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Shin Megami Tensei |OT| Choose a new Reason
- Thread starter HylianSeven
- Start date
The issue with this is that I have no real access to SMTI and II and thus have never played them. I could try to get a sense from the official art, of course, but I won't have that context and personality to really inform the work.
'I do not comprehend'
Joke aside, any example ? There is a chance it's tied to the story.
In particular I'm thinking of the conversations with Jinana, everyone talks like robots
"Are you sad?"
"What is sad?.... Yes I am sad"
Nearing the end of my Apocalypse replay. Just the final dungeon, now. The Anarchy route is... wild. I'll get into it properly after I beat the game, but it's better than I remember, mostly. There are a few seriously wack parts, though, and an overarching tone problem I think I can explain better now.
I started replaying Apocalypse. I did the "good" ending for my first playthrough, and I hadn't done the neutral route in SMT IV before I played it the first time.
Now I'm super confused to when Apocalypse actually takes place.
Now I'm super confused to when Apocalypse actually takes place.
Maybe going that route will improve my impression of the game. I have a save file right before the major choice, might just go from there. I'm still not over how disappointing the game was for me.
The game doesn't really differ much outside of difficulty, but the battle that comes immediately after making that choice and some dialogue right after it are really good.
Sucks that they didn't try to justify the route at all, though. Nanashi has literally 0 reasons to go anarchy lol.
I don't know what happens on that route (did the friendship is magic one) but I want to play it because I'm hoping that it will allow me to fucking kill everyone.
In IV I got Chaos on my first run and having to kill Isabeau broke my heart, in Apocalypse I'd actually like the option to go berserk on all those idiots.
Isn't is during the part of SMTIV Neutral where
Flynn is running around becoming Champion to become Tokyo's beacon of hope?
I mean, I don't think it fits anywhere else.
Yes
In Apocalypse, Flynn is popular precisely because he's been helping everyone and giving Tokyo citizens hope.
Ohhhh, this is gonna be a long deconstruction. I'm hitting the third page already and I haven't even touched the Bonds ending, nor have I seen the Anarchy ending yet, so I don't know how much I'll have to say about that.
Apocalypse, you done fucked up your thematic depth bad.
Apocalypse, you done fucked up your thematic depth bad.
Apocalypse is peak modern Atlus.
That and the new content in Strange Journey make me somewhat concerned for SMT V.
That and the new content in Strange Journey make me somewhat concerned for SMT V.
There are times I'm almost good with thinking of Apocalypse as a weird experiment, until I remember some of the stuff I'll be posting later and what I've heard about Redux and then any hype I had for V just dies again. I now await the next game with a strange mixture of curiosity and trepidation.
I have my issues with IV, but it's still mostly on the ball and it wasn't that long ago, dammit! What the hell happened.
But Persona - is about - psychology - and SMT - is about - philosophy - and these - are actually - really different - and are served - by different - tropes - goddammit
/preaching to the choir
Persona is now about anime, pretty boys and girls and dating sims.
Oh and there's an RPG in there somewhere.
I always thought that majority of Persona players play it for the Dating Sim/ Visual Novel aspect. I know I do lmao.
I mean. The spinoffs have a higher proportion of that fluff, and the only ones I give a shit about are PQ and any sequels. P5 itself has some stupid bullshit in it, but is mostly still fucking great with its themes. The entire game is a metaphor for the importance of political activism, the final boss is pretty much the incarnation of fascism, and the final mission exists because society's psyche is fucked at the time and it's the phantom thieves--i.e. activism-- that wakes them up. On the whole I'd say Persona is still doing pretty well.
I'm playing Redux at the moment. I'm at Eradinus/third fruit and I'm not sure how I feel about the new content so far. Aside from the surprise of it's introduction there hasn't been much to it so far. Gameplay wise, working through the Womb of Grief has trivialised much of the difficulty of the main game.
All right. I have now finished SMTIV: Apocalypse on both the Bonds and Anarchy routes. I could go into some thoughts on other things like gameplay and whatnot (short form: it fixes all the gameplay issues of IV except the missing VIT stat and associated fallout and thus plays really nicely, and it has an absolutely wonderful soundtrack), but I doubt anyone really needs to be reminded of things like how horrendously the writing screwed Toki for the back two-thirds of her existence. So, instead, here is a little essay on what I think is the ultimate reason Apocalypse misses the mark. Please do call me out if I have misremembered something or if you think I am simply incorrect.
Note also that there are, of course, open spoilers for all of Apocalypse, as well as spoilers for Nocturne's True Demon Ending in here.
SMTIVA's biggest failing, I think, stems from a fundamental problem with the ideology and tone behind the story, and how that informs everything that happens. Or, rather, a critical lack of ideology and how that fails to inform everything that happens.
SMT as a series is largely plot-driven. Characters do not usually have an excess of depth because humanity is always caught in an ideological crossfire between heaven and hell. The war is always out of their hands, lest they join a side and wrest control, or manage to navigate a narrow option to overthrow all sides. The series has taken criticism on this front, and I think that some of that is valid. But I don't think this approach is entirely without merit, either. Characters being willing to side with extremes--yes, sometimes too readily and without much build-up--can contribute to the harrowed, philosophical atmosphere when executed well. War is often about ideology, but in a universe where supernatural entities are given form by human thought and need those thoughts to subsist, every supernatural war is a literal struggle for humanity's collective soul. This leads to moral argument and philosophical debate in a way that causes the traditional Law, Neutral, and Chaos alignments to feel like something more than personal opinions or squabbles, almost like they have characters unto themselves, as if the universe was to sew their ballpark ideals of fascism, humanism, and might-makes-right as natural law into the fabric of the cosmos.
And this is where Apocalypse fails. Over and over and over again.
Apocalypse is themed around the Neutral alignment. The protagonist, Nanashi, is a human from a Tokyo that's already warded off a Law armageddon and has eked out an existence in the city's current Chaos state of demon occupation for the last 25 years. It is, quite literally, a representation of an incomplete Neutral ending, where both Law and Chaos have been resisted for the good of humanity, but not yet overthrown. As mentioned, Neutral is usually representative of a humanistic stance based on mankind breaking free of devotion to deities and taking control of their own future. It's not as easily identifiable as the extremes of Law and Chaos, but rather than simply being a rejection of extremes, it clearly also possesses a core. However, the game itself feels like it missed this memo in its quest to expand on the Neutral alignment.
The Divine Powers show up to challenge Lucifer and Merkabah for control of humanity. As they represent the fabled Third Option, they end up as the de facto Neutral alignment. It's not a bad idea, especially as they originate from a group of non-Christian religions that are understandably resentful about being shafted. What they consistently fail to do, however, is to establish a driving moral core to their goals, and thus they are never elevated to the oppressive, natural-law-of-the-universe feel that the alignments traditionally have.
The Divine Powers want to break humanity free of the material universe YHVH has bound them in and take them to a new universe where their souls will be divided evenly among the global pantheon--though it must be noted that achieving this first requires committing omnicide. There was an opportunity here to establish a moral core around, say, absolute equality, but it is never capitalized upon. No other moral core appears, either. Instead, the focus remains on their anger towards YHVH and the cruelty of the material universe. These are actually even decent arguments, and they fit into a general theme of criticising elements of Christian theology, but they are incomplete. They are exclusively defensive, not constructive. There is no ideology here. Law and Chaos (not to mention other experiments like Yosuga, Musubi, and Shijima) owe much of their insidiously horrifying atmospheres to the sheer devotion their adherents have to building a new reality by merging their philosophies into the actual physics of the universe, making them inescapable on a fundamental level. Probably the single best example of this is the sheer skin-crawling horror of Strange Journey's original Law ending. The Divine Powers, on the other hand, never think like this. Krishna's vision of a new universe actually manages to make a Nirvana-like one-ness with the cosmos sound almost banal, as if the polytheistic gods will still exist and will just be manually dividing human souls evenly to sustain themselves. How... mundane. The Divine Powers have hijacked Neutral's humanistic focus on mankind and its rejection of the Law/Chaos dichotomy and recentered it around focusing on serving the pagan gods.
And here we have two problems. One, that doesn't work. The only reason humanism can even stand as a rival ideology against the immense forces of heaven and hell is that humans are both the creators and victims of gods in the SMT metaverse. The Divine Powers are trying to co-opt an ideological cycle they fundamentally exist outside of. Two, as a result of problem One, we have now taken the thematic space SMT usually fills with ideology and filled it with what amounts to a mere squabble. A squabble between gods, to be sure, but when your series warfare is usually over rewriting the fundamental laws of reality, any given boss fight already stands a good chance of being informed by actual mythology, and any given battle has you playing squabbles between the opponent gods and the ones you've summoned from your smartphone, there is no way for that not to feel like an awkward spat has muscled its way into your Primary Conflict. The result is that almost the entire main game feels like a sidequest. The forest has been lost for the trees.
And Apocalypse gets lost in the trees constantly. Nanashi's missions almost make it feel like the group is being used with the way they are tossed around, desperately flailing against the three supernatural factions as they try to protect what little humanity has managed to keep intact. This would actually be a great example of using the gameplay to underscore the terror humanity suffers in these eldritch wars, except that they never advance beyond this point. The humanistic evolution has been completely hijacked. Similarly, your partners are never seduced by other ideologies and the only disagreements they have are ultimately fairly minor. They have some relatively superficial character, more than series standard, but there is no depth. Character growth doesn't have enough focus to have the depth of something like the Persona series (and let's be real, none of these characters are as personable or plausible as your average Persona party member[1]), and their opinions about the hellscape they exist in never move from the basic subsistence of the humans in Tokyo at large. The people in Tokyo, including your partners, seem to generally be of the opinion that "humanity can do anything if we band together," but what "anything" should actually be is, once again, never defined. I don't even think there was any talk of how to actually rid the world of the angels and demons, or what little there was was immediately sidelined by the appearance of the Divine Powers. The details are crowding out the picture.
The game takes Tokyo's citizens' ideals of sticking together and makes the Bonds ending out of it. This ending sees your party ultimately decide to off YHVH to free themselves of his control. It also weirdly only applies to YHVH. Lucifer, Merkabah, and the Divine Powers are all defeated at this point, but Tokyo is still suffering multitudes of demons everywhere, and I don't remember any plans or research to actually solve that. There is a scene showing humans working with some demons (I noticed some of the fairies, whom are amiable) at the end to rebuild, which is a convenient way to ignore the rest of the demons killing and eating humans everywhere. It's like the game's oppressive opening sequences about being permanently seiged by demons and constantly losing good people because of it were all simply forgotten. The armies of Lucifer and Merkabah might be gone, but the original problems were the Expanse and the Demon Summoning Program. Throwing off YHVH's chains to free the world for humans and other gods feels like the point of the Neutral alignment has been sidestepped entirely in a way that doesn't quite fit together, like a jigsaw puzzle of low build quality. YHVH wasn't the only problem here and is hardly the only high-powered entity prone to specific and oppressive ideas about what humanity should be getting up to. We literally just had an entire game about the Divine Powers doing this exact thing. Neutral endings are often temporary islands of stability in a chaotic and uncaring universe[2], but this one just feels naive. And this is without getting into the extreme tonal whiplash of this happy-go-lucky ending being far more weight than the character writing quality can bear.
Then we have the Anarchy ending. This one is actually rather interesting because it shares several pieces with Nocturne's infamous True Demon Ending, but woefully fails to utilize them properly. Your protagonist has been turned into a not-human by a powerful demon who wants to use you to kill gods. You end up ideologically split from your friends and end up murdering them all en masse. You destroy the source of the cycle of creation and destruction, and a transhumanist twist has you blow past human limitations and become a god-like entity. But, unlike in Nocturne, almost none of it feels justified. Nanashi's friends are with you all the way through the game, constantly emphasizing their usefulness and strength in numbers, and the game itself backs them up with how incredibly useful the partner abilities can be. They basically give you a free move every turn, and you have some limited ability to dictate whether that move will be an attack, healing, or a buff. The only representation the Anarchy route even gets before the big decision is Dagda's disdain for interreliance and for humanity's desire to congregate around a saviour (in Flynn). There aren't any missions where you have to work by yourself in some way or times when having partners really holds you back particularly significantly. There's almost no time in the game spent alone at all. There are a few times having partners carries some risk--like having Toki lead you into Tsukiji Konganji even though she intends to assassinate Flynn--but those risks don't ever materialize. From a gameplay and narrative standpoint, they might as well not exist, and they certainly don't offer a counterbalance to how useful the partners are in battle. The game would appear to want you to take the feel-good ending that doesn't actually solve things as well as it would have you believe.
On top of this, the Anarchy ending comes off as extremely selfish. Nanashi slays YHVH and takes the Cosmic Egg's power to supplant the current universe with a new one, which necessitates omnicide. He has, in effect, done the exact thing the Divine Powers were painted as evil for, and he has similarly failed to develop a real ideology to justify it. What are the rules of his new universe even supposed to be? Who knows! The game didn't appear to think this was an integral part of the decision to off YHVH. The ending feels incomplete. It feels like such a personal battle, with Nanashi's/Akira's individual grudge against YHVH for constantly ruining his plans to build a better world (see the alternate Tokyos in SMTIV) spilling out to screw over the rest of the universe. Even the Divine Powers' plans had more definition. So much of Apocalypse feels like shallow fan fiction, where the surface details were grasped--some actually, extremely well; see details that show care and attention like YHVH's final battle theme kicking off properly on the seventh horn blast[3]--but the structural work that births those details is so often missing, and thus the game will, and does, inevitably misstep more frequently and much more egregiously than previous entries.
Which is exactly how the shallow relationships between Nanashi's partners feel. The game puts quite a bit of emphasis and a huge amount of dialogue on building a closeness in the party, and yet it never feels as plausible as another, less-developed example within the same game--the samurai. Flynn and Isabeau have a far more plausible relationship. You can feel their trust and respect for each other and that it comes from their mutual struggles. Even the tiny handful of lines they have with what remains of Walter and Jonathan at the end of the Bonds ending conveys more actual respect, despite their fatal differences.
There are so many places where Apocalypse spends so much time and text to say so little. Compare the styles of dialogue between the gods of Apocalypse and those of Nocturne or Strange Journey. Krishna's dialogue is usually longer and somewhat more grounded. The major demons in Nocturne and Strange Journey speak in fewer, blunter words with a certain regality. They consider you beneath them and they don't need to actually say it. Why should they? You're a transient human and all conversation you have with them exists at their behest. Their foreboding presences and mysterious dialogue often suggest they are somewhat eldritch in nature and can never exist entirely within human comprehension. Meanwhile the demons of Apocalypse, some of which do keep the older style of dialogue mostly intact--see the Fiends, Maitreya, and YHVH himself--overall seem to lack that presence, sometimes almost coming off more as people with strange powers than as the unknowable entities their noisy, pixellated appearances outside of battle would suggest. Probably the easiest point of comparison is the character assassination of Lucifer in IV and Apocalypse versus his behaviour in Nocturne, Strange Journey, and Raidou Kuzunoha vs King Abaddon. What was once a sinister, calculating presence--and I do mean presence, as his appearances would tend to suck all the life out of a room--that carried himself with a certain ominous nobility now feels closer to a generic anime demon king. And more dialogue is spent getting there.
Which is ultimately the biggest, most fundamental problem with the game. Clearing it doesn't leave you with a heavy feeling of moral dubiousness[4] or of accomplishment. Clearing it doesn't leave you with much of a feeling of anything. The game actually manages a successful case for atheism in a universe where the gods blatantly and indisputably exist[5] and yet it still feels as though you have finished a very long book that had very little to say.
[1] Except potentially Isabeau, and that's probably because she's not original to this game.
[2] Because Neutral serves humans, and humans are transient and ever-changing. The Law and Chaos alignments are usually more permanent because they serve demons, eternal and unchanging.
[3] The Book of Revelations states the apocalypse is heralded by seven trumpets.
[4] Well, Anarchy kind of does, but again, it felt more like I had just played as a selfish, myopic jerk more than anything substantial.
[5] "Flat-Earth Atheism," as amusingly christened by TV Tropes.
Note also that there are, of course, open spoilers for all of Apocalypse, as well as spoilers for Nocturne's True Demon Ending in here.
SMTIVA's biggest failing, I think, stems from a fundamental problem with the ideology and tone behind the story, and how that informs everything that happens. Or, rather, a critical lack of ideology and how that fails to inform everything that happens.
SMT as a series is largely plot-driven. Characters do not usually have an excess of depth because humanity is always caught in an ideological crossfire between heaven and hell. The war is always out of their hands, lest they join a side and wrest control, or manage to navigate a narrow option to overthrow all sides. The series has taken criticism on this front, and I think that some of that is valid. But I don't think this approach is entirely without merit, either. Characters being willing to side with extremes--yes, sometimes too readily and without much build-up--can contribute to the harrowed, philosophical atmosphere when executed well. War is often about ideology, but in a universe where supernatural entities are given form by human thought and need those thoughts to subsist, every supernatural war is a literal struggle for humanity's collective soul. This leads to moral argument and philosophical debate in a way that causes the traditional Law, Neutral, and Chaos alignments to feel like something more than personal opinions or squabbles, almost like they have characters unto themselves, as if the universe was to sew their ballpark ideals of fascism, humanism, and might-makes-right as natural law into the fabric of the cosmos.
And this is where Apocalypse fails. Over and over and over again.
Apocalypse is themed around the Neutral alignment. The protagonist, Nanashi, is a human from a Tokyo that's already warded off a Law armageddon and has eked out an existence in the city's current Chaos state of demon occupation for the last 25 years. It is, quite literally, a representation of an incomplete Neutral ending, where both Law and Chaos have been resisted for the good of humanity, but not yet overthrown. As mentioned, Neutral is usually representative of a humanistic stance based on mankind breaking free of devotion to deities and taking control of their own future. It's not as easily identifiable as the extremes of Law and Chaos, but rather than simply being a rejection of extremes, it clearly also possesses a core. However, the game itself feels like it missed this memo in its quest to expand on the Neutral alignment.
The Divine Powers show up to challenge Lucifer and Merkabah for control of humanity. As they represent the fabled Third Option, they end up as the de facto Neutral alignment. It's not a bad idea, especially as they originate from a group of non-Christian religions that are understandably resentful about being shafted. What they consistently fail to do, however, is to establish a driving moral core to their goals, and thus they are never elevated to the oppressive, natural-law-of-the-universe feel that the alignments traditionally have.
The Divine Powers want to break humanity free of the material universe YHVH has bound them in and take them to a new universe where their souls will be divided evenly among the global pantheon--though it must be noted that achieving this first requires committing omnicide. There was an opportunity here to establish a moral core around, say, absolute equality, but it is never capitalized upon. No other moral core appears, either. Instead, the focus remains on their anger towards YHVH and the cruelty of the material universe. These are actually even decent arguments, and they fit into a general theme of criticising elements of Christian theology, but they are incomplete. They are exclusively defensive, not constructive. There is no ideology here. Law and Chaos (not to mention other experiments like Yosuga, Musubi, and Shijima) owe much of their insidiously horrifying atmospheres to the sheer devotion their adherents have to building a new reality by merging their philosophies into the actual physics of the universe, making them inescapable on a fundamental level. Probably the single best example of this is the sheer skin-crawling horror of Strange Journey's original Law ending. The Divine Powers, on the other hand, never think like this. Krishna's vision of a new universe actually manages to make a Nirvana-like one-ness with the cosmos sound almost banal, as if the polytheistic gods will still exist and will just be manually dividing human souls evenly to sustain themselves. How... mundane. The Divine Powers have hijacked Neutral's humanistic focus on mankind and its rejection of the Law/Chaos dichotomy and recentered it around focusing on serving the pagan gods.
And here we have two problems. One, that doesn't work. The only reason humanism can even stand as a rival ideology against the immense forces of heaven and hell is that humans are both the creators and victims of gods in the SMT metaverse. The Divine Powers are trying to co-opt an ideological cycle they fundamentally exist outside of. Two, as a result of problem One, we have now taken the thematic space SMT usually fills with ideology and filled it with what amounts to a mere squabble. A squabble between gods, to be sure, but when your series warfare is usually over rewriting the fundamental laws of reality, any given boss fight already stands a good chance of being informed by actual mythology, and any given battle has you playing squabbles between the opponent gods and the ones you've summoned from your smartphone, there is no way for that not to feel like an awkward spat has muscled its way into your Primary Conflict. The result is that almost the entire main game feels like a sidequest. The forest has been lost for the trees.
And Apocalypse gets lost in the trees constantly. Nanashi's missions almost make it feel like the group is being used with the way they are tossed around, desperately flailing against the three supernatural factions as they try to protect what little humanity has managed to keep intact. This would actually be a great example of using the gameplay to underscore the terror humanity suffers in these eldritch wars, except that they never advance beyond this point. The humanistic evolution has been completely hijacked. Similarly, your partners are never seduced by other ideologies and the only disagreements they have are ultimately fairly minor. They have some relatively superficial character, more than series standard, but there is no depth. Character growth doesn't have enough focus to have the depth of something like the Persona series (and let's be real, none of these characters are as personable or plausible as your average Persona party member[1]), and their opinions about the hellscape they exist in never move from the basic subsistence of the humans in Tokyo at large. The people in Tokyo, including your partners, seem to generally be of the opinion that "humanity can do anything if we band together," but what "anything" should actually be is, once again, never defined. I don't even think there was any talk of how to actually rid the world of the angels and demons, or what little there was was immediately sidelined by the appearance of the Divine Powers. The details are crowding out the picture.
The game takes Tokyo's citizens' ideals of sticking together and makes the Bonds ending out of it. This ending sees your party ultimately decide to off YHVH to free themselves of his control. It also weirdly only applies to YHVH. Lucifer, Merkabah, and the Divine Powers are all defeated at this point, but Tokyo is still suffering multitudes of demons everywhere, and I don't remember any plans or research to actually solve that. There is a scene showing humans working with some demons (I noticed some of the fairies, whom are amiable) at the end to rebuild, which is a convenient way to ignore the rest of the demons killing and eating humans everywhere. It's like the game's oppressive opening sequences about being permanently seiged by demons and constantly losing good people because of it were all simply forgotten. The armies of Lucifer and Merkabah might be gone, but the original problems were the Expanse and the Demon Summoning Program. Throwing off YHVH's chains to free the world for humans and other gods feels like the point of the Neutral alignment has been sidestepped entirely in a way that doesn't quite fit together, like a jigsaw puzzle of low build quality. YHVH wasn't the only problem here and is hardly the only high-powered entity prone to specific and oppressive ideas about what humanity should be getting up to. We literally just had an entire game about the Divine Powers doing this exact thing. Neutral endings are often temporary islands of stability in a chaotic and uncaring universe[2], but this one just feels naive. And this is without getting into the extreme tonal whiplash of this happy-go-lucky ending being far more weight than the character writing quality can bear.
Then we have the Anarchy ending. This one is actually rather interesting because it shares several pieces with Nocturne's infamous True Demon Ending, but woefully fails to utilize them properly. Your protagonist has been turned into a not-human by a powerful demon who wants to use you to kill gods. You end up ideologically split from your friends and end up murdering them all en masse. You destroy the source of the cycle of creation and destruction, and a transhumanist twist has you blow past human limitations and become a god-like entity. But, unlike in Nocturne, almost none of it feels justified. Nanashi's friends are with you all the way through the game, constantly emphasizing their usefulness and strength in numbers, and the game itself backs them up with how incredibly useful the partner abilities can be. They basically give you a free move every turn, and you have some limited ability to dictate whether that move will be an attack, healing, or a buff. The only representation the Anarchy route even gets before the big decision is Dagda's disdain for interreliance and for humanity's desire to congregate around a saviour (in Flynn). There aren't any missions where you have to work by yourself in some way or times when having partners really holds you back particularly significantly. There's almost no time in the game spent alone at all. There are a few times having partners carries some risk--like having Toki lead you into Tsukiji Konganji even though she intends to assassinate Flynn--but those risks don't ever materialize. From a gameplay and narrative standpoint, they might as well not exist, and they certainly don't offer a counterbalance to how useful the partners are in battle. The game would appear to want you to take the feel-good ending that doesn't actually solve things as well as it would have you believe.
On top of this, the Anarchy ending comes off as extremely selfish. Nanashi slays YHVH and takes the Cosmic Egg's power to supplant the current universe with a new one, which necessitates omnicide. He has, in effect, done the exact thing the Divine Powers were painted as evil for, and he has similarly failed to develop a real ideology to justify it. What are the rules of his new universe even supposed to be? Who knows! The game didn't appear to think this was an integral part of the decision to off YHVH. The ending feels incomplete. It feels like such a personal battle, with Nanashi's/Akira's individual grudge against YHVH for constantly ruining his plans to build a better world (see the alternate Tokyos in SMTIV) spilling out to screw over the rest of the universe. Even the Divine Powers' plans had more definition. So much of Apocalypse feels like shallow fan fiction, where the surface details were grasped--some actually, extremely well; see details that show care and attention like YHVH's final battle theme kicking off properly on the seventh horn blast[3]--but the structural work that births those details is so often missing, and thus the game will, and does, inevitably misstep more frequently and much more egregiously than previous entries.
Which is exactly how the shallow relationships between Nanashi's partners feel. The game puts quite a bit of emphasis and a huge amount of dialogue on building a closeness in the party, and yet it never feels as plausible as another, less-developed example within the same game--the samurai. Flynn and Isabeau have a far more plausible relationship. You can feel their trust and respect for each other and that it comes from their mutual struggles. Even the tiny handful of lines they have with what remains of Walter and Jonathan at the end of the Bonds ending conveys more actual respect, despite their fatal differences.
There are so many places where Apocalypse spends so much time and text to say so little. Compare the styles of dialogue between the gods of Apocalypse and those of Nocturne or Strange Journey. Krishna's dialogue is usually longer and somewhat more grounded. The major demons in Nocturne and Strange Journey speak in fewer, blunter words with a certain regality. They consider you beneath them and they don't need to actually say it. Why should they? You're a transient human and all conversation you have with them exists at their behest. Their foreboding presences and mysterious dialogue often suggest they are somewhat eldritch in nature and can never exist entirely within human comprehension. Meanwhile the demons of Apocalypse, some of which do keep the older style of dialogue mostly intact--see the Fiends, Maitreya, and YHVH himself--overall seem to lack that presence, sometimes almost coming off more as people with strange powers than as the unknowable entities their noisy, pixellated appearances outside of battle would suggest. Probably the easiest point of comparison is the character assassination of Lucifer in IV and Apocalypse versus his behaviour in Nocturne, Strange Journey, and Raidou Kuzunoha vs King Abaddon. What was once a sinister, calculating presence--and I do mean presence, as his appearances would tend to suck all the life out of a room--that carried himself with a certain ominous nobility now feels closer to a generic anime demon king. And more dialogue is spent getting there.
Which is ultimately the biggest, most fundamental problem with the game. Clearing it doesn't leave you with a heavy feeling of moral dubiousness[4] or of accomplishment. Clearing it doesn't leave you with much of a feeling of anything. The game actually manages a successful case for atheism in a universe where the gods blatantly and indisputably exist[5] and yet it still feels as though you have finished a very long book that had very little to say.
[1] Except potentially Isabeau, and that's probably because she's not original to this game.
[2] Because Neutral serves humans, and humans are transient and ever-changing. The Law and Chaos alignments are usually more permanent because they serve demons, eternal and unchanging.
[3] The Book of Revelations states the apocalypse is heralded by seven trumpets.
[4] Well, Anarchy kind of does, but again, it felt more like I had just played as a selfish, myopic jerk more than anything substantial.
[5] "Flat-Earth Atheism," as amusingly christened by TV Tropes.
The game's entire mindset is reactive instead of active and thus it only gets halfway to establishing its premise. This applies to basically everything in the game that feels off, such as the partners having more character, yet feeling shallower.
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^Yep, all sound points. I especially think they dropped the ball in not fleshing out the Divine Powers and giving them their own route. Great idea, bad execution... Like most of Apocalypse.
Ghostlight messed up the release, but the delay was not their fault. They got the publishing rights almost a year and a half after the NA release.
I do wonder if that could have worked. I assume it would have at least felt more complete, if nothing else.
Anyway, since I finished Apocalypse but then decided it's a thematic disappointment, I drew Flynn instead.
Now I shall go back to Strange Journey Redux.
I dunno what I expected but they really didn't make Mem Aleph any easier in the Strange Journey enhanced edition huh.
I've beaten the first boss in the Womb of Grief, and the place is annoying me more than it is anything else. The Etrian Odyssey-esque 'maze made of plants everywhere' is such a massive tonal clash to how oppressive and guilt-tripping the main game is. It's like they didn't even try to have it fit in at all. >:(
It's almost like Atlus added completely new content that doesn't fit the original game at all!
Honestly can't tell if you're snarking at me or agreeing with me.
I just want it to not feel like it comes from some completely different game (or even series), man. :(
So, I got Strange Journey Redux in the mail, not sure when I'll be able to get to it though as I still haven't beaten Nocturne and IV D:
I want another Metroidvania. One starring Kresnik.
Also Inquisitive_Ghost you're completely right about Apocalypse and there's still so much more to cover but it's such an exhausting game to think about.
Also Inquisitive_Ghost you're completely right about Apocalypse and there's still so much more to cover but it's such an exhausting game to think about.
Debating restarting Strange Journey. I got a couple hours in a year and a half ago or so before deciding to play a different game instead. I've got a couple sidequests open on my file that I don't remember where I need to go to do them or hand them in anymore. Also don't remember much about my interactions with the cast.
Also still have Raidou 2 and I also started Soul Hackers a couple months ago.
Hmmm....
I'm kind of thinking SJ's setting would be more appealing to me atm than the other two.
Hmmm....
Also still have Raidou 2 and I also started Soul Hackers a couple months ago.
Hmmm....
I'm kind of thinking SJ's setting would be more appealing to me atm than the other two.
Hmmm....
SJ is the only right choice, you know it in your heart, I'm sure.
*high-five*
I've played all of these and IMO SJ is the best one. SH fails me a little in that its gameplay feels archaic and the story is among the weaker half of the series, (but the atmosphere and soundtrack are really absolutely fantastic).
I don't know man; you'll be playing a solid game in all three cases!