YMMV / Shin Megami Tensei I

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Due to the Law Hero not showing any real signs of zealotry until after he comes Back from the Dead, it's easy to read him as some flavor of Came Back Wrong and/or Brainwashed and Crazy. This was eventually confirmed in dev interviews, stating that the angels stripped him of what made him human during the resurrection.
• Complete Monster: (Including the events of the sequel): The original incarnation of YHVH is a self-centered and totalitarian dictator with a malignant need for attention. As the supreme leader of the demons associated with Law, YHVH's ultimate goal is to create his own totalitarian definition of the Thousand Year Kingdom on Earth, an ultra-collectivist society ruled by him where freedom of thought is a crime and only those who are willingly obedient to him shall thrive. In the first game, YHVH spearheads a global nuclear holocaust to pave the way for his kingdom to become a reality, allowing the militant Messian gangs to roam the streets in the post-apocalypse, and years later, YHVH summons a massive flood to destroy the suburbs around Tokyo. With the Messians gaining political support in the sequel and rising in power to become the dominant faction, YHVH succeeds in creating his kingdom, Tokyo Millennium, but ultimately abandons its people and decides to build an Ark for a select few that were chosen by him before activating a Kill Sat within the city to eliminate all unworthy life as his form of divine judgement to rule over a "new world filled with my thralls".
• Ensemble Dark Horse: 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.
• 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.
  • Marin Karin and attacks with similar effects are even worse. Most enemies, including bosses, are capable of being enthralled, and will then for the next few turns keep hitting themselves (compared to the one-round stun of Zio, that's quite the upgrade). In fact, the final boss can be killed simply by charming him and letting him kill himself.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Not even Inherently Funny Words can alleviate the horror after one round too many of, "Bucca-Boo used Maha-Bufu!"
  • In a game where the auto-battle function is vital for speeding through constant enemy encounters, any common enemy that nullifies physical attacks will be this, especially if they reflect them. Girimekhala and Tamamo are a couple of notable examples.
• Good Bad Bugs: In the Playstation version, pressing Circle and a button on the D-Pad on the exact same frame while equipping items will cause that item to be equipped in the next slot over. By itself, this doesn't really do much, but if you equip Nerve Bullets to a character as armor using this bug, they become completely invincible.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This game is infamous for having Random Encounters everywhere, notably even inside a lively shopping center. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, released 17 years later, features a shopping mall dungeon.
  • The demonic version of Mickey Mouse that was Dummied Out of the original SNES game was created three years before Disney themselves would give us a demonic Mickey in the form of Julius.
• Killer App: Pun aside, a number of people got iOS devices simply for an official english release of this game.
• Magnificent Bastard: Lucifer, King of the Abyss, under the alias of Louis Cyphre, calls himself a part of YHVH that was discarded. He was behind Lilith's actions throughout the game in an attempt to convince the reincarnation of Adam to follow the violent Darwinist path of Chaos, helping and congratulating him if he does and trying to trick him to his death if he doesn't, completely avoiding direct confrontation in all the routes. Several years later, while watching Aleph in his disguise, Lucifer prepares for the rebirth of his hated enemy Satan in an attempt to save his realm from its annihilation at the orders of YHVH. Failing to prevent Satan's rebirth, Lucifer intends to use the dragon Kuzuryu, given to him by YHVH Himself, to destroy the highly populated city Tokyo Millenium and its new Eden. He partially does so in the Chaos route before fighting against Satan and YHVH Himself, freeing humanity and demonhood from His rule after destroying the biggest human population centers of the post-apocalyptic world. More affable than in the past, Lucifer seeks to protect his people as its affable king while still carrying out his ideology of freedom over all.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Law Hero's infamous advice to the Hero after his mother's death:
    Law Hero: Hero... I don't think there's anything I could say that would bring much comfort, but... try not to feel too bad...
  • Pascal the dog is here.
  • "If you're such hot shit, then crush this rock with your bare hands!"
  • "All my friends are dead!"
• Once Original, Now Common: 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 PS2-era and beyond user interfaces, though, the game will want to make you tear your eyes out in frustration over how clunky it is.
• 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 speaking haltingly while 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.
  • No matter what route you take, both of your best friends will die. On Law and Chaos, you have to kill one of them yourself due to opposing alignments, with the one you aligned with dead either from an artifact too strong for him or from your other best friend who had become his enemy. On Neutral, you have to kill both, because they refuse to accept anything short of full Law or full Chaos.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The extreme encounter rate. This is a game where you can get into fights with demons inside a bustling shopping center. The iOS version tones the encounter rate down, making it you don't get into fights every three steps, at least until you hit the End of the World, in which the encounter rate skyrockets back to the originals infuriating degree.
  • Trying to use the map. Summoning the map screen requires two layers of menus, and the Mapper spell, which provides a handy minimap, requires three, as well as 2 MP, and it doesn't always work. Hence why the sequel allows you to enter the map screen simply by hitting Select (not to mention it's easily selected using the L-button in the iOS port).
  • The nonsensical and labyrinthine design of not just dungeons, but just about every indoor area. Kichijoji mall is already rather awkward to navigate, and the level layouts only grow in size and complexity the further you progress through the game. Down the road, you'll start encountering many annoying features that serve to make navigation even harder, like lengthy dead ends, pointless corridors acting as filler space, damaging floor tiles, one-way doors, traps that send you down a floor, and dark areas that are obscured even on the map. Speaking of which, these issues are exacerbated by the awkward map system and the minimally-detailed walls seen through a first-person perspective that make everything look identical.
• Signature Song: The Law theme is the closest the franchise has to a main theme. Nearly every mainline game after this has remixed it in some way once or even twice, ^note Nocturne used it for Metatron's leitmotif and implemented it in his battle theme; IV used another remix for a lategame character and mashed it with the II Law theme for a DLC Boss Remix. and even some of the spinoffs have used it. ^note Trumpeter's song in Devil Survivor 2 is the start of the Law theme.
• Stoic Woobie:
  • The Hero was dealt a bad hand early on, with his parents' divorce leaving him without a father, but once Gotou's coup starts going into motion, the world throws hardship after hardship onto him that he just shrugs aside while fighting for his chosen cause. After escaping from Orias's hospital, he finds his mother eaten by a demon, who proceeds to attack him and his new friends. Shortly after, his dog Pascal, having become Cerberus, is forcibly separated from him, and Tokyo is ultimately turned to ruins, with the girl he's destined to be with sacrificing herself to save him. Thirty years later, he's helpless to save one of his friends from fusing with a demon and leaving on his quest for power while his other friend is killed and revived as the Messiah. In the end, both of them die, at least one of them by his hand. In the timeline that leads to the second game, he kills both and seems to defeat both factions, only for the Messians come out on top anyway and ultimately assassinate him in a random cave.
  • With dev interviews and the visionary scenes added in the remakes, the Law Hero becomes an immensely tragic figure. Ever since childhood, he admired the namesake figure of the Messian faith and longed to help people like he did, only to be used and have his dreams twisted and warped. Early in the game, he finds out his girlfriend has been kidnapped by Gotou, and embarks on a mission to rescue her. After surviving Thor's nuclear holocaust and returning to Tokyo, the Law Hero finally finds his girlfriend, except she's been turned into a zombie aware of her situation and is begging for a mercy kill. Soon after, the Law Hero sacrifices his life to save his friends and is taken to Heaven, only to get an offer from Gabriel to be revived as the Messiah. He jumps at this, but his soul is also twisted to suit the angels' needs, stripping him of his empathy and turning him into a heartless Knight Templar. On Neutral and Chaos, he is killed by the Hero, and he spends his final breaths realizing his nature as a disposable puppet before passing on.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Kichijou Overworld theme sounds extremely similar to the bassline to "Thriller", with the only real difference being some added exit notes.
• That One Sidequest: Want to get those Game Breaking weapons from the Fiends? Good luck finding them, as they appear in certain areas with 1/256 chance of them appearing, with the weapons appearing with a equal 1/256 chance.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: 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 since despite all the blood you’re shedding, ultimately you’re just making it someone else’s problem.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The game is an RPG with magical creatures, so it must be for kids, right? Wrong. In the game, the USA falls under the control of a fanatic Christian cult ruled by supernatural beings which uses the US nuclear arsenal to rebuild civilization around a fascist theocracy, and God really approves of what they are doing—and he's still the closest thing to a good guy in the story. There's a reason this is a game where the Omnicidal Neutral path is generally agreed on as the most moral.