Shin Megami Tensei is the mature form of Megami Tensei II. Where MT was biased towards Chaos and had definitive good and bad endings, in SMT there is no happy conclusion and the ideals are balanced with respect to their shortcomings in comparison to one another. This balance is tied inexorably to the format of Choumin's Discourse and the influence SMT's writers took from it. My efforts are to elucidate the origins of SMT's ideas, as well as to discuss at length the primary authors' shared passion for myth and politics. Shin Megami Tensei is a game created by and for the culture of 1992 Japan. It is from a time spent in the aftermath of the crashing bubble economy, fenced by the political tensions surrounding American bases and shadowed by emerging new religious movements. It is from a world that did not have the '95 sarin gas attacks that was living below the trophy case of the high-growth era, when Japan was at its economic nadir and simultaneous peak political period. When Shin Megami Tensei came out, Japan had a one-party government; by the time Shin Megami Tensei II came out, that 38-year system had folded and a new, politically ambiguous administration had emerged. This is evident throughout the content of the Super Famicom duology.
In this Let's Play I will be periodically including citations to further reading on particular topics, mainly those relevant to Japanese history, but also to relevant literature. Shin Megami Tensei is a surprisingly literary game, if you know how to trace the influence. This will not just be one of my mechanics-heavy breaking-the-game-over-my-knee LPs. This is a tenuous form of academic experiment for me. I will also be exploring the differences in translation between Aeon Genesis and Atlus USA's translation, based on my familiarity with AE's 2002 patch. I want to discuss the cultural influences SMT is drawing from, which have generally been lost in translation, and to place the game in the historical context of modern Japan. As someone who's working on an Asian Studies degree focused on this country, and as a student of Japanese art history, I'm excited to have the opportunity to go into this headfirst with everything I have. Atlus' translation is also subject to censorship to accommodate the iOS platform, which I'll be addressing where it arises.
As a caution going in, I will not be expressly going for the Neutral ending. Virtually every online playthrough of Shin Megami Tensei defaults to the Neutral alignment on the basis of it being either the most reasonable decision or the canonical ending. While it is true that the sequels mostly take place in worlds where the Neutral ending is presumed, the alternative Law and Chaos endings are still valid alignments. I will be reasoning out each alignment choice as we come to it and make my decision based on an ethical evaluation of the options, not necessarily with a specific long-term alignment in mind. I do have a pretty good idea of how I think Shin Megami Tensei is going to evaluate me because of how its sequels have done so, but I want to demonstrate the alignment system as it's intended to work rather than try to game it.
I am not totally committed about which display mode to use for the game. Playing it windowed will keep the face buttons from interfering with the display and show off the game at its native resolution, but I find the status bar less obtrusive in full screen and there's quite a bit of dead space when uploading screenshots from windowed display. So I'm going to try out both at various points and see what sticks.
A note on the title screen, the background is appropriated from a ninth century hanging scroll located at the Shingon Buddhist temple Tō-ji in Kyoto, the Taizōkai "Womb World." Its counterpart artwork, the Kongōkai "Diamond World," appears as an actual location in Shin Megami Tensei. The two paintings are objects of worship for the Shingon sect, with each Mandala piece acting as a diagram of the spiritual universe (Mason 123). The Kongōkai is placed in the east of a Shingon temple's inner precinct and the Taizōkai in the west. Adherents concentrate first on the Taizōkai and then on the Kongōkai in order to meditate on the meaning of Buddhist entities (Boddhisattvas, Buddhas, et al.) depicted in the paintings in order to internalize their visual appearance and the ideas that they embody (Mason 125). The player when beginning Shin Megami Tensei is thus intended to similarly meditate first on the Taizōkai in the title screen, and then move to the Kongōkai within the game itself, framing it as a journey of spiritual growth.
Atlus and Aeon approach the gatekeeper head's dialogue differently, with Atlus leaning toward the King James English side. Aeon does drop an extra -eth at the naming screen prompt. It's also worth noting that Aeon Genesis' translation is gendered and assumes a male protagonist, but Atlus' is gender-neutral.
Thematically, this game is modeled on Discourse and resembles its format; an extended dialogue between two characters representing opposing camps of philosophy who envision extremist new worlds as solutions to what they see as the end of days/a desperate time where national spirit is being consumed by external forces, with their dialogue being parsed and mediated by a neutral party. Unlike the other two main characters, the protagonist in Shin Megami Tensei does not correlate one-to-one with a character from Discourse. The shoes of Master Nankai are instead filled by another cast member, and the protagonist represents a kind of direct player avatar not dedicated to one of the alignments.
Head: If thou truly art Touya then thou hast hidden reserves of power.
>Allocate your 18 bonus points to your stats.
Aeon's "dormant power" translation is pretty memorable, seeing as it gets repeated so often.
That said, the tried and true way to victory is to focus on the Vitality stat to keep the protagonist alive longer so he can fulfill his utility role, with Agility as secondarily important for avoiding enemy attacks and moving first. Most enemies have an Ag in the range of 10~13 so you don't need it that high starting out. Intelligence is also important for limiting which demons you can negotiate with, and 8 is an early threshold in that regard. Strength is a low priority stat for the protagonist because gun damage is independent of St so you already have a reliable way to damage enemies which frees you up to devote time to the other stats. All human characters have base stats of 5 in each parameter, so +10 Vi +3 In and +5 Ag.
Head: Touya...What awaiteth thee past this door?
Atlus' translation leaves out the bit about the followers of Law being "chosen by God" but otherwise Aeon handles this the same way.
As we traverse the dreamscape, a cross flies out from the background.
The wording in Aeon's translation is that he was "offered" to God, implicating his sacrifice as unwilling rather than voluntary. The manipulative approach is appropriate given this character's long-term story arc. Megaten has been built up a bit as the emblematic example of Japanese paranoia regarding Christianity, having had the torch passed from Final Fantasy Tactics some time ago, and I find that in general its western audience doesn't have a whole lot of respect or understanding for why or where this theme came from. Caution against Christianity goes back to the medieval period, and is one parts politics and another native religious belief. Politically, Christianity became problematic for Tokugawa period policy makers around ~1587 CE after the daimyo ("feudal lords") began converting in order to acquire saltpeter from Portugal, and holding forced conversions of commoners and vassals (Elison 54-55).
The dilemma of subjects with conflicting religious beliefs threatened to undermine the stability of the government (to borrow from Matthew, the Japanese people could not "serve two masters") and so it was viewed as an anti-government religion, leading to a medieval ban on missionaries and mass executions of Christians to suppress the belief system. During the Meiji, Taisho and Showa periods the religion was also in conflict with the emergent idea of the emperor as divine, and the development of state-mandated religion during the second World War prevented any footholds for Christianity. So while the rest of the world has been affected by missionary efforts much more severely, Japan was secluded from major Christian movements for most of its history with isolated pockets of proselytizing occurring in the mid 1500s and after 1945. In the postwar period when Japan was under SCAP occupation, Christianity was the religion of the oppressors and renewed missionary efforts proved unpopular. Christianity consistently accounted for just 1% of the population since the allied occupation began and continues to hover in that range (Gordon 232).
Christianity has also been historically viewed as out of touch with the problems of everyday people and treated as having a caroling-while-Japan-burns-stance. Critics of the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa periods ridiculed Christian speakers for trying to proselytize to an impoverished public by taking advantage of their lack of education and reinforcing the state agenda. While the missionary work conducted by the Salvation Army and other charities attracted praise from some of the forerunner Japanese socialists like Yamakawa Kikue, even when these writers were not Christians themselves, the rhetoric the missionaries employed was repulsive to them. In one memorable instance, Yamakawa volunteered with Salvation Army members that were proselytizing to factory girls doing live-in work on textile manufacturing, hoping to see the girls' working conditions and question them about their work by going along with the SA. Yamakawa was disgusted when SA lecturers Yamamuro and Kawai Michiko extolled the sacred qualities of labor, telling sixty young girls that had just come from a twelve-hour work day that Jesus was a laborer like them, and that "You too must become good workers, just like Our Lord Jesus. You must be grateful that you are able to work every day in good health. God will answer your prayers." Kikue wrote that she was "filled with shame and anger. The girls had worked all night beside roaring machines. They were pale and bloodless. How could they be told that the life they led was due to God's blessings and that they should view this kind of slave labor as sacred and holy?" (Yamakawa 484) Missionaries of this kind were talking in broad terms about a great cosmology of God, the devil, heaven and hell, salvation from the original sin of Adam and Eve through Jesus Christ, without offering any kind of practical salvation to the immense poverty and inhumane living conditions of these factory girls or trying to improve those conditions. Christianity wasn't relevant during Japan's periods of modernization and industrialization. During the depression there was resentment from the lay community against it for seeming to ignore the common people. The early negative response was thus hugely influential in how subsequent generations approached Christianity.
On religious grounds, Christianity is also an affront to the syncretic Shinto-Buddhist belief native to Japan. Under a Shinto system, emphasis is placed on harmony with nature and one's place as an equal to the animals of the nation. The Christian view of humanity as stewards of the Earth charged with ruling God's creation is incongruous with Shinto's equality between men and nature. Shinto is also a polytheist system wherein divinity lives not above people as a dominating force setting the world in motion, but around them inhabiting each individual aspect of the world. The ethics of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism also hold that life is a karmic path toward entry into paradise, and that cyclic view is at odds with a cosmology in which one enters the world, exits and is then cut off from it in heaven or hell based on affiliation with a deity. The concept of Christ's resurrection is also disturbing from the Shinto perspective on the purity of nature, beauty of transient life and the importance of dying. Coming back from the dead is a perversion of nature, it's equivalent to Izanagi traveling into the underworld to retrieve Izanami and finding her to be a shambling corpse. The most apt comparison I've heard in cultural terms is that Christianity is viewed in Japan in the way that Voodoo is in the United States; a disturbing zombie religion followed by crazy zealots and dangerous foreigners.
We'll actually see several examples of death and resurrection in Shin Megami Tensei and it's fascinating how the game treats the various kinds of each differently.
>Gentleman joined your party.
The focus on being "meant" to do something is pretty interesting. Each of SMT's principle characters comes to embody the traits associated with their respective alignments, arguably by necessity so that there will be solutions to the crises about to unfold.
We come across a demon in the dungeon.
Just as the Law Hero corresponds to the Gentleman of Western Learning, the Chaos Hero is a counterpart to the Champion of the East (東洋豪傑 Touyou Gouketsu "Oriental Hero"). Champion spends about ten pages less outlining his manifesto, but follows traditional samurai values, supports nationalist militarism and envisions cultivating an empire in East Asia by preying on a nearby rich but strategically weak country to "instantly change [Japan] into a Russia or a Great Britain" (Nakae 100). Historically Champion won their debate when the Empire of Japan left the League of Nations to pursue the colonization of Manchuria, but as the novel forewarned this led to wanton bloodshed and retribution from the outside world.
Champion learns the Agi series of Fire magic spells, and death magic as well, but Fire is probably the most resisted element in the original Shin Megami Tensei and his lone death spell is also the last magic he'll acquire. He does learn really great ailment spells and utility stuff (Estoma blocks random encounters and Makarakarn reflects all magic for a turn) but it's all very late in his development. Maragion (heavy party-wide Fire damage), Shibaboo (party-wide bind ailment preventing movement) and Makarakarn are his signature moveset, but Shibaboo is the only thing he'll learn reasonably early on a magic playthrough so it's generally more effective to cultivate him as a physical character with heavy St and multi-attack weapons to support that. +10 Str +3 Vi +5 Ag.
Champion: Dammit...fine. You'd better lead me outta here, then.
>Champion joined your party.
The imagery of a demon sitting atop the body of a sleeping person is associated with nightmares in folklore, derived from the sensation of a weight upon the chest during waking dreams and night terrors. It's been used in various artworks like Fuseli's The Nightmare, the irony being that Champion was enjoying the nightmare we woke him from.
Woman: Oh...You're Touya.
More to the point, Yuriko in this game emulates Yumiko from the original Megami Tensei, making her out to be something of a red herring for Japanese players in the 90s.
Mother's Voice: Touya? Are you up yet?
References to school are one of the few details we're given about the protagonist. It's easy to presume that he's a high school student because he's living with his mother, but in Japan it's not uncommon for students to live with their family while attending college or university if it's nearby.
>You seem to have received a message on your PC.
>Downloading...
>You have received the Demon Summoning Program.
>The message ends there.
The biggest difference in translation is Stephen's name; it's been STEVEN for over a decade in the Aeon Genesis translations, and that's still his name in big English letters in all of the Japanese materials. Given the capital letters and that you're first introduced to him through a '92 BBS, I'd wager that STEVEN has always been intended to be his web handle rather than a real name. The decision to make him into Stephen for the English translation puts him closer to the real-world person he's based on, Stephen Hawking. His dialogue in AG is also a lot more intense and sort of crazy sounding, like a homeless man marching around with an end-is-near sign.
Mother: You seem to have slept well last night. I think something really bad happened...
>Touya received 10,000 yen
Actually...Can you go buy some coffee from the cafe at the arcade? Thanks. Don't let your guard down, Touya, and make sure you're not out late, okay?
This line isn't very different from Aeon Genesis', but what makes it interesting is that it was actually first translated for Persona 4. The dialogue is lifted almost word for word from the script used for the Void Quest dungeon in P4, which was supposed to be a deliberate callback to the first SMT game, but for players outside of Japan it was their first time encountering it if they hadn't played the fan translation.
Our goal right now is the Kichijoji mall to the southwest. There's three different entrances, each of which can make navigation somewhat confusing at first, but once you've spent a little time in the hub area, going through becomes second nature.
The survivalist store is normally your first stop in SMT, as the game gives you a knife eventually and it's not worth investing in a marginally better one so soon, so armor is priority 1. Body armor carries the biggest defense and evasion bonuses, and the increases from leg, hand and head armor are so low at this point that we're better off conserving our cash; a Survival Vest by itself takes a fourth of the yen mom gave us.
SMT's genre conventions are all but extinct these days, but a good third of the plot is exposed through speaking to non player characters in bars (or in this case, a cafe.) One of the much-appreciated features of the iOS port is that you no longer talk to each character by default just by running into them. If you pass over a map square that has a character you've already talked to, a "TALK?" prompt appears at the bottom of the screen and you can press A to speak to them or just keep walking. In the SNES release you would talk to the same person every time you hit that map square, with no opt-out. While the system's evolved considerably, the same style of presentation is carried over into modern games; I rather memorably was confused by part of IV's chaos area plotline because I missed out on some of Akira's backstory. The cafe is mostly fluff about the police cordon surrounding Kichijoji, the investigation of a classmate's murder at Inogashira park, and there being a crazy man behind the antique shop. Another point where Aeon's translation differs is that it specifies the murder victim as the classmate of the girl the protagonist was speaking to, where Atlus chooses to hit a little closer to home and say "our" classmate. This is another case of implicit versus explicit statements like the apocalypse versus millennium above. Japanese is a strongly subject-drop language where nothing is said if it's already understood, and the protagonist being put in the role of a student implies the safe assumption in the original language that the victim was one of his classmates.
Another little detail is the coffee mom sends us out for. Aeon's translation handles it from start to finish as just "coffee" but once you're at the cafe Atlus clarifies it as "coffee beans." This is technically a modification of the text, but it's not an extended leap of the imagination by any means. It does ease the visual image of a coffee house barista running over to the protagonist's house to deliver a cup before it cools; they're just mailing beans.
Man: Don't come near me! N-Nnrgh...Hrrrgh, gaaaaaah...!
>You see an Attack Knife on the ground.
>Touya obtained Attack Knife.
Hoy but did they ever sanitize it. This was the first scene in iOS that gave me pause; first because I'm so accustomed to SMT's Preta being called Gaki (and Yuuki Gaki at that rather than Ghost Preta) and second because the original line was "Yuuki Gaki appeared, and ripped out the man's throat!!" To my knowledge, the word Preta has never actually been used in the Japanese games and the English-language name change first occurred in Nocturne, and going from the screenshots provided by Japanese bloggers this is pretty much the case. Suddenly having a Preta lunge out and tear a guy's throat open in the middle of Kichijoji mall leaves a strong impression of what the rest of the game will be like, and it's emphasized by the main character actually taking damage from the Preta's attack before it runs off. The shock value is huge. So the iOS version of the scene is consequently bland and comes off as an unimportant addition.
Pascal the dog is another bit of worldbuilding that's off to the side when leaving the main character's house. I figured it would be redundant to screenshot his barkarfwowing when we'll be seeing him come into the storyline soon enough. Right now, it's time for bed and another vision.
This is what the windowed view looks like. I prefer it resolution-wise because it displays the screen at the GBA's native resolution, but it's cumbersome for screenshots and the iPad HUD can't be turned off. Aesthetically it's modeled on the various COMPs employed by the Megaten protagonists, and in particular it seems to evoke the tech from Soul Hackers. There is a small bit of humor in the iOS release, given that in SMTIV the majority of devil summoners use smartphones to carry around their demons.
We enter a door.
Priest: O dark lord, deep in slumber...Take this young one's soul!
>The girl is being sacrificed.
>Will you save the girl?
I believe this is the first alignment choice available in the game. Ethically, I prefer to minimize harm and disavow killing where possible; although we don't know the motives of the priest nor the goal of their ritual, in absence of context I believe we should presume that this girl is an innocent victim.
Alignment in this game is 0 to 255 with 0-111 as Law and 144-255 as Chaos. Neutral is in the range of 112-143, and the protagonist's default alignment is 128 (absolute Neutral) while Gentleman's default alignment is 0 (absolute Law) and Champion's is 255 (absolute Chaos.) Each alignment choice pulls you towards itself, which means that if you're at 128 and make a Neutral choice, you will remain at 128 rather than go up or down. Genuine Neutral choices are few to none however, and most all of them will pull you up or down on the alignment axis. You can generally tell which choice is which based on whether Gentleman or Champion supports or opposes it, and while I'm making my decisions independent of going for a specific ending, I will detail how my alignment is being affected by these decisions and where the main character stands.
>Yes (Law, -5)
No (Chaos, +12)
Champion: Hey, that guy in back has a sword, and we got nothing! You're nuts!
Priest: Who's there!? Who dares meddle in the ritual!?
Girl: Touya! You came to save me...! Quick, call my name!
Unfortunately, the Heroine is one of the few fronts on which Shin Megami Tensei drops the ball. Women are underrepresented in the series. There is a tradition of having nonentity heroines with limited influence on the games' storylines who follow the protagonist on any of his routes, without choosing an alignment of their own. This tradition is as deeply ingrained into the franchise as the final boss having Null/Reflect Gun or as the alignment system itself, and while it began earlier in the NES era it was SMT that really codified it. Isabeau, Hiroko and this Heroine are each fantasies of male power, and one-way fantasies at that because mainline SMT does not allow for the player to choose their sex.
Nominally, the Herione appears to be on equal footing with the protagonist as the primary female voice in the storyline, and the game gives her some considerable influence that at a glance would seem progressive for 1992. The problem with the Heroine is that SMT drops the idea as quickly as it raises it. The Heroine is trapped in a supportive role and is the only core party member that will never conflict with the protagonist's worldview, and the more time she spends with the party, the less dialogue she gets. Her importance diminishes constantly until she's become almost as silent as the protagonist himself by the end of the game. The Heroine's supportive role extends to gameplay; her alignment will shift to be identical to the player's alignment. On the Law and Chaos routes, she will be Law or Chaos if he is, and Neutral if he's on the Neural route, and there's even custom sprites for the Heroine based on these. In a game about conflict and doing what must be done even if it means fighting close personal friends, keeping quiet is an awful representation for the definitive female voice.
The patriarchal approach to the Heroine is baffling precisely because of how Shin Megami Tensei challenges moralized institutions elsewhere. The Law alignment in SMT is a simultaneous embodiment of the complacent deference to authority that permeates the social order of modern Japan, and all the paranoia of proselytizing westerners poisoning the national spirit of the country wrapped up into one. It is the easiest alignment for Japanese players to defer to because it is the social norm, but it creates conflict because it also means choosing to suppress one's identity by yielding to a foreign deity and the same religion as the American military--compare giving the option to a Texas Libertarian to live a life of absolute individual freedom without any government, with unrestricted rights to firearms and no regulations on their sale, all in exchange for converting to Islam. Meanwhile the Chaos alignment venerates Japan's indigenous gods and promises liberation from that oppressive system of norms, but this comes at the expense and expulsion of the physically weak and disabled, and it means siding with a nationalist agenda from the same kinds of people that want war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni. Yet in spite of these challenging ideas, the treatment of the Heroine is wrapped up in the same segregation of gender roles and subservience of the female partner that created the dubious corporate "position" of Office Lady. The Heroine is supposed to be the leader of the game's Neutral faction, and consequently the player really ought to be forced to kill her on the Law and Chaos routes. If permitted to maintain her own stance, she would be the Neutral equivalent to Gentleman and Champion, but as it is the protagonist assumes that role while the Heroine is relegated to being a fourth wheel to the dialogue.
This is part of a greater problem of patriarchal control in Japanese media and culture that extends back to the early modern period, c.1890 CE. Ever since Nakamura Masanao coined the slogan 良妻賢母 ryousai kenbo "good wife and wise mother" there has been a conscious effort to stratify gender roles and restrain the rights of women in the public circle, and this agenda has been advanced by the Japanese government despite the popular support feminist movements have enjoyed since westernization efforts began. This is a country so thoroughly dominated by Confucian values that women did not obtain the right to vote until 1945, where women are still routinely made to retire from work once married, where unmarried working women are called "parasite singles" and where one of the major reasons that Japan's population kite is unsustainable is due to the dearth of working women to compensate for an absence of young male workers. Literature is similarly problematic. Despite the world's first novel being authored by a Japanese woman, the products of the Meiji-period enlightenment were male dominated and rather than portray disempowered female characters, they opted for a more total negation of feminine presence by not having female characters at all. There are exceptions and the feminist literature post-Meiji can be powerful, but even when women are portrayed in the early modern period there is a curious tendency toward portraying non-Japanese women specifically. Women as a whole have been such a nonentity in modern literature that when trying to dig up a literary name for our Heroine, the only appropriate one I could come up with is the very embodiment of that absence; "Yamato Nadeshiko." An impossible fantasy of femininity as fabricated by men. The good wife and wise mother. There is so much unrealized potential in the Heroine that it's disheartening to put to words all the ways she could have been better handled, but most of all the protagonist's fixed sex is what could have answered these problems handily. There is a particular logical reason involving Yuriko that the plot would not want to tread through, but more than the storyline purposes it would be offensive to the 1992 male audience's sensibilities to have a female option. There is no particular reason under a Japanese belief system that the protagonist could not be female, and it would fit the undertones of other reincarnative stories like the Tanabata festival lore.
Nadeshiko: We won't meet for some time. It's fated that we part for now. But when the day arrives, come find me.
The domestic scenes in SMT set it apart from the later games in the series. There's an unnerving quality in the text created by having these juvenile, Personaesque conversations with mom and then walking out into the demon infested streets of Kichijoji to talk up some Pixies and Pretas.
The neighbor's house does exist immediately below the protagonist's apartment on the world map, but as the Nadeshiko we encountered in our vision said, we won't be meeting the actual Nadeshiko for some time.
And so our third dream sequence begins. The Old Man is an icon of the original Shin Megami Tensei and our Master Nankai equivalent. While Gentleman and Champion will each err towards their own ideals, the Old Man provides a critical voice mediating their tone throughout the narrative. Much like Stephen in SMTII and the little girl in SMTIV, the Old Man's appearance in the Neutral ending basically confirmed its canonicity ahead of the fact, as it's the only ending in which he reappears to tie up loose ends.
That said, the series' writers have distanced the franchise from the idea of canonicity entirely as of Nocturne, with the interpretation being held in-universe that all endings and incarnations of the universe have happened in parallel. The core SMT games mainly take place in a world where the protagonist chooses Neutral, but that doesn't diminish the validity of the Law and Chaos endings.
We travel up several floors.
The layout of this dream is important because, although blurred and in poor resolution blown up on iOS, it corresponds one to one with an upcoming dungeon. Incidentally, this is the only time that the protagonist's mother addresses Gentleman and Champion directly, and much as our meeting with Yuriko in our first vision was indicative of a real encounter, this conversation straddles the line between dream and reality.
This is the first time we see SMT's unique brand of science fiction fused to mythic trappings. The gate surrounding the summoner's computer terminal is a Shinto torii, a religious boundary between the sacred and the mundane that is normally built outside of shrines. The women flanking him are miko, shrine maidens typically charged with ritual duties, and the wands they're waving are gohei, used in cleansing rites and stock depictions of Japanese ritual magic. The conventions being used here are all very familiar to native Japanese players, who would have encountered Shinto shrines daily, and seeing them married to a demon summoning ritual has a certain impact to it that doesn't carry through. I think that for Americans at least, we're so unaccustomed to the idea of demon conjuring that the impact is present, but it's different because it's crossing a boundary of acceptability rather than appropriating our indigenous religious beliefs. The involvement of specific Shinto imagery here is important, as it's an early clue on what kind of role the Shinto pantheon will play later in the game.
Regarding translation, the major difference between this translation and Aeon Genesis' is the use of the term Expanse. The original Japanese term is 魔界 Makai the "world of evil spirits," but the Ma kanji can also be read here as "demon" or "witch," it's used in the words for witchcraft/sorcery and red-light district, and Makai has been liberally translated as "hell" in some instances. "Demon world" is a direct if nonfluid translation, while "devil world" is the name used in the soundtracks. Aeon called it the Abyss in both their SMTI and SMTII translations, and this was a pretty appropriate translation for conveying a world to which the demons have fallen into, but the Expanse is a carryover on Atlus' part from SMTIV. In IV, the world of demons is a world of possibility and raw (untamed) imagination; the desires and beliefs of mankind take shape there, giving rise to demons as the manifestations of their desires. Conceptually, an "Expanse" implies a vast, constantly opening space or endless horizon, which is appropriate for a world where thought and desire take physical shape. I'm partial to the Abyss or (to borrow from Milton) Tartarus as a translation, but Expanse is appropriate for the shared nature of demons and mythology in the franchise.
Summoner: Hrm!? What are you playing at, waltzing in here like this!? Sadly for you, you've seen the ritual. Which means I can't let you live...
When I first began looking for information on Douman I ended up in the completely wrong part of the internet, so I demand that any readers also suffer through this alternative origin for the demon. DOUMAN-SEIMAN-DOUMAN-SEIMAN!
The warning flags being raised here are interestingly divergent from modern conventions. Essentially, SMT is broadcasting a message at the player that there's an unwinnable fight coming up and that we have to prepare for it somehow. Yet in spite of that, the majority of modern players--and this is not just cultural boundaries speaking, because I've seen Japanese players on NND making the same exact mistake--presume that they can somehow outlevel the upcoming rematch with Douman instead of go around to find an alternative solution. What SMT is trying to communicate here is that conventional means will not be enough for Douman, that we're going to approach him as a puzzle rather than as a boss fight.
This is where the little details of worldbuilding start to come together. The outer wall of Kichijoji has been under police guard since the beginning of the game, but on the return trip home from Inogashira is the first time we're forced to speak with them. In Aeon Genesis' translation the policemen say "You're under arrest for murder! We found your blood fingerprints at the scene! You sick little puppy, tearing out that guy's throat like that! Restrain and handcuff him, boys!" I have to presume that these details were purposefully omitted in order to go along with the censorship of the man's death behind the antique shop, barring the possibility that they were absent in the Japanese iOS port.
Young Man: ...Were you taken captive too? ...Oh. Are you...?
>YES
Another difference between translations is that Gentleman in AG's text said that he was arrested for killing rather than "fighting off" the demons. The whitewashing of instances of "kill" is bizarre and I'm convinced it's to meet the 4+ rating on the iTunes store. At this point the censorship only confuses the narrative. What Okada and Kaneko want to convey is that the police and the demons are in league with one another; the demons kill people, the police frame it on a mark, then arrest and bring them to the hospital. If the mark resists and kills the demons, the police have to make good with their demonic sponsors by bringing in the demons' killer.
An interesting cue is that this is the first time we hear the original Law theme. The music direction in SMT is primitive but effective. You can generally recognize the hymnlike quality of the melody as embodying the Lawful worldview without having to refer to a tracklist to see what it represents. Similarly, the theme for Chaos is filled with a foreboding awe emulating that of the ancient world and the aesthetics of the old gods. It's not as beautiful or engrossing as Strange Journey or IV's soundtrack, but it communicates the ideas clearly and that's all art needs to do.
Gentleman: My girlfriend's name is Nadeshiko. What? You're Nadeshiko's neighbor, Touya? You live right next door to her...
>You hear a sound from the room to your right.
Gentleman: All right. Let's use this opportunity to get out.
A little detail about Gentleman is that even though he has spots of his ideals already embedded in him as in the dream sequence with Nadeshiko, when starting out he's still able to do reckless and proactive things like attacking unarmed hospital workers.
Gentleman is our crutch character for now, he starts with the single target healing spell Dia and quickly learns the force spell Zan, which hits for more than double either character's physical attack and is our main method of dealing with demons aside from using demons ourselves. By the time we get through the dungeon he's also learned the multitarget force spell Mazan, as well as the automap-displaying Mapper.
We enter a room off to the right.
He doesn't give us a name, but the backstory for the Demon Summoning Program tells us right away that this is Stephen. The art of subtlety is unfortunately lost on a lot of scenario writers, and like with the collaboration between the police and the demons this point is very well conveyed by SMT. For the duration of this dungeon Stephen will act as our free heal spot and save point, a role that he's come to reprise in the later games. Having access to early and immediate healing is important, because it makes his room our temporary base of operations while we're building up in the first dungeon, giving us time to recruit all of the demons here and grind up our stats.
Regarding alignment, we can only recruit demons of the same or one alignment removed on the axis. Since we're Neutral that means that we can recruit all Law, Chaos and Neutral demons, but if we were Chaos we could only recruit Chaos and Neutral demons, and vice versa for if we were Law-aligned. These rules don't apply for the demons we fuse ourselves.
On the second floor of the dungeon...
Director: I see. Then you're still wicked humans that won't obey my command. Allow me to modify you to become my puppets.
We pick up a St Incense on the second floor of the hospital and then head over to the Director's office. Incenses permanently increase a character's stat by +1, but I'm refraining from using them on my character just yet because I don't anticipate that he'll be attacking very often in this playthrough. (There's also the fact that gun damage is independent of physical attacks and therefore it's arguably a waste of an incense on him.)
So testing out the combinations, we have Weredog, Pixie and Knocker;
Lv5 Therian Weredog x Lv2 Fairy Pixie = Lv10 Brute Azumi
Lv5 Therian Weredog x Lv4 Jirae Knocker = Lv6 Fairy Goblin
Lv2 Fairy Pixie x Lv4 Jirae Knocker = Lv10 Brute Azumi
And with all three;
Lv5 Therian Weredog x Lv2 Fairy Pixie x Lv4 Jirae Knocker = Lv13 Foul Slime
On a translation note, Aeon Genesis' translation used a literal transcription of the Japanese term Kaifuku "Healing." Kaifuku can also be used as a verb, "to heal/kaifukusuru" and is more general purpose than an Ashram. By translating it as an Ashram however, Atlus gave the Neutrally-aligned healing shrines their own identity, associating it with spiritual instruction that is neither Abrahamic (Law) nor shamanistic (Chaos.) I find the Ashram translation preferable, even though it treads the ground of embellishment.
Inside Kichijoji mall...
>A gang has cornered a young man and is beating him.
Gentleman: That's so cruel...I can't allow this.
Young man: ...I won't give in...to assholes like...you...
Gentleman: Are you all right?
Young man: Shut up! Do I look all right to you? If only I had power...Then I'd...
Gentleman: What should we do, Touya? He's still talking like that.
Young man: You called him Touya, didn't you?
Gentleman: ...You must be Champion.
Champion: I see. Well, it looks like you saved me. Augh...Dammit! If only I had more power...I can't even beat these bastards by myself...How am I supposed to beat demons if I can't even fight Ozawa? Please! Let me join you! Well, I'm coming whether you like it or not.
>Champion has joined the party.
Sometimes I have trouble buying the ages 4+ rating. Champion is a hotblooded and abrasive character, somewhat atypical of the Chaos alignment compared to the more laid back, all-business Jimenez in Strange Journey or the snakelike Naoya in Devil Survivor. One of the surprising aspects of the Law and Chaos alignments in SMT is that while there is a deliberate motion to bias the player in favor of Gentleman by comparing his and Champion's introductions, strong support for Chaos has emerged both in Japan and overseas. I think it's a testament to the strength of rhetoric that Okada sets the player up to dislike Champion in full confidence that they can be persuaded to support him after seeing the remainder of the game.
Lv5 Therian Weredog x Lv2 Fairy Pixie = Lv10 Brute Azumi
Lv5 Therian Weredog x Lv4 Jirae Knocker = Lv6 Fairy Goblin
Lv2 Fairy Pixie x Lv4 Jirae Knocker = Lv10 Brute Azumi
Lv4 Jirae Knocker x Lv2 Jirae Brownie = Lv8 Element Erthys
Lv4 Jirae Knocker x Lv6 Fairy Goblin = Lv10 Brute Azumi
Lv2 Fairy Pixie x Lv6 Fairy Goblin = Lv11 Element Aeros
Lv2 Fairy Pixie x Lv3 Jirae Brownie = Lv10 Brute Azumi
Triple fusions;
Lv5 Therian Weredog x Lv2 Fairy Pixie x Lv4 Jirae Knocker = Lv13 Foul Slime
Lv6 Fairy Goblin x Lv2 Fairy Pixie x Lv2 Jirae Brownie = Lv16 Megami Ame no Uzume
There are other triple combinations obviously, but they all result in one of these two demons. Ame no Uzume is the strongest thing we can fuse with the demons available to us right now, and considering that her components are mostly trash and Goblin's easily replaced I would fuse her if I could, but I'm half the required level to handle her. Instead my plan is to fuse Aeros using Pixie and Goblin once I'm at the appropriate level, then rerecruit a Pixie for fusion with Weredog into Azumi, and here and now I'm going to fuse Knocker and Brownie into Erthys. Let's talk about why same-race fusions are so special.
More typically, Element demons let you bypass the normal restrictions on what kinds of demons you can fuse based on what's available in your area as fusion material. Aeros has a positive relationship with the Fairy race, so if I were high enough level to fuse Aeros I could then rank Pixie up to Goblin, or Goblin up to Jack Frost, or Jack Frost to Pyro Jack etc. Having access to one race and its positive and negative Elements gives us access to the entire order of demons, with level being our only restriction. Taking an index of the races we currently have available, the Therian race is pretty worthless except for compendium completion, as there's only two other members besides Weredog and their abilities are mostly weak physical attacks, while the Jirae race has some okay early and mid-level demons with buffs and second level spells. The Foul race that we can access through the Slime triple fusion can only be completed through Element fusion, but the only member of it that's really worthwhile in battle is the level 44 Backbeard. The Megami race on the other hand is consistently great at support and we'd get a lot of long-term mileage out of fusing Ame no Uzume and ranking her up with Elements. Eventually that would lead us to Lv64 Megami Lakshmi, tied with Oberon and Fudo-Myo-O for the bottom place in the top 20 highest level demons in the game.
Erthys himself is a pretty good buff demon, with Rakukaja, Sukukaja and Tarukaja, but our party's somewhat skewed towards buffing right now and I'd like to update it with more variation, dedicated damage dealers and healers. Gentleman and Champion will cover the offensive bases for now. Unfortunately, Erthys shares Knockers' terrible Force/magic/Almighty weaknesses.
Gentleman: Something's strange...
Champion: Yeah, there's definitely something fishy about this.
Demon: Damn...looks like I couldn't fool you. I've already eaten your mother...but don't be sad. You'll see her again soon. In my stomach, that is...But first, let's see how deliciously you struggle!
This is one of the iconic moments in SMT. The dramatic irony of the scene with the hero's mother in the Douman vision was that it contains her last words to him; she's worried over the safety of the hero and his friends, when unbeknownst to her she's about to die at the hands of a demon.
(There is no such enemy encounter in this game.)
Amanojaku drops ¥576 and 240 MAG on defeat.
>Touya obtained ID Card.
Champion: Give it a rest, Gentleman. Let the guy alone...His mom just died.
A conflict in coping with grief. Gentleman chooses to try to give his condolences and console the mourner in a western-style funerary practice, Champion chooses to let the protagonist have his dignity and grieve uninterrupted, which is more in line with native Japanese funeral observances.
>Pascal the dog is tagging along.
>The doorbell rings.
Mother: About what?
Voice: People have been going missing around here lately. That's what we're investigating.
Mother: Pardon me, but...who are you with again?
Voice: Oh, didn't I mention? Sorry. I'm with the police.
Mother: ......
Voice: Would you please open the door?
Mother: ...We're fine here. Please leave.
This scene imitating Amanojaku's native myth, where he repeatedly asks the protagonist of Melon Princess to let him into the house, and she continually denies him after remembering her grandparents' warnings about the demon. In that story the protagonist was goaded into continually letting Amanojaku let a toe, then a foot, then a leg, a hand and eventually his head in. There is allegedly a grimdark incarnation of the story floating around where Amanojaku kills the girl and wears her flesh, but I suspect this is just an invention by the SMT fandom as there would be no story if the girl died.
Voice: Um, but...This is the police. Please open up.
Mother: My son and I are fine as we are. Please leave.
Voice: Your son...Would that be Touya?
>Your mother hastily threw open the door!
Mother: Office, did something happen to Touya!?
Policeman: I was just taking a look into what you were thinking...
Mother: Aaaaaaah!
Mother: No...Touya...!
On that very
note, next time I'll get around to Pascal's purpose and some more version differences. SMT opens up a lot after Kichijoji, and it's in the aftermath of all this that Gentleman and Champion begin to really make their points philosophically. At the end of this update our party is all around level 8~9, and excluding the initial 18 stat points we got to throw around this is how the team's developed:Touya: +5 Vi +2 In +1 Ag
Gentleman: +3 Ag +5 Ma
Champion: +3 St +2 Vi +2 Ag
References
Elison, George. Deus Destroyed; The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. New York: Harvard University Press, 1973. Print.
Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.Yamakawa, Kikue. "Record of the Generations of Women." Trans. Mikiso Hane. Sources of Japanese Tradition. 2nd ed. Ed. Wm. Theodore de Barry, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 482-86. Print.
Mason, Penelope, and Donald Dinwiddie. History of Japanese Art. Second ed. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.
Nakae, Chōmin. A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government. Trans. Nobuko Tsukui. Trumbull: Weatherhill, 2004. Print.
Glad I found this--it's been quite insightful thus far. I had a feeling the alignment choices were set up to tap into the Japanese player's mindset, and this more or less confirms it.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I want to comment on though is the use of the term "Meta." I think they were going for "metahuman," which is used in DC comics at least to refered to humans with superpowers. As you mentioned, "Super" or "Uber" wouldn't have had the same sound to it, and something like "Great" would've caused trouble down the line when translating Soul Hacker's "Dairei" race.
Good point! I don't typically read comics and wouldn't have thought of that. Something that also didn't occur to me while writing this is that the literal meaning of "Meta" pertains to high-level thought and self-commentary. So it's not an inappropriate translation considering who the race's other members are, but it's hard to recognize right away for what it's trying to say. Probably because meta has become a word that's thrown around too commonly, in conjunction with competitive games, so you hear things like "the meta" in P4Arena and so on.
DeleteDidn't know you were LPing the iOS version!
ReplyDeleteA few things, though.
First, the Preta is called that instead of Gaki because Gaki is merely the Japanese name for the same being the occurs throughout the pan-Buddhist sphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preta Unless there's reason for calling something common to Buddhism or whatever by the Japanese names (such as the portrayals of the Four Heavenly Kings), I absolutely agree it should default to the general name.
Also, I disagree with that vitriolic write up that the cultural views of Christianity in Japan influenced the Law/Messians to be portrayed as profoundly negative, if only because I think the Law faction is traditionally fairly accurately portrayed, even from a Western perspective cognizant of criticism of organized religion. From my own experience, Christianity is certainly seen as foreign in Japan, but they are very interested by it, perhaps because it is so different. The Japanese Christians I personally dealt with did come off as kind of creepy or cultish (as seemingly part of some denomination I wasn't familiar with and thus their interpretation of some of it seemed...off) and one older lady REALLY loved me or something and I think she was stalking me... but that's how it was in 2012-2014 as opposed to 1992. So what I'm saying is that Christianity can be natively interpreted as it is in the Law faction independent of the Japanese historical context, but said context does put an interesting spin on things. But you're right--some people just don't know (and/or are too sensitive)!
Also, all this translation talk and criticism of Atlus USA's work is giving me some serious indigestion, since, in the other post (though I'm reading these sequentially) it was pointed out Aeon Genesis' translation may add some "fluff" to the text but that's certainly not to force any blame on your initial intentions to provide as much information as possible. On races, Zealot is also totally fine instead since it implies fanaticism. Meta is a good, neutral term as described above since that race has to house not only historical villains like Douman but also series alignment heroes like Commander Gore. There are some issues of meaning/transparency with certain race names but these aren't the ones :P
"one of my disappointments with the Law routes of each game is that none of them involve destroying the Cathedral and hunting down its master." Well, they are a notably neutral place anyway despite the name, considering you can fuse angels as well as any hellish demon there. Sometimes name isn't everything in SMT :P
But good analyses still, I'll be sure to read the next and whenever you get to more!
Also, shit, I totally didn't see your latest post about the translations...so please ignore that part of my post, or all of it. BRAIN FART
DeleteYeah I did a bad on the translation discussion.
DeleteLooking back I realize I didn't frame this well, but I didn't mean to criticize the Gaki > Preta translation convention, I intended to highlight it as a notable difference between translations. After all, just because I'm used to it doesn't mean it's better. It's like Byakko > Baihu.
I hope I didn't sound *too* negative in how I discussed the portrayal of the Law faction, I'm usually pretty content with their portrayal. I did want to account for the criticism that I've seen others levy against it, and answer against the more generalized belief I've seen in the gaming community that SMT, Final Fantasy and Xenogears are all somehow evident of an irrational anti-Christian plot by Those Wacky Japanese. You know there's a certain stereotype going around when "the church is evil" is treated as a JRPG cliche. But I've also found it hard to gauge Christianity's actual reception in Japan post-1970 because just about the only data that gets circulated these days is the stable 1~2% statistic, and that doesn't give any idea of how people respond on an individual level.
It's interesting that you found the Japanese Christians that you met (I presume in Japan) creepy, because back around 2011 when I was visiting a church established by immigrated Japanese Christians up in Michigan I found them to be fairly unsettling. I grew up in a pastor's family that changed churches every couple years, so I've had my fair share of weird regional variations on the religion down in Orlando and in the Not Great But Slightly Mediocre American Midwest. I'm not sure what exactly to pinpoint as the reason I didn't want to stick around with those fellows, but I remember the English translations of their worship music focusing more on the Rapture than I'd heard in any American church. Their service was actually the first time I heard the Christianity statistic, years before I ever got into reading Gordon, from a young pastor-in-training who was preparing to go back to Japan to do missionary work. He also gave an interesting view from another side of Japanese Christianity, pointing out to the non-Japanese attending the service that becoming a pastor is looked down upon in the country because it's not a "real job" and that he was giving up on higher education and a stable career to do it. Thinking back on that now, I wonder if the same economically-minded disapproval surrounds becoming a Shinto or Buddhist priest.
There, I knew I'd have time to reply eventually. :p
DeleteThe problem with those people who say games like SMT or FFT are blasphemous or anti-Christian is down to pure ignorance. They are being offended by a criticism they themselves don't understand. If they are religious, then the religion portrayed is not even theirs: the Messians for example don't even begin to resemble most of modern Christianity, not Catholic or Lutheran, but a more extreme version seen in history such as during the Inquisition or, to a certain extent, the religious fundamentalism seen in America today. But it doesn't just represent Christianity; this religious zeal could be extended to other examples, such as the Roman religion and how conquered nations were forced to assume to the imperial cult. Law is merely a general concept to be adapted to a range of ideals and dogmas rather than just strictly a Christian example. A friend of mine nearly had a spat with someone he knew who was playing SMT IV and decrying the use of angels as enemies and whatnot. But in my experience you can throw all the evidence to the contrary to them and they still won't listen because their own personal experience to them is probably more important than what some game says--especially a game from some foreign land that shouldn't know any better. So yeah, basically I'm just sympathizing with you. :p If SMT is guilty of anything, it is of using the Judeo-Christian stock to represent Law over and over again when there are many other ways to illustrate it, even in a one-off way like SJ did with Chaos.
But yes, I lived in Japan for 2 years and just got back. From my experience other than the door-to-door crazies, Christianity is generally not understood very well beyond specific references. They know who Jesus is of course, and vague ideas about angels and God as a Monad, but I think most of it is learned through foreign pop culture imports. I tended to know more than most people I talked with about Shinto myth, by their own admittance, which never failed to impress them. So really, kind of the same thing as the offended Christians above, except the Japanese I talked to were at least humble about and willing to admit what they didn't know, even in the face of the "outsider"!
Becoming a Shinto or Buddhist priest in Japan probably has prestige dependent on the rank of the shrine or temple, but then again I have no idea how much money they make so I can't really comment!
But before I move onto part 2 finally, I have one more thing to mention. When you say:
"The concept of Christ's resurrection is also disturbing from the Shinto perspective on the purity of nature, beauty of transient life and the importance of dying. Coming back from the dead is a perversion of nature"
This can be refuted with the example of Okuninushi and his brothers killing him multiple times. Each time he is brought back to life by his mother's intervention. And Okuninushi is a pretty popular guy, albeit originating in the Izumo mythology rather than the Yamato system, but that distinction hardly matters today.
But all right, catch you on the flipside!
For the record, I now disagree with myself over the Preta/Gaki issue. Only "gaki" have those distended bellies!
DeleteAgain for the record, I now also disagree with myself and agree with the text regarding that the history of Christianity in Japan has negatively tinged portrayals of the Messians and even YHVH. This is actually good because it explains YHVH without "HE'S A CORRUPTED VERSION" nonsense. I still agree that it's a fine observation of Christianity even as an apostate.
Delete