Shin Megami Tensei II

Shin Megami Tensei II  is a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game developed and published by Atlus. It was originally released for the Super Famicom in 1994 in Japan, and has since been ported to multiple platforms. It is the second game in the Shin Megami Tensei series, which is a subset of the larger Megami Tensei franchise.

Gameplay
The player takes the role of the gladiator Hawk, who is able to communicate with demons. The gameplay is identical to the first Shin Megami Tensei, the game is controlled from a first-person view, has the player exploring dungeons and navigating outdoor areas, which are presented as 2D maps seen from a top-down perspective.

In both types of areas, the player encounters and battles against demons; a gauge on the bottom of the screen shows the likelihood of a demon encounter.

Story
Hawk wins the gladiator tournament in Valhalla, obtaining citizenship in the Center, and is asked by Hiroko to help her find a boy who has gone missing. Upon their failure to find him, they are escorted by Zayin to the Center, where they meet the Messian bishop. He reprimands Hiroko for acting independently and tells Hawk that his true identity is Aleph, the Messiah, who will save mankind and bring about the paradisiacal "Thousand-Year Kingdom", and that Beth was sent by God as the Messiah's partner. The Center sends Aleph and Beth on missions across Tokyo Millennium to eradicate demons and prepare the world for the Thousand-Year Kingdom. They meet with Gimmel, and are shown Arcadia, a prototype of the Thousand-Year Kingdom. Returning to the Center, they learn that demons have invaded and that someone the bishop calls the Anti-Messiah is proclaiming to the people that he is the true Messiah. Aleph and Beth are sent to stop him, and learn that he is a man named Daleth. During the ensuing fight, Daleth nearly kills Aleph, but Beth sacrifices herself, allowing Aleph to regain the upper hand. Honoring Beth's dying wish, he spares Daleth, and is considered the true Messiah.

With the demon Nadja, Aleph travels through the underground, finding a brainwashed Hiroko in a concentration camp. Her cell is guarded by Zayin, who admits to having doubts about the Center's action and lets Aleph free Hiroko; she refuses to leave, but Nadja frees her from the brainwashing by fusing with her. On their way back, Aleph and Hiroko learn that the Center has released the demon Abaddon to swallow the entire Valhalla district, and that the Center only plans to let those they deem worthy be allowed to live in the Thousand-Year Kingdom; everyone else would be abandoned and left to die. Zayin starts a revolt against the Center, who threatens to cut off the air supply to the Holytown district if he does not surrender; he, Aleph and Hiroko go to the Center to confront the four elders leading it.

Aleph and Hiroko learn that the elders are actually the archangels Michael, Raphael, Uriel and Gabriel; Aleph and Hiroko fight and kill the first three archangels, after which Gabriel reveals that YHVH, the creator god, had ordered the archangels to watch over the creation of Tokyo Millennium and wait for the Messiah, but that Michael, Raphael and Uriel, unable to wait any longer, created Aleph as an artificial, false Messiah, leading YHVH to abandon them; he was the boy Hiroko was searching for, aged unnaturally fast to take on the role of Messiah. Similarly, Beth was artificially created as the Messiah's partner, Zayin as his bodyguard, Daleth as a false savior intended to be defeated by the Messiah so that Aleph would win the people's favor, and Gimmel as a trial Messiah for the Arcadia prototype.

Suspecting that Aleph is Satan, Lucifer summons Aleph and Hiroko to his castle in the Expanse; he is relieved to learn that Aleph is not Satan, but says that Satan's revival is only a matter of time. He tells them that Satan is an instrument of God's wrath, to be used to judge and eradicate humanity, and that he wants Aleph and Hiroko's help in fighting Satan. Leaving Lucifer's castle, Aleph and Hiroko meet Gabriel, who takes them to the garden of Eden, located on top of the Center, where they meet Zayin – revealed to be Satan – who wants to ally with Aleph and Hiroko and fight Lucifer, destroy Tokyo Millennium, and create the Thousand-Year Kingdom.

If the player joins Gabriel and Zayin, the Thousand-Year Kingdom is created through Eden — revealed to be a vast spaceship carrying the chosen ones — and the destruction of all life on Earth. YHVH appears aboard Eden, and Zayin, Aleph and Hiroko fight and kill him for having committed genocide, after which Zayin declares Aleph the true savior, and Hiroko the holy mother, and then crumbles to dust. If the player instead allies with Lucifer or stays neutral, Aleph and Hiroko kill Zayin before he can activate the destruction; Aleph is dubbed a false Messiah and commits the "ultimate sin" by killing YHVH, freeing humanity.

Development
Shin Megami Tensei II was developed by Atlus for the Super Famicom. It was directed by Koji Okada, produced by Hideyuki Yokoyama, and written by Ryutaro Ito, with music composed by Tsukasa Masuko. Kazuma Kaneko designed the game's characters, but was also involved in the planning phase. During the game's pre-production, the development staff visited Hariti's temple in Zōshigaya and Taira no Masakado's grave to cleanse themselves. They had done this before, first during the development of the first Shin Megami Tensei; after one of the staff members got robbed, they decided to do it regularly. The inspiration to do this came from Go Nagai, who was said to have exorcised a spirit with the help of Hariti while writing the manga Devilman.

During the game's planning, it was decided that it should not be directly connected to Shin Megami Tensei, ensuring that it would hold interest independent from the first game; because of this, Kaneko envisioned it as a story loosely based on Shin Megami Tensei's future. At first, he imagined it to take place ten years after the first game, as he thought that would be roughly the amount of time needed for society to rebuild, but another staff member wanted it to take place hundreds of years later. Kaneko disagreed, saying that culture would have changed a lot over a hundred years, and that he could not even imagine what the world would look like a hundred years into the future or what it had been like during the Meiji period. The two had different ideas about the timeline of the series, but eventually decided to set the game "several decades" after Shin Megami Tensei. They made use of the tree of life as a central theme of the story.

According to Kaneko, the reason for choosing the Judeo-Christian god, YHVH, as the game's antagonist, was that he saw YHVH as the base for all other gods around the world: Having observed common motives throughout different mythologies, such as the flood and the creation of the world, he reasoned that they all originated in one single mythology, which had been changed as people took it with them, leading to modern-day myths. He thought the original mythology would be the Old Testament, and therefore considered YHVH the folkloristic base of all gods. Despite casting YHVH as the antagonist, Kaneko noted that he did not intend for YHVH to be evil incarnate in Megami Tensei.

Reception
Famitsu 's writers appreciated the amount of freedom the player has. In their reviews of the PlayStation and the Game Boy Advance versions, they said that the gameplay still holds up. They found the demon fusion system to be excellent and fun, and did not think it felt outdated. Famitsu appreciated the game's "grand and unique" theme, its "profound" dark worldview and scenario.

Kurt Kalata and Cristopher J. Snelgrove of Hardcore Gaming 101 appreciated the game's lowered difficulty compared to that of the first Shin Megami Tensei. Kalata and Snelgrove did not think the game's story started "with the same pizzazz" as Shin Megami Tensei; they thought that "the amnesiac savior" is a "lame cliche", and that the idea that Western religion is evil has been worn out.

They did however also say that Shin Megami Tensei II came out before these elements were overused, and that they "undoubtedly" were fresh at the time. In his book Game Magic: A Designer's Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice, Jeff Howard used Shin Megami Tensei II as an example of a video game with allusions to Kabbalah, with its use of Hebrew letters as character names; he said that this contributes to the atmosphere, and gives a feeling of depth or mystery. Chris at Square Enix Music Online disliked the game's music: he called it the worst in the whole series, and said that the music pieces tend to be monotone and based on repetition of nothingness. He said that slowly building ambient pieces such as "Title Demo", "Title", and "Memory Recovery" are effective in context, but that they are too simple and repetitive to be enjoyable as stand-alone music.