Time to spice up this Christmas with some good old-fashioned blasphemy! A while back I reviewed and mostly enjoyed the Devil Survivor games, which are a spinoff of the Shin Megami Tensei series (or Resurrection of the Goddess if you’re not a weeb who thinks leaving things untranslated makes them cooler). The main series is also highly praised, so I decided to check it out, especially since as a Pokemon fan I’m interested in monster-catching games, and this one actually predates Pokemon by a significant margin! I chose to skip the NES Megami Tensei games and start with the SNES Shin Megami Tensei trilogy.

Sidenote: Every game starts with a standard “Any similarity between our characters and real people or organizations is purely coincidental” disclaimer, which, LOL. LOLOLOLOL.

A general note before I get into specific games: I found the mons mechanics of this series highly intriguing, and an excellent model for making mons recruitment both ethical and mechanically engaging. How do you recruit mons in these games? You talk to them. Every single demon you encounter can talk and be negotiated with. Every regular encounter can, in theory, be resolved nonviolently, though you may have to bribe the demons to leave you alone. The specific mechanics are rather rough and opaque, especially in the earlier games, but even though there’s a lot of randomness, certain classes of demons do display fairly consistent behavior, and figuring out how best to converse with them is its own strategy. Undertale‘s ACT system was apparently inspired by this, and I can definitely see the resemblance.

However, in a lot of ways it also reads like a version of Undertale with zero self-awareness. Despite every demon being sapient and capable of communication, you are encouraged to slaughter them in droves. Demons of the same race will even get mad at you if you kill a lot of them… which usually just makes them refuse nonviolent negotiation, thus encouraging you to kill even more. There is even a mechanic where demons of the same species will automatically truce with you because they don’t want to fight their friend (or get mad if you get their friend injured, even!), but you can make demons under your control kill their friends with no consequences.

Despite that, the game is still worlds ahead of Pokemon in its handling of this mechanic, despite the first game predating Pokemon by a full decade. I especially liked how it resolved the “what are they getting out of this” question in a very direct way: You pay them money. The only problem, really, is that it doesn’t go far enough: I would have liked to see allied demons express more personality and agency such as being able to initiate negotiations on their own or balk at bad orders. (Later games do in fact take steps in this direction, which I’ll discuss later.)

Overall, most of the problems with this system come down to the general video game problem of your principal method of engaging with the world being violence. You can’t gain EXP without killing demons and you can’t survive without leveling up, which necessitates your “heroes” being mass murderers. They do at least make an attempt to show that some demons really are objectively evil — and by this I mean they are vastly more likely to betray you in negotiations while cackling about how much they enjoy torturing people to death rather than the game just telling you they’re evil so it’s okay — but it’s not like the player characters make any attempt to restrict themselves to killing just those demons, and it would still be uncomfortable even if they did. (Even these “evil” demons still refuse to fight their kin, for instance.) I think the whole thing would be much more palatable if battles didn’t involve actually killing people, but the game explicitly marks HP 0 characters as “dead”, so.

The games also encourage you to treat demons as disposable, but in a way that’s actually not as unethical as it sounds. Demons cannot gain EXP or level up, so you need to replace your old demons with better ones as you progress; however, the primary way of doing this isn’t simply to dump them for a hotter model, but to fuse two demons together to make a stronger one. You would be justified in asking “Isn’t that still horribly unethical?” but the game resolves this very neatly: All demons are aware of fusion and actively want to be fused because it will make them stronger, so it is fully consensual and there presumably exists full continuity of consciousness for both demons. It’s really that simple, Pokemon. You’ve already established pokemon can talk, just have them explicitly consent. Other games do not have trouble grasping this concept.

Overall, the whole thing has a similar feel to Yo-Kai Watch‘s mechanics (which I discussed in my review of that game), just not absolutely terrible from a gameplay perspective. Turns out you can in fact have the best of both worlds!

Onto game-specific thoughts:

Shin Megami Tensei

This one I didn’t play past the opening, because I found the gameplay boring and confusing. The very first thing the game asks you to do is to allocate stats to all of your future party members with zero information on who they are or what their abilities are, potentially leading to such hilarious misplays as putting all your points into Magic on a character who cannot use magic. This made me scramble for a guide as soon as I started up the game, which is never a good thing. The poor communication continues throughout most mechanics — there’s almost nothing in the way of a tutorial and no explanation for how the demon recruitment mechanics work despite that being a core feature of the game.

Storywise, I think the game has a lot of interesting concepts executed poorly. The story begins in the present day when demons suddenly appear; you have a bunch of prophetic dreams and meet up with the people you saw in them, discovering a conflict between a Japanese nationalist and an American ambassador who’s threatening to nuke Japan to contain the demon threat. You have to choose which one to support (or just kill them both), but no matter what you do Japan gets nuked anyway and the rest of the game is post-apocalyptic. In the new world, your party members split over ideological differences, ultimately leading to you making a similar decision with the two of them, culminating in you defeating either the legions of Hell, the legions of Heaven, or both.

This idea of player choice influencing the story is really interesting, especially for such an early game, but in practice the actual result is very flat. The first major choice between Thor and Gotou sets the tone for the entire story: No matter what you actually choose, you’re always railroaded into a specific outcome. Similarly, your friends breaking up and forcing you to choose between them has the potential for really poignant emotional torque, but falls flat because your friends have the personalities of cardboard and break up for absolutely nonsensical reasons — the Chaos Hero just abruptly decides you’re cramping his style after he only accomplished his goal thanks to you, and the Law Hero dies outside of your control and then gets resurrected as a brainwashed God fanboy with little clear continuity to the version you knew. They also both die even if you side with one, making your choices even more pointless.

I criticized Devil Survivor 2 for pushing friendship-above-all-reason as the correct option, but this game has the opposite: Indiscriminate murder is the correct option, because both sides are terrible and the only way to express yourself in this game is through murder, so the “neutral” route just involves killing everyone. This is the good ending, somehow. Despite all that, you don’t even get to throw down with God and Lucifer directly, just some anticlimactic fight against a bunch of archangels and archdemons, respectively. This means the fundamental conflict is obviously not solved, leading to…

Shin Megami Tensei II

I found this game better on gameplay but worse on story, which is saying something. I did manage to play it all the way through, but relied heavily on guides and fast-forwarding. (So many random encounters, ugh.) The premise is that the railroading continues even after SMT ended: Despite being ungodly powerful enough to slaughter the legions of both Heaven and Hell, the hero was powerless to stop the ordinary human Christians from taking over and killing him when he got uppity. Also, he died alone despite the first game making a huge point of the Heroine having undying loyalty.

So, you play as a completely new character in a post-post-apocalyptic world run by the Christians, who are obviously as comically evil as they were in the previous game. I’m honestly not sure if their hilariously over-the-top evil conspiracy is supposed to come as a surprise or not; it’s framed as if it is, but anyone coming from the first SMT will see it coming from the word go. Like I said in my Devil Survivor review, while I’m no fan of Christianity, even I thought this portrayal was ridiculous and felt like a cartoon parody rather than saying anything about real Christianity.

So, the Christians got tired of waiting for the Second Coming, so they made an artificial test-tube Christ, somehow, which is you. God hates this but no one can tell because the archangels who came up with the plan believed in it so strongly their belief created a fake God. (It’s unclear if they know the fake God is fake or not.) You kill the fake God two-thirds of the way through the game, at which point the Law representative insists that everything is fine now because all the problems with Christianity were the fake God’s fault, only for the real God to show up and be just as evil as the fake, so what was the point of that twist, Atlus.

Continuing our adventures in railroading, the real God is in fact so evil you fight him even on the route where you side with him, because even his Christo-fascist followers can’t stomach him. When I read the summary for this I thought it would be an emotional twist, but it plays out as incoherently as possible: After you kill Lucifer the Law representative abruptly tells you that actually God’s plan was to use an orbital nuke to kill ALL LIFE ON EARTH, he DOES IT, and then while God is complimenting him he goes “Actually you’re guilty of genocide so I’m gonna judge you too now.” Dude, YOU PULLED THE TRIGGER. WHY ARE YOU ONLY OBJECTING NOW.

Lucifer, meanwhile, has no such ulterior motive and siding with him gets you an unambiguously happy ending, so good for him.

Shin Megami Tensei: if…

A spinoff game released shortly after SMT2 that serves as the prototype for the Persona series. It’s an AU set in a high school rather than a grand global apocalypse.

This game is way, way better than its predecessors, to the point that I would actually recommend it. The developers finally figured out that game mechanics require tutorials. Human weapons no longer immediately outpace fighter demons and magic. You can actually see demons’ elemental affinities instead of guessing for the first time in the series. You can continue after dying instead of having to reset. Dungeons are greatly compressed and there’s way less aimless wandering. (Except for the Domain of Sloth, which everyone involved should be shamed for.) It only took them three tries, but they finally made a good game!

The story is also much more engaging. Your choices matter less, but then the previous games did that terribly, so not a huge loss. You get to choose from a selection of four party members at the start, each of which has a notably different personality and changes the ending. The characters and NPCs both had fun, interesting dialogue, and I actually enjoyed trekking back to the school after every world to see everyone’s dialogue update.

However. The plot is that a bullied student (who’s secretly an ~unappreciated genius~) decides appropriate retribution is to drag the entire school into Hell and horrifically torture all the students and faculty to death. One of the things in particular that pushed him over the edge is that a girl he had a crush on turned him down, which results in him singling out her and her boyfriend for the worst torture during the main plot. The true ending reveals this is supposed to be sympathetic.

The game was made before school shootings/killings became commonplace, but wow has that aged poorly. I think it should concern people a lot more than it does that we are so eager to create and justify narratives about disproportionate retribution. It cuts especially deeply on this blog where we’ve received utterly depraved harassment from people who think the slightest perceived wrong gives them a blank check to hurt people as much as they want.