Well, Shin Megami Tensei II is without a doubt the worst SMT game I’ve had the honor of playing. I’m being dead serious when I say I think I’ve had more fun playing DemiKids than SMT 2. It is one of the rare games in this franchise I would recommend only to a hardcore fan. The most unfortunate thing about that is that it bridges SMT 1 and Nocturne, two great games. Fortunately, one skip it with little consequence.

I had high hopes going into 2 from 1, figuring that 1’s surprise success in Japan would allow a greater budget that would fix some of SMT 1’s issues, which were mostly related to its somewhat barebones nature and limited aesthetics. Money can’t buy common sense, but I had hoped Atlus were well enough in stock. They weren’t. SMT 2 is a “one step forward, two steps back” kind of game. While it clearly has a higher budget than SMT 1—and this pays off in some ways such as more varied dungeon graphics—almost anything that could’ve been worse from SMT 1 did get worse.

I think the most frustrating thing about SMT 2’s problems is that they’re consistently things that would’ve been easy to fix, or should’ve never been put in the game in the first place. SMT 2’s problems are those of constant annoyances. The more you play the game, the more irritated by them you become because they were so easy to avoid. The biggest difference I noticed from SMT 1 was that absolutely everything was slower.

Surely, this was a deliberate design choice and not a coincidence. Turning takes an entire goddamn second, and while that may not sound like much if you haven’t played the first-person SMT games, it’s absolutely grueling when you’re turning constantly to get through huge dungeons, mapping the dungeons out, occasionally taking wrong turns, etc. The time adds up to an insane amount, and to make matters worse, there’s lag when you finish turning before you can move (which adds to my “second” count) and your compass changes. Moving in this game practically feels like you’re drunk.

It doesn’t end there. Opening the menu and pressing any button in it takes about a half second, so that adds up a ton, too. Dialogue boxes are much, much smaller than in SMT 1, yet the text size is much, much bigger. I guess it’s for all our geriatric SMT fans. Anyway, this means that even when reading battle information—which should be brief—you often have to press the A button twice to get through one event description. It’s atrocious even when set to the fastest speed possible. Auto-battle is the only way you can fight and stay sane. Pulling up the map and putting it away also takes about a second and a half, which you’ll do a lot, obviously.

And what could be more perfect for a game where exploring intrinsically takes so much time than loads of backtracking? One of the bigger things SMT 1 needed for its sequel was a more detailed mini-map, but Atlus didn’t realize this. I mean, who needs to save in a punishing game where getting anywhere can take hours? If you’ve got time to waste playing this game to begin with, then you can spend even more time scouring the map for an unmarked save point. There’s a new marker system, but you can only mark up to 8 squares and there’s no way of distinguishing them for different things, like being able to change their color. I ended up using all my spots on Terminals, and of course there weren’t anywhere near enough markers just for those.

Anyway, the game jerks you around all the time, often going all the way to a bottom of a previous dungeon where you gain no relevant EXP or Macca from the outdated enemies just to get one Key Item. Every case of backtracking in this game can be easily wrote out of the story, and that aspect defines “padding” to me. To make matters worse, there are a lot of buildings in SMT 2’s overworld that aren’t named anywhere except by NPCs, so when someone tells you to go back to one of them late in the game, you’ll often be wondering where the fuck it is and lose even more time looking for it.

Shin Megami Tensei II has the least stimulating battles out of the first four games in the series. Since magic offense sucks so badly, combat pretty much boils down to focusing entirely on physical attacks and running whenever you encounter something that blocks physical moves. Other than that, not much has changed. Spell inheritance has returned, but you can never carry more than two spells, and you can’t manipulate what carries over during Demon Fusion. I’ve only had this feature come to my advantage once or twice. Demon negotiation is far too long-winded this time with too many options leading to the same two or three results. The translation patch makes this worse by being a broken mess, resulting in many of the conversations being nonsensical. Fortunately, even if it did work, it’d just be guessing anyway—it’s still SMT negotiation.

I got excited at first when I started the game, as it seemed to be setting up a much grander story than SMT 1 with more named characters, but there’s only a modicum more volume to it than the first game. With the exception of two of these named characters, they all do extremely little in the plot, and I felt I was hyped up for nothing. The setting is generic by any standard, a dystopian society where people fight in a coliseum for a chance to be accepted into the center area, which has a higher quality of life. Obviously, this system is exploitative and blah blah. For a game that takes this trope and puts many more twists on it, play Digital Devil Saga.

This game is super tonally off for an SMT game too. It feels like an SMT game aimed at the lowest common denominator. There’s a boatload of repeated exposition that’s not necessary or interesting, as well as a bunch of lame attempts at humor that come out of nowhere. The game is never as dark or violent as you’d expect from an SMT.

All told, it’s pretty goofy until the final areas in the Abyss, which actually do feel like aesthetics suited for an SMT game. The modern environments and normal people of the game’s world are just too dull without any provided contrast to them. The music isn’t great either. I mean, it’s okay, but there’s not a single song from it I think ill listen to again, except for maybe the Chaos theme. There’s many songs that have an annoying sound font to them that seems to imply comic relief.

I’m kind of at a loss for words about Shin Megami Tensei II. I wouldn’t go as far to as to call it bad, if only because of what very little of SMT’s distinctive style remains—but it’s too close to comfort. Even the lesser SMT games tend to have something interesting about them to make them worth playing, but Shin Megami Tensei II—whether it’s the plot, art design, music, or combat—has nothing.

It’s inferior in every regard to the rest of the franchise and among the most annoying to play through. It’s puzzling how it turned out like this, but I can only assume it was an attempt to make the game more palatable for a wider audience. The results are, after all, exactly what you would expect from that decision: it’s generic. Mediocre in all ways, rather than specializing in anything. It was shocking to me to discover that one of the most influential SMT games is among the worst ones to actually experience.

Putting you on Law alignment for using the default character names at the beginning is pretty funny, though.