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I made the Unmastered series of posts to showcase games that I beat, did not master, but still wanted to review. This is a bit different. I actually did not beat this game. But I’m playing the sequel, and loving it, and expect to master it, so to talk about it, I wanted to talk about this one too, for context. There’s also a lot to talk about.

Megami Tensei is one of the most important RPG series of all time. Kind of. See, Megami Tensei was pretty popular, then it got a spinoff series called Shin Megami Tensei, which superceded the series and became so much more popular people forgot the original existed. And then that series got a spinoff series called Persona. And now some people don’t even know about SMT. And even LESS know about and remember MT. Even even LESS know about and remember the fucking book series that this game was based on. But is that fair? Let’s see where this series started, and determine if it’s unfairly forgotten…

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Megami Tensei is a sequel to the novels. Basically, the idea is that Nakajima invented a computer program that let him summon Demons into this world. He used it to try and get back at and scare some bullies, but it went WAY too far, and now he’s trying to stop the Demons. There’s also stuff about him and his gf Yumiko being a reincarnated God, I dunno, I didn’t get to any part where that’s mentioned, if it is in this game. This game is VERY low on story, character, or plot, but the basic idea is you need to traverse this labyrinth and find and defeat Lucifer. Along the way you’ll explore different areas and defeat the generals there before finally fighting Lucifer. There aren’t really any smaller stories in this areas either, it’s pretty straight forward.

And now, the gameplay. Megami Tensei is a dungeon crawling RPG in the style of Wizardry. In fact, it’s basically just a Wizardry game. And, look… I like retro RPGs. A lot. I REALLY love NES era RPGs, ones people say “aged poorly”. I will happily play Dragon Quest 1 until the cows come home. But this… this feels like it goes beyond aged poorly. It’s missing so much shit that we take for granted today, and utilizes it in ways that fucking hate the player. This game is very, VERY rude. And it, like Dragon Quest, is almost completely a grind-fest. But it does NOT make that easy, or pleasant, to accomplish.

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You have stat allocation. Be sure to allocate it correctly, or you’re fucked. There’s a single place to save the game, heal, fuse monsters, and cure status effects. You can get spells to do some of these things, but if you get to the deeper areas, and Yumiko gets hit by a numb status effect, you gotta wander aaaalll the way back to undo it. While draining health, and being attacked by a ridiculous encounter rate. When you enter a door, the encounter rate is like, 60%. Also, the game crashes. A lot. A LOOOOOT.

But that pales in comparison to the #1 most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen in an RPG like this. Some enemies have attacks that drain your levels. Yes. ENTIRE LEVELS. Just, boom, hit by this enemy? Your levels are gone. You can run sure, but you’ll probably fail running at the worst time… and since you’re grinding like crazy, you’re probably on autopilot anyway, so you’ll miss that you’re fighting the level draining enemies, and suddenly whoops, 2 hours of effort is gone.

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So, what DOES Megaten bring to the table? It’s not just a rehash of Wizardry with really rude mechanics. It DOES have a lot of cool ideas, but they’re also implemented…. weirdly. This game has a monster catching mechanic! You can befriend monsters then summon them using your computer. They drain resources when they’re out, but you usually make back more than you drain if you’re just killing everything. They gain no levels, but are invaluable. You can also fuse them together to create new demons. Very useful, and neccesary to continue. It’s confusing and needs a guide for you to get anything done, but still, cool idea.

What ISN’T cool is the monster catching itself. In later games, you can influence it slightly. In this game, it’s all RNG baybee. Good fucking luck. And many demons just can’t be tamed, so you’d never fucking know, but they can and WILL take your bribes, just like all the ones that can, so you’ll just assume you’re VERY unlucky.

Megaten is… a rough game. It was cool for the time and had some good ideas, but frankly, there’s no reason to ever go back to play this now. Just play Megami Tensei 2.