This Page is:
A place for me to rant about random topics.
Megami Tensei is a JRPG franchise that started in 1987 with Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei.
DDS:MT was, itself, based on a novel series by Aya Nishitani. These books were about a boy named Akemi Nakajima getting revenge on his bullies by summoning a demon to screw with them. Said demon, Loki, ends up killing a large population of his school and ends up kickstarting Nakajima to go on an adventure with his classmate Yumiko Shirasagi, who dies several times over. These books are weird.
Nowadays, DDS:MT is more accessible than ever. In fact, several popular Megaten YouTubers just put together a fully voiced visual audiobook of the first novel. I haven't listened to it myself yet, but it's obviously had a lot of work put into it.
Megaten is one of the most prominent JRPG franchises ever nowadays, especially with the success and popularity of Persona 5.
Megaten also has a great many games for most consoles nowadays. The original games are available on the Super Famicom, the original SMT games are available both on the Famicom and PsX, and the original Persona has an enhanced rerelease on the Playstation Portable.
If I listed every console Megaten is on, frankly, I would be here forever.
This is going to spiral into a rant about one of the most present topics in my mind right now, so forgive me.
Mainly, the death of physical media and the use of the internet as a method of preservation.
Physical media is dying out.
I don't want this to sound like a Phone Bad Book Good argument, I promise. I just think it's important to have physical copies of things that don't cost 5000 dollars. I'm serious.
Something I've noticed over my years as a Megaten fan has been that physical copies of most of these shitty (pardon my language) games from the Playstation 1 and 2 era cost well over 100 dollars. In fact, DSRK1 costs about $275 for a used copy.
If you want to access many of these games, you need an emulator. It's nearly impossible to discuss Megaten as a franchise without mentioning emulation, in my humble opinion. So many of this franchise's foundational games are nearly impossible to access without it nowadays. SMT1 got an official English translation for iOS in 2014, which was actually quite revolutionary for the franchise.
Unfortunately, they let this translation die out with the release of iOS 11 and have not done anything to bring it to newer consoles, despite the translation being actually quite good and still in their archives.
G-MODE, a software company in Japan, recently ported all three Last Bible games to Steam (without region lock) and Nintendo Switch. This is revolutionary for the franchise! Unfortunately, these were not officially done by ATLUS. It's a step in the right direction, I'm certain, but not one ATLUS is willing to take.
ATLUS is generally incredibly reluctant to translate or port older games to newer consoles, something that was brought under more scrutiny by their recent practices regarding. Sigh. Persona 5.
ATLUS has been under fire recently for many reasons, but mostly milking Persona 5 while ignoring the titles that helped boost the series into the public eye in the first place. Persona 5 Royal got an enhanced rerelease for Ps5, Ps4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Steam on October 21, 2022.
Most of the merch and announcements for the Persona 25th Anniversary last year were for Persona 3, 4, and 5. They have a long history of ignoring P1, P2IS, and P2EP to the point where some people joke about them not existing. Whether or not these jokes are annoying to you doesn't matter here, they obviously exist for a reason.
Persona 5 has too many properties. Recently, a mobile spin-off that's essentially Persona 5 again called P5X was announced, much to the distaste of many fans. (It's also a whole other story that the protagonist of this looks like Tatsuya Suou, the protagonist of P2IS, and there's another character in an in-game asset that looks like Tatsuya's canon male love interest Jun Kurosu. Some of this can debatably be added to ATLUS's list of queerbaiting their fanbase by evoking imagery of the only gay couple in the series without intending on any way to follow through to keep their middle aged dudebro fans happy, but that's. Again. Another tangent.)
While my off-topic tangent was very off-topic, I promise it does relate back to the death of physical media.
Because of the lack of effort by ATLUS to preserve any of their older games to focus on Creating Profit, many of these games are nearly inaccessible now for the general audience.
When you want to play one of the Famicom games for example, you must test your luck on eBay and pay a good chunk of money to purchase the physical copy. Sometimes you can find them in retro game stores, mostly in Japan, but they're not cheap.
Some of the games are dirt cheap on Amazon, like Nocturne and both DDS games (which I purchased for $25 each), but my physical 3DS copy of Soul Hackers cost $65 alone.
This is why emulation is so big in the Megaten community.
Emulation is the process of using software called an Emulator to simulate a game console and play games on your computer or phone.
My personal feelings about emulation aside, I must leave the PSA here that Internet Piracy Is Wrong And I Do Not Condone It.
Alright, obligatory message over. Wink Wink.
Emulation is not technically illegal. You're supposed to dump the BIOS required for most emulators from an actual console and extract the ROMs from actual games, not downloaded from online. Sometimes games just run better on emulators than they do on the console, to be frank.
Still, like I said, it's nearly impossible to access the physical copies needed to dump ROMs from physical games. So most emulated games are spread over the internet. For more about this sort of thing, read my FAQ in the sidebar.
Despite this, ATLUS seems to be increasing prices even for newer games. Soul Hackers 2's complete edition cost about 90 dollars, with the base game being $60. Day one DLC should not cost half the price of the base game.
Fans have been expressing their distaste for this business practice for ages, but ATLUS has no intention of stopping, it seems. They also did not follow the same practice other companies do with console releases, charging for a whole new copy of Persona 5 Royal's Ps5 version regardless of whether or not the person owned it on the Ps4. Most games do not charge extra for console upgrades.
All in all, ATLUS has proven time and time again that they do whatever generates the most revenue for them. It's partly caused them to (in my opinion) stagnate in terms of creating good and unique games. Each new ATLUS title as of late has gotten less interested reviews, almost like they're sort of afraid to do new things (again, in my opinion.)
SMT V doesn't have a lot to say aside from concepts that would be more interesting if explored deeper, with many people saying that it feels like it wants to be Nocturne. Soul Hackers 2 barely feels like a sequel or even a Devil Summoner title, stepping lightly into the water of new gameplay without having a defined enough concept to be more than passively engaging. Persona 5, while visually a peak in the franchise, doesn't really know what it's saying with its own story and frequently walks back on very interesting things it would have had to say.
Now, I'm not sure why this is happening. Most people are generally unhappy with the state of ATLUS's recent catalogue. They seem to be endlessly chasing increases in profit without listening to what the fans actually want. The early Megaten titles have a cult following, and if they made any content at all of the first three Persona titles, they would make insane amounts of money. Maybe they're too scared of having gay people in their games. I dunno.
So if they would make a lot of money porting and rereleasing old games, why don't they do it? Part of it might be because they're pandering to a very specific audience that doesn't like change, but it might also be the result of them not taking much meaningful input from their fans as of late. Plus, their ports have been historically lazy and quite janky, refusing to listen to fans' input on most of them anyways.
The DDS1 port to the PSNetwork on the Ps3 has insanely bad framerate issues. Like, to the point it runs at a drastically decreased speed. Music glitches, voice acting has syncing errors, and it's prone to freezing. The Nocturne HD remaster reuses the old Ps2 cutscenes (very visibly) and Unity glitches the fog out of one of the endings, ruining the visuals. It's bad. The audio is also still extremely compressed. Even recently, Persona 3 Portable's remaster was done with AI upscaling, leaving noticably streaky and badly rerendered images. The backgrounds look horrifically bad. They outsourced that port, but still. It's not good. People have been unhappy with their porting practices for years, which might contribute to them not doing more, instead of raising the quality. You know, the thing most fans want.
Well, in order not to get all capitalism-bad-y on you, I think one of the most important things to bring up to demonstrate why this matters is the recent case against Internet Archive's library. Internet Archive is, in all seriousness, the most important website on the internet. It's full of thousands of important documents, books, videos, games, the wayback machine, everything.
Recently, four publishing houses sued Internet Archive (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House) for mass copyright infringement. The Archive is full of hundreds of thousands of digitized books, scanned from people who physically own them and technically falling under fair use. If the books published by these companies are removed, countless people will lose access to them and a large chunk of our archives will be removed.
It really reminds me that the internet isn't a safe way to preserve these things. When large companies decide they want to destroy one of the most reliable ways to keep track of our history, they can just get away with it. And, personally, I think that shouldn't be allowed.
These sorts of things are difficult cases. It's not like we can do much about it, aside from making an effort to preserve them ourselves. Thankfully, we do have publishers like G-MODE and a web project called Flashpoint which is an app that contains several TERABYTES of archived flash games. It's not too late. We still do have hope. People just need to do their parts, and thankfully, people seem to be willing to do so.