Several Japanese game developers are cognizant of how important and valuable music is to their games, resulting in a lot of great video game music concerts. Sometimes, those concerts come West for tours, but several of them don’t. However, for the first time, Atlus will bring a Shin Megami Tensei (SMT) concert to North America — the Shin Megami Tensei 30th Live: Band of Shadows, which will come to the Novo in Los Angeles for Anime Expo on July 1, 2023. Tickets are not yet available to purchase, but Atlus encourages signing up for its newsletter to receive those details as they become available.
Atlus also shared the below cool video to hype the coming of this SMT concert, including live music and clips of gameplay from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, Shin Megami Tensei IV, and Shin Megami Tensei V. At present, while a remaster of SMT3 is available on a few platforms, SMT4 and its pseudo-sequel Apocalypse remain confined to Nintendo 3DS, and SMT5 is currently a Nintendo Switch exclusive.
In a perfect world, the Shin Megami Tensei 30th Live: Band of Shadows concert coming to LA would be only the beginning of lots of Atlus concerts coming to North America, as lots of fans would kill for their own Persona concert to attend. That series is only continuing to grow in popularity now that Persona 3 Portable, 4 Golden, and 5 Royal are available on more platforms.
If you’re hungry for more video game music in general though, don’t forget that the Square Enix Music Channel exists on YouTube, which is packed with live performances, rearrangements, OSTs, and severely underappreciated interviews with composers and musicians.
