The very first Megami Tensei game, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, finally has a full translation, thanks to some intrepid fans. You might be saying, “but it already has one,” but this isn’t the one you’re thinking of. This is the game created in 1987 for Japanese home computers by Telenet.
The Megami Tensei series is best known as a series of games by Atlus, which would eventually expand to Shin Megami Tensei, which includes the Persona series. The series actually began being based on a series of novels by Aya Nishitani before going off in an entirely different direction.
But before Atlus stepped in, Telenet was the first developer to create a video game adaptation. This one was for the Japanese home computers, and it was released a scant few months before Atlus released the Famicom game that would start their long-running series. Confusingly, both are called Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. While Atlus’ version was a first-person dungeon crawler, Telenet opted for more of a top-down action RPG. Though, it’s still a dungeon crawler, make no mistake.
While Telenet’s take on the series was vastly overshadowed by Atlus, it’s still a pretty neat historical curiosity, if nothing else.
The English translation of the MSX version comes to us from Kaisaan and other collaborators. You can find the patch here at their GitHub.
