Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (デジタル・デビル物語 女神転生), released 9/11/1987, developed by Atlus, published by Namco

This is of course the first game in the long-running Megami Tensei franchise that still lives on today (primarily through Persona, although they seem to release a new SMT game about every 10 years.) I played this game quite a while ago in the SNES remake (Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei), although when I played it then I used online maps to make things easier. This time I wanted to try making my own maps to see more what the game would have been like if you played it “as intended.”

When this game came out, there weren’t a whole lot of blobber first person exploration RPGs. For consoles there was only Deep Dungeon and DD2, very primitive games that just have one character and a fairly small dungeon. On computers there were the first 4 Wizardry games, Might and Magic 1, Bard’s Tale 1 and 2, and the first 4 Ultima games (which all had some first-person dungeons in them). All of these games share the general design where there isn’t actually that much you have to do to win the game, and there isn’t a great deal to find in the dungeons. The majority of the game is finding your way through the mazes (and making maps since I don’t believe any of those games have an automap), and building the levels of your characters to the necessary point to win the game.

Megami Tensei is also basically like this, but it also has the demon recruiting and fusing game system. MT does pale in comparison to modern games and even to many of the later blobber games that were coming in the late 80s and early 90s. However, I feel that it compares quite well to what was available at the time. By the time you reach the Shin Megami Tensei games I think the series is falling behind games like the Gold Box D&D games, the later Might and Magics, and the DW Bradley Wizardry games, with far too little development from the first game. But here everything feels fresh, and even the interface is not that bad.

As you might expect, the weakest part is the storyline. I don’t know if it was intended to fit in with the novels, but the instruction booklet gives the back story — Nakajima (a reincarnation of Izanagi) made a computer program to summon demons but that caused a bunch of demons to come into the world. With the help of a transfer student Yumiko (Izanami), they defeat Loki and Set, but later Lucifer comes back and creates a huge labyrinth. Nakajima and Yumiko have to go in there and defeat Lucifer.

This is basically the whole story — there’s a bit of plot development during the game but not much. However, for 1987 that’s not unexpected.

As usual you begin by assigning stats. One oddity in this game is that Yumiko’s spell learning is based on Nakajima’s intelligence and level + Yumiko’s intelligence and level. So this makes it even more worthwhile to boost nakajima’s intelligence (which I think helps him recruit monsters). I put most of my points into Strength, Speed, and Intelligence.

One of the themes I’ve been looking at in these early game posts is how “friendly” the beginning of the game is. Here you begin on a floor with no enemies, and you can get introduced to the interface as well as find the shop, healing area, and some hints. The enemies on the first few floors are not very difficult, and if you die you go back to the town with half your gold but everything else kept. I think this ranks on the “friendly” side of 1987 RPGs.

After buying some equipment for the duo, I headed down to the other floors of the Daedalus tower. There are 8 floors — 8F is the town, 7F-2F are 8×8 floors, and the bottom 1F floor is triple size. I made maps as I went, aided by the “mapler” spell.

It was quite nostalgic to be making the maps myself. I had fun doing it, although I don’t know if I could have kept up that interest for the whole game — there are about 30 different floors, many of which are much larger than 8×8.

However, as you can see there’s not much to find on each floor — the first two floors have one treasure chests and some hints.

One thing I did not write down is that some rooms have guaranteed encounters with one recruitable monster. You can use this to get Dryads and other useful allies that you can combine at the Jakyo place in town. This is quite an innovative game element and I think the game deserves a lot of credit for implementing this system in 1987, at a time when most RPGs were not trying to do much beyond the basics.

The recruitment system is basically the same as the next few games — the main difference here is that you can only recruit a demon if there is only a single demon there. In this game you only ever fight one type at a time, but there might be 5 enemies and in that case you will have to kill 4 of them before you try to recruit.

The dialogues here are familiar from Shin Megami Tensei — the monster will often want you to put down your weapons, or will be scared. They may run away, attack, or end up asking for Magnetite or money. Eventually they may join or may not. I’ve never seen any behind-the-scenes information on what actually determines whether this succeeds or not. I imagine it’s a combination of your choices and luck, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least in the original game there’s no way to know what you should be doing (based on the enemy type, or whatever).

Anyway, I mapped my way through 7F-2F. Along the way I picked up a Cerberus which was a very helpful ally. I was also able to combine two other monsters into a Baku, which can cast a full heal spell that is quite helpful as well. By the time I reached 1F, Nakajima and Yumiko were level 9, and I had all the best buyable equipment from the shop.

There were two chests with money, and a number of people who gave hints. From those, I learned that the elevator would activate when I got a Shizutama (gem), and that there was a Minotaur boss on 1F. Other hints were about gameplay (that you can only recruit certain types of monsters, that there has to be only 1 monster, and that monsters are stronger in certain moon phases).

1F is three times the size of the rest of the dungeon. Here you find the Minotaur, the first boss.

He has 700 hp which is quite high, and I didn’t even come close to beating him. You do need to beat the Minotaur eventually to win the game, but you don’t need to do it right away. You can instead move on to the Valhalla Corridor.

There are stronger monsters to recruit and a shop here with stronger equipment, so it’s possible to do some more training here before you take on the Minotaur for real.

This is where I stopped playing. I said earlier that this is quite an impressive game for the time it came out — I wonder what I would have thought of it, if I had played it as a kid. I started getting into these kind of maze exploration games in the early 90s (I was playing older ones since we had bad computers that couldn’t run newer games). I believe that if I had played this game back then, I would have liked it. In comparison to Deep Dungeon, there is just more of everything, including the whole recruitment and fusion system.

I should be back with a new post this coming weekend although it’s possible I won’t have one until the 18th.