Shin Megami Tensei: Part 2: Video Game Beginings and Atlus

See, I told you the company will be a Titan. Or rather the loose misspelling of one. But let's focus on Namco first because they got the license from Nishitani.

Namco was interested in making the story into video game material and prior to them, Telenet Japan (a defunct video game company) made a Gauntlet-esque style game. But Namco had a different priority. But as such, it went to a smaller company (Atlus) to make the game.

Atlus was a very relatively new player in the video game market, and just made it onto the scene when other gaming companies like Squaresoft (Square-Enix) and Nintendo already had some ground as well as Sega (both Nintendo and Sega had been around long before shifting their focuses on the Video Game market with Nintendo selling Trading Cards and Sega doing Arcade Machines and even in WWII selling slot machines when it was an American Enterprise on Hawaii. Also, Atlus is now Subsidiary of the Sega company and many people joke it is the only good investment Sega has done given all the bad Sonic games. I would agree.)

Atlus made, instead of a Gauntlet game, a Dungeon Crawler that took heavy inspiration from the storyline of DDS: Megami Tensei, many aspects influencing the future of the franchise. The setting is in Modern Tokyo rather than a fantasy setting, Loki as an antagonist and also Set and as the true villain, Lucifer. Summoning Demons from a Computer and negotiations with the enemies to make them Potential Allies was another aspect that still has its roots in DDS: Megami Tensei. And the monster collection genre was a mainstay staple and is a pioneer of the genre. (When this franchise became popular in the West, people compared it to Pokemon.) But these were the small aspects of the game that would make it into the overall franchise of Shin Megami Tensei. The real story is of the two visionaries to made leaps with the game's story.

Kazuma Kaneko (one of my favorite modern artists) and Kouji (Cozy) Okada had both been involved with Atlus since the founding. (Cozy is one of the Six founders of Atlus) Both of them, as well as the Atlus team, wanted to Remake Digital Devil Story so they did but what became a remake, became an all-new storyline. But what made Shin Megami Tensei stand out was the name.

You see, Megami Tensei means Goddess Reincarnation or Goddess Metapsychosis. (The cycles of life, death, and rebirth that were usually tributed to the Goddess Izanami in the very early games.) However, add the Shin and you have the word for True or New so the literal name is True or New Goddess Metapsychosis.

When you think about it, it's kind of a cheap ploy but it's effective nonetheless as the RPG had a new design and look with all sorts of artwork done by Kazuma Kaneko. In fact, my next article will analyze some of the demon designs as well as the human designs for the Shin Megami Tensei Series.