The Persona series has increased in popularity tremendously in the last couple years thanks to Persona 4 and its Vita revamping with Persona 4 Golden, but that series is actually a spin-off of the classic Shin Megami Tensei games. For the first time ever the original Shin Megami Tensei is releasing in the US and its coming to all iOS devices.
The game originally released in 1992 for the Super Famicom in Japan, but North Americans were left in the dark. Atlus is just now seeing how popular the series is starting to become in the West, and the release of Shin Megami Tensei IV was welcomed warmly on the Nintendo 3DS this past summer. The demon battling RPG series got several ports to a number of Japanese systems and it appears that the version of SMT coming to iOS is a port of the Japanese Game Boy Advance re-release that came in 2003.
Atlus has slated the release date to be the 18th of this month, but what’s still unknown is the price for the port in the App Store. Graphically speaking, the iOS version actually appears to be very similar to the original and if the trailer Atlus has shown is to tell us anything it looks like the original soundtrack is all intact as well. This is perhaps due to the backlash that Square Enix received for the updated visuals in many of their ports of the Final Fantasy series to iOS. It’s unknown whether there will be in-app purchases, but it’s pretty exciting that North America will get to experience the original demon fighting RPG relatively soon.
See the trailer here.