Shin Megami Tensei on Game Boy Advance: Tokyo's First Handheld Apocalypse
Before the series became a household name among role-playing fans, Shin Megami Tensei was a first-person dungeon crawler for the Super Famicom, released by Atlus on 30 October 1992. It stayed in Japan for 22 years. The Game Boy Advance version came out in Japan on 28 March 2003 and was the first time the game ran on a handheld.
At a glance
- Based on: the 1992 Super Famicom original; the team treated it as a remake of Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II
- Created by: Atlus; Kazuma Kaneko did character and demon design, and Tsukasa Masuko the music
- Released: Game Boy Advance, Japan, 28 March 2003
- Genre: first-person dungeon-crawling RPG
- What sets it apart: talk to demons, recruit them, fuse them, and pick a side
Premise
In a near-future Tokyo, a portal to the demon realm opens and the United States orders a nuclear strike on the city. The protagonist and two companions are sent thirty years into the future, to a ruined Tokyo where two cults, the Order of Messiah and the Ring of Gaia, fight for control. Your decisions shape your alignment (Law, Neutral or Chaos) and lead to different endings.
What the GBA version changed
- Demons and items can be traded using the console's data exchange features.
- The music was remastered.
- Changes were made to make the game easier to play.
Later mobile versions of the game were based on this edition. Famitsu scored it 27 out of 40.
The English patch
Atlus did not localise the game for the West until its iOS release in 2014, so English-speaking fans turned to patches. One released in 2021 for the GBA version carries over the official iOS English text.