Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
The inspiration to do this came from Go Nagai, who was said to have exorcised a spirit with the help of Hariti while writing the manga Devilman.
In their reviews of the PlayStation and the Game Boy Advance versions, they said that the gameplay still holds up.
In his book Game Magic: A Designer's Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice, Jeff Howard used Shin Megami Tensei II as an example of a video game with allusions to Kabbalah, with its use of Hebrew letters as character names; he said that this contributes to the atmosphere, and gives a feeling of depth or mystery.
Famitsu appreciated the game's "grand and unique" theme, its "profound" dark worldview and scenario.
Chris at Square Enix Music Online disliked the game's music: he called it the worst in the whole series, and said that the music pieces tend to be monotone and based on repetition of nothingness.
He said that slowly building ambient pieces such as "Title Demo", "Title", and "Memory Recovery" are effective in context, but that they are too simple and repetitive to be enjoyable as stand-alone music.
Thomas found the soundtrack to be excellent, and said that while several pieces are short, they have solid melodies.
This title is the 2nd work in the "Shin Megami Tensei series", the successor to the "Megami Tensei series" made by the developer Atlus.
As noted above in "#Overview", this title was developed as the 2nd work in the "Shin Megami Tensei series", a sequel to the previous title Shin Megami Tensei (for the SFC, Atlus, 1992).
One problem cited is that the initial versions of the Super Famicom and PlayStation releases have many serious bugs, such as freezes. Corrected versions were released later.
In particular, the initial lot of the Super Famicom version came with a note describing how to avoid the bugs, so it was released on the assumption that bugs would occur.
It was originally released for the Super Famicom in 1994 in Japan, and has since been ported to multiple platforms.
The game was created to not have direct connections to the first Shin Megami Tensei, to ensure that it was interesting independently; this led character designer Kazuma Kaneko to create the concept of a story vaguely based on Shin Megami Tensei future.
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