Shin Megami Tensei NINE's demon roster consists of new designs, returning designs and REPEATED designs. And no demon demonstrates this better than Harpy, whose model appears in NINE's roster no less than 5 times. Rather than just post 5 gifs and be done with it like I normally do, I have decided to curate a short overview of the BEST Harpy appearances in MegaTen! Hit "Keep reading" (after viewing this post in my blog because the formatting gets fucked up if you don't) NOW!!!!
Harpy and Furiae appear in Shin Megami Tensei 1 but they don't share assets yet so who gives a crap. Siren is a blue harpy, I guess.
Furiae returns in Shin Megami Tensei II with a new sprite, joined by
Ocypete, Celaeno and Aello! There's some slight asset resharing among them as Aello and Furiae share the same base sprite, but the others share with non-harpy demons so as far as this post is concerned they're original. Combined with artist Kazuma Kaneko's tendency to embellish demon designs in artwork and you'd never expect that all these birds were destined to be textureswaps for an underperforming 2002 XBOX JRPG.
But they were! Now we're cooking! In Shin Megami Tensei NINE the 5 bird-ladies return in one fabulous package. If you love Harpy then you'll love Harpy being given a haircut and a dyejob and reappearing four times. You'll love how they appear alongside themselves for hours of gameplay because they're within the same 10-28 level range. As an added bonus for the asset-reuse lover, said gameplay takes place in looping CG render backgrounds arranged into dungeons so just imagine leaving the town square in Ocarina of Time and arriving in that exact town square except mirrored. By the end of NINE you will love asset reuse, because you will not make it to the end of NINE otherwise.
(The harpies are also in Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE but without the looping backgrounds it just isn't the same.)
Honorable mention to Persona 1 which squeezed in the named furies Megaera, Tisiphone and Alecto by using the same upperbody sprite as the three named harpies. Unfortunately Atlus were too afraid to include the named harpy Podarge for a total of 7 unique birdladies, so Persona 1 will only be commemorated by an opacity-reduced overlay of the six they bothered including.
Only regular Harpy survived to the DS-3DS era, using her Soul Hackers design where her head kind of looks like a pinecone. After gracing us with her presence in Strange Journey (+ Redux) and Shin Megami Tensei IV(+ Apocalypse), the Harpy disappeared from the pages of SMT history never to be seen again. As for actual history, I think Harpies were evil birds in Greek mythology but don't quote me on that.
Special thanks to @veskscans for the SMT1/2 art of Harpy, Furiae, Ocypete, Celaeno and Aello, and @eirikrjs for the Soul Hackers Harpy scan. NINE gifs by me, other sprites from the MegaTen wiki.
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