If you’re of a certain vintage and inclination – and sorry to make assumptions, but given you’re currently reading Eurogamer I reckon it’s likely you are – you’ll be familiar with an infamous review of Doom way back in 1994 that ended up asking what if you could talk to the monsters. It’s an idle thought that’s since passed into legend, oft-mocked and even held up as some vague prophecy, but I’ve only just realised it’s not really that strange a notion. Maybe the mysterious reviewer behind this particular Edge legend was just really into Shin Megami Tensei, the long-running RPG series in which, yes, you absolutely can talk to the monsters.
There’s a slim chance that’s the case, seeing as this is a series whose genesis can be traced back to 1987, and one that stands as a grandee of the RPG genre alongside the likes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy – even if it’s never quite had the global appeal of either. Partly that’s thanks to the sporadic nature of mainline releases – Shin Megami Tensei 5, which is out on Switch this week, comes some eight years after the fourth installment, which itself has a clean ten-year gap to 2003’s Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne. Partly it’s because Shin Megami Tensei’s various spin-offs have overtaken the mainline series in terms of popularity – the Persona games easily eclipse the series from which they span off in terms of profile, which has in turn set some awkward expectations for newcomers to a core Shin Megami Tensei title.
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