How Long is the Shin Megami Tensei Series?

The latest game in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise has just been released, so of course that got me wondering how long it would take to play through them all. The entire series has 18 titles with the “Megami Tensei” name, and that doesn’t even include the Persona spin-off franchise. That does include remakes, an online game, and a mobile game, though.

The Megami Tensei games have been going since 1987, and are role playing games that involve you going around and recruiting demons into your party to fight a greater evil. There’s more to them than that, of course, but that’s the basic idea. To find out how long these will take, I’ll just be looking at the main series, and then only games that were officially released in the West. I also won’t include remasters or remakes either, unless I have to.

For reference, here are the games that count for the purposes of this article:

• Shin Megami Tensei
• Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call / Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
• Shin Megami Tensei IV
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse

To help me work it all out, without having to actually play them all, I looked to HowLongToBeat.com, and the category of finishing the main story. Obviously, your playthroughs may vary, but at least you’ll know roughly how long it would take.

It will take about 225 hours for you to finish all of these games at a regular pace. That’s right, over nine days of constant gaming. The one that takes the longest to complete is Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey at 55 hours, and the quickest is Shin Megami Tensei at 32 hours.

However, there’s another way to play through games. Rather than play the whole thing, I looked to Speedrun.com, and added up the fastest times for Any% runs - which means they literally finished the game as quickly as possible.

It will take exactly 28h 42m 56s for you to finish all of these games at a world record speedrunning pace. The longest is Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux at 7h 27m 38s, and the quickest is Shin Megami Tensei at 16m 21s. There aren’t any records for Strange Journey, so if you ignore that, the longest to complete is Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse at 7h 09m 42s.

So there you have it — you have to set aside either a couple of days or more than a week, if you want to play through the whole Shin Megami Tensei series. More than that, if you know Japanese and want to play through all 18 games, including an apparent 50 hours for the brand new Shin Megami Tensei V.