Thank you mushman, though I am not gonna watch the video entirely as I wish to play SMT 2 and currently on SMT. Your SMT 1 video inspired me to play the more classic megaten games and I use it when I am stuck in SMT 1. Thanks!!!

No worries man, your style explores the full game in a specific way, nothing pretentious about it; the longer it is, the more game has to offer, secrets, alt routes and what have you, it's the nature of the beast when games get more complex and have actual branching paths.

Thanks for your work Documenting the least known games.

knew you were gonna deliver. Was looking forward to SMT II finally getting covered in your channel

hell YES. I’m unsurprised you enjoyed delving into this entry so deeply considering you already appreciated the mysterious semi-cyberpunk atmosphere of SMT1. SMT2 takes that to a whole new level and it’s joy to even just think about.

I never thought about Aleph's gun skills in 4A that's really funny. They knew it was busted

In IVA, Gaea Rage is a magic move, as is Freikugel.

@@kichiroumitsurugi4363 I would bet it still runs off Demi's Strength stat because all physical skills in 4/4A only cost MP, not HP. Or at least melee skills, Gun uses Dex.

@@UltimaKeyMaster Demi-Fiend's magic stat is also higher than his Strength btw. Gaea Rage was also not St-based in IV

Cant wait to play that, shit sounds sick

Zayin? that reminds me, I should google some words, thanks m8

@@eat00002 LOBOTOMY CORPORATION?!

@@shaggyrogers8869 I'll never see these words the same ever again.

Zayin means weapon too. I find it very funny that the "weapon" means rupert

Japanese speakers be like "Rupert-o very mysterious western name, very cool probable means something deep"

And said wife also happens to be your surrogate mother

​@@nathan7031We are all Char now

bro that’s your mom 💀

@@nathan7031 I think he's referring to Beth.

​@@Colddirectorit's Beth

I like to imagine him as extremely unlucky, like we never really got to see him at full strength. If only the sap incident never happened

It honestly says how tragic his existence is. Groomed for this sole purpose of believing he was meant to save everyone from a false messiah by puppet masters who raised him wrong on purpose.

I loved that he was bumbling comic relief.

He didn't even kill her on purpose. The man was born to be a failure, and he succeeded beyond with flying colors

I feel like the devs originally had big plans for Daleth, but either the plot changed or they didnt like how his arc was turning out so they did this to get rid of him.

Not like theres much going on that anyway 😂😂😂

This is the true Summer Game Fest experience. Love this game.

The real and more entertaining Summer Fest

Destroyed the entire “festival” 😂

Agreed, Hijiri in 3 is one of Aleph's reincarnations and no one can change my mind

he need magic for his crazy dance moves

@@abeeocta2599 in my head, the magic stat in aleph is just his shoes burning

2:47:20

@@LJCG777 Lmao exactly

Certified Chiaotsu moment

Such is the life of Marsh Mello, slayer of Minotaurs and arch-nemesis of Rag.

WE DID YEAAAAAAAH

Un saludo desde el grupo Shin Megami Tensei Latinoamérica

don't call this a comeback!

🤟

@@j.2512 Marsh has been here for years.

I wondered why people kept making art of aleph and nadja only to realize that i entirely skipped that portion of the game

Basically, yeah. He comes to the realization that the God that the Messians worship isn't actually YHVH but instead The Great Will. And The Great Will is *everything*, and everything is The Great Will. YHVH is just a "face" of The Great Will, and isn't the one true God he arrogantly claims to be.

basic gnosticism.

i did

he did lets goo

Sanity is overrated.

Nah bro, the insane people actually PLAY these games, Marsh videos are just how sane people get the story without going crazy in the dungeons

We're here waiting on the 16 hour set 3 vid.

Marsh is built different.

@@erikvaldes4293 Touche, I did in fact play 'SMT If...' after he posted his video on it... bro he was not kidding about wandering around for several full moon cycles to progress the game 💀 But actually it's more fucky than that, I didn't know you have to interact with the NPCs after each full cycle and I ended up having to do this about three times as long because I couldn't figure out what the problem was. I should have just stopped playing the game and I didn't LOL

It threw me off doubly since if you say his name out loud it sounds like it should be spelled "Zion."

I mean, IIRC, you go to Kether Palace in Mystic Square.

The whole game is "I REALLY LIKE SMT I AND II AND Y'ALL GOTTA GET IN THIS" on top of the Touhou (which is amusingly appropriate) for absolute purified fan game essence.

@@jariu9612 and tbh, classic Megaten is verh Sumicore anyway

@@jouheikisaragi6075 It really just works, it got even funnier with the latest CoLA.

It even foreshadows the ending of that game, if you think about it: People stuck in an addictive dream world, slowly withering away...

Saaaaame

same !! omg

Same here

That's the mark of a true nerd 🤓

Same! This game stayed with me all these years.

The neutral route dialogue makes me concerned that someone might pull the “surrogate means they technically aren’t related” card

appreciate it - glad you liked the elevator bit, I really wanted to drag that part out and show how long it was

I figured Okamoto was meant to be a reference to Taro Okamoto

It's funny because I recognized Joe's mentor through Megalobox and definitely thought Okamoto resembled Joe's mentor

Ashita no Joe references are a rabbit hole you enter and never leave. I was waching Digimon these days and there was an Ashita no Joe reference on it (it was a dream scene with a guy with eyepatch managing a boxer rendered on old anime style)

absolutely agree

If him and the last bible protagonist teamed up they could probably bully the great will without any resistance

@@MarshSMT but the real question is who wins, Zayin or Akira Miyamoto? I mean two half demon badasses who end up partially ruling over a giant tower/monolith, and both can kick major demon Janus, so who would win

Jokes on you, I just finished the whole first hour while working

I think I'm gonna skip movie night today, lol

​@@smtmonkeme too, just did it today

To be fair, tear-stained statues are often a recurring aesthetic.

What did you love most about it? I played it when I was a teen as well

​@@ianleather5699So many things... The idea of demon fusions, the fact that the demons were based on historical or mythical figures, summoning demons from a wrist computer, the ability to befriend demons rather than just kill them... If I had to narrow it down it would be the overall theme (god, Satan, Lucifer, Law, Chaos, Neutral), and the music. I still listen to the soundtrack (and other SMT game tracks) regularly.

It's Disco right? It's gotta be Disco

Mr. Thriller being covered in this walkthrough feels like a punch in the gut for those who loved his namesake and his timeless music. =‘(

Same here, I played SMT 2 to prepare for the video, but only played the Neutral route and at midgame the buff dmg bug kinda killed the mood. The story is amazing however.

Both are anti-religious, so yeah.

Unexpected Setsu!

On to more specialised commentary : 00:05:47 - Ah, our good old pal, Cyber Danpei- I mean Janitor Okamoto- I mean regular, future Tokyo Milenium Okamoto; nice to meet him again and see he hasn't changed his goal to make Yabuki Joe- I mean, Akira Miyamoto- I mean, Hawk, into a boxer. Some things never change. 00:05:058 - "Let's just say Okamoto's not the best with money" you're telling me buddy, poor guy had to code Black Tiger, a flight action game on some dinky pc and had to help on coding SF2 while being underpaid by Capcom, before being able to make his dream game of Final Fight at the time. What? Oh sorry, you meant this Okamoto, not Yoshiki Okamoto, my bad. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 00:23:44 - Shoulda went for the Bible names for the memes Marshal ( ͡• ͜ʖ ͡• ) 00:24:45 - Nice. 00:38:20 - Hey now Marsh, it might not seem like much but a japanese game having a buttler named "Alfred" is a huge innovation; it is almost mandated by law that every buttler EVER, is to be named "Sebastian" or "Sebas". Atlus were true trailblazers back in the day. 01:04:16 - Yup, now starts the awesomeness, with the urban myths, tv horror and horrori-fication of big action stars and symbols, still have a blast when looking at these goobers in artbooks. 01:12:00 - Marsh, come on, stop being suspicious of big method actor Robert DeNero, practicing his biggest role yet for the premier of the 1987 film Angel Heart. Just have a drink with the fine fellow, what could possible go wrong? (¬‿¬ ) 01:14:25 - The silent tears can mean something else, which may be on the nose given the early games still had themes of re-incarnation before SMT3 tried to curb it and then went back to them in DDS and SMT4; The Hero is the re-incarnation of Adam, the firstborn, so he's sad to see that his children still fight and are dogmatic and what's worse, that his creator and the angel that used to hang around the big guy, still bicker with each other and use the poor humans as toys for their petty conflict. It doesn't help that Aleph in a way, is a modern cyberpunk messiah, an artificial human, not one from dirt and mud but from a lab tank this time, and he has to repeat all the shit the Hero went through to keep the peace a little longer. It's as if the spirit of Adam, through the first SMT Hero is now going into Aleph(and the player), since Aleph wasn't a reincarnation but a creation, thus he's the Hero's spiritual successor, as the new "Adam" of a new age and a new humanity in a new millenium. Since the Hero never gives into despair but still feels sadness for others due to his empathy(insert something about the Hero being so empathic and this is why he saved the Law Hero and the Charlie Hero in his dreams. Yes, I know what I wrote). And it may be a coincidence but Cerberus saying at 01:28:33 "Hey it's me. Remember me? your old friend, Cerberus." reads less likely as a dog being playful but Cerberus now seeing you as the Hero, his previous owner, while he was still Pascal. 01:36:50 - Canon Ending of Neutral Allignment, the Hero ends up with a Pixie, just as Kaneko and Okada always intended. Amazing, no wonder this kind of masterpiece of a thematic story was repeated with SMT3 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 01:51:25 - The dance scene will be available as a QTE minigame in Shin Megami Ga Gotoku II, where Aleph will disco dance so hard, he'll actively learn the Essence of Demons and proceed to win the entire game, coming in 2034 by Sega. 01:56:47 - I want to make clear the irony of naming the place "Arcadia" as if to namedrop the greek kingdom but at the same time, a very famous magazine called "Arcadia" was going around, about Arcades and Fighting games in Japan, with artists that already dabbled or would later dabble in these kinds of dystopian societies. And the whole Arcadia here is almost set up like the dingy arcades in downtown Tokyo. 90s alternative scene Japan was quite the trip, I swear. 02:07:10 - Based Parasyte / Kiseiju enjoyer. Also a product of the 90s, I swear, something was going on in downtown Tokyo. 02:12:45 - Funny you say that because two games almost kinda had the kind of fate you describe for their themes a bit earlier and were closer to the Dungeon Crawling genre than the Doom games of the 90s; I'm refering to Ultima 8 Pagan and Ultima Underworld I and II, despite the games having you face the equivalents of Satan and you being basically a crusader of Protestan Christianity. Pagan in question was the target of many angry mobs. 02:32:32 - Insert DMC3 reference due to Kaneko, but it's actually a SMT2 reference, but it's actually a Bio Senshi Dan reference but it's actually a Contra reference. Yes, I went there. 02:43:55 - Could be but I think it goes like this : [Wisdom = Knowledge + Time(age, memories)] so it's not that they'll take away their memories, the people will lose their ability to think critically and be reduced to dumb, pacified "sheeple", only existing for food, sunlight and maybe the ocassional procreation. Basically, what they are doing is wanting to go back to how things were when Adam and Eve were around, as ignorant and blissful existences, with the minds of simpletons. In this case, [Knowledge] is one of the crucial parts of humanity in the series, the "evil" in human's soul that balances the "good/law", to reach a perfect balance. Since YHVH and the Archangels want an Eden, well...humans must be "cleansed of evil" thus Knowledge, since it was gained thanks to Lucifer's help and due to breaking the Law of their creator. In short, nowhere near as bad as what the Elders did, for sure, but not that great either. Also insert some part of social commentary about lazyness and confort and how it corrupts people to simpletons etc etc, yada yada, japanese 90s social issues, and something about Schools getting more lax and ineffective etc. and somehow lead to Persona etc. etc. 02:49:03 - I don't know the original JP script but if it is what I think it is, the way it's worded here; Lucifer probably means that "wiping the Earth clean" = "Restore the Planet to a clean and technology-free world once more" rather than human genocide, basiclaly the whole planet Earth will be Eden and how was Eden? Dumb naked people running around happy and frolicking with other animals, free under the Angels and God's watchful eye. The "inventions" of manking come from "knowledge", therefore they are "evil" like Lucifer, so they must be wiped. I think that's what they mean and it's probably re-inforced by the endings as well. 02:51:46 - Yup, called it. 02:53:44 - Wow, thanks Satan! Guess SMTIV Apocalypse was more SMT than people ever gave it credit for. Or it was one of the laziest rehashes of previous SMT plots to prop up the new stuff that would handle future Atlus from that point on. You be the judge. (¬‿¬ ) 02:55:26 - Thank you for bringing this up, I value as much authenticity as possible in translations so that's a something to have in the back of my mind, as I'm sadly not as good with japanese, yet. Also, that makes it even similar to SMTIV A than I realised, damn. SMTIV A being a pseudo neutral version of SMT2 while SMTV being "look we're SMT3" just starts to make me wonder if SMT4 would have been SMT1 all over again had it not for quite a few of Kaneko's original script notes making it in the script to at least attempt to alter the obviously SMT1-lifted plot threads and points. 03:17:18 - THANK YOU!

Really appreciate these comments, they're always a lot of fun to read through

Praise Nakajima, the True God Reborn!

So far, the SMT4 series on the Nintendo 3DS was the closest we had to SMT 1&2 being remade.

I also wonder if SMT NINE’s “Green Bear” is a reference to the colosseum’s red bear?

@@melly5741 I didn't realize it at the time but that seems pretty likely yeah good catch

Fun fact, the drinks at the bar give a boost that scales off of the stat it's raising, meaning the more you invest in a stat the more you'll get out of drinks. There's multiple possible starting stat spreads for Aleph, Hiroko and Beth that the game assigns at random at the start of the game. I'm pretty sure one of those stat spreads has Aleph start with like 2 Magic, which means a drink isn't going to get you over that threshold on its own.

"Uh... can ya suck it???"