Game Reviews: Megami Tensei II and Super Mario RPG

Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II (1990)

Played the Super Famicom version, which is good because the Famicom original definitely would’ve killed me.

I’ve played 80s Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, SaGa, Ys, Phantasy Star. Of all those classic console RPG series, only classic MegaTen feels like something made exclusively for true 80s PC RPG freaks. You know what I (lovingly) mean: the kind of people that beat Wizardry without backing up their save disk, that filled up an entire graph paper pad playing Might & Magic. I played Shin Megami Tensei on Super Famicom years ago, and it was leagues gentler than its Famicom predecessors.

The first game was tough-as-nails and taxing on my patience, but I still managed to get through the softened Super Famicom version without a guide or emulator cheats. I unwisely jumped into Megami Tensei II immediately, and for the first five or so hours, it seemed almost too easy. I was worried they’d overcompensated for the difficulty of the first game. Then the world opened up, and I experienced about fifteen or so hours of pure classic console RPG bliss. I honestly got Dragon Quest III tingles from exploring dungeons, mapping out the overworld, and hunting down the seven pillars. I really can’t overstate how good a time this section of the game is.

There’s no reason the game couldn’t have wrapped up after this. All it needed was a meaty dungeon or two in the underworld to put a nice bow on the story. But no, finding the seven pillars is barely the halfway point. The back-half of the game, “the underworld,” is an extended dungeon gauntlet, and the event flagging suddenly gets much meaner. These dungeons are also presented in a largely linear order, so the open-ended pacing that made the first half such a joy is largely absent in the second half.

 

I think the moment where I fully lost my patience was when the game demanded I fuse a specific demon in order to progress the story. It offered no guidance on how to fuse it, or even that I needed to fuse it (versus finding and recruiting them as part of a dungeon event). When I looked up how to fuse it in a guide, it still took me a full 20-30 minutes (with frame-skip!) to recruit a damn harpy for it.

As far as I can tell, the intended pacing here was to stop dead and spend ten or so hours wandering the world, recruiting random demons, and trying different fusions. Or maybe I was supposed to quit, start the game over six months later, and go “OH!” when I spotted that demon by happenstance on my early game fusion list. (For the record, they make you do this again with a different demon for another dungeon.)

At this point, I knew I was either hard quitting, or playing the rest of the game like an absolute bastard. I chose violence. Armed with a guide, frame-skip, imperfect maps (the ones on GameFAQs are for the Famicom version), and save states, I successfully mainlined the rest of the game in about six hours. I’ll let you guess how much fun it was.

Is there a point to playing RPGs like this? I think it’s a valid question. When I was very young, I played on hardware and didn’t know about walkthroughs. When I got stuck in Chrono Trigger or Pokemon Red, I’d simply start the game over. Making progress was less important than the simple joy of playing an RPG.

Then I discovered ZSNES and GameFAQs, save states and frame-skip. Suddenly I could dismantle these games I’d struggled with as a kid. I’m not sure I ever made it to the Moon in Final Fantasy IV on SNES hardware – now, armed with new tools, I could make it through the whole game almost trivially. 

I played games like this for a long time. Eventually it got boring. There’s a dramatic weight that’s lost in an RPG when you can frame-skip fast-forward through a whole dungeon, when you can grind your character to absurd levels in maybe fifteen minutes. The developers paced the game the way they did for a reason. Often following that intended pacing makes for the best experience.

I mostly try to play games “legit” now, not for gamer dick-measuring points but because I simply find it more rewarding. But the tools are still there. If I really get stuck, to the point that I’m ready to quit playing the game, I’ll almost always pick looking at a guide over quitting. Of course, once you’ve looked once, it’s much more tempting to look again, because the playthrough is already “tainted.” Same with frame-skip or save states. And that can snowball into having my nose glued to a guide and cheating like hell for the rest of the game, like it did with Megami Tensei II.

It ultimately comes down to trust. As a little kid, I trusted games implicitly, because it didn’t occur to me that a game could be “bad,” that it could waste my time. Once I got access to tools that could circumvent a game’s intended pacing, that general trust I had for games collapsed, and it took years to purposefully rebuild it.

I went into Megami Tensei II expecting, at the very least, that it wouldn’t be harder and scarier than the first Megami Tensei. I trusted that would be the case, even though the game itself never made me that promise. When that assumption proved incorrect, when twenty hours in it became even scarier and more demanding in some ways than its 1987 predecessor, my trust in the game collapsed. 

This isn’t really fair — the designers absolutely wanted me to have a good time. They built the game with that intent in mind. But they also built it to be an expensive, hardcore Famicom RPG in 1990. The intent was that I’d plug away at it over multiple months, possibly starting over from the beginning multiple times. They weren’t accounting for me loading it up on my Anbernic that has a thousand other games on it, intending to cruise through it in a couple of weeks.

I can’t fully control when my trust in a game breaks, or to what degree. There are, after all, times when a game should lose my trust, when the design was rushed or outright incompetent and the game’s intended pacing is too miserable to be worth it. It’s easier when a game loses me early because I can just stop — I remember playing the first few hours of Golden Sun, immediately hating the cadence of the writing, and dipping. And occasionally I can guide my way past one ill-considered puzzle in a game I'm enjoying and then get back on track (the palm tree puzzle in Final Fantasy Adventure springs to mind).

But I was twenty hours into Megami Tensei II and having a ball when it started hitting me with one indignity after the other. Did I mention the colosseum with level-scaled enemies that’s balanced such that it felt nearly impossible when I tackled it but would’ve been trivially easy if I’d visited five hours earlier? Did I mention that you can lock yourself out of the true end battle with YVWH early on with a seemingly inconsequential dialogue option? I actually became physically seething mad. Once I’m that deep, it becomes a choice between dropping it (no closure, unsatisfying to the point that it’s nearly impossible for me), white-knuckling it and continuing to play legit (works out great sometimes, but if my trust collapsed for good reason it can make me lose my mind), or cheating my way to the end quickly (half closure, unsatisfying).

I think I’ll be struggling with this balance the rest of my life. I generally want to extend more trust to game developers than I do now. I’ve felt that way for a long time, and for the most part I’ve been getting better at it all the time. I want to engage with truly demanding, niche videogames for weirdos, and the only way to do that is with a wide-open heart. But there are games (like Arknights for example) that don’t deserve my trust. I need listen to the doubt inside me sometimes too.

I’m not sure where Megami Tensei II lands, ultimately. It’s a good RPG, I think. The first half is great. The bits where you need specific demons to progress are bullshit. If they’d taken those out, I might’ve had the patience to put up with the rest of the less heinous bullshit in the back-half. I probably should’ve just replayed Shin Megami Tensei and continued forward from there.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996)

What a delight. I played the whole damn game with a big grin on my face.

What do you even need to say? Super Mario RPG is a tightly paced sub-20 hour RPG by 90s Square at the top of their game, an unpretentious high energy roller coaster full of adorable set-pieces and ideas. The setting is full of wild creative characters; it's not processed IP slurry like the more recent Mario RPGs. Go play it, it rules.

That said, I did feel a contrarian take brewing in me about halfway through the game. Mario RPG is fun, but it's essentially pure sugar, right? This is the cute humble set-piece RPG they made (seemingly effortlessly) in the footsteps of their more ambitious SNES successes like Chrono Trigger, the Final Fantasy's, or Live A Live. It's even more linear, easy, and episodic than usual. It's good, but clearly a lesser entry in the canon.

I think there's truth to all that. But the last third of the game has just enough real RPG and children's fantasy storytelling chops to elevate it over being solely a romp for me. The dungeons get deeper and longer, and the bosses get legitimately A Lil Tricky. Often there's one more dungeon or boss at a climactic section than you'd expect. It's not Megami Tensei or whatever, but if you want open-ended PC RPG grit from 90s Square you're better off playing SaGa than any of the games in Final Fantasy IV's roller coaster tradition.

As far as the overall story goes, the resolution with Geno was lovely, and I adore everything about Smithy. "RPG villain that operates from the background the whole game, whose nature and motivation only snaps into focus in the climax" is a strong shape, and Smithy's a good take on it. And of course, everything's elevated by the Shimomura's wonderful score.

A lot of the game is cotton candy. But the artists working at Square in the 90s weren't the best to ever do it because their games were super-smart or thematically deep, and it certainly wasn't because the games were grueling challenges. It's because they played with game language in ways almost no else did — and still don't. They were loose and improvised and good at tying things together in the edit. They weren't beholden to "the one right way to do things." Super Mario RPG isn't my favorite game from that era, but it's a great one, and firmly representative of everything that made Square's classics so magical.

(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)