2013年03月03日

Even though his demon designs are awfully absent from the official Shin Megami Tensei IV boxart, the following interviews demonstrate Kazuma Kaneko’s profound influence on, and affection for, the Shin Megami Tensei series.

Website articles

• Ed Moore. “Interview: Behind the Scenes of Shin Megami Tensei“. The Escapist, 11 November 2010.
• Brandon Sheffield. “E3 Q&A: Atlus’ SMT Character Designer Kazuma Kaneko”, Gamasutra, 12 May 2006.
• Ryan Payton and James Mielke. “Devil Summoner. 1UP interviews artist Kazuma Kaneko”, 1UP, 12 September 2005.
• Nich Maragos. “In Character: Kazuma Kaneko”. 1UP, 20 September 2004.
• “Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne”. 1UP, 3 April 2004.

Video

• Shin Megami Tensei III-NOCTURNE Special DVD ~Souzou no Kiseki~. Pony Canyon, 20 August 2003. DVD.
• “Interview with: Cozy Okada & Kazuma Kaneko”. Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. Atlus. 2000. Video game.

Special thanks for Primaeros for pointing out the interviews and taking the time to upload the rare Nocturne DVD.

2013年02月23日

Thanks to buromu‘s assistance in translating, the first update – albeit brief – of Megatengaku is a fact.

• Completed the translation of the Japanese summary of Digital Devil Story: Reincarnation of the Goddess and started working on its sequel, Warrior of the Demon City.
• Transcribed the behind-the-scenes interviews with Atlus from the DoubleJumps Nocturne and Devil Summoner guide respectively. Thanks to strangeshrimp for pointing out the former one!

This excellent Xenogears study guide inspired me to attempt to create something similar for the Megami Tensei franchise, which I have dubbed Megatengaku (メガテン学, ‘Megami Tensei Studies’) thus far. For now, I have collected some random materials that I used for my MA thesis (e.g. interviews about, and random text dumps from Strange Journey), but considering the scope of the franchise, I figured I might as well appeal to its passionate fan community.

Currently, I am in the process of translating materials that have been published only in Japanese, such as an interview with Kazuma Kaneko regarding Strange Journey, summaries of the Digital Devil Story novels  and a digitalisation of aKyuuyaku Megami Tensei player’s guide (pretty random, heh).

I would like to compile an archive of Megami Tensei materials, which may lead to articles or essays that treat the archive as its sources. Therefore, I kindly request that if you happened to have stumbled upon articles (such as this report of Nocturne’s launch party or Gamasutra’s interview met Kaneko) that might be relevant for such a study guide – regardless of the article is still available online or only through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – please drop me a message with a link or, if you feel like it, the entire article in text format. High-res scans of paper articles, regardless of language, are also welcome. The same goes for questions, tips, critique and pictures of Black Frost.

If it appears that not only I am interested in this project, I will try to shift my working space from my local computer to this place.

– Guan van Zoggel