My Strange Journey through modern Shin Megami Tensei
(disclaimer: i didn't actually play Strange Journey)
(disclaimer disclaimer: I'm in the middle of playing Strange Journey Redux while writing this but didn't want to wait until I finished it)
I played Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance recently, and to stave off the existential dread of reality I ended up jumping into the existential dread of virtual reality. That is, I played SMTIV and SMTIV: Apocalypse, a process which included literally breaking my 3DS and having to take it to a local repair shop where they tried to fleece me.
Having played three-ish SMT games means I have played more SMT than the vast majority of humans on Earth. I dunno if I have capital-t Thoughts, but I do have lower-case-t thoughts. Might as well put them somewhere.
"We get off on your tears"
My early experience with mainline SMT is one that was apparently quite common; at minimum I have spoken to at least one other person who had the exact same experience completely independently. To wit: I played and enjoyed Persona 3 and 4 - both of which were released westward with SMT branding - and picked up Shin Megami Tensei IV when it launched on the 3DS in 2013, curious about the mainline franchise.
Shin Megami Tensei IV does not fuck around. The beginning of any given SMT or Persona game is always the hardest, before you have access to the tools that let you get a leg up. And I unintentionally made things harder for myself, presuming I simply could not make use of basic gameplay mechanics.
If you've played the fourth, fifth, or sixth Persona games (so 3, 4, or 5), you know they have a major life sim / time management element. When you open up the dungeon in Persona, that's spending that day's (and night's) "turn" that could have been used to go on a date with the hot goth doctor. The game is balanced around your resources being difficult to replenish within the dungeon and forcing you to account for that in your schedule.
SMTIV doesn't have this. You can just go back to your room to rest and heal. It's fine.
However.
The earliest quests in SMTIV narratively imply a time pressure. You're a new Samurai cadet being tested by the Commander, pitted against your cohorts in a race to see who can spelunk the hardest and fastest. At the time, I assumed that meant time would pass if I went to heal and I would lose the race. Isabeau would think I'm a loser! Navarre would laugh at me! Unconscionable!
Bereft of curatives, not even realizing I could simply abandon unneeded demons, my strategy was thus: enter Demon Negotiation with Napaea, the lowest tier Fairy demon in the first dungeon. If Napaea sees that there's already a Napaea in your party, she casts Dia (the lowest tier healing spell) on you. I slogged through the first couple quests assuming this was The Way.
Forgive the discourtesy of an oversaturated analogy: Dark Souls. Certain obnoxious portions of the fanbase of Dark Souls make much ado about the game's supposed extreme difficulty, how it's not for babies, how not playing how they dictate is cheating not only the game but yourself, et cetera. The marketing tagline was "Prepare to Die". Its actual difficulty is greatly exaggerated, but the zeitgeist is already scarred.
In Dark Souls, once tossed into the game's true map, you broadly have two choices:
- Enter the Undead Burg, manned by fairly weak zombies appropriate to your starting level placed in various configurations to get further acquainted with what the game expects of you.
- Enter the Catacombs, guarded by skeletons balanced for the mid-game who reform themselves indefinitely if not killed with an enchanted holy weapon. Pressing on reveals trapped walkways, precarious vertical shafts, and a powerful Titanite Demon in a cramped hallway.
The design here obviously pushes a new player in a certain direction, but a new player might turn towards the Catacombs first. Aware only of the game's reputation as brick-shittingly difficult, this hypothetical Howard smashes their head repeatedly against the immortal skeletons, assuming this is intentional and likely giving up in the face of unreasonable difficulty for a starting character.
What I'm saying is that Shin Megami Tensei also has this reputation. I thought I was too weak, but I was simply unaware. 12 years later, I finally understood I could rest at the inn, treat the game less like cock-and-ball-torture and more like a regular-ass RPG.
Those first few hours are hard as hell though, damn. That Minotaur is rough and Walter is a fucking idiot for casting Agi on it repeatedly.
"Horrible outdated gameplay"
The Press Turn battle system - introduced in SMT Nocturne and used most recently in Metaphor ReFantazio - is perhaps Atlus' greatest innovation in JRPGs. Each active party member adds an action point to the pool. Hit an enemy weakness or land a lucky crit and your attack uses up only half an action point. A nullified attack - via a miss or an elemental immunity - costs a whopping two points. An absorbed or reflected attack ends your turn immediately.
With a deliberate hand, you can effectively double your turn. I've found the off-beat action pips are often best utilized for healing or support skills, setting up a beatdown for the next turn. The rub is that the system is indiscriminate; enemies can do all of this to you too.
Put it all together and you get a game of big swings and careful observation. Awareness of weaknesses and resistances is the key to victory and whoever gets the momentum first is likely going to win the whole battle. This is what actually makes SMT hard; mistakes or unpreparedness are severely punished and the tools necessary to access and act on necessary information are doled out slowly. Major bosses usually take a dry run or two just to figure out how to approach the fight.
SMTIV in particular has several mechanical quirks that oil up this proverbial slippery slope. There is no Defense or Vitality stat; new armor only affects your HP and resistances. Upon hitting a weakness or dodging/nullifying an attack, a character has a chance to "Smirk"; a Smirking character has their weaknesses covered, a high chance to dodge, and their next attack is guaranteed to crit.
The boss hit a weakness on their final press-turn and started smirking? They're going to get more turns and you're not. Too fucking bad. It can get frustrating, but when you've set up your perfect deck and force Satan to punch himself in the face and lose a turn? You feel like a genius.
Press Turn makes every single battle into a little puzzle. You can only braindead brute-force through if you're overwhelmingly more powerful. The reason you can hold like 20 demons is so you can keep every possible situation covered. Ideally, you observe and consider the information available and make intelligent decisions based on that information... and sometimes watch it all crumble instantly through no fault of your own.
Just like everything else right now, I guess.
"Ugly and muddy world"
I'm told Shin Megami Tensei V is a bit contentious on the narrative front (even with the Vengeance additions) due to its sort of soft reboot status. When a franchise goes a long time without an installment, a new release is liable to be a "back to basics" scenario, re-establishing the baseline without taking any big swings or weird shots. See also Ace Combat 7, Armored Core VI, Baldur's Gate 3, Mario & Luigi Brothership, and plenty of others that I can't think of immediately.
I didn't have a reference point in my previous post. Now that I've actually played other SMT games, I can see that SMTV really doesn't have any frills. The apocalypse happened before you were even born and the Tokyo you live in is an Act of God; a pocket reality cordoning off the last remnants of humanity. Gods and demons war without end, vying for the Throne of Creation, and you are no different. Do you choose to preserve the current world along with all its sins and virtues? Or do you tear it down, believing the system itself too fundamentally broken to ever allow humanity true happiness? Law vs Chaos, et cetera et cetera.
IV has a far more ambitious setup, which I hadn't quite expected out of a 3DS game. You're a knightly Samurai in the fantasy kingdom of Mikado, almost 1500 years strong. Only after several hours of gameplay establishing the kingdom's caste system and theocracy are you tasked with infiltrating the mysterious realm of the "Unclean Ones", hidden deep within the earth. This strange land is (and unlike some games, they do not really go out of their way to make this seem like A Big Twist, they know you know) the post-apocalyptic modern Tokyo.
Where Vengeance has various palettes of bombed-out wasteland to map to Tokyo's districts, IV still has a functioning post-apocalyptic society. Communities live in the subway system. There are shops, restaurants, children. People survive and keep on living the best they can regardless of whether they live in anarchy or authoritarianism. These contrasting societies help flesh out the Law vs Chaos dichotomy, showing you the logical endpoints of the opposing ideologies and how each is alluring yet flawed.
SMTIV: Apocalypse understands this setting is the most interesting thing about IV and attempts to explore it further, edging into the cyberpunk vibes SMT has always been adjacent to. The main characters are mostly born and raised in demonic Tokyo. To them, the half-wrecked train tunnels are not eerie, unnatural cave-dwellings (IV's Ueno theme) but a comforting refuge (IV:A's Kinshicho theme). They're home.
This more humanistic approach brings extra attention to random NPCs around Tokyo and how they feel about being pawns in the interminable proxy war between various divine factions. They largely think it fucking sucks. When angels and devils and the Polytheistic Alliance are slaughtering humans by the droves, what's the point of living? Even on a franchise level, one has to wonder what purpose the little people play in this world of gods and monsters.
Vengeance establishes that after claiming the Throne of Creation, the Abrahamic God forcibly split all other deities from their metaphysical "Knowledge", reducing them to mere demons unfit to truly challenge the status quo. Lucifer imbued that Knowledge into humanity by tricking them into eating the fruit in Eden. Therefore, if someone is to claw their way to the top of the new world order, they must first become a complete being wielding the Power of demons and the Knowledge of humans. It strikes me as a surprisingly mechanical answer, in a "this keeps the worldbuilding consistent" kind of way.
IV itself is rather vague on the subject, but Apocalypse rolls up its sleeves to support its own agenda, gesturing towards quantum mechanics with a dash of Persona-like Jungian metaphysics. It posits that even if the world was created by YHVH, humans are still required to "perceive" it. Deities change form and function over time due to how human thought changes over time. If all humans were killed, all creation - even its creator - would cease to be. Therefore, humans, weak though they may be at times, hold the true power and must fight to throw off the yoke of their oppressors! Et cetera, et cetera, it's fairly standard business for the JRPG genre.
To support both ideas - that humans are pitiful pawns suffering in a conflict bigger than themselves and that friendship is the greatest truth of all - IV:A's tone is cleaved in twain. The heroes laugh and hug and flirt whilst NPCs wail in despair and violently perish next door. I think focusing on the happiness we can find in a doomed world could be an interesting angle, one I'd love to see in a different format, but the proverbial teeth I expect from the franchise feel sanded down. SMTIV posits that true "Freedom" cannot exist without conflict, just as true "Order" cannot exist without oppression; Apocalypse posits that you can overcome anything with a little help from your friends. The game overshoots, making the catastrophe a bit too cozy, the consequences a bit too rosy.
I mean, this is Shin Megami Tensei, the franchise about deciding the fate of all reality. I'm challenging the Creator to free the pathetic dregs of humanity from their destiny of servitude. I'm forced to choose between extreme ideologies that will inevitably end with former friends and loved ones being put to the sword.
It seems to me - despite my limited experience - that this ought make you feel a bit ill-at-ease. This ain't Persona.
"Persona without the heart"
A common criticism of SMT, especially from people like myself who were introduced via Persona, is that the characters are little more than mouthpieces for ideologies who do not grow or change much over the course of the story. They certainly don't have 8-10 steps of character development punctuated with quantifiable mechanical bonuses.
Watching (and podcasting about) Legend of the Galactic Heroes has given me a different perspective on character writing. That show is all about characters who represent or champion specific ideologies or concepts! Yet it remains compelling from beginning to end, because it's not about the characters growing or changing or confronting some kind of lie at the center of their being or whatever. It's about how they react and respond to the complex, ever-changing circumstances of the world.
With this in mind, I was better able to appreciate the way SMT handles its casts. IV's Walter and Jonathan are not meant to be complex. They exist to show how and why someone might slide into extremism when confronted with the injustice and unfairness of the world. Vengeance's Dazai illustrates the way religion offers a purpose to the lost, and why someone might be drawn to its strict hierarchies and rigidity.
It doesn't always work well, of course. I think Yoko Hiromine from Vengeance is an absolutely hilarious character, and I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be laughing. Her repeated interjections supporting Chaos are borderline unhinged. When we're two decades deep into Armageddon, the ethics of automobiles are not something that really warrant discussion, I think. Coupled with Tao's saccharine Law pleadings to fix the ills of the world, the two make an amazing comedy duo.
I'll be honest: if you confront me on whether I like any of these characters more than I like the cast of Apocalypse? Obviously I like the cast of Apocalypse more. They're my buddies! They're actually useful in battle! We went to the beach that one time! I can totally see Asahi and Hallelujah just hanging out and having a good time. I would gladly max out Nozomi's hypothetical Social Link, if you know what I'm sayin'.
But what do they believe in? If we're gonna be putting a bullet in the Creator and charting a new course for reality, I feel like I should know the answer. What ideologies do they hold in their heart other than "if only we can just get along, friendship overcomes all"?
There is of course a mechanical motive here as well, other than just a narrative or tonal one: no true disagreement among the party will occur because all of them have to stick around for you to make use of their skills in battle. I love JRPGs and their tropes, but if you've read anything on this site you can tell I'm also an avid player of western CRPGs. They've stuck much closer to tabletop roots, so the concept of "alignments" still lingers. Emphasis on choice and consequence means that there's a bit more room for characters to have ideologies, and more importantly, act on them.
In early examples like Wizardry, you simply could not have both Good and Evil characters in the same party. By the time of Baldur's Gate, you could force folks to work together for a time, but some characters would inevitably come to blows (paladins, I swear). Viconia might ditch you just because you've been too nice.
I've got Avowed on the mind, so take Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. Depending on your actions and whom you're supporting in the geopolitical stalemate, your party members will make their opinions known. Maia Rua, the cool Gunhawk ranger, is a representative of the Royal Deadfire Company; it doesn't matter if we're shacking up together, she'll try and put a bullet in my head if I go against her nation's interests. Party members even get in fights with each other, like Pallegina and Xoti's memetic argument on the nature of divinity.
In most of these games, the proverbial Breaking of the Fellowship rarely happens in practice due to the protagonist privilege of the "Charisma check", but I appreciate the artifice. It stands in stark relief considering I've recently played Atlus's own Metaphor ReFantazio, a particularly clumsy attempt at selling "what if we just all got along" as a coherent political message.
The ever-popular "good times and compromise" sentiment rings increasingly hollow these days (if you're reading this far enough in the future where maybe things are different, it's early 2025 right now, shit is bad). Not to get too real here, but I'm of mixed race. There are people out there who - according to their strongly held ideological values - think I should be killed. Our worldviews are fundamentally incompatible. No amount of hanging out at the cafe or going to the beach is going to change their mind and make us friends.
Hell, I live in California, supposedly one of the most left leaning states in the USA. Yet, in the 2024 elections, over half CA's voting population chose to keep slavery. Fucking slavery! If this is the Law option, then yeah I'm going with Chaos. What else am I supposed to do? Pick no option and pretend like that makes me above it all somehow?
It's easy to take the past of least resistance and just muddle through everything with your head down; that's my usual state of being, after all. I think because of that, there's something oddly appealing about Shin Megami Tensei as a franchise. It'll cuff you to the fence until you choose between equally unappealing extremes, or else call you a hypocrite and a coward. It'll punish you for the slightest mistake and kick you while you're down. It'll make you watch your friendships die, if not sever them yourself.
Shin Megami Tensei is histrionic, hostile, hamhanded, and yes, perhaps heartless at times. Few other games are willing to take those chances.
---