Shin Megami Tensei IV



Shin Megami Tensei IV is the fourth main-series installment of Shin Megami Tensei, developed by Atlus for the Nintendo 3DS. It would later be followed by Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, a rare direct sequel.

Not to be confused with Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, a Nintendo DS game in the series that used the working title Shin Megami Tensei IV during early development.


 * Art Shift: Due to reused assets, while most of the game uses Masayuki Doi's art and 3D graphics based upon it, in battle most demons and stats screen portraits use Kazuma Kaneko's art. Since Kaneko's art is very distinctive, this is quite jarring.
 * Blue and Orange Morality: Though you could consider Chaos Route to be the path of a villain protagonist, it is indicated that Lucifer is more a tempter than he is evil...and that he could be a good friend or a dangerous foe.
 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: The game was released with a lot of DLC you could buy that increased resource gain rate among other power ups.
 * Comically Misidentified Foreign Technology: Most relic descriptions are Flynn's very strange conclusions about modern technology. In Apocalypse the descriptions are more straightforward, as Nanashi was raised in Tokyo.
 * Glass Cannon/Fragile Speedster: Since the game has no defense stats the only thing that makes higher level characters not die (as much) compared to lower level ones is more HP. The result is everything under the player's control falls under this or Master of None.
 * Luck-Based Mission/Stop Helping Me!: NPC allies are effectively random and will attack enemies with elements that enemy is immune to or (worse) reflects, powering the enemy up and potentially leading to a Smirk based one turn beatdown of your entire party.
 * Wake Up Call Boss: Minotaur guards the gateway out of the opening dungeon and shows you need to actually pay attention to the game's mechanics to win.
 * Sidequest: Lots of them in Chaos and Law routes, none in the Neutral route due to the curious decision to make all of what are sidequests in the other routes into mandatory requirements for that route.