Shin Megami Tensei I/YMMV

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• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: When the world slowly grows more and more crapsack, and the canon route involves murdering nearly everyone, do you honestly think any of the characters deserve to win? Then again, it could be Fridge Brilliance to show that even the Neutral path can be just as bad as Law and Chaos.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Alice's first appearance is in this game, as a minor character who exists solely to provide motivation to a couple of side villains, and doesn't even fight. She was so memorable that she's been brought back numerous times and is usually depicted as being very strong.
• Freud Was Right: Even discounting the insanely popular Mara, quite a few demons have designs that resemble human genitalia.
• Game Breaker: Zio's many forms stun almost everything in the game. With high enough speed, the heroine can immobilize pretty much everything before it even has a chance to move. The Bufu line of spells works just as well, but you need demons for those.
• Goddamn Bats: Not even Inherently Funny Words can alleviate the horror after one round too many of, "Bucca-Boo used Maha-Bufu!"
• Player Punch: Not too long after the game begins, at one point you come home and, naturally, visit your mom. What seems like typical mother-son banter takes a turn for the worse when she starts coming off as extra-affectionate towards you. One of your allies warns that this is a sign of something weird. He's right; it's actually a demon in disguise. A demon that had just eaten your mother. You then have to avenge your mother's death and whoop his ass.
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: The game was truly revolutionary in its treatment of the post-apocalypse, demons, morality and the like... and everybody in Japan proceeded to rip them right the hell off, from Neon Genesis Evangelion to Super Robot Wars to Soul Eater (the latter being a kind of Lighter and Softer Deconstructive Parody, that's how far we've come). Seeing what made the original game so unique can be somewhat harder in this day and age. The gameplay also suffers from this in a huge way - in 1992 the first-person dungeon crawling was relatively unique in execution. For anyone used to post-Quake 3D navigation or PlayStation 2-era and beyond user interfaces, though, the game will want to make you tear your eyes out in frustration over how clunky it is. The mapping feature itself requires you to open two menus alone.
  • The Playstation version lessens the gameplay element of this a little, with interface improvements and graphical upgrades.