what if... during a normal day at school, just as you were about to leave, everything went out of control? what if... your school was thrown into another world, full of dangerous monsters, frightening locales, surreal scenarios, all under the rule of a Demon Emperor? what if... your youth was taken from you, and you had to fight to survive?

that's the premise of today's topic: Shin Megami Tensei if... the elipses are necessary, because if i don't put them, the title of the game is going to blend in way too much with the rest of the text. i gotta say, that name seemed really dumb to me at first glance, but now that i've played the game i can appreciate it a lot more. it certainly made the game stand out to me, that's for sure. my first exposure to if... was technically long before my recent discovery and love of SMT, because the first time i ever saw it was on the Nintendo Switch Online Super Famicom application. back in the day, i had a japanese nintendo account that i used to download japan only games to my switch, (specifically i used it to play the demo of Katamari Damacy REROLL before it was put on the american eShop) and it turns out you can actually download the japanese virtual console libraries with such an account. these have some pretty meaty differences in terms of selection, most famously the japanese GBA library includes Mother 3, which... STILL hurts to hear. don't think i'll ever be over that. one day while i was scrolling through the SFC library, i saw this game with if... written in big, red letters. the cover was super striking, it was blue with this big badge on the front. i booted it up, saw a bunch of japanese text, and gave up not even 10 seconds in. i swear, that's gotta be a record for someone giving up on if.... i don't think i even knew what megaten was at the time, noless that this was in that series at all. however, about a year or so ago, i discovered a youtuber by the name of Marsh. if you're into megaten like i am, that name is sure to ring a bell. i found his Gu-L video, and loved it to death, but at the time i still hadn't gotten infected with my megaten obsession. it took until around May of 2024 for that to hit, where i found myself face to face with an issue. there are so many games in this series, and there's no damn way i'll ever beat them all. don't get me wrong, i want to, but i also want to have free time to play other games before the heat death of the universe, so i don't think that's a very realistic goal. instead, i settled on a compromise. i would play through the mainline games and certain spinoffs such as Strange Journey myself, and for the games i didn't plan on going through, whether that be because they hadn't been given a translation yet or they were just difficult, i'd watch the Marsh videos about them. this included Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (look where that got me) DDS:MT2, Majin Tensei, Last Bible, Devil Summoner 1, SMT NINE, and most importantly, if.... i knew from my friend Caid that if... was crushingly difficult, and i simply didn't have the mental fortitude for that. if you haven't watched Marsh's video on if... and the Akira route, i can't recommend them enough. they're extremely entertaining, and feel as if they were plucked straight out of 2011 youtube with how crusty they are. i mean, the gameplay was recorded in widescreen with black bars on the sides, but the video was edited in 4:3, so there's this huge black border surrounding the whole thing. that's just not something you're gonna get from a more professional video, and i live for that. all that aside, however, i had two main takeaways from this video. the Domain of Sloth is the worst dungeon in any rpg, and that i was never going to beat if....

fast forward to now, and i've proven me from 6 months ago completely wrong! despite the constant reinforcement that if... was going to do nothing for me but cause trouble, i still found myself drawn to it. at the end of his video, Marsh compared the atmosphere of the game to Yume Nikki, which like, come ON, i can't resist that. plus, between then and now, i'd proven to myself i was pretty good at these games now. i'd beaten SMT1, Persona 1, and had gotten through a pretty big chunk of DDS:MT. plus, i love Persona 1 a lot, and i'd heard that a lot of its ideas and concepts first stemmed from if..., so i wanted to check it out at least for that. so, against my better judgement, i finally decided to dive into Shin Megami Tensei: if... and see what it was all about.

before we begin, i'd like to set down a few facts to provide context to my playthrough. one, i played the SFC version with Aeon Genesis' 2018 english patch, i believe it's version 1.0. Aeon Genesis has done a lot of great translation work for many games of the era. one that comes to mind personally is Snoopy Concert on SFC, which is a good way to get into my best wishes. second, i played the game on an emulator, specifically RetroArch with hardcore RetroAchievements. this meant no save states, no rewind, and no cheat codes. while fast forward is allowed, i tried to avoid it for the most part, since once i get hooked on fast forward, especially in RPGs, it's hard for me to put it down, and it can kind of take me out of the experience to be speeding through everything. i also wanted to experience the Domain of Sloth as intended, that being in constant misery. this also meant that i was trying to go out of my way to get some achievements, which definitely affected the way i played a lot more than it would have otherwise, such as with the map completion achievements. and finally, i did my playthrough with everyone's favorite nut-grabbin' freak, Charlie. now, i knew going in that this wasn't the best option for a first timer. usually people suggest Reiko, since she's the normal route where you get to see the most of the game. however, here's my reasoning: i like Charlie. i have a tendancy to latch onto characters that i like from a design perspective before evaluating their effects on gameplay, one glance at my fighting game mains is enough to tell you that. but while i do like Yumi and Reiko enough, i think Charlie's punk getup is what sold me.

i really love the mix of his school uniform and the punk accessories, it's a really cool way to personalize something that's usually so... well, uniform. on the topic of the official art, actually, there's an interesting point to be made. SMT1, 2 and if... were all remade for the PS1 with fancy 3D graphics, and new key art of each character was drawn for these remakes. i do generally prefer the PS1 era art over the SFC ones, but... man, a lot of the ones done for if... specifically look REALLY weird. take for example, Charlie. in the SFC art, he's just sort of holding his hand in a weird spot, no biggie. however, in the PS1 art, he's GRABBIN that sack. i'm not sure why Kaneko made that change, but like... sure, man.

one unique aspect about this game is that it's one of the few megaten games that actually lets you mostly put yourself into the role of the main character. sure, you can technically name your character whatever you want in Nocturne, but they're always gonna look the same, and it's gonna feel weird not naming them Naoki. here, you're given a choice between a male and female protagonist, which is a one-way ticket to getting my approval. every game should let me play as a girl if it expects me to put my name in. funnily enough, this does actually have a very minor effect on gameplay, since it determines what equipment you're allowed to put on your main character. in that case, i guess picking Charlie was the best option after all, since i was able to equip both types to at least someone. and hey, i mentioned earlier that this game has a lot of parallels to what would later become Persona, what are those exactly? well, the school setting, for one. it also has a mechanic called the guardian gauge. unlike most other megaten games, if... is remorseful when it comes to game overs. instead of being told to fuck off back to your last save, getting a game over in if... does two things. one, it sends you back to the beginning of the current dungeon, and heals all of your HP. second, it assigns you a new guardian. guardians are, for all intents and purposes, personas. you can't choose what Guardian you get, and you only get a new one when you die, but they have most of the same attributes. your guardian affects your stats, resistances and weaknesses, and what spells you have access to. (just like every other SFC megaten, however, your main protagonist isn't capable of using magic, only your other human companion.) there are ways to influence which guardian you recieve from Charon, however. the longer you go without dying, the more a meter in your stats called the guardian gauge goes up. if its yellow when you die, you recieve a guardian that's lower level than your current one. if it's red, the new guardian will be a higher level. this incentivizes you to stick with a guardian, instead of constantly dying until you get the one you want, which i like quite a bit. on top of that, there's certain rare guardians, which have obscenely specific requirements to get. your character needs to die during a full moon, and even then it's still a 1/256 CHANCE YOU'LL GET ONE. evidently, i never saw these, but they seem pretty cool. the rare guardians are mostly important characters from SMT1, such as Pascal, the Law, Neutral and Chaos heroes, and En-no Ozuno. even besides that though, you can get other characters like Alice and Gotou, which is pretty cool. which guardian you get is also limited by character, so you'll get different ones depending on if you're playing as the male or female protagonist. this also applies to your partner character. it was kind of hard to find specific details on guardians, since the only complete GameFAQs guide was... malnourished, to say the least. mad respect to the megaten wiki for having so much info on this topic, it helped a ton in my playthrough and i was crossreferencing it constantly.

alright, enough dawdling. i've rattled on way too long, and we haven't even gotten into the main meat of the game. my playthrough had me go through four main dungeons: the domains of pride, gluttony, sloth and wrath. i believe Charlie's route has the least amount of dungeons in the game, so i guess i lucked out on that front. Pride is the most straightforward of the four, no gimmicks, just get to the top floor and kick Vine's ass. i actually got stuck here for about 4 hours of gameplay over the course of a couple days, since it's a little crushing starting out with such little to work with. i also had to get used to the negotiation system in these early megaten games, because they've always given me a ton of trouble. demons are so wishy-washy here, just like in SMT1, and it kinda drives me up the walls. you'll give them all the macca and MAG in the world, and then they'll just run off like it's a highway robbery. something else that i didn't discover until i was done with Sloth was that there are certain demons you just can't recruit, no matter what. i feel like that wasn't a thing in SMT1, but i could be wrong. for the whole game i was trying to recruit Jack Ripper, since there's an achievement for having all three Jacks in your party at once, and i never did figure out how to do it. it's of the Foul clan, so you can't recruit it through normal means... but because of how barebones the GameFAQs is, i couldn't find out what the special requirement was. moon cycles also feel like they take WAY longer here than in later games, which will be important later, trust me. with all that said, once i'd gotten enough money to afford the Gonz Pistol and a handful of bullets, Vine wasn't too hard to take care of. you'll probably find yourself crawling back to Pride a lot even after you're done with it, since it's the easiest way to access the fountain, the cathedral of shadows and some basic shops. speaking of which, there's a Code Breaker location here. that's right, the bane of my existance in Persona 1 manifests itself oncemore here! it's way more manageable in this incarnation, instead of being 9 spaces with numbers 1-9, the Pride Code Breaker is only 3 spaces with 5 numbers. i actually had a lot of fun doing this version, which can't be said about the harder difficulties. (we'll get to those.)

next up is Gluttony, and i'd say this is the first real dungeon. Pride was the training wheels to get you on your feet, and now Gluttony is here to test what you've learned. it's much, MUCH bigger than Pride, and there's way more to uncover. speaking of which, something that bothered the hell out of me was an achievement related to this world. there's an achievement for uncovering every space in each dungeon, and i ended up going for all of them. for whatever reason, however, Gluttony didn't unlock for me.

look at this shit, it even says i uncovered 335/335 spaces! it's just taunting me at this point! i think this had something to do with the fact that i did the final part of the dungeon before uncovering all the spaces, but still, it's really annoying. anyways, tangent aside, Gluttony also contains the first (and only) casino in the whole game. it's got slots, big & small, keno, and a russian roulette game, though i could never play that last one since the guy in there always said the master was out. code breaker locations are separate from this casino, strangely enough, though it might have been like that in SMT2 as well, i'm not sure. you know, actually, speaking of which, this game borrows a lot from SMT2, it feels kinda like the Majora's Mask to SMT2's Ocarina of Time, if that makes sense, to the point where certain character sprites are reused and repurposed, like Aleph's trainer being reassigned to being the school janitor. anyways, the casino is the only place that you can get the King Frost equipment, so i spent a lot of time here near the end of the game. besides that, there's also a town here that sells Shotgun Shells, but it's pretty far into the dungeon, so whenever i ran out of bullets i'd usually just go buy more normal ones in the Pride shop. oh god, yeah, that's a mechanic in this game. limited ammo! i didn't get far enough into SMT2 to see if this is something it lifted from that game, but i KNOW SMT1 didn't have that. at first i kind of hated this mechanic, but over time it sort of grew on me. it made me think harder about whether an encounter was worth using bullets on, or if i could manage with just my melee and spells. funnily enough, it had me thinking about combat like a survival horror game, of all things. (i mean, later on i was kind of rolling in money so i didn't have to manage my ammo at all, but... who's counting really.) at the bottom of the dungeon, you end up shrinking yourself down to be eaten by Orcus, the master of Gluttony, and the final part of the dungeon is you crawling through his insides to defeat a parasite inside him. first of all, what the fuck. second of all, it's dungeon concepts like this that have me obsessed with megaten. it's so surreal and gross, but like, what other RPG can you say has a tapeworm as the boss of a dungeon? (besides Bowser's Inside Story.) this was definitely the most challenging part of Gluttony, and i ended up dying here a few times. it's pretty intimidating at first, the encounter rate is a little overwhelming, there's damage floors which melt away your HP, and the demons here are hard to negotiate with. but it's not as bad as it sounds, just make sure to bring some demons that can heal, and try to be cautious with your battles. the only enemy you really need to be worried about is the Stomach Bugs, they were what gave me the most trouble, so try to negotiate them away if you can. otherwise, Gluttony shouldn't be too bad.

and with that, we've entered the part everyone's been waiting for. the domain of sloth is the most infamous dungeon, not only in if..., but probably in all of megaten. it will test your patience like nothing else in the series, and is the true gatekeeper to the rest of what if... has to offer. now, let's be fair here and look at some of the positives. one, Sloth is relatively small and linear. there's only three floors, and they're mostly just straight lines with small offshoots along the way. the concept is also interesting, the students from the school are being put to work in a mine, and you have to pass the moon cycles to advance their progress towards finding the ring, which lets you access the next world. it's a neat idea, but good lord, the way they went about executing it is disasterous. remember earlier when i said that moon cycles take a long time in this game? this is why. it takes 16 steps (yes, i counted) to advance the moon by one phase, and to progress the students' mining, you have to go from one new moon to another, which is 16 phases. supposedly you only need to complete a minimum of 6 cycles to get to the ring, but for some reason, sometimes i would go through a whole cycle and it just... wouldn't affect anything. all that time, completely wasted. in Marsh's video, he said it took him 4 hours of straight gameplay, and that was grueling. i'm pretty tolerant to endurance challenges, i used to shiny hunt a lot in Pokemon, for what it's worth. i figured, okay, 4 hours is a lot but it shouldn't be too bad. and it wasn't, i just sort of spent the morning grinding away at the enemies and watching the moon fly by, no biggie. it became somewhat zen after a while, i didn't even have any music or youtube videos on in the background, it was just me, the game, and the demons. i also decided to omit speedup, since i wanted to be able to say i did all of Sloth without it. but the students didn't finish mining. and i kept walking through the halls. i started the Sloth grind at 8:20 AM that morning, and finished at 3:20 PM. 7 hours straight in this dungeon, no fast forward, nothing else to keep me entertained, i did it completely raw. i would NOT recommend it, that shit was agonizing near the end when i just wanted to get it over with. on top of all that, at the very beginning of the area i'd talked to this guy who turned all the demons into "dark demons." i didn't know what that meant, so i just kept on playing without thinking about it. and for the first 4 hours or so, every time i'd try to recruit a demon, it'd never work. i tried every combination of actions, but i'd never get anywhere. i asked a couple of friends who'd played the game if they knew what was going on, and they suggested that i increase my intelligence stat on my main character, since that affects negotiations. so i tried doing that on every level up for a bit, but still nothing. turns out, that guy at the beginning turning every demon dark? that means they can't be recruited. not only that, but it also made these Mandrake enemies appear, and they SUCK. they're from an area later on in the game, so they're way more powerful than you at this point, they have a shit ton of HP, can heal their party members, and can inflict statuses like bind and sleep. it always brought the pace to a crawl whenever they showed up, and that's on top of the fact that the game is moving along at a planck length every couple of years as is! sure, i could have used a demon with Estoma to reduce encounters, but then if you do that you'll be missing out on like 20 levels for the rest of the game, and it'll make things way harder in the long run. at the very least, i did the entire area without dying, which has to be worth something in gamer cred. domain of sloth is exactly as bad as everyone says it is. if you play this game for yourself, my recommendation is to spread out the Sloth grind over the course of a couple days, or chip away at it when you're on a long shift at work or something. i will never get those 7 hours of my life back, and i'll take that to my grave.

well, coming off of Sloth, i was fiending for a dungeon that would provide my brain with any amount of stimulation. and oh boy, did the game deliver. the game diverges after sloth depending on which party member you chose at the beginning. if you chose Yumi or Reiko, you'll go to the Domain of Greed. exclusive to Charlie's route, however, is where i went, the Domain of Wrath. compared to Sloth, this world fucks. it's got everything, damaging floors, one way doors that undo tons of progress, fetch quests, confusing as fuck teleport mazes, and on top of all that, Charlie leaves you at the very beginning, meaning you have to fend for yourself for the entire dungeon. sure, i wasted 7 straight hours of my day on Sloth, but it took me 3 grueling days to work through Wrath. now, that is partially my own damn fault, because i was going for 100% map completion for that achievement, so i forced myself to explore every nook and cranny. and i was definitely having more fun here than i was in Sloth, that's for sure. one thing i really liked about Wrath was just how alone it makes you feel. after Charlie abandons you, i felt like the atmosphere had a big shift. it felt like i was truly fighting for my life, and it felt kinda sick to be honest. this is also the only dungeon besides Gluttony that has a mid-dungeon save point. i didn't mention it before, but unlike other SMT games, there are no terminals here. the main save point you'll be using is the one back at the school, and there's only like two or three other ones scattered throughout the domains. the one in Gluttony was barely useful to me, since it wasn't close enough to Orcus to be convenient for save scumming, so i didn't mention it before. this is another way i feel like if... is sort of the Majora's Mask of the SFC trilogy, it explores a lot of unique concepts for the series like this. instead of having an interconnected world with an overworld map, it feels more like a gauntlet of brutal dungeons that are really gonna test your skill. the story also isn't anything too deep, at least in comparison to SMT1 and 2. the focus is almost entirely on the dungeon design, it gives them way more legroom to explore unique concepts, like having a second, smaller dungeon in Gluttony, or being fucking miserable like in Sloth. they can't all be winners. Wrath felt especially huge to me, i think it's because of how much horizontal space it takes up. usually in megaten, dungeons are big because they have a fuck ton of floors, but Wrath is really expansive in comparison. there's only like, 3 or 4 floors, but those floors are HUGE. it feels like if they trimmed the fat of the Basilica from SMT1 and made it actually bearable and interesting. i also like the look of this place, it looks like pure hatred made into a solid form. near the end, you meet Hazawa, the guy who caused all of this, and he makes you run a bunch of errands for him because he's the demon emperor, and he can. he's holding a girl captive, and using her as ransom to make us do his dirty work. this was kind of where the dungeon got boring for me, because it's a lot of backtracking, but i guess that's the point. i actually ended up doing this part out of order, what's supposed to happen is you're supposed to retrieve the Megaton Orb, defeat a miniboss, go worship a statue, and then break another statue to get this area's ring, where Charlie is supposed to rejoin you. however, while looking for the worship statue, i accidentally stumbled into the event where you get the ring, and it was really weird because Charlie showed up in the cutscene, despite the fact that he wasn't in my party. i'm wondering if this is a bug relating to the english patch, but i'm not sure. either way, Wrath was a nice, brutal breath of fresh air after the misery of Sloth.

and that's all four dungeons in Charlie's route. it has the least amount of worlds, you get to skip both the Domain of Greed and the Domain of Envy here. guess i kinda lucked out, huh? maybe that's why i had such a good time with this game. because yeah, i fucking loved if...! i was expecting this to go the way it did with SMT1, with that game it was fun for the first couple hours, but somewhere around the midway point it started to drag on and on and on, and became a viscious cycle of dying and grinding for money to revive myself with. if..., at least when played on Charlie's route, doesn't overstay its welcome, and i found it to be very enjoyable, despite its shortcomings. it makes up for the more difficult dungeons with its forgiving guardian system, and i never felt like i was extremely outclassed by the most basic of enemies like SMT1. and on top of all that, there's WAY more for me to explore in if... than what i played, not only with Yumi and Reiko's routes having those extra dungeons, but also the new game+ path, Akira Miyamoto. as we speak i'm FIENDING to see what Akira's route is like, and i honestly might do a separate review for that. but in conclusion, SMT if... was way more enjoyable than i'd expected, and if you're willing to put up with Sloth, it's absolutely worth your time. (plus, there's some way to get done with Sloth in like, 20 minutes using certain items, so that's not even necessarily a given.)