Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux director talks remake, connection to mainline games

These are quotes from a Retronauts interview with Eiji Ishida, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux's director...

On the decision to remake a game like Strange Journey
''We decided to remake Strange Journey to make it more widely known. We would like to consider a sequel, and we actually have ideas for the story and a new game experience. Whether we can make it happen, though, depends on how well this game performs.''

Talking about the rumor that Strange Journey was originally a mainline game
''To be exact, it was developed as a spinoff from the start. The promotional staff at the time judged the game to have high enough quality to be marketed as a numbered title, so they suggested selling it as a numbered SMT game. Even Mr. Kazuma Kaneko, who worked with us to design the human and demon characters and pen the original story, backed up the suggestion, saying it was “good enough to be called Shin Megami Tensei IV.”

But, because it was conceived as a spinoff, we enjoyed the freedom of going off on a tangent from the mainline games (and the extra pain and suffering from that, haha). Therefore, I felt a strong resistance to market it as a numbered title, and I ultimately rejected the suggestion. I think I would be a little more flexible about it now, but my past self who had just experienced the pain of creating a new title wasn’t as confident, and I couldn’t make that decision then.

On that note, Strange Journey has no chronological relationship to the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei series.''