JRPG Journey 2024: Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (Winter Bonus Game)

February’s game: Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium

March’s game: Tales of Phantasia

(Alright, I know it’s not winter anymore, but if you’re willing to cut me a break, I’d appreciate you—as long as you come back for next month’s entry.)

Often I’ll hear an older game described as “not having aged well”, and I’ve always disagreed. In fact until recently I thought this was a silly concept — how could a game not age well? I’ve never had trouble judging games in the context of their era or getting into the mindset of what a player back then might have thought. After all, if people had fun with a game decades ago, there’s no reason someone wouldn’t find it fun now. Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei is the first game I’ve played where I feel that sort of criticism fairly applies.

Perhaps best known as Megami Tensei 1 or “Megaten” 1, this bonus entry of JRPG Journey will take a look at none other than the first entry in Atlus’s megalith of a series now better known by the Shin Megami Tensei label it evolved into. Indeed, we only get SMT or Persona games from Atlus now, so it’s understandable that the original Megami Tensei games get lost in the discussion. Understandable, but not deserved. When judging Megami Tensei I have to take context into account, as it’s the first JRPG with a monster capture mechanic (or at least the earliest one people care about today), having released way back in 1987, long before similar dungeon-crawling JRPG Shining in the Darkness and even a few months before Phantasy Star and its first-person dungeons. Digital Devil Story (I’ll call it “DDS”) lays impressive groundwork for the kind of sprawling, metro demon-taming adventure future games would cook up, but whether due to hardware limitations or lack of experience—this game was a trailblazer, after all—DDS feels more like a prototype than a fully-fledged experience I’d recommend to others.

But what a prototype. In its crowning achievement, Megami Tensei 1 turns random monster encounters from rote obstacles only there to dole out experience into interactive puzzles of a sort, asking the player to choose the best course of action to interact with each new demon . Unlike the majority of its contemporaries, avoiding encounters is easy in DDS. Running away usually works, but even better, you can talk to any demon to try and recruit them. The outcome is more or less random, but sometimes they’ll get spooked and flee, handy if you’re hurting for health and trying to make it back to that healing spring before you kick it. For a first attempt at a monster capture system, Atlus nailed the concept, though it could use refinement. For instance, similar to countless other dungeon crawlers, you face not monsters but monster stacks, which here can contain up to six of a creature. While you always fight a single stack, you can only recruit a demon if there’s one left in the stack, a cruel limitation that makes already difficult grind even more grueling. And oh, DDS loves punishing players at every opportunity. Often after defeating an enemy stack, another random stack will pop up immediately, acting as a forced additional encounter. The catch is that if you run from or recruit this monster, you don’t get any of the XP from the ones you’ve already defeated. It’s a pure time waster that not only drags the already slow pacing to a crawl but just plain doesn’t make sense. It breaks what I consider a fundamental rule of RPGs: the player can trade his time to get stronger. I defeated the demons, where’s my experience?

Aside from demon recruitment, battles are your standard turn-based early-era JRPG fare. You’ve got two party members—that’s a plus—; you can choose your stats at the start of the game; you’ll learn new spells and level up by getting XP—all the usual stuff. DDS sets itself apart by adopting a modern Japan setting where you play as a high school student named Nakajima. In what may be the biggest leap of logic I’ve ever seen used as the foundational concept of an entire franchise, Nakajima writes a computer program that summons demons. You read that right—somehow electrical currents inside of a computer are causing demons to cross from their realm to Earth, specifically Japan. Nakajima and his curiously cult-obsessed girlfriend Yumiko vow to stop them and enter the demon world, battling their way through underground towers and a labyrinth that might just lead directly to hell. Lucifer himself is involved in all the demon attacks, of course, yet there’s also more to Nakajima than meets the eye. I won’t spoil anything, but to be honest I don’t fully understand the plot myself. Megami Tensei 1 has never received an English release, and the fan translation I used seemed a bit shaky at best. At any rate, it’s a surprisingly detailed plot that moves between various locations and kept me mildly interested at minimum—when I could remember it, anyway.

For having such barebones mechanics, Digital Devil Story is one long game—22 hours according to HowLongToBeat, which sounds about right. (There’s no in-game timer.) Unfortunately, much of it’s spent grinding, and not the fun kind. When entering a new area or dungeon, more often than not there’s no reasonable way to progress without fusing demons together to make more powerful demons. Otherwise, your party will get wiped in short time, as your main heroes are never strong enough on their own to take on the beefed-up new enemies. For a game about fusing demons that may not sound like a problem, yet you can’t fuse new demons unless you’re a high enough level to handle them. Pokemon later implemented a similar idea with its badge system, which works great for those games, but the levels required in DDS are way higher than I’d expect. I had to stop numerous times to grind for hours just to reach a high enough level to get the demons I needed. There might be something I’m missing here, but from conversations with others who have played the game, I don’t think so. It’s more time-wasting tedium for the sake of frustrating players, I suppose.

Thankfully we’re in the modern day where I can mitigate an old game’s draconian mechanics with emulator speedup, a privilege I happily employed every chance I got. I also noticed the tiles you stand on after walking through most doorways have a high probability of triggering random encounters, marking one of this game’s few conveniences: a way to grind while not losing Magnetite, or “Mag”, a resource that constantly drains while you have monsters summoned, or active, in your party. The stronger and more numerous your demonic party, the more Mag you lose with each step. Like in Pokemon—which I now know copied this game—you can store and retrieve monsters from your PC, only in DDS you can do it from anywhere. (Damn, it only took Pokemon a couple decades to implement a feature that the game it copied already had.) Magnetite sounds like a good system, one that could serve as a good way to balance the power of high level demons. But you can’t fuse high level demons in the first place! So instead, Mag acts more as a constant albatross, a warning of how long you can keep running from battles to try to get some exploring done before being forced to fight every few steps.

The best fix for low Mag? Grinding, of course. Defeating enemies rewards Mag, but only sometimes, all but demanding you adopt a slow, deliberate pace, taking on nearly every encounter, for the duration of the game. This also deters players from pottering about in areas they’ve already explored with powerful demons in tow, yet isn’t doing just that part of the fun of JRPGs? Megami Tensei seems to want the player to toe a thin line and play an ostensibly open-ended experience in a linear, almost guided way. It’s a pure, raw, and number-focused to its core. I suspect that’s what hardcore fans love about the series, and I do as well, but here it’s too stripped-down for me. I need a little more story, a little more side content, a little more mechanics or something to keep me from wishing a game were shorter.

It doesn’t help that there is no maps to be found aside from a fairly useless and clunky mapping spell. So in a first for me unless you count games like Myst, I set out to draw maps by hand and really try to enjoy Digital Devil Story the intended way—or at least the old-fashioned way. Many dungeon crawler fanatics recommend this approach, and I’ve got to admit I had a ton of fun. For a while, anyway—I stuck with my hand-drawn maps through the entire first area, Daedalus tower, eight maze-like floors of traps and treasures that start with, oddly enough, a city at the top. This acts as your first home base where you can heal, shop, or fuse demons to help you reach the boss at the bottom. This first quest takes several hours, and I had a blast getting used to the mechanics, marveling at the detailed Famicom sprite work and demon designs, and slowly inching my way closer to the mighty Minotaur, who guards the exit. It helps that the tune you’ll hear the most during the first several hours is an absolute bop: the Daedalus theme, a.k.a., the first dungeon theme. Check it out on YouTube; this song makes great use of the Famicom’s various sound shapes and channels to offer an initial hopeful outlook for our protagonist. The rest of the soundtrack mostly pales in comparison (the Mazurka Path theme is another standout) but nonetheless sets an appropriate tense, dark mood for a game where you fight Lucifer’s minions with devils of your own.

To be fair, the game isn’t totally heartless: some enemies drop helpful Jewels, which restore all HP to a single party member, a godsend before attaining demons with healing spells. In what has to be an intentional design choice, certain enemies always drop jewels, so if you’re in the right area, you can infinitely grind while healing as you get more jewels — hallelujah! However, as you’ve no doubt guessed, once the initial sheen of diving into an unfamiliar series wore off, the numerous annoyances I’ve detailed came into focus, and I still had two-thirds of the game left. It was at that point I decided to switch to online maps, and in some respects I wish I hadn’t. I no doubt have more fun playing a first-person dungeon crawler like Megami Tensei when I’m discovering everything on my own, piecing all the information together myself, and discovering where that strong piece of equipment is hiding or where that powerful optional demon is lurking. The problem? That would take dozens of hours, time I’d rather spend playing other games. I simply don’t have the patience for an experience this basic given how much time it demands. Digital Devil Story’s core formula doesn’t appeal to me quite enough on its own; I need a bit more. Thankfully, there’s lots more to this whole Megami Tensei thing.

I’ve since played most of the third entry in the Megaten series, Shin Megami Tensei, enough to know I can’t think of any reasons to play an archaic beast like Megami Tensei 1 today other than for historical appreciation or just wanting to have played them all — I’m proudly guilty of both. Otherwise, if you’re curious about Megaten’s origins and just want to play a fun JRPG with a cool story, jump right into SMT. It’s the “1.0” version of Digital Devil Story’s prototype, if you will, the same general concept with the same gameplay mechanics, all refined and done right.

I may do a retrospective on Shin Megami Tensei or other classic entries in the future, but until then, thanks for reading. Join me later this month when I’ll discuss March’s game, Tales of Phantasia.