Playing a video game is the process of living through it. It is the act of making a thing known that was once obscure, mapping its landscape with your hands and your eyes, and your mind. Eventually, it becomes something not so different from a model or a puzzle, but occupying instead a place in time, along with the person you were when you played it. This is, I think, all you can take with you. That will have to be enough.
Recently I played through the game Shin Megami Tensei IV on the Nintendo 3DS and I thought about this a lot — the idea of an experience, and the transition of a thing from mystery to intimately known. Because, like all SMT games, the shape of the experience resisted me, even as I mastered it. SMT IV is rich with detail and intention, to the point of being florid, but is also elusive, cold, and hard to pin down even at its most generous. Because of its aesthetics and a demand for technical proficiency in its gameplay, the horizons of the experience seemed always so vast, ever-distant, and inching always further, until suddenly I was done and — that was the game. It’s weird now to think I’ve actually played the entire thing and that (aside from mostly unnecessary minutia) nothing of substance really remains to be discovered. I’d played and felt more connected to the Persona games, which were not so different but also extremely different in the most key way. I understood Person; I knew what it wanted from me, who I was in it. But I still wanted to know what Shin Megami Tensei IV was and I felt like it didn’t want to tell me.
On a “technical” level, I understand why people complain about SMT IV being frustrating — there are things it clearly wants you to be frustrated by and therefore overcome. But, also, there are elements and concepts that are simply annoying, the biggest being map navigation in the overworld. It is difficult to know where to go next and even, in a general sense, what direction you need to go in order to get there. There are a lot of potential solutions — map spots, party chat, etc. — but it doesn’t really care. The game seems to bank on the player having a general knowledge of the layout of real-life Tokyo, at once kind of a neat idea, but also functionally frustrating in a way that is hard to deny.
But that’s not correct. I realized, later, that this precise frustration is the point, fundamental to understanding what this game is trying to say about games and about itself: in Shin Megami Tensei, “Tokyo” is the dungeon. You’re not meant to navigate it easily or well, and the designer intends for you to be fighting for your life more or less all the time, as you might be in Wizardy or Tower of Druaga. The dungeon now is a high school, an office building, or the Sky Tree tower. The constant barrage of battles, ever hostile, across simultaneously foreign and mundane landscapes, these things reinforce the dominant ideology of the game’s conceit and design: to become strong, you must survive the horrors of this dungeon — and the dungeon is the whole world.
The tone is often cynical and there is a clear indifference, particularly in combat, to the whims of the player in a way that makes them feel disempowered while also placing them very much at the center of the action. Religious figures appear as proxies for the sublime, a soup of concepts so vast as to be existentially terrifying for the meager human mind, and so the game does a good job approximating and also systematizing the intrusion of those forces into our lives, both in the literal way they are played in the narrative drama of the story, but also simply via their existence, the transcendental inference they suggest by being present. In SMT IV the mystical, hard-to-explain distance and alienation of religious and mythological texts is invoked through the hostility of the navigation and the technical and unforgiving nature of the combat.
And so here there’s a sort of thread we become aware of — the image, the gameplay, and the narrative, working in unison, to emphasize something for the player to experience. One-third of that (or, I should say, at least one-third) is the story, which is itself the storytelling and the plot — or rather, what it’s about, and how it's about it. Because the way SMT IV handles the sublime also points toward how it handles everything. This game is by its nature obscure; not in the sense that it isn’t popular or widely available (it is, now, both of those things) but because even in the story its intentions are hard to grasp and difficult to fully articulate. The narrative often underutilizes its drama in favor of the narrow and technical game experience, while surrounding itself with either the potential or the imagined trappings of a more vividly realized story.
The story, I think, is not meant to be in the foreground, so much as it is meant to contextualize what that foreground is. “Flynn”, the player-character, is only a small step removed from you the player. It is your interiority and motivations that matter because it’s your philosophy that it ultimately wants you to interrogate. Stuff is happening insomuch as there is a need to motivate your choices, to provide a platform and an arena for missions, decisions, and sacrifices. That the narrative has an arc is the product of the need for you to experience the consequences of your worldview in some meaningful way.
Conversely, Shin Megami Tensei IV has a lot of plot, and I’d like to run through it now in order to explicate, specifically, what I mean when I say that too little of it is dramatized. The player enters the world as “Flynn,” a peasant in a stratified medieval society, as he comes of age and steps into the mantle of a demon-user. Doing so drafts him into the struggle between law, chaos, and nihilism, and his decisions will be fundamental to the fate of the universe.
But the story, the content that really sells this and brings it together, begins much earlier, elsewhere. In Japan, in the 21st century, the Yamato Perpetual Reactor is invented as either a military weapon used to summon demons into the world or as some kind of advanced power source that connects to the demon world as an unforeseen consequence. This device is able to open a portal into the Expanse, also called (in various other SMT products) the Makai, the Netherworld, and the Demon World — a kind of higher plane of existence where conventional laws of physics do not apply. It is also, importantly, a dimension where demons, gods, and angels exist, brought into being through the interaction of collective human consciousness and emotion. When the reactor is engaged, it allows the demons to flood into our world, touching off several conflicts at once: 1) a struggle of humans against these creatures 2) a world war between human nations, based on how they choose to deal with these intruders, and 3) a battle between angels and demons, the forces born of and feeding off of law and chaos, in order to determine who will control the minds and souls of humanity, and thus the destiny of the universe itself.
Prior to (or possibly during) the creation of this reactor, the Japanese government implements the Counter-Demon Force, a specialized paramilitary organization that utilizes a demon-summoning technology in order to battle the demons. This force is probably like the organizations depicted in other SMT games (specifically Strange Journey), with similar goals. The members of this group include several characters the player will meet: Fujiwara, Skins, Akira, Kyoharu, Kenji, as well as the original incarnation of Flynn. The Counter-Demon Force is apparently modestly successful at combatting demons but ultimately fails to hold back the cataclysm that shapes the world of the present tense of the game.
The demon-summoning program is the key weapon humans are able to use to deal with demons and retain some degree of security for their own society. This application, created by a man named Stephen (clearly a reference, visually at least, to mathematician Stephen Hawking) shrinks, systematizes, and digitizes the complex rituals needed for calling and controlling demons; once it is leaked to the world, and suddenly becomes accessible to almost anyone, it engenders a crisis of demon proliferation that the CDF is not equipped to deal with.
At this point, the nations of the world (specifically Country A, a likely reference to the United States, under the influence of Angels) decide to bring the demon threat to an end by using nuclear weapons in a scenario I suspect is largely similar to the “Tokyo Lockdown” of Devil Survivor. Flynn’s first incarnation, the youngest member of the Counter-Demon Force, wields various powerful demons; moments before a nuclear ICBM strike on Japan, he engages with Masakado, a strong Japanese demon, and uses him to protect the city by creating an earthen dome called the Firmament that encompasses Tokyo and shields it from destruction. Flynn’s incarnation apparently “dies” doing so (or, he fuses with Masakado?) but his spirit reincarnates periodically into the new world above. Because of his natural connection to Masakado and whatever inherent strength of will makes him a strong demon-user, he becomes a “Messiah” — that is, like those past SMT protagonists, he is the person that will choose the moral path that humanity, and ultimately the universe, will take.
The other, tragically little-explored, members of the CDF also play their parts here; Kenji is original Flynn’s friend, who fights alongside him, as is Akira; Skins and Fujiwara are also CDF members who survive into the present in underground Tokyo, which is why they are such effective Hunters according to the board rankings and have a suspiciously thorough understanding of what is going on relative to the other inhabitants.
One of God’s counter-moves during the Tokyo crisis, implemented via his four strongest angels, who act as proxies, is to assemble his chosen followers in a cocoon in Tokyo so that they can be protected from the ICBM strike. After the strike he moves this cocoon above the Firmament, where he intends for those chosen to carry on humanity with His plans as their guide in pursuit of lawful order. Akira, another CDF member who is very strong, climbs the Sky Tree in order to find his sister, who was among those chosen in the cocoon. Above, he encounters the four angels and apparently sides with them, using his demons (Minotaur, specifically) to seal Naraku and guard the only path between Tokyo below and the country above he then founds, which he calls Mikado. He becomes its first King, Aquila — or possibly, history is ret-conned by the various powers that be to depict him as such. It’s not clear how much of this was his choice; the Akira met in the course of the game is more mercurial, moved by the prevailing sentiment of his time.
Because of his inherent power of will, as well as his connection to Masakado and the soul of Tokyo, Flynn’s is the choice that will tip the balance of power definitively in a specific direction (based on the desires of the player). After being inaugurated into the order of the Samurai, he becomes aware of the machinations of the Black Samurai, or, Lilith, a demon who is disrupting the complacent lawful order of the surface world by introducing knowledge in the form of literature to the working class, and thus challenging the dominant ideology of Mikado. Lilith is a demon on the side of chaos, and wants to engender a sort of “might makes right” anarcho-libertarian society, where the strongest and most capable people are empowered to shape the world as they see fit, without being forced to conform to norms or institutions they don’t like. She is able to egress upon Mikado’s socially conservative society with so much success, in part, because three of the four Archangels (God’s most powerful proxies) are captive under the dome, and Gabby (or, Gabriel, the last of the four) does not alone have the power to rescue them.
(I suspect Lilith’s use of the CDF armor is meant to suggest she, or at least her original human vessel prior to merging, was a member of the Counter-Demon Force as well).
The Black Samurai eventually pushes Flynn and his peer samurai into the nightmarish, apocalyptic Tokyo that still exists beneath the firmament, where they are exposed to the excesses of the various factions and ideologies at play in the struggle for the city’s and humanity’s soul. Eventually, after being pushed and pulled by these various forces, the delicate order that separated Tokyo from Mikado begins to collapse — the Ashura-kai (essentially the Yakuza) lose their ability to make peace with the demons because they can no longer produce the hideous “Reds”, the Ring of Gaea loses its leader, and the Eastern Kingdom grows too strong with the return of the other three Archangels — and so the Samurai engage the Yamato Perpetual Reactor. Here, Flynn encounters the White.
Stephen appears, though this may be the Stephen of another timeline, and he explains the dynamics of the larger struggle taking place for the remaining human souls on Earth — between God, who is cold and indifferent to humanity, who wants humans to inhabit a stultifying and fascistic existence, the demons who want anarchy and survival-of-the-fittest, and (most importantly) “the White” — sentience born from collective human nihilism, engendered by humanity’s natural resentment at having to live under the whims and edicts of a cruel and uncaring God.
The White wish to wipe out the universe and return everything to nothing, to essentially commit cosmic suicide, which they claim is the only meaningful way to resist and upend God’s plans. In order to do this, they have selected Flynn as a catalyst, and the events of SMT IV are, in part, the process of attempting to teach him why they believe they are on the correct path. Everything is pointless. Friends and enemies suffer equally in a world designed to create pain. The appearance of free will is an illusion. However, assuming the player chooses one of the non-“bad ending” routes, Flynn arrives at a very different conclusion and rejects the desires of the White, i.e. he rejects the most nihilistic desires of humanity.
The SMT games, and the Atlus / SMT universe in general, depict God, humans, demons, and the White in a kind of system of perpetual symbiotic connection. It is unclear which created or engendered the other (Persona 3, for example, suggests some vast cosmic entity influenced the evolution of human beings and human consciousness, which then birthed the Demon World in response); however, everything is born from the deeper nature and experience of life — namely misery, suffering, longing, wanting. The outstretched hand searching blindly for connection in a vast and lonely universe. And so it is that Flynn (and the player) are given the option to choose — the fascistic, repressive law of God, the cruelty of demons, the suicidal nihilism of the White, or — a neutral path that rejects all of these in favor of the possibilities of human agency.
The term “neutral” feels ill-suited to what the choice actually entails. It is not centrism, not a merged or watered-down version of the other ideologies. Instead, it is a kind of optimism; Flynn believes that humans can be better, and through their striving, they can find a way to make the world a better place too. And if they fail, they should be allowed to fail on their terms, and die in their striving. To choose one of the other endings is to subordinate yourself to someone else’s ideology, to choose not who you think is right, but rather, who you’d like to be your master. The neutral path is the path that rejects such complacency. It allows humans the agency to master themselves. This message is the point of SMT IV.
But my explanation here makes a lot of the story more clear than it is in the game. The backstory — which is to say, all the stuff that happens before the modern Flynn incarnation becomes a Samurai — is barely articulated even in the most basic way. The stuff with the CDF, the ICBM strike on Tokyo, the relationships between Akira, etc — none of this is dramatized or appears in-scene. A few lines of dialogue are all you get to put the pieces together for the majority of the plot, worldbuilding, and emotional beats in the story.
It’s puzzling that they chose to tell the story this way, but it again gestures toward the greater intentions of the game: coldness. Indifference to the player. The world has existed before you got here, and it will exist after you leave. Here are some clues, some choices, and you decide who you are. What do you do? That’s what SMT IV wants to ask, and this is the way it frames the question.
There were many times I was distracted by how much /more/ impactful the plot could be if there had been consideration of the context, the clarity of the consequences, the urgency, and the stakes of the story. For example, a character named Kaga is introduced with great drama, and then almost immediately and unceremoniously killed off, having fulfilled only the barest requirement to feature in the plot. Other supporting characters like Hikaru and Fujiwara, who appear multiple times, are never given space or opportunity to do anything in-scene, in the present-tense of the story [it would be interesting if they briefly joined your party, for example].
Further examples abound: mid-game, a samurai gets taken hostage by Tayama to motivate the player to choose a side; sadly he’s a no-name and not one of the characters you’d actually have an attachment to. The former members of the Counter-Demon Force, a cornerstone of the in-game lore and worldbuilding, are never really explicitly described or dramatized but left to the player to triangulate via suggestions and gestures. If any of these elements had been more narratively refined and meaningful, the associated plot points would have hit so much harder, but in the end, the game is weirdly disconnected from so much of its own concrete material, so under-dramatized, and subsequently, disconnected from the impact of that drama.
SMT games are strange little morality plays. The characters you meet represent different moral positions, spaces on the social hierarchy, concepts, and ideas in the social/moral space. They are played against one another and against the will and choice of the player; they are sometimes allowed to carry their own worldview to a kind of conclusion so that we understand what the consequences of that extreme might be. In a way I can see why this is sometimes dramatically inert — it’s not really about the human drama at all, but about making a point using straw men and proxies and examples. At its best, it functions in this sort of It’s a Wonderful Life or Christmas Carol way. Sometimes it just feels like there are pieces moving around you while you kill monsters in a dungeon.
But that, again, is the conceit — the whole world is a dungeon. It is mysterious and unforgiving, and every battle is a fight to the death. You are yourself. Surrounded though you might be by friends or enemies, fundamentally your motivations and your choices are your own. Where you arrive is up to you, or rather, to look at it differently, it is your fate, determined by the kind of person you are in your soul. That is Shin Megami Tensei.
While all of this is very interesting, it's frustrating that so little of it is depicted or dramatized in a meaningful way; a lot of it has to be arrived at via inference, or dialogue that is cryptic and mealy-mouthed. One redemptive quality might be that much of the backstory is a play on events that have happened in other prior games, so in a way, the long-time player has “played” all of this before. It’s interesting in a meta way, but I still feel like it leaves so much unexplored.
Because so little of the above plot is dramatized, the player spends much of their time on their heels, wondering “why is this happening?” and “why did this person do that?” instead of enjoying the richness of the experience. Moreover, the lack of context and clarity means we have little sense of interiority — beyond the main cast we barely understand the character’s motivations because we don’t know what they want, what the stakes are, and what is urgent to them. This lack of context might also contribute to the “moody” atmosphere, but in a way that is a bit of an indictment. SMT IV chooses to lean so hard on affectation and technical stuff like combat, rather than genuinely moving us with drama.
SMT IV is a dungeon crawler that wants you to reconsider what a “dungeon” really is — a stone tower, a high school, a city, a whole world. It also wants to challenge the crawl and the axis upon which you interact with that game world. Everything you do is your choice, seen through your eyes, motivated by your philosophies. However, herein are buried the seeds of its undoing. This is why Persona ultimately usurps Shin Megami Tensei: by expanding and focusing on the social interactions between characters as a way of structuring the narrative, by providing interiority and motive as a way of contextualizing the crawl, Persona gives life to the drama of the dungeon.
I learned what Shin Megami Tensei is, and then I realized that Persona is more Shin Megami Tensei than Shin Megami Tensei could ever be.
