Shin Megami Tensei's demon designer Masayuki Doi breaks down his monster designs and what goes into creating them.
When one thinks of developer Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei series, two things usually come to mind: Iconic, muffled music tracks and demons. In fact, one of the main draws of the franchise quickly became its creative and diverse depictions of gods, demons, and mythical creatures taken from various cultures around the globe.
How much research goes into your demon design process? We’re thorough in how much time we spend on research to help find clues about how we should approach our designs. Aside from the folktales surrounding each demon, we also look into their broader mythological lore, historical details about the time period, as well as things like what kind of traditional garbs and accessories people in that era wore.
Generally, I think certain deities and demons that have been depicted widely throughout history are easier to turn out intuitive designs for. But I think an important task is also to see how much of a unique twist you can add to such designs. It’s always difficult to balance this without compromising the essence of each demon, but I think Nuwa is an example of a character design where we succeeded in achieving what we wanted.
The design of Amon, on the other hand, is strongly influenced by the woodblock prints featured in the Dictionnaire Infernal by Jacques Collin de Plancy. The demon designs in SMT have historically used these types of demonology books as reference, so we inherited that design philosophy here as well.