The other day when I was talking about Persona 3, I got a comment about the SMT series being a Western-based RPG instead of a JRPG. To start off with, the original game for the Famicom was based on a Japanese book about using the digital world to summon demons. From this point forward, no matter how much the first-person dungeon crawling might be reminiscent of Ultima or other Western RPGs, we cannot call the game Western, but we can do better than just this.
Demons: Gotta catch ‘em all!
From the start of the series on the Famicom, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, there was a focus on using digital methods to capture or recruit demons to fight on your team. A variety of demons should be collected so that the player will have access to multiple attacks to exploit the weaknesses of other demons and characters. So you can capture, coerce, or convince demons to join your party and fight alongside your team. They have specific characteristics and properties that they can exploit/be exploited. Does this sound like some other game that’s huge in Japan? That’s right, it’s like an early Pokemon, but much more violent and demonic. It’s rare to see a game of this type come out from the West, at least not before the Pokemon clones started to come out. Collecting monsters and elemental properties may not have been exclusively developed in Japan, but it was definitely refined in the East before the West even saw a prominent game of that type (please correct me if I’m wrong).
Tokyo Destroyed
If you’ve ever watched anime, no doubt you’ve seen at least one instance of a Neo Tokyo or New Tokyo or post-apocalyptic Tokyo. Fear of destruction through nuclear attack, earthquake, or military assualt is very deeply ingrained in the collective Japanese unconscious. Just consider the number of calamities the country has experienced: serious bombing in WWII, two nuclear assaults, also in WWII, and the earthquakes the island weathers. So when most of the SMT games feature the destruction of Tokyo through missile attack, both nuclear or non-nuclear, it becomes clear that this series is distinctly Japanese.
(Anti?) Western Religious Themes
It takes a non-Christian country to have the final boss of a game be YAHWEH. The Almighty God is indeed the final enemy of SMT2. Lucifer and other angels, like Michael all make appearances, along with gods and demons from other religions. Especially back in the SNES day, but even nowadays, there would almost never be a Western game that prominently featured a character called the Messiah (there are Messianic characters, but that’s way more general and not considered offensive in the West), an anti-Messiah, or any vilification of the Judeo-Christian religion.
All of these small things combine to give what I feel to be a very distinct Japanese feeling, even with the first person viewpoint used in the earlier games.