Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE

» see imagine.aeriagames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i knew shin megami tensei as a series i respected without ever finishing a mainline entry. nocturne on ps2 sat in the pile of games i owned but never truly played through. persona 3 and 4 pulled me in later, mostly on ppsspp and later steam. the mmo spinoff imagine ran in parallel to that whole discovery and i missed it entirely. it was a japan-first release aimed at the megami tensei fandom in tokyo before it was anything else.

cave developed the game under an atlus license and launched it in japan on 4 april 2007 as megami tensei online: imagine. the shin megami tensei branding came about a year later, timed to the mainline series revival that atlus was running around the same period. gungho online entertainment took over publishing on the japanese side. the west waited until aeria games opened a north american service on 31 december 2008, followed by europe on 5 january 2009.

you played a demon buster in a post-apocalyptic tokyo. shinjuku babel was the hub city. combat was real-time in open field zones rather than turn-based like the mainline series. the interesting mechanical carry-over was the demon recruitment and fusion loop. you talked demons into joining your party through a dialogue mini-game, then fused two together at a cathedral to produce a stronger third. that is the megami tensei signature and imagine was the only mmo that ever ran it live between many players.

~ the case file ~

~ the western run ~

aeria games handled the western service from launch through 2012. the version had cash-shop items with the usual free-to-play tradeoffs. atlus online took over the western operation in 2012 and kept it going for another year and a half. the audience was small but devoted, mostly people who came in through the mainline atlus games and stayed for the demon fusion loop.

the western closure landed at the end of february 2014. atlus online cited low population as the reason. the western player base had been below sustaining numbers for over a year by that point. a change.org petition to keep the servers alive drew a few thousand signatures and no response. the domain and client went dark on the same day the service ended.

~ the actual end ~

the japanese server held on for two more years. cave posted a shutdown notice in early 2016 citing continued difficulties in giving players a quality experience. the servers went off on 24 may 2016, nine years and two months after the japanese launch. the client stopped connecting the same day. no offline patch, no international successor.

~ the long tail ~

the interesting piece is that a fan preservation team spent years reverse-engineering the client and running a private server called re:imagine. that project has been playable in some form since roughly 2018. it is the reason the game exists at all today in a state you can log into. atlus has never sanctioned or opposed it. the mainline series moved on with smt v on switch in 2021 and stayed offline single-player from that point forward.

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