Shin Megami Tensei anyone?

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I know there's got to be some SMT fans hanging around here. ^_^ I haven't played much of the older ones, just some of SMT1 and Persona: IS (waiting for the psp release! Haven't got emulators working properly on my new laptop), but I am a super huge fan of the ones I have played. Nocturne was an eye-opening beauty. I could never be a Final Fantasy fan after playing it!

Here's a list of the ones I've played:

SMT: Nocturne (beat)
Persona 3 (original release beat and some of P3P girl vers.)
P4 (about half-through, didn't like the characters)
Digital Devil Saga 1 (Beat)
DDS2 (stuck miserably in final dungeon)
Raidou Kuzunoha 1 (beat)
Raidou 2 (partial)
Devil Survivor (stuck miserably on final boss)
Strange Journey (partial)
Persona IS (about half)
Persona PSP (partial)
SMT1 (partial)

I wanted to get into this series, but most of the early games aren't translated yet.

Depends on how far back you want to go, really. And whether or not you want to use emulation. I've never tried to play Megami Tensei 1 or 2, I jumped straight to the "Shin" stuff, but I bet if you poked around you could find a translation patch for them. I definitely know you can find an English version of the first SMT both in a physical cartridge and emulation.

But if you really want to stay free of emulation, the first Persona game (which you can play without any knowledge of the main series) got a PSP remake last year, and the second (both IS and EP) are getting remakes to be released this fall. At least IS is coming out this fall. I think EP's still in the making. And then 3 and 4 are on the PS2, so the Persona series is really a great way to jump into the franchise without having to use.... questionable means. Digital Devil Saga is another spin-off that isn't really connected to anything else, and both of those are out for the PS2. Same with the Raidou games.

But that said, only SMT, SMT II, and if... really have connecting story lines in the main series. Nocturne and Strange Journey both have self-contained plots. Their connection is really more one of general themes. Kind of like Final Fantasy games, except the general themes are... actually existent in things other than artwork and cinematics? (Yeah, I don't think too highly of FF. I enjoyed X when I was a silly teenager and the first one was pretty good, but beyond that I'm just not impressed.)

Personally, I think Nocturne is a great place to start. It's a fairly "pure" example of what the series is about, by which I mean that it's a game set in post-apocalyptic Tokyo where you recruit demons via a negotiation system and your task is not just to save the world but to decide it's future based on your choice of philosophical reasoning. Where it's not so typical is that it doesn't adhere to the law/chaos system you see in the ones before it and after it. Instead, there's about six different endings you can choose from based on the different lines of reasoning presented by the characters. It also introduced the press-turn system which you'll also see in DDS 1&2, where you gain turns by exploiting the enemy's weakness but can also lose turns for having your weakness exploited or by hitting the enemies strengths.

But that said, it's got this one difficult boss right at the beginning (Matador) but the difficulty comes not so much from the boss itself being difficult so much as that in order to beat the boss you've got to know a bit about how the battle system works. You can't just brute your way through it, in other words. You need to have some knowledge of how the elemental strengths and weaknesses in the game work. Getting to know the buff/de-buff spells and filling your party with force-resistant demons wouldn't hurt either. For me he was a very discouraging boss, but with the aid of a guide and some luck in getting good demons, he shouldn't be that horrible. Like I said, it's not so much a matter of your character's strength as it is your knowledge. Looking back, he's so easy to beat. And the rest of the game's bosses are pretty manageable, which is why I'd suggest going to this one first. It has several side-quest/bonus bosses that are absolutely horrible, but they're avoidable. It's basically just a good game to get your feet wet, unlike, say, DDS1 which has one of the hardest bosses I think I've ever beat AND IT'S NOT EVEN THE FINAL BOSS...

Strange Journey might be easier to find because it's on the DS. It's much more similar to the older games, being first-person with a similar battle system and the law/chaos system. On the downside, it is much, much harder than Nocturne. (At least it is in my opinion.)

I don't mean to discourage you at all, though. Or suggest that the difficulty is a bad thing. You don't get into the SMT series because it's easy. XD But I also get that a lot of people can get incredibly discouraged when they can't beat the first boss of the game and it makes them turn away from the series, and I'd be really sad if that happened to you!

Nocturne, Lucifer's Call version. (There are what, 4 notable variations now?)

P3, FES version.

DDS, haven't had time for DDS2 yet.

Strange Journey.

If you're talking world-wide, i think that's about right. @_@ I think there's really only two different versions as far as content goes. There's the version without the fiends and the amala labyrinth and the version with. I think the only difference between the NA and EU versions were naming. And language options. Japan was the only place to see the original.

I've never played FES. I refuse to believe the horrible thing that it brought to the game that I'm not going to mention because it's a spoiler actually happened. In the world I live in, it's nonsense. No such thing happened, and you will never convince me otherwise. T_T (I beat the original version before FES came out and thought it had one of the most beautiful awesome endings to a video game ever. FES won't shatter my love.)

I LOVE digital devil saga (PS2). Amazing ambience in that game.

I played a lot through Strange Journey (Nintendo DS) till it got stolen.

Well I'd like to start with the original Megami Tensei games, or at least the SNES remake of the two of them, but none of those are translated.

I'd be willing to skip those and try Shin Megami Tensei, but that's only been translated on the SNES, and it'd be much more convenient for me if the Sega CD or especially the GBA versions had translations.

I've beat P3P with both the Male and Female MC's. I've beat the Persona remake on PSP. I've also beaten Devil Survivor on the DS (which isn't as good as the Persona games, in my opinion). And I'm ordering Persona 4 through Amazon.

By the way, did you catch the Catherine reference in P3P? Awesome!

Oh yeah, I forgot about having played FES! You're referring to what happens in The Answer, I presume.

Yep. Here I go falling in love with a game and they go and add a "bonus" ending that makes me want to cry. Just not polite, I tell you.

I remember vanilla Nocturne, MANIAX edition (Which I think is more or less identical to PAL's Lucifer's Call), and a remake with Raidou instead of Dante.

I've only seen a copy of plain old NA Nocturne myself, but this is what wiki had to say on the confusing matter:

I see.

I very rarely delete a demon. I usually just fuse them ad infinitum.

I own...

Nocturne(Passed where you are. cant go on becuase I dont want to run into dante. thats just WTF)

Persona 1(beat)

Persona 2 EP(neeed to find my ps2 to play it)
Perona 2 IS( not sure I want to continue with out playing its other half at same time)

Persona 3(P3, FES. PSP. beat all. FES made the ending even more heart felt it also helps with P4)

Persona 4 (beat it with reall 100% blamed alll the right guys ending. thought it was badliy writen and wanted to kill all the girls not save them, I miss you Yukacan)

Digital devil saga 1/2(beat Ending made my head spin)

SMT devil summoner 1(beat)
SMT devil summoner 2(not opened)
strange journey (lost DS)
I also own Catherine Love is over copy.(I already paid it off)

You are the first person I have ever heard say that p4 was badly written! 0-0 (Granted, I don't know a lot of people who even know what P4 is...) I basically stopped playing that game because the new characters from Kanji onward were just so poorly written compared to the first three! Kanji was a walking gay joke (which was difficult for me to look past because I'm gay), Rise was aggravating and shallow, and Naoto's entire "conflict" was shoved into two minutes of dialogue. Teddie was just annoying, can't really remember if his was poorly written.

And really, it wasn't so much that they were badly written that bothered me. There are tons of horribly written characters in great video games. For me, it was that Yukiko, Chie, and Yosuke all had such great shadows, and then when you hit Kanji everything felt rushed and shallow. We stopped seeing the internal conflicts of the characters and started seeing the internal conflicts of stereotypes. It's like the people who wrote the game just stopped caring and so did I.

it really was. In p3 I even questioned what me persona would be. In p4 all I could think was why not just go on tv again/ think for one second and as to what's really going on and the real 100(how you awaken ending) ruins a great legand AND the small town. I found so many loopholes and fails. I new the real enemy from the 2ed month.