire dungeon, especially without a guide, and the mana recovery items in this game may as well be nonexistent. And do bear in mind that if one of your demons drops to 0 hp, there is a very real chance that he may die and be removed from your party entirely. Fortunately, most of them are relatively easy to replace, but nonetheless, it can be a concern.

And that brings me to the next, well, quirk about this game. It's very heavy on the dungeon crawling, obviously, but given the limited resources you have to work with, this will probably change how you're used to playing a dungeon crawler type game entirely. Granted, you'll still have to run through a gauntlet of enemies and conserve your resources for the inevitable boss at the end, but the difference lies in how you run that gauntlet. Chances are, you'll be trying to talk your way out of most encounters. Fighting causes a loss in precious health and potentially MP or items. On the other hand, if you try to negotiate with the demons, you can just as often get them to give you money or convince them to join your quest. It's especially a smart idea to recruit as many demons as you can from the dungeon you're about to face because any further demons you meet of that type will automatically be friendly and give you something if you try to negotiate with them with that type of demon in your active party. For example, if I had a Tenshi Angel in my combat party and randomly encountered another Tenshi Angel, I could just press the talk button and the Angel I was about to fight would automatically give me money or an item and then go away. Now, it is important to note that you gain absolutely zero experience points from doing this, however, I don't consider it much of a loss. First of all, your demons can't level up to begin with so it's pointless thinking in terms of them. Secondly, while your stats are important, it's a bigger deal to have good equipment on your characters than lots of stat points. Thirdly, you'll find a lot of items that will improve your stats anyway if you look hard enough. And lastly, while level growth may affect what spells your characters have available, you gain most of the spells early on and your main hero can't use spells anyway. By the end of the game, you'll only have one human character that may use spells, so it's a bit pointless thinking about the other ones who can anyway. Anyway, a problem you may encounter with demon negotiations will occur through alignment shifting. You start to kill too many chaos monsters, for example, you'll become Law aligned and all the Chaos monsters will attack you on sight. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself (Law alignment is basically the game's easy mode, you get the best equipment and demons), it does mean you won't be able to negotiate your way through a whole dungeon. Now, this doesn't apply if you're doing a neutral playthrough, as I did, but if you decide to do something different, you'll probably have to be a little smarter about how you use your recovery items. And if that makes neutral sound like the easy mode, believe me, it isn't. Law and Chaos both get really overpowered demons to use in the final dungeon. Neutral has to kill both sets of said demons. One last note about negotiating is that the game is on a timer system based on the phases of the moon, and it is completely impossible to negotiate with any monster on the full moon because they all go feral or something. I'd strongly advise avoiding dungeons until a full moon passes. Whether you like the negotiating is up to you. I think it's an interesting concept, but it gets boring quickly since all demons respond pretty much the same way every time, so all you have to do is memorize how to talk to each one. Demon recruitment and fusion are like that as well, since there's a limited number of fusions you can realistically do and most of the demons don't end up anywhere near as powerful as your human characters anyway.

In terms of presentation, as I said before, most of SMT1 looks on the lower end scale of the SNES's output. Honestly, the game sort of looks like your standard NES Dragon Quest game with uglier, more pixellated sprites trying to represent more realistic looking characters. Much of the game is, of course, flat black menus, particularly in dungeons or in combat, where you only get a tiny centered window to display movement. Slightly more interesting is the world map, with colours and expansiveness more befitting the system it's on, but still not living up to the quality of something like Super Ghouls and Ghosts, for example. Musically, the game strangely sounds like something off the Genesis rather than the SNES, which is a shame because I vastly prefer most of the SNES's tracks to the well-known Genesis "twang." SMT1 is not without its good tunes, however, and the battle theme and the theme of the Ginza area really do stand out.

But what about replay value, you ask? Well, you could see how the game changes from each of the different alignments, but sadly, I don't believe those changes are enough to justify a full replay. There's also a fair bit hidden items and secrets you may want to go back and look for if you missed them on your first try because you just couldn't get stick around in the dungeon long enough, but honestly a lot of them seem so frustrating to get that I wouldn't bother, especially because a lot of them aren't worth it. Bear in mind that this is a game where you are absolutely forced to cross trap spaces that you have no way of seeing or avoiding being damaged by once you touch them (and yes, you must cross them to progress, there's no way around them). The optional areas are even more obnoxious, particularly in the final dungeon, made even worse by the fact that you have little to no landmarks and the place is ridiculously huge.

Should you play SMT1? That's up to you, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but hardcore fans or those looking to experience the novelty of an Atlus style RPG without all the bells and whistles of newer offerings. I managed to complete it, but I probably only did so because this was my only experience with the Atlus RPG, so the whole system was somewhat new to me. Had I been more familiar with it, I would have likely put the game down and never picked it back up. SMT1 probably won't appeal to most people but will be catnip for those it does appeal to, but, as always, use your own discretion.