Shin Megami Tensei II, which released exclusively in Japan on March 18, 1994 for the Super Famicom, is the direct sequel to Shin Megami Tensei - not just in number like for most of the Megami Tensei games - and has become a video game that I have very conflicted feelings for. It is a game I enjoyed a lot overall, but one I can't recommend to anyone who isn't a big Megami Tensei fan. It is a game that confirmed once again that the Megami Tensei franchise is one of my favorites in gaming, but is also a game I don't see myself ever playing again (unless we get a remake). Though I'll explain what I thought about the game in detail in this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
(To preface this, as with the original, it's worth cautioning that if you are a deeply religious individual, you might take offense to the portrayal of the Messians in this game. Personally, I think a work of fiction should be treated as such, and I think the social commentary in this game goes way beyond the Messians (who appear to be portraying Christians) but if this kind of portrayal is a no-go for you, I'd stay away from the game. Some say this fear within Atlus is why the games never released in the West at the time, but who knows.)
SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST GAME: This game starts several decades after the first game ended. From the ashes of Tokyo, the Messian religion created a new encapsulated city called "Tokyo Millenium". Millenium's purpose for the Messians is to bring about the Thousand Year Kingdom, an age where people can live in peace. This concept was put forth in the first game as well, but did not come to fruition for the Messians yet, who are awaiting their Savior / Messiah who can guide them there. These seemingly noble amibitions aside, looking at the layout of the Millenium paints a different picture of perhaps not only their intentions, but definitely of their actions.
See, Millenium is divided into several districts, with one central tower controlling and ruling them all, aptly named "The Center". This is where the Messians and the elite live. The other districts include "Factory", the industrial center where commodities are produced and mining and excavation projects take place, "Arcadia", a demon-free district filled with care-free citizens, and "Valhalla", a zone more or less free of control by the Center and one where its citizens can pursue earthly delights as well as fight in a "Collosseum" in deadly tournaments, the winners of which get to live in the Center themselves.
You are one such fighter called "Hawk". Your trainer, Okamoto, wakes you up one day to train for the upcoming finale of the tournament. You are also an amnesiac who Okamoto "found", took in and named one day after you were unable to do so yourself. As you prepare for the final battle, many mysterious characters show themselves to you in odd visions. There is an old man in most of them standing next to bodies of men and women who are standing motionless in chambers, as the man asks you if you remember their names. Apparently, they are tied to your destiny. There is also a guy named Steven, who you will remember from SMT 1 if you played it, who appears in a "Virtual Battling Program" to give you something he calls the "Demon Summoning Program", which he gives to many capable people because of certain events that he fears will take place soon.
From here, you become demon-summoning Hawk, though that's just the start of who you are. What is your real name? Who are you and why are you strong? Why did the old man come to you in these visions? How do you tie in with the Center and their plans for the Thousand Year Kingdom?
Know that the characters you name ARE tied to your destiny somehow and that the reveal of who you really are is a big deal in this game and a pretty awesome moment. In general, characters feel a lot more fleshed out here than in the original. While two of the characters you are asked to name appear very briefly in this game, multiple of them play a massive role and the others have their own storylines that are interesting to follow for many hours. The resolution to all of their invidiual stories were satisfying in my opinion. The characters, both yourself and the others, have canon names which you can let the old man give them, or you can look them up and give the names yourself. The difference here is that letting the old man name them somehow means you get a lot of points towards the "Law" alignment.
Yes, the Law and Chaos alignments return in this game and as with SMT 1, there are many ways that your alignment at any given moment impact the way the game is played. During the end game part, you once again then decide which path to ultimately follow and you get one of three endings from there, Law, Neutral and Chaos.
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| The setting is explained at the beginning of the game - Tokyo Millenium is the new Tokyo |
SPOILERS REST OF THE WAY
Unlike SMT 1 though, I feel like Atlus played around with these alignments a bit more. While Law was not your "Objectively morally good" path then, it is even less so here, with some surprises along the way in terms of the characters that are supposed to portray and follow the Law path. Whatever you were expecting in that regard, it likely will not have been what this game throws out there. While the game starts off with a heavy focus on the Messian religion and would make you seem that this game becomes a negative commentary on Christianity, it moves beyond that to provide general social commentary about humanity's need for guidance and the leader's tendency to exploit it.
In that regard, I found the Law ending that I achieved in the end to be really satisfying. Unlike the Neutral ending, where guiders / leaders / saviors are generally rejected, or the Chaos ending, where you follow Lucifer's anarchic path to freedom (which I personally think could never last), the Law ending, to me, presents the best path to achieve true peace.
While the Messians used their ambitions as a pretense to make a luxurious life for themselves and let the majority of citizens in Millenium slave away for them, the Law ending takes things in a different way when the Archangel Gabriel takes the protagonist to the top of the Center, where the garden of Eden is located. The idea is to create the Thousand Year Kingdom here, as Eden turns out to be on a "spaceship" that will take its inhabitants away from the Earth while the Earth. Instead of taking those with them who pretend to be working for the ideals that they propose, such as the leaders of the Center, you find that regular citizens of Millenium were chosen and brought to Eden, people who devoted their lives to make the Thousand Year Kingdom a reality in pursuit of true peace, with no ulterior motives. Meanwhile, you can find followers of the Messian religion remaining in the lower floors of the Center, wondering whether God made a mistake because they weren't chosen.
What really tops it off for me is the fact that at the end of the game, YHVH himself is challenged by you and Satan (yes, Satan), despite the fact that you seemingly follow the same ideals. I presume this was done because Satan didn't want a being to be mindlessly worshipped and one everyone attempts to please and be judged by. Instead, killing him and bringing all those pure-souled people with them achieves the reality of the Thousand Year Kingdom, where people truly work for each other's benefit, while those with the exact same ideals, the protagonist and Hiroko (who turns out to be the protagonist's surrogate mother), are presented as the "leaders", mainly to satisfy humanity's desire for "leaders" to cling to, instead of actually acting as the sort of leader YHVH or the Elders in the Center would have been.
I think an argument can be made for all three alignments however, which is why I like the alignment system, even though I am by no means someone who has more than basic knowledge on any religion, political ideologies or mythologies.
All this is brought home with the cyberpunk aesthetic of this game, both through the art design and its themes, which makes this stand out over the first SMT game. I don't SMT II's story is among the best in the history of video games, but it is certainly among the best for its time, it is certainly a notable one for the medium despite its shortcomings in pacing and character development at times (lack of memory storage at the time would play a big role there) and it is certainly one worth retelling thorugh a remake (PS: the genocide in the Law alignment is indeed fucked up, but I think it works as part of what the Law alignment proposes I feel).
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| You are asked to name multiple characters during these visions, or you can let the old man tell you their canon names |
GAMEPLAY | 13/20
Shin Megami Tensei II's gameplay is a tale of two sides. There is the Great side and the Terrible side. The Great side is just as great as the original with some quality of life improvements but little innovation, while the Terrible side slightly improves upon the issues that were present in the original, but adds a couple more terrible things. Well, and then there is some stuff that is not terrible, but also not great.
The Great side
This game features the same gameplay as SMT I but improves upon it in some areas. The screen is divided into two halves akin to a Nintendo DS, with the top half presenting the gameworld and its dungeons, and the bottom half showing you the up to 6 humans and demons you have on your team. You and one other human character are together for most of the game, while the remaining 4 slots can be filled by demons. You acquire demons by negotiating with them and persuading them to join you by selecting the correct dialogue options, giving the demon presents and sometimes, hoping that the invisible stat-checks work in your favor. Once you acquire demons, you can summon them for battle. In the Cathedral of Shadows, here 'Jakyou', you can fuse 2 or 3 demons together to create even stronger demons, which you will need to do in order to be strong enough for the battles ahead. As you level up, you have access to higher level demons and as you progress in the game, you get into areas where some of these stronger demons can be found and negotiated with. As with the majority of the Megami Tensei series, this gameplay loop is more or less the same and pretty addicting.
As you traverse dungeons or the overworld, a multitude of random encounters await you where you need to battle demons and figure out a way to your destination, where you fight bosses to progress the story. Random encounters are not difficult for the most part, so you can use the Auto Battle function to quickly dispose of the enemies, but there are enough tough enemies to make you face them manually, and besting them will require you to have a certain strategy to do so. There are no affinities here like in future games, but you still have to see if the enemy is more susceptible to physical or magic attacks and you will need to find demons with certain skills that will make your life easier like "-kaja" attacks that can buff your attack or defense. Getting those demons requires a lot of negotiating, fusing and testing, which is, again, a really fun gameplay loop that can entertain for dozens of hours, as is the case here.
The game is your typical early 90s RPG, with story moments mixed in between all the dungeon crawling you do. Dungeons are more or less the same in the way you traverse them and in their layout, but traversing feels a lot smoother here, which makes doing so more satisfying. There are also a lot more different challenges dungeons have for you. There are the fog levels as in SMT 1, but there is also a dungeon that pushes you around in a specific pattern which you will need to fight to reach the stairs, there are a lot of dungeons with traps that will throw you down a couple flights of stairs if you walk into them and more. I have this listed under "the Great side" because I like that there are more challenges than simply walking forward, but this aspect certainly has a negative side to it that I will get to later.
There are also a lot of optional dungeons and areas you can enter, many of which will grant you pretty nice bonuses for your playthrough, such as better equipment or boosts to your stats like "Strength", "Magic", "Vitality/Stamina" and "Speed". Even in mandatory dungeons, you can go straight to the destination or be rewarded for exploring every nook and cranny with item drops and sometimes entrances to areas that provide you with a Save point.
Finally, the best quality of life improvement here is that you can now instantly access the map by pressing the left bumper, which is such a big deal here.
Overall, the best part about this game is simply the gameplay loop of demon negotiating, fusing and battling, which is I think some of the most engaging combat in an RPG for its time. It's not nearly as fleshed out as in later entries of the series (obviously) but I think it is satisfying enough to still be enjoyed here. Unfortunately, distractions from this come in many negative forms.
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| Battles are pretty much the same as in SMT I |
The Terrible Side
It starts off easy enough. One of the early objectives you get is to go to a place called "Holytown" and kill two bosses. There are 4 districts you can go to on this overworld where you get the task, all of which could be "Holytown". If you talked to a specific NPC in a bar, you will know which it is without having to potentially go through all four. Nice, you get rewarded for exploring with this useful piece of info. Once you get to Holytown, you explore the dungeons and find one of the bosses. Great, no hand holding and you get it done, no problem. The other boss however is not in these dungeons. Instead, I stumble upon it by walking through a semi-random spot on the overworld. Hm, ok, no problem.
Then, it gets progressively worse. To unlock a new area, you need to find six pillars. I found most of them, but one gave me trouble and one would give all players trouble who go into this blind I think. That is that you need to win a now infamous dancing contest to get one of the pillars. This is done in a disco. Finding the disco can take a while on its own if you don't mark every notable location somewhere on a notepad or something while you play, walking through the disco is a pain because no matter where you go or where you look, each individual step is interrupted with a good 3-5 seconds of uninterruptable dialogue showing people who dance and a text that states that they dance. Once you finally find the spot, you may enter the dancing contest, but ONLY if you have 10 magic. Magic is a useless stat for your protagonist because he can't do magic, so you wouldn't level magic due to this. If you read up on a couple small tips beforehand, you will know, but if you don't and are stuck with the 4 magic at the start of the game, you may be in some trouble and have to grind for a while. Getting a certain drink and wearing a certain equippable item can get your magic up by up to 4 points temporarily I believe however.
The other thing that I myself had trouble with was with one pillar that you apparently get by going to a super-random location in one of the, by this point, dozens of dungeons you unlocked, and finding one random NPC. Getting these pillars can generally be random (buy something from the junk store to get one, go to a digging site on one overworld map to get another) but this felt over the top. There are countless times where the solution to progression is not intuitive at all and talking to NPCs doesn't help either, which I think takes it way too far. On top of that, there is absurd amounts of backtracking that you are meant to do, and that's if you even know where to go. If you don't, you can easily spend hours per task just to find where you needed to go, so I can't imagine anyone wanting to go through this without a guide. It didn't stop me from enjoying the game (it actually helped with that) but I can imagine this being a dealbreaker for some and is the primary reason why I can't recommend this game. Late in the game for example, I need to enter a certain area. I can't, and so I apparently have to go all the way back to a different area, have one short chat, and go all the way back to the area I wanted to enter to be able to do so. This can easily take 45 minutes and is just one instance of backtracking being brutal here.
In terms of the combat, while I enjoyed it, there is one issue and that is that it is way too easy after you reach about the mid-way point of the game. I got a Gun at this point that let my protagonist and other human partner shoot 3-6 shots per turn, which absolutely obliterated the majority of random encounters. Get one or two demons that have the Tarukaja spell (increases damage) and you will do absurd amounts of damage. This has made pretty much every boss fight from that point on trivial and simply a matter of depleting their health. Some bosses are resistant to Gun attacks, like the final one, but even there the damage the boss dished out was so low (and they only get one action per turn) that I just had to wait for the boss to go down. Part of me was glad because I notoriously am terrible at JRPGs, but obviously being able to spam one tactic for half of the game is not very fulfilling.
I also can't end this part without mentioning the encounter rate. There are many areas where the encounter rate is actually more than OK, but there still are too many where the encounter rate is way too high. It's especially infuriating when you are lost and trying to figure out where to go, or when you are thrown down two flights of stairs and have to go back. It is an improvement over 1 though.
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| Level Up Screen |
The "Meh" Side
This game still has the Magnetite system, which I believe will stick around for a while, and I can't say I like it that much, though it's not a big deal, if you know how to deal with it. Magnetite is a resource that is spend with each step you take, if you have a demon in your lineup. The more demons you have active, the quicker it goes down. As dungeons get larger and more complex, your Magnetite can run out insanely fast if you have two or more demons active. If you have 0 Magnetite, each step dishes out damage to your demons, so you should always have Magnetite. This forced me to grind for Magnetite at multiple points early on to have enough (luckily some enemies give you a lot of Magnetite) but what you can also do is simply walk around without any demons being active. This means you will be in a tough position if you can't get away from an encounter and it means you need to re-summon demons, which costs a little bit of money, but it was a great trade-off in my opinion. In the end game, you get so much Magnetite but dungeons are so massive that even that is not enough, so I never felt secure with the Magnetite I had in stock right until the end, and it's a system I can definitely live without.
There are also some activities you can do on the side, like go to the Casino or play in a "Code Breaker" game. While I didn't play in the casino (I hear you can get some near-game-breaking items from there), I found the Code Breaker game to be not really rewarding. You need to guess 5 numbers in the right order and have about 10 guesses to do so. If you picked one of the correct numbers, a B is shown to indicate that. Get the number in the correct spot and an H is shown. 12345 could for example show you "HBBB", which means one of the numbers is in the correct spot and three others are in the solution. 21358 for example could be the solution, and the quicker you get it, the better the reward. Unfortunately, the only rewards that are worth it were for the first two guesses, and you can imagine how unlikely it is to get those right, so either use your emulator to cheat a win or don't bother. Plus, you need Metal Cards to participate, but you get so many and these Code Breaker stores appear so rarely that they only end up clogging up your limited inventory space, and I didn't realize they were a waste of time until I got to play the game again and truly understand how poor the rewards were.
In general, a lot of items in this game are pretty useless. "Maha-" stones for example are attacks that can damage multiple enemies. Usually, if you face one enemy, it would just hit that enemy, at least if you use "Maha" attacks as part of a demon's magic. If you use the item, it doesn't even work unless there are multiple enemies on the screen. Then there are tons of other items which have 0 use for boss battles and are ineffective compared to your other attacks, so I went through almost all of the game without using any. Only time I needed to use some was during the final few boss fights, when I was locked out from going to any stores and the last 5 or so stores only sold guns, which meant my protagonist (who went from Neutral to Law at this point) couldn't equip his sword anymore, couldn't find a new sword anymore and was useless because he has no Magic attacks and all Gun attacks were blocked, so I just ended up using his turns to waste all the items I had been carrying for almost the entirety of the game.
OVERALL
Overall, I can't say I would have finished this game if it weren't for the fact that I played it on an emulator that let me use save states and let me fast forward whenever I needed to and used a guide. The pacing of everything being slow can really be frustrating when most of the time you are simply trying to figure out what even to do, and backtracking for ages just to get a nugget of info (if it even was available) just felt too ridiculous. I did want to beat it though because I think it is worth it for the story, but I'd recommend watching someone else play it to not potentially lose your mind with this.
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| Steven is back! |
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
No voice acting. I'd say the sound design was a mild improvement over the original, but not too noticeable in that regard. The soundtrack was great once again here, though I'd say a step down from SMT 1's soundtrack. There weren't enough tracks that were as notable as in that game, and even worse, a select few would play for roughly 80% of your playtime. Truthfully, I did not get fed up with these tracks and could gladly listen to them right now, but I can see how it would get on people's nerves after 30+ hours. There are plenty of bangers here however and it is one of my favorite soundtracks out of all games I played as part of this challenge I am doing, so I can't complain, I just know that Atlus has done better a lot of times.
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| The dancing animations are great. LET'S DANCIN'! |
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
This game is not technically impressive by any means, so the majority of time is spent looking at wall tiles in first-person dungeon crawling that, while they look improved from the original thanks to actual textures being used (and a variety of them), each dungeon's tiles all look the same and each texture is reused multiple times, apart from later ones. The other part of the game is spent in the overworld, which has an odd mix of blue-yellowish colors but, after getting used to it, is definitely a step up to the originals. Where the game really shines visually is in the design of its demons, which are pretty much all looking excellent and also in its cyberpunk aesthetic, which I think could have been more prominent but shone through whenever it needed to. The UI in this game also looks much better compared to the original, as it has been cleaned up and doesn't take nearly as much space anymore.
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| The overworld looks different to what I'm used to from SMT games |
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Shin Megami Tensei II is just as atmospheric as the first game, and the series in general has some of the best atmosphere out of any video game I've played. To do this despite the clear technical limiations at the time is quite impressive, and it couldn't be done without the game's soundtrack, its art design and the story. There are multiple events that really surprise you and make you realize that in this fucked up world, everything is fair game and no one is safe. Its an atmosphere that is as depressing and hopeless as in the first game due to the state of the world, but I think the options of resolution offered here made me feel more hopeful once it was all said and one than I felt with the first.
CONTENT | 7/10
Dozens of mandatory dungeons, a handful of optional ones, plenty of which provide you with really useful stuff. A huge list of 100-200 demons to choose from, a fun battle system and more story content than in the majority of games at the time and among the highest quality story content for sure. The game will take you 30+ hours, though closer to 40 to 50 if you do the Neutral route and closer to 70 hours, if you decide not to use a guide at all. Unfortunately, as you can tell, a lot of these hours come from not knowing where to go and/or backtracking, so a lot of very good content feels slightly buried in between these nuisances.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
There are a ton of really interesting areas to explore in this game, such as the multiple districts in the Millenium, the underworld and the Abyss, but the backtracking and cryptic progression are just so bad. If you want to show a horrible example to the "I liked when games didn't hold your hands" crowd, this is it.
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| There are a dozen dungeons that looks just like this one |
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The concept still feels really fresh here, simply because there was no game like it at the time. All RPGs I've played focused on the same style of turn-based combat and put the onus on level-grinding to be able to beat tough enemies. This game offers a lot more strategic options beyond putting man-hours into playing it, which is what I really appreciate about its system, and its approach to storytelling is unique to this day. Its such a demonic story that the developers, to this day, go to a shrine to cleanse themselves before working on one of these games, and I am glad that their superstition didn't lead them to stop making these outright. In an era where console games where nearly exclusively aimed at kids, I am glad this was made.
That said, the game doesn't innovate a lot over the original, though that is to change over the coming years when SMT moves from mainline to the Devil Summoner and Persona series.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Once beaten, you can decide to go for the other two routes, which will not only change the path to the ending but will also allow you to use different demons and equipment. Replayability is reduced a bit by the fact that progression has a big focus on backtracking.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 74/100
In many ways, this is an improvement over the original and in some ways, it's a step back. It's a game that shows its age a lot and will be tough to play and enjoy for the majority of people who try it these days, which is why I can only recommend this to hardcore SMT fans. The story is worth experiencing and is the main reason why this game is worthy of a remake, and it didn't do anything to stop me from being excited to play Shin Megami Tense if... in a couple weeks / months, but I'm unlikely to want to play SMT II again in its current state, though happy to have done so.
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