Forests and Representation: Let's Play Pokémon Part 2

Music: Viridian Forest

Viridian forest is the first area of the game that I'd describe as sprawling, untamed nature. There's a clear way through Viridian, but that way still runs through paths of tall grass and nests of Bug-type Pokémon, and the music creates a grungy punk atmosphere that you don't see in the settled parts of Kanto. The player has now gone into the woods, an unprotected and dangerous locale where they are for the first time on their own. Viridian forest is not a difficult place to navigate, but it is wild.

BUG CATCHER: Hey! You have POKéMON! Come on! Let's battle 'em!
There are three Bug Catchers in Viridian forest, each with very similar teams. I will not be covering them all. Bug Catchers are characterized by their use of Bug-type Pokémon, which generally evolve at lower levels than other Pokémon but also lack long term strengths. Bug-type moves are universally physical prior to the fourth generation, but have low base power and very few Pokémon learn Bug-type moves.

Illust. Ken Sugimori

This is ahead of where my discussion is, but the generation II games have several hidden opponents representing key staff members for the Pokémon games, and in them Tajiri represents himself as a Bug Catcher. His original idea for Pokémon was based on the insect collecting he practiced in his childhood. What does it say that one of the most influential creative minds of the late 20th century chooses to represent himself as nothing greater than a young boy with a hobby? Is it humility, that even now the games are just a time capsule for his childhood? Potentially an understanding that he's only a piece of an idea that's grown far greater than himself?

Or perhaps this is merely how Tajiri prefers to identify because it is how he sees himself. Since generation III trainer classes have been used to identify the traits of each individual player, and this idea may have originated from how the staff used them in Gold, Silver and Crystal. It would be interesting to encounter Tajiri on Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire or X & Y's wifi and see how he represents himself now, especially since Bug Catcher isn't a publicly available trainer class in ΩRαS.

Each in-game trainer class tends towards a theme. For Bug Catchers this is using otherwise-neglected Bug Pokémon, which are typically not fully evolved despite how early they can reach their evolutions. This Catcher's Weedle is barely on par with an untrained starter Pokémon. Statistically the Weedle line has the same totals as the Caterpie line, but where Caterpie's final evolution invests in Special Weedle's invests in Attack, and the points Caterpie invests in Defense Weedle splits between HP and Speed.

Weedle's primary advantage is that it learns Poison Sting, a 15 base power move with a 30% chance to inflict poison. In terms of status effects poison is easily the weakest, as all it does is take off 1/16th of the inflicted Pokémon's max Hit Points at the end of each turn. Burn damage is second weakest, taking off the same value but also halving their Attack stat. Paralysis and freeze are tied for second best, with the former preventing the opposing Pokémon from executing its moves 25% of the time and also reducing its Speed by a quarter, while freeze can never be guaranteed unlike these other status effects but can completely immobilize a Pokémon with close to no chance of recovery. Unlike in later generations, frozen Pokémon can only dethaw through items (unavailable in player-versus-player) or by being hit by Fire-type moves. Getting frozen means that a Pokémon has been removed from the game; trying to compare a 1/16th HP reduction to that, when every other status has some volatile stat or move-affecting effect, is like trying to compare the longbow to chemical weapons. Sleep is the best status because it can be guaranteed to happen 60~100% of the time on key moves, and immobilizes the opponent for one to seven turns. They can't attack on the turn they wake up, so it's the strongest status with virtually no risk nor drawbacks, unlike freeze which at best is 10% chance only available on certain Pokémon that tend to be questionable choices for status inducers.

While Butterfree runs a double powder set, Beedrill uses the stat-boosting Swords Dance and Agility to build up as the best Bug-type attacker in the game. Both moves boost a stat by two stages (two out of six), Attack for Swords Dance and Speed for Agility. Critical hits in Blue are based on the Speed stat, so not only can Beedrill set up to always go first it can also help secure its own critical hits. Beedrill is the only Pokémon to learn Twineedle, a base 20 move that hits twice and has a 20% chance to inflict poison with each hit. If the first hit is a critical hit then the second one will as well, which upgrades Twineedle to a net 80 BP and if poison goes off the opposing Pokémon also loses 1/16th of its maximum HP at the end of the turn (and every turn thereafter.) The Swords Dance/Agility set is the first generation ancestor to the modern Dragon Dance strategy, which splits the difference by increasing both Attack and Speed but only by one stage instead of two. The optimal Swords Dance/Agility is probably Scyther, one of the better Bug-types in Blue Version. Typically Swords Dance users pair it with Hyper Beam, aiming to set up a one-hit kill that will negate that move's recharge cost and then proceed to sweep through the rest of the opposing team. Most of them can't actually access Agility as well, which puts Beedrill and Scyther in a weird niche. Dragonite, one of the best first generation Pokémon in general, has a similar gameplan but only needs Agility because he already has a base Attack stat of 134.

If you were going to use Bug-types as an answer to Psychic-type Pokémon, Beedrill would be the way to go. (Which speaks more to the game balance issues with Bug-types than it does Beedrill's greatness.) In addition to the Twineedle option described above, Beedrill is the only Bug-type capable of learning Pin Missile, a risky multihit move that strikes for 2-5 hits (average hit of 3, although you have the same odds of getting a 3 as you do a 2, and a 5 as you do a 4) for 14 base power each. If the first hit crits, so does every hit that follows, for a net 72 average and 120 maximum. This is questionable because it relies more on random chance than Twineedle does, although critical hits are easier to secure through Agility boosting. Twineedle can also get a one-hit KO off of Alakazam, one of the best Psychic-types in the game, and on Exeggutor who has a 4x weakness to Bug. Scyther would be statistically better, but has no Bug-type moves.

Basically what you can take away from this is that if we're really gonna start trashtalking Pokémon and call Butterfree total garbage, then Beedrill is another man's treasure. Like virtually every Bug-type you will not want it when you're up against the majority of first generation threats, but when you're staring down Alakazam, Exeggutor, Jynx or Slowbro, and the opponent doesn't have any of the other threatlist Pokémon to switch into (I would call Rhydon a hard counter to Beedrill but everything is a hard counter to Beedrill) you will be thankful to have gone sifting through somebody's garbage.

BUG CATCHER: cut it!
Every battle opens the same way from hereon. I lead with Bulbasaur, who sets up Leech Seed on the opposing Pokémon. I then sweep with Tackle. Because of the difference in the opposing Pokémon's base Attack compared to Bulbasaur's Defense, the opponent cannot overcome the HP that Leech Seed is refunding me each turn. I then take their money and walk. If String Shot is able to shift the turn order and Weedle procs its 30% poison things become slightly interesting, but this is only marginally more engaging than autobattling through hordes in Shin Megami Tensei.
BUG CATCHER: Ssh! You'll scare the bugs away!

POKéDEX: electricity could build and cause lightning storms.
The franchise mascot can only appear in Viridian forest 5% of the time, or in one other remote location 25% of the time. What's interesting is that when Pikachu debuted, she was ostensibly just another rare Pokémon like Clefairy, Jigglypuff or Scyther. Her role in the anime series and subsequent rise to stardom allegedly came off of a combination of fan popularity and an executive decision to choose a gender neutral mascot--the story circulated since 2004 is that Clefairy was originally billed as the series' mascot, featuring prominently in the first Pocket Monsters manga, and from there having gained significant ground with fans. This resulted in a switch being made in the first episode of the April 1997 anime, with Satoshi's (Ash's) Clefairy being changed to a Pikachu, and animation cels being redrawn to accommodate that. The hole in the story is that it originates from Joseph Tobin's Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, a book written in the aftermath of Ruby & Sapphire's 2003 crash as a reaction to the apparent death of the franchise. (I say this knowing full well the irony that my own writings are a reaction to its rebirth.) The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, while academically reputable, cited no source for this story and does not contain personal interviews with Tajiri nor any of the other Pokémon staff. The reliability of the Clefairy legend is thus questionable.

Numbers-wise the problem with Pikachu is that her evolved form Raichu splits itself between Attack and Special, going 90 both ways. This evolution line is pretty fast (base 100 Speed which is faster than 60% of Blue's overused Pokémon) but because it's a mixed physical-special attacker with low HP and Defense there aren't reliable ways to faint the stronger Pokémon before they get in one attack and KO poor Pikachu. Remember that Dragonite back there has 134 Special, and he's far from the standard these Pokémon have to compare to. To take advantage of Raichu's Speed and get around her frailty you can start with a Substitute/Rest set that puts up a sacrificial wall between Raichu and the opposing Pokémon, then recoups the expended HP later after taking the lead, and Raichu can benefit from the same-type attack bonus off of Thunderbolt while having a 10% chance to paralyze. Essentially you throw paralysis out from behind the Substitute to make attacking safe, but there are better Pokémon for this. Jolteon can do practically the same strategy with better Special, with Raichu's only advantage being that she can have Body Slam in her fourth slot, and the mythical Pokémon Zapdos is better at the actual mixed Attack/Special gameplay that Raichu is supposed to be good for. Raichu's niche is that Pikachu can learn the Water-type move Surf, countering the Ground-type Pokémon that otherwise neutralize her. This is only available through a special move tutor in the Nintendo 64 game Pokémon Stadium, or by way of a 1999 Nintendo Power distribution event.

Without any formal tutorials, Viridian forest introduces two kinds of items; those represented on the overworld as Poké Balls, and those invisible to the naked eye. The latter broke my trust with the game as a kid and unleashed my imagination in a terrible way. Suddenly every single tile could have an item on it. I spent hours trekking through any suspicious territory mashing the A button, searching for any signs of treasure. The worst part is that I was sometimes rewarded. It fueled the type of mentality that gave birth to the Poké Ball button codes or 151st Pokémon-catching myths. (One of which is actually not a myth, works perfectly fine and which I will be taking full advantage of.)

Viridian forest is a completely boxed in environment that nonetheless feels endless. The player has the impression of a sprawling forest opening out on all sides into an expanse, fueled by the incomplete view of either side of route 2 that the rest house exteriors give. It can never be seen in one image in its entirety, and so becomes larger in the player's mind than it is in the cartridge. For the kids like me that were experiencing their first real video game, Viridian presented a rich environment from which all of nature seemed to be pouring out of. It was engaging, detailed and a little gross. At seven I was also left with the impression that someone had drawn out the forest for me, precluding any knowledge of the Brickroad quandary. It's rare to reflect on the people that design JRPG dungeons, but when I experienced my first one I was left wondering who it was that drew up and critiqued these spaces.

Pokémon Special Vol. 1, July 2000. Personal scan.

The scan at right is an example of one way in which Pokémon's multimedia approach characterized the geography differently depending on how much of it one was exposed to. It comes from the first English run of Pokémon Special, renamed Pokémon Adventures. The illustration is reversed as a result of the entire book being flipped to read left-to-right instead of in the original right-to-left order. Sometimes sentimentality must trump canonicity; and the 2000 printing is on higher quality paper than the right-to-left 2009 reissue.

The manga format preserves the monochromatic quality of the original games, although for any kids playing on original hardware the addition of black and white was arguably a clearer picture over different shades of green. Contrast that to the anime series, which mapped out Viridian forest in full color. The forest in the manga was burgeoning with possibility and exotic Pokémon species not found in the games, planting the idea in the player's mind that perhaps these areas were living environments containing more than what they could find in the cartridge.

The second Bug Catcher in the area switches to a strategy partway through our battle that I once detested but now understand better. The Pokémon he sends out is Weedle's evolved form Kakuna, who normally inherits Poison Sting and String Shot from Weedle but when caught in the wild only knows Harden naturally. This Kakuna is the latter type. Harden increases Defense by one stage and has no other effect; combined with Kakuna's naturally high defense, it makes her one of the most effective cocoon wall Pokémon, effective in that she can stall for somewhere around twenty turns but cannot fight back in any way. Metapod follows the same "strategy." I'm opposed to this because all it does is drag out the inevitable. Stalling does not actually change the momentum of a Pokémon battle, it just preserves it in miniature, and in order to make use of stall competitively you have to invoke passive damage moves like Poison Sting/Twineedle. One of the gym leaders will actually use this better version of stall later on. Viridian forest is inundated with Kakuna and Metapod encounters that drag out the journey, but as an adult I realize their real purpose; to consume PP. The Metapods and Kakunas being fully hardened means it takes up to twenty times the normal PP to get out enough attacks to drop one, which wears out your best offensive moves quickly and forces you to use weaker attacks that may not get the job done versus genuinely dangerous opponents. Viridian forest does make use of good stall, by subtly wearing you away with intermediary cocoon Pokémon, poisoning you with Weedle and then throwing the army of Caterpie at you to knock you out. The scale of it is just so massive that it's difficult to perceive as a child.

Incredibly, in fourteen years I had never once discovered this hidden Antidote. It's right at the start of Viridian, so in order to find it you'd have to walk all the way back after learning about hidden items and then check the tree.

SIGN: LEAVING VIRIDIAN FOREST
PEWTER CITY AHEAD
The end of Viridian forest is the end of the early game. After this the player is on their way to becoming a credible Pokémon trainer with badges to their name and the skill to back it up. The region surrounding Viridian city is an abundant ecosystem teeming with options for the player's nascent team, and Pewter city will test how well she can train and make use of those options.

See you Thursday.

Tajiri's Box, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and Se Jun Park: an Introduction

In 1996 Satoshi Tajiri unleashed a terrible and profound chain reaction that threw world culture off its axis. I cannot imagine going into a 2015 without Pokémon; the franchise has deeply affected my generation's views on materialism, morality, animal rights and competition. Between 1996 and 2000, 46 million first generation Pokémon games were sold, and much of the intrigue behind the Twitch Plays Pokémon social experiment earlier this year rested on the 1.16 million people that collectively participated in a playthrough of Red and Blue. The rapid, ravenous growth of the video games into a global phenomenon and its subsequent deathgrip on humanity can be understood as a kind of Pandora's Box from which all things Pokémon spread. While the nostalgic appeal of the original games may be reduced to mobilizing just 1/46th of its original audience and the much-maligned "genwunners" were already being discredited as they came into being, the relevance of Pokémon in contemporary times is indisputable.

To claim otherwise would be to ignore that Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire's first week in 2014 sold approximately five times the units of Red and Blue's first week twenty years ago. Every day new trainers are recruited into the ranks of Pokémon Leagues around the world, participate in a global trading network, and compete for regional titles at Nintendo and fan-sponsored conferences. Each year a handful of successful trainers are cheered on at the World Championships while their matches are streamed live to anxious fans, and are then awarded scholarships worth several hundred thousand dollars for their skill at the games.

Artwork by 12m, used with permission.

Pokémon has changed the ways in which people relate and interact with one another, and attracted a periphery audience of onlookers vastly exceeding the scope of the 1990's arcade audiences. Consider the success of the 2014 Pokémon World Championships. Illustrating the climactic moment in which, against all odds, a squirrel held up the entire world on one finger quickly became a rite of passage for Pokémon fanartists. The livestream of the 2014 world finals drew over 4.6 million views and almost 450 thousand more between its multiple YouTube recordings afterwards, making it the most watched Pokémon battle in the world. World champion Se Jun Park has become a minor cultural icon to South Korean fans. For the Karenites, a faction opposed to traditional competitive values comparable to Super Smash Bros.' "tiers are for queers" crowd, Park is a heroic example of a trainer that plays their favorites instead of what's strongest.

(This last point is counterfactual to history. Se Jun Park was and is a competitive player who carefully selected and bred his Pachirisu for a deliberate strategic purpose that catered to the VGC's double battle format.)

Artwork by pictolita, used with permission.

Park's achievement shook the world much like Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky's 1972 chess match. More people were tuned in to a single Pokémon battle than ever before. Any trainer that sends out a Pachirisu in-tournament again will be doing so in his shadow. Competitive Pokémon has become a spectator sport that fans bite their nails over, rather than being confined to the competitors' experience.

Going back to the Twitch Plays Pokémon example, no one would be worshiping Lord Helix if Ken Sugimori hadn't sat down and drawn an ammonite Pokémon in 1990. The popularity of each respective generation in comparison was made clear during the height of the TPP streams. TPP Red averaged 80 thousand continuous viewers during its initial run, but by the time the stream got to Crystal there were already complaints about a lack of participation. Some qualia about Red and Blue still resonates with those that experienced it at the turn of the millennium, and the games stopped retaining this in Ruby and Sapphire, if not earlier.

There's been a lot of speculation about why Pokémon took off as it did, and what it was that the series tapped into in the children of the world. I'm concerned less with how Pokémon's become a front-and-center feature in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and more with the consequences of it upstaging Santa Claus. What values did Red and Blue instill on the children of the late 90's, and the adults that they've grown into today? Pokémon is part of a grandscale Japanification of the entire western world that's been going on since Voltron hit in 1984 and has continued to the present. In 1975 Japan was grappling with Americanization; forty years later in 2015 the pendulum has firmly swung in the opposite direction. Today in the United States you can buy children's jerseys with "super kawaii" on the back, when prior to 2000 the most prevalent Japanese word in the American lexicon was tycoon (大君 taikun) brought over in 1857.

I have always thought of Pokémon more as a kind of time, setting or place rather than as a story or narrative. The fact that it was born, died and gave way to a restoration of itself is testament to the games' cultural footprint. The first Pokémon games were the beginning of an experience from '96 to '04 that brought a close to the cultural 90's, the tail end of which dragged into the release of Pokémon Emerald. I'm not in a position to say whether the changes brought on by this experience were positive or negative. But I can interrogate how they have reshaped my home country.

Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have been out for a month now, but for me they're still on the horizon. I know that once I have them I won't want to put them down for a while, so in the spirit of the season--not of Christmas nor Saturnalia but of Pokémon--I want to jump headfirst into 1998 and illustrate the cultural impact of the original games on today's USA, and to a lesser extent on a global scale. I should clarify that I am not a competitive Pokémon trainer, no matter what aspirations I held in my youth, but because of the unique concessions and simplicities of Red and Blue it's easier for me to grasp them than the later games. I am more comfortable as a Pokémon naturalist. I enjoy capturing the image, spirit and personality of the species. So my position is not one of total authority on the subject, but with all this said, I'm ready to go back down the rabbit hole.

Index

Chapter 1: Interpretation, Nostalgia & EarthBound (Pallet town through Viridian city)
Chapter 2: Forests & Representation (Viridian forest)

End of Hiatus and the Beginning of Escapism

I am done with my examinations for this semester and I am exhausted.

I cannot voice properly the realization of having no more obligations to meet for several weeks. The idea that I am not in school for winter break has not yet set in. But I am very ready to return to doing the things that I enjoy most. To give an idea of what I've been working on to build credits in undergrad, back in November I had written ~1200 words on executioners and the life of Meister Franz Schmidt, in comparison to a bad 2002 Matrix derivative. The film could have been improved by cutting its action scenes altogether, but it was ultimately its preoccupation with the spectacle of violence that made it relevant to the discussion of execution, torture and state control. Over the following weekend I hurriedly completed two other papers for a course on a survey of French history from 1789 to present, papers on nouvelle vague cinema and the socioeconomic changes brought about by the Great War. This was followed by another paper on structural violence and poverty in the slums of Mumbai for an anthropology course, and then one on the historiography of the archaeology of Chinese writing. Some of these papers were better put together than others, but in all I felt them to be some of the driest, most regurgitated writing I had ever put to paper. I'm sorry I wrote the one on Mumbai and made the TA sit through it, but only two days before I turned it in she had mentioned offhand to a student that she hadn't actually started reading the book yet and none of the other graders had either. This is the systematic paper mill we live in, a Frierian nightmare of inputs and outputs and meeting academic criteria for spitting up information as quickly as we can swallow it.

It's this kind of thing that compels people to escapism. We want to put ourselves in a different pair of shoes. Like Kafka beleaguered by his breadjob and wanting to pursue his true calling, people are compelled to wonder if they could be something else. If they could be born in another time, place or world entirely, and step into the shoes of someone who occupies a completely foreign social role. The allure lies in the idea that this role may be better than one's own.

This fantasy is at the heart of games like Crystal Chronicles. You roleplay in the most in-depth fashion possible, becoming a self created from the ground up from a pool of fantastic races so far removed from your own reality, that you can treasure the character without having to put a second thought to why the game was created with the idea of race as something other than socially constructed already built into its system. Myrrh is the sacred lifeblood of this game's world, and as a caravanner it's your responsibility to go out and gather it each year to keep an encroaching toxin from breaching your village's walls. Crystal Chronicles is completely noncommittal. You can walk away from this second life at any time, then come back later and resume freely at your own leisure.

In spite of it being so noncommittal, choosing your family's profession can be as paralyzing a choice as naming one's character. I remember spending a half hour or so deliberating over the options as a child. I knew what race I wanted to play well in advance because I'd been reading about the game for months in Nintendo Power magazine, but nothing I'd read prepared me for this other decision well enough that I could call it informed.

When I first rented Crystal Chronicles from a local Blockbuster back in '04, I played a solitary Selkie boy, the son of an alchemist's family, who led his town's crystal caravan out into the mist entirely heedless of the dangers at work. The Selkie race has a particular reputation as outsiders even within the villages they've settled in for generations, perpetual vagrants and thieves that will drive unfair bargains and pick the wallets of anyone dumb enough to look the other way. As I found out in a string of embarrassing letters from my in-game mother that made me grateful to be caravanning alone, the stereotypes are pretty much true. I think I received a single letter from Rah Sie that did not at some point urge me to swindle every poor sod that crossed my path, and I think I made a rather disappointing son to a clan of thieves. And for the longest time, I didn't understand everybody's complaints online about Leuda village because--well, Selkies don't steal from other Selkies.

This act of roleplay colored my outlook significantly. When The Crystal Bearers came out in 2009 I was ecstatic to receive it for Christmas, having followed the hype train for Crystal Chronicles' many sequels much as I had the original game. Yet I found myself sympathizing not with the game's Clavat protagonist, but with Keiss, Belle and Vaigali: the local Selkies. I had sufficiently internalized the race values of Crystal Chronicles to the point of excluding the other in-game races. The fictional culture of Chronicles' world had been instilled in me as it had in others, creating preconceptions about races and professions that do not exist.

The game world thus acquired a kind of presence as a location and space that people have interacted with but never set foot in. Coming out of the early 2000s push for social gaming on Nintendo's then-newest console, Crystal Chronicles has an Animal Crossing-like atmosphere. You're supposed to play with two to four other players using one of the jankiest hardware setups money could buy, plugging in up to four separate GameBoy Advance handhelds through an equal number of GBA link cables into a single GameCube. Any lesser number of players means that the houses in the starting village of Tipa are unoccupied, with only a single Moogle doing the housekeeping while they wait for residents to move in. Like Animal Crossing's Gyroids bouncing around outside of homes, waiting for new families to arrive, the Moogles encourage you to find friends to accompany you or otherwise face the journey alone.

Crystal Chronicles came out right as I was moving cross-country into a section of Orlando that was caught up in the craze of video games as being the work of the devil, so I never got to take part in the collective player experiences that Nintendo Power had been hyping me and my school friends up for. Nevertheless, I could indulge in the feeling of being part of a living world interconnected by fragile roads of trade and the exchange of Myrrh. Perhaps the most startling thing I realized about this world is that the story begins and ends inside of a self-professed dark age. With its reserves of iron long since dry, the last great civilization of the Lilty empire had already collapsed about a hundred and fifty to two hundred years before the game's start, and by its end there are no signs of the empire returning. The world of Crystal Chronicles is idyllically disconnected, barely more than a handful of settlements struggling to keep the Myrrh supply sustainable.

In finally freeing the world from the grips of the toxic miasma, and so also removing its dependence on Myrrh, you both set the stage for this idyllic setting to be destroyed by urbanization, and erase your own social role. With the caravanning done, the world doesn't need you anymore. So it becomes tempting to ignore saving the world even once you know how to do so, and instead keep on caravanning forever as part of an endless line of Myrrh-hunters. At some point though, you'll inevitably feel pressed to know how the journey ends.

I don't know how quickly I'll get back into Shin Megami Tensei, but I'm considering TJB live again.

Translation Talk and Aeon Genesis' Modifications to Shin Megami Tensei's Script

Apologies about not getting back to this blog sooner. Between CFPro and summer semester I've been swamped, and there's a book I need to finish reading for one of the upcoming chapters. In the meantime, there's a couple topics I'd like to bridge, centering around the general issue of translation.

Let me get this out of the way: I was wrong about several points, and owe an apology for my shortcomings. It's frustrating, because this stems from one root mistake that should have been spotted well before I made my current headway into the game. It's completely counter to the whole premise of TJB, and considering how far my mistakes appear to have carried, I think that my credibility has been blown a bit out of proportion. Any readers coming over having experience with Cardfight Pro are used to me never making mistakes. As a journalist, that's pretty much in my job description. Most incorrect information never makes it into the news cycle, having been rigorously tested and verified, but Juraku is where things run more lax and that's where the room for error arises. And in the process of this, people have trusted my words too much. The core issue is that the text for Aeon's translation patch features a number of insertions that I wasn't aware of, and I mistakenly (and unfairly) criticized Atlus for omitting these. I didn't catch this sooner because there isn't a comprehensive transcript of the Japanese game text for the SNES or iOS ports of Shin Megami Tensei which made comparing text directly much more difficult than just referring to the always well-documented AE script. Accounting for the AE script being the only one that's been relevant in the west for the past twelve years, I ended up walking headlong into my own mistake.

I admit I wasn't expecting--and was definitely unprepared for--translation to become such a domineering topic. In part I owe this to the fact that I simply hadn't reconciled how wildly different some parts of each script are to one another. Between the four translations of SMT we have right now, the core events that happen in-text are the same, but the detailed dialogue, the tone of the script, the ways that characters are presented and the implications created by the presentation are drastically different. But now that those differences are apparent, it raises concerns with regards to what Shin Megami Tensei even is. When I first put down the $5 to start this up and began taking screenshots, I wasn't planning on this being a translation-centric LP, and the first time that I felt it would be a helpful discussion was when I encountered the old man in Kichijoji. It was only during the retrospective point of going back to revise before publication that I realized how integral this would be. If I didn't comment on the translation differences, somebody else was going to eventually, and so I felt it was better to approach it as an actual feature of the LP rather than just ignore it.

In the aftermath of the translation debacles of the 1990s, there's a certain paranoia in the video game community over this topic. There is a fear that somehow, just by reading a text in our own language and not in a foreign tongue, we are being implicitly lied to; that an objective truth exists in foreign languages which is not retained within our own. This paranoia has been built up on by constructed scandals, by two decades of companies like 4Kids butchering anime for the western market, by Pokémon's infamous jelly doughnuts, by Sailor Moon's dub names, by airbrushing the blood out of imported products. In the video game industry Atlus' own Revelations: Persona has acquired a legend of its own as an example of how not to translate a video game, and Nintendo's history with moralized censorship of Final Fantasy, Pokémon and Earthbound has left a strong anti-censorship sentiment within the culture. The problem with that anti-censorship sentiment is that like any anti- movement, it advocates against rather than for a cause, and in the course of advocating against, it becomes easy to lose sight of the rationale behind it. If you're anti-censorship, what is your platform outside opposing censorship? It biases the dialogue towards creating an anti-censorship versus pro-translation discussion, whereby translation implicitly advocates censorship and thus the destruction of the text.

The anti-censorship sentiment is thus easily transformed into one of anti-translation. No official translation will satisfy the community at large; only fan translations, which have the ethos of the community members ("insiders") working on them, will abate the desire for a translated video game. Fan translations acquire credibility regardless of their accuracy. Years later now I recall discussion on Persona 3's GameFAQs board over the nature of Evokers, and comments about how in the then-untranslated FES remake the Evokers were said to be powered by feathers of Nyx. At that time no one thought FES would ever make it overseas, and statements of this kind acquired a certain gravitas because they came from a version of the game we did not have, they were in a foreign language and therefore promoted an understanding we did not get from our English translation. Innately, we felt that our knowledge of Persona 3 was inferior compared to that of the Japanese players with FES. And when that remake did finally get brought over to the western market, across the board I was hearing statements about how little it improved on P3, the shoddy story and poor voice acting (with Tara Platt's Mitsuru and her faux French being a favorite target.) From my perspective there's a certain irony in comparing this to the Cardfight!! Vanguard community that I normally work in, as there's a preoccupation with the "official" story over there to the point of questioning anything that doesn't come from the mouth of a stiffly-suited corporate exec with a nametag reading "MR. BUSHIROAD."

In both cases, the problem is complacency. Either a given community refuses to believe anything written by the official publishers and only adopts information coming from fellow fans, or they become so dependent on the corporate machine as to put blind faith in the work of individuals who are ultimately at the mercy of company policy. In the pursuit of an objectively true understanding of our media, we tend to gravitate towards different forms of rejecting alternate expressions of that truth. Being a blanket moderate won't necessarily help the situation, because to answer these problematic approaches to translation you have to make an informed understanding of the different sides. Keep in mind that it is still the complacency that is at fault, not the extremism of either side. We need to be willing to question the authority of both sides of translation, not accept each of them universally and without question.

Jumping from one can of worms into another, that brings us to the issue of SMT's translation. Some clarifications on my own background with the game; I originally played SMT1 around 2008~2009 using Aeon Genesis' fan translation patch. Around this time I also became familiar with Re-Miel's translation FAQ on GameFAQs, which was more or less contemporaneous to AE and involved a more literal approach but also contained a number of flaws and presumptions that I attribute to it describing what the author was reading rather than try to create a script for insertion into a video game ROM. I ended up reading SMT1 more times than I originally intended through following a series of Let's Plays of it, which gave me a lot of time to think on it and helped spark some of my interest in Japan as a real place instead of as the weird Neverland a lot of Americans make it out to be. I began studying Japanese on my own in 2010 and (after very limited progress) started formal classes in 2012 while working on my undergraduate Asian Studies degree, and for academic reasons stopped studying in the program after my fifth semester in late 2013~early 2014. I first attempted the game in Japanese from 2012~2013, eventually lost my save data during a computer move, and since that time have referred to Japanese playthroughs on NicoNico Douga and blogsites when reading it. If two and a half years sounds like a lot of preparation, it's really not. I'm convinced you need at least four years to be good at this. I would describe the process of learning Japanese as "perpetual exhaustion," a daily repetition act that takes twice as long to learn as any of the Romance languages, and the fact that you have ~2000 written characters to learn looming over you conditions you towards the idea that no, you'll never have 'mastery,' but you can see how far you'll make it. I basically persevered until I could reliably learn things on my own and then stopped signing up for classes, the academic equivalent to turtle-shelling.

Next, the history of the script. Shin Megami Tensei's script was first written in a combination of hiragana and katakana on the Super Nintendo in 1992, phonetic Japanese scripts representing "native" and "foreign" words which are usually used in combination with kanji. This may be attributed to the SNES' limited memory, as there are around two thousand commonly used kanji but just 48 hiragana and katakana characters. (For reference, most second graders can read all of the hiragana and katakana characters, but total kanji literacy is only obtained in high school or college.) The Mega CD remake from 1995 used a revised script which incorporated kanji, and this is an important distinction because in addition to their phonetic readings kanji have innate meanings that can influence how one understands the script. The most commonly known example among Megaten fans is the word "demon," which when rendered in kanji would normally be 悪魔  "evil demon/vice spirit" but which in the games is written 仲魔 "related demon/related spirit." The writers added another layer to it by making the phonetic reading of the kanji nakama "friend" instead of akuma "demon." In English we might try to approximate that meaning as a Familiar, or in AE's case a "minion," but most commonly demons are demons. This is an example of a single word having at least four simultaneous understandings, and one of the difficulties of kanji is that it's totally possible for a skilled Japanese writer to give every word that kind of weight, although that's rarely the case. (Taking an example from some of the material we've covered on TJB, in his career as a novelist Yukio Mishima made a hobby out of using archaic kanji in his novels that publishers would have to specially request types to be cast for, as they were no longer in popular circulation and so the kanji would have to be newly molded to print his books.) The Mega CD script had some influence over the 2001 PlayStation port of the first SMT, which also used kanji, but it's not clear if the script was lifted directly or if it was rewritten from the ground up from SNES to PSX. In 2004 the fan translation group Aeon Genesis translated the SNES game, their translation became widly circulated on the internet and eventually gained exposure through multiple Let's Plays and hostings of it on YouTube. Whether AE referred to, or had knowledge of the Mega CD script is unknown, but I'm writing under the assumption that they did not. The Mega CD script is available for reference here, but any differences between it and the Japanese SNES script are not documented. The final incarnation of Aeon's script was penned by the romhacker Orden, who did so primarily to fix a number of bugs endemic to the AE patch, but also updated the script to be in line with Atlus' official translations. This version of the patch is relatively recent, released September 30 2012, and I have never played it but have seen some of it secondhand from LPs.

One aspect of this discussion that can't be restated enough is that Aeon Genesis did not just translate SMT, the group also localized it. This is a touchy subject across the board because localization is the part of the translation process where modifications, cuts and additions to the new script become an established practice. An unlocalized translation is acceptable as long as it is understandable and relates directly to the text as it appeared in its original state, but a localized translation is the point where a text stops reading like a text and starts reading like a book. A translation is readable, but a localization is fluid and written as if written by a native speaker. In the process of their localization, AE inserted a number of modifications to the script, some of which have become so memorable in the west that they have outright obscured the meaning of their Japanese equivalents. Some of these were minor, like converting Jack Lantern into Jack o' Lantern or calling Tan-ki as Tangie (which I would call a mistake because these are completely different myths), and none of AE's modifications are as drastic as those of the contemporary group DeJap (the group primarily remembered for the line "I bet Arche fucks like a tiger" a very liberal and inaccurate translation inserted into their patch for Tales of Phantasia.) But it's a fact that some major lines by key characters in AE's translation have escaped criticism when those lines are not liberal translations, but outright insertions with no resemblance to anything in the Japanese script.

The implication of this is that the Shin Megami Tensei the English-speaking world appreciates so much has never existed except as created by Aeon Genesis translations. The version of the game where Gotou accuses Thorman of setting up a dictatorship, where every other word out of Chaos Hero's mouth is "damn" and "shit," and where the old man's throat gets ripped out by a Gaki in Kichijoji mall, never existed. It would be unfair to criticize Atlus' translation for not including these things because to do so would be to create a less accurate and/or embellished translation, when even the embellishments that could be said to improve the text are not their own. It is very tempting to say that it is wrong entirely to cling to AE's translations, but with it so heavily embedded in the culture of the fandom ten years after its release, there is a greater justification at hand; that because the community of discourse established around Shin Megami Tensei has never been reading it without these embellishments, that it does not really want for a version of the game without them. The AE script sticks with the community because the non-AE script was never important to it in the first place. As someone who uses and converts Japanese to English every day I cannot approve of how the script was modified, but as a critic I can absolutely back the supporters of AE's script because it is a part of our culture.

At the same time I can't go on calling it censorship when Atlus is simply not adding in things that weren't there to begin with. In terms of practical effect and not literal methods AE did to SMT what Ted Woolsey did to FF6, making it exciting where it was mundane, visceral where it was repetitive and readable where it was not. Nobody likes Cefca and everybody loves Kefka, because "Son of a submariner!" is much better writing than "Heeeee! Kussoo!" But like Woolsey, AE also lost sight of the form of direct one-to-one authorial intent that Atlus' translation tries to preserve, even though Atlus' translation is very wooden. People love to talk about video game translation like a criminal enterprise, treating the translators as always guilty either because they're too literal or not literal enough or using honorifics or changing Engrish into Frenglish, but it's more common to have several acceptable approaches than just one true path among a sea of wrong ones.

One aspect of this many-paths approach is in the visual nature of Japanese as an ideographic system. That is to say, where kanji is being used it is possible to understand the meaning of a text by scanning the kanji printed even where pronunciation is not well understood. Because of this, it is possible to preserve the overall meaning of a sentence made into English without a 1:1 translation, much to the chagrin of more literally-minded translators. It is acceptable to rephrase a Japanese translation, because ideally perfect translations read as if the original author were fluent in the new language. There's actually an excellent example within Atlus' own history of the same lines being rewritten entirely when conveying the same meaning. Devil Survivor and its 3DS remake Devil Survivor Overclocked have entirely divergent scripts with very little being preserved in the transition between them. While Overclocked was fully voice acted and some lines were presumably rewritten to accommodate that, the game doesn't make use of extensive animation so there's no actual mouth flaps to map the dialogue to. Most famously, the Demon Summoning Program's Hello World message "Peaceful days are over_ Let's Survive" was changed to "Peaceful days died_ Let's Survive" but there's more relevant comparisons to be made, like Naoya's introductory line.

俺は「神」が苦手でね。
Ore wa "kami" ga nigate de ne.
Literal: I'm no good with God.
DS: God's no friend of mine.
Overclocked: I follow no god.

Both are faithful translations which convey his standpoint in the storyline to the viewer, but I've personally favored the Devil Survivor line. The kanji involved are 苦 "feel bitter/scowl" and 手 "hand" the latter of which is used in most words involving action, doing or skill. Nigate expresses dislike and a weakness at something, it's used similarly to the English expression "bad at/with." Just as you can be bad with math, bad with women and bad with kids, so Naoya is bad with God.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not going to call Overclocked's translation a wrong one. Certainly I disagree with it and consider Atlus' first approach better, but this line is an accurate reflection of the source material. And that's essentially what good translation is, it reflects the original script the way that the moon reflects the sun. The light that results from that reflection is weaker and visually divergent, but it comprises the same seven colors and comes from one fundamental source. Is AE a good reflection? Not particularly, as in our analogy it would be a weaker one compared to Atlus', but even weak light can be appreciated all the same. The deeper question is if we can even approach it as the same text, which I would answer with an emphatic "Yes." It's a bad translation because it's a fundamentally incorrect one, but if you can accept and have fun with the embellishments, then it's fair to say that AE made the game a lot better than it ever was in Japanese. You just have to recognize that it has little bearing on what Shin Megami Tensei actually is. Atlus' translation, while seemingly unpolished in places as with the American soldiers and occasionally wooden dialogue, is much closer to the objective understanding of SMT's script that we are trying to approach in the first place. There are minor idiosyncrasies like Gotou addressing the party as しょくん Shokkun "my friends" getting dropped from the Atlus script and kept in AE, but as a whole the Atlus script is the more accurate and honest translation.

Sure, it would be convenient if Aeon's was the one more true to the spirit of the game, but that's just not reality. It leaves some lingering questions about the accuracy of SMTII as well; I'm not as familiar with the text of the second game as I am the first, but given the two year time gap between fan translation releases, had their policy shifted at all between games? Seeing how liberal this translation is caught me off guard in part because their releases of Clock Tower, Live-A-Live, Madou Monogatari, Super Robot Wars 3, and SRW Alpha Gaiden have very strong reputations. I'm vexed to have my respect for their translations challenged when SMT if..., a game after my own heart, is one of their projects so close to completion. How will it play into all this? Most of what I've been reflecting on is over a decade old. I have not yet amended my statements in previous chapters regarding the translation, as there's a lot of them and for the time being this post follows up directly from where my mistakes left off, but I do intend to go back and revise those writings. I realize that I've only just scraped the surface of the issues presented here, but I think we still don't have a full picture of how deeply these translation differences affect SMT as a whole, and by proxy the dialogue around it. What confounds me the most is whether or not the fan translators were wrong or not in writing the script as they did.

Megaten and A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government: Let's Play Shin Megami Tensei iOS

Nothing is written in a void. When Nakae Choumin penned his 1887 masterwork, "A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government" (三酔人経綸問答 Sansuijin Keirin Mondo lit. "Three Drunkards Governing Dialogue") an undercurrent of civil enlightenment was sweeping through the national polity of Japan. The words "freedom" "peace" and "constitution" were being drilled into the minds of the public. Rural farmers and Tokyo scholars alike were holding meetings in townhouses and huts to draft constitutions, read and discuss books, and engage in learning (Gordon 81). Choumin's great dialogical work captured the political arguments of the 1880s. Roughly divided into three arguments regarding western ideals of democracy and the equality of man, far eastern Samurai traditions and native Japanese identity, and a mediatory criticism of both, the novel has been applied as a universal narrative to countries around the world in vastly different time periods. It is also one of the most widely read of Choumin's books, treated in Japanese schools much as Rousseau and Kant are in American ones. And just as Choumin's work was the culmination of the political dialogue of the period, Okada Kouji and Kaneko Kazuma's 1992 video game Shin Megami Tensei (lit. "True Transmigration of the Goddess") produced over a hundred years later, was the product of a much smaller-scale dialogue in digital media over the ideals of mass safety secured by a higher power at the expense of personal freedom, in conflict with the pursuit of heroism and individuality in exchange for a lawless rule by arbitrary strength. Shin Megami Tensei is almost certainly not Okada and Kaneko's masterwork, but is a definitive turning point in their careers, and in an effort to reign in the ideas of the preceding Megami Tensei series it drew considerable license from Choumin's writing to frame the newly-defined alignments of Law, Chaos and Neutral.

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.

The iOS port of Shin Megami Tensei is based on the Game Boy Advance port from 2003. As such, it's been graphically touched up in places but is fuzzy in others because it's meant to display at a native 240 x 160 instead of a 1024 x 768 resolution. One difference veterans of the SNES release can spot right from the point you hit NEW GAME is that the moon phase and cardinal direction don't display during dream sequences--I'd call that an improvement because I remember being confused and thinking that "NEW MOON" was the location of the dream when I first started SMT back in 2007, which was considerably more of a sci-fi bend than the game ever delves into.

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.

The point where Atlus drops the ball is that Aeon was able to squeeze an extra 26 characters out of the system by implementing lower case text. Both versions are restricted to eight characters, which will make some problems with names in this LP.

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.

The protagonist is not an offensive power house in this game. He's actually a utility character designed to summon and dismiss demons as appropriate in-battle, facilitate negotiations and throw items around. Infamously, he's incapable of using magic spells, so his Ma stat is effectively a dump stat. It does have one hidden property in negotiation; if Ma is high enough, additional options that would normally just end a negotiation by angering the target demon will instead return to the battle with the protagonist's side getting a free turn in. For example, the "glare" and "sing" options will enthrall demons to achieve that, while leaving you still able to select the "talk" option again to resume negotiations in a neutral state. Ma also affects the likelihood of some demons recognizing the protagonist and throwing money at him to run away.

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?

Head: Place them both on thy scale, and tread lightly so as not to drop them.
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.

Messenger of God: Call his name, and he should awaken.
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.

The Law Hero is equivalent to Nakae Choumin's Gentleman of Western Learning (洋学紳士 Yougaku Shinshi) a character best remembered for taking up almost half of the novel with a 42-page tract about the greatness of the God of Evolution, who brings people out of the dark age of monarchy and into the glory of constitutionalism and then true democracy. His vision for Japan is to abandon the military-industrial complex entirely, surrender arms, have the emperor step down and declare themselves a nation of true democracy ruled by scholars, heedless of the danger of colonization by western powers. It's a novel about drunkards after all, and I have a pet theory that of the novel's three principle characters, Gentleman has the lowest alcohol tolerance.

Gentleman will be our primary offensive caster in this playthrough, as his spell list is heavily weighted towards using the Zan-series of Wind elemental spells, with supportive healing and utility spells like Mapper (displays automap while we walk.) His Ma and In affects the rate at which he learns spells thanks to an obscure mechanic called proficiency, with Ma alongside his current level being the more important determinant. It breaks down to having higher Ma both equating greater damage from attack spells/healing from healing spells and letting him learn those spells at earlier levels. Gentleman is one of Shin Megami Tensei's most enduring party members, as he's the first to join and the last to leave. Unlike with the Chaos Hero though, we'll never get him in our party during the peak of his character arc. 13 Ma is the first threshold at which MP increases, and 11 Vi is the same for HP, so after bumping those up I give him as much Ag as possible to help outspeed our demon opponents. +6 Vi +4 Ag and +8 Ma.

Gentleman: So, you saved me? Something tells me I'll discover my purpose if I go with you...Please, let me come along.
>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.

Demon: You call him Champion?
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.

This background (and the scene as a whole) is reused with some modifications in Shin Megami Tensei II, but the area it's used for borders on a spoiler for this game.

Woman: Oh...You're Touya.

"Eternally" she says, but Yuriko does not join us. Also note the art direction; we first encounter Gentleman from the front, Champion from the side, and Yuriko from behind. Yuriko is a very layered name, derived from yuri as in Lily flowers, and may also be influenced by the twentieth century novelist Miyamoto Yuriko, who wrote on socialism, feminism and the moral bankruptcy of postwar Japan. Shin Megami Tensei IV players will find her especially relevant, as the real-world Yuriko's books were repeatedly banned and censored after 1932 for inciting political dissent and supporting a socialist overthrow of the imperial government, and she herself was arrested several times.

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?

Mother: Just because you're off school doesn't mean you can sleep all day! It's time to get up!
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.

Stephen: To all those connected to the net...At present, we humans are facing an immense threat. The demons from legends and myths have awakened and are poised to attack. The only way to fight the demon threat is to make use of the demons ourselves. This program is the key. I hope that some brave soul will take this program and rise up...The demons must be fought to save humanity.
>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...

Mother: Oh, I almost forgot. Here's your allowance for this month. Don't spend it all in one place.
>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.

Stepping out from the protagonist's home, it's clear that the world map has been renovated heavily for the GBA/iOS ports. The isometric tilt and greater detail on the map lends some greater depth to the exploration, but it feels a lot less crisp and colorful in the transition. On the note of SMT's different versions, the original SNES release is undoubtedly the one that westerners are most familiar with, but it seems the PlayStation 1 release from 2001 is the definitive version in Japan (where it's available on PSNetwork). It shares all of the updated content we have from the GBA port, with redone areas and new items, but there's more detail in each dungeon and higher quality sound. Having glossed over some playthroughs on the Japanese side of YouTube, and on NicoNico Douga, one thing that bugs me about the PSX port is that the sprites weren't touched up to match Kazuma Kaneko's new artworks for the characters and demons. It would be good to see a Strange Journey- or IV-style remake of Shin Megami Tensei with updated sprites/character models and voice acting. The gravitas of the storyline is somewhat lost without the dramatic setpieces we've become accustomed to.

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.

One of the definitive differences between navigation in iOS and navigation in SNES is the polished interface. The party interface in the original game was text-only and acted like an old-school dungeon crawler display, with the party prefaced by a hash sign and each character existing on a numbered line, with the back row being represented by an indentation. The current interface originates from Shin Megami Tensei II, where the front and back rows were more clearly defined by a visible field position, and the update to the original game was first implemented in the PSX and GBA ports.

Being a 1992 game, SMT is wrapped up in the same millennial apocalypticism that set out the plot for Chrono Trigger and drove year 2000 paranoia. You can pretty well imagine the survival store owner sitting huddled in his basement on New Years' eve surrounded by mountains of bottled water with a yakuza-issue AK47 in hand. The Aeon Genesis translation was a little more time-sensitive in this regard, as the store owner talked about the "coming millennium" instead of "inevitable apocalypse." Given the general cultural embarrassment surrounding said millennialism and the subsequent unfamiliarity of the younger generation with Y2K theories, it's probably for the best that the translation be this explicit, but I appreciated the subtlety of the Aeon's approach.

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.

We meet up with Yuriko in the cafe, confirming that our dream earlier was a little more than just prophecy. Since Yuriko remembers us, it's fair to say that Gentleman and Champion do as well. Atlus' translation makes a separate text box for Yuriko's laugh ("Hmhmhm..."), which was originally an "Ufufufu" that Aeon rendered in the (similarly unbelievable?) "Heehee," but among handling these idiosyncrasies Atlus has also periodically deleted ellipses from the text. Of course, to some translators modifying the text to that point is sacrilege, but there's an argument in favor of rendering the text in a way that native English speakers will be able to read it both naturally and prosaically. While ellipses in Japanese and English may be visually similarly, and it's tempting to preserve instances of them between translations, the actual regulated usage of this punctuation between the two languages varies immensely. That said, while there's a lot of instances of translators deleting ellipses when translating from Japanese to English, you tend not to see examples of them being added when translating from English.

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.

Owner: I'll have them sent to your house. You can wait to pay for them when they're delivered.
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.

Behind the antique store is one of Shin Megami Tensei's most oddly visceral scenes. I think everybody remembers the crazy guy despite him having all of three lines in the game. It's the type of scene that couldn't be done in a modern game like Nocturne where you have very detailed, animate 3D models to work with.

Man: Don't come near me! N-Nnrgh...Hrrrgh, gaaaaaah...!

>Preta ran away...
>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.

Mother: Oh, hi, Touya. Where've you been? Don't stay out too late, or I'll start to worry. Though I suppose boys will be boys...Did you hear? A girl was killed in Inogashira Park. It's becoming a dangerous world out there...I don't even feel safe walking around town...Oh, and don't forget to walk Pascal.
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.

Champion: Yo, Touya. We're sharing another messed-up dream, huh?

Yuriko: Remember...I'm always by your side.
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.

Gentleman: What the hell? What are these people doing? Are they trying to summon a demon?
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!

Priest: Th-that name...it's...Gwrahhhhhh!
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.

Nadeshiko: They nearly sacrificed me. If the ritual had finished, it would have summoned a fearsome archdemon...Ahh, I can feel my lost power flowing back to me.
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 is our other magic user, and a lot better at her job than Gentleman. She gets the Zio series of lightning spells, capable of inflicting paralysis ("Shock" ailment) if there's enough Ag backing them. The mechanics behind it are a little obscure, but they're the same basic principles used in Soul Hackers. The faster Nadeshiko is, the greater ease with which Zio will paralyze demons and keep them from moving. The higher her Ma is, the more MP and damage she does. We also need her to stay alive though, so pumping Vi early on to keep her sustainable as she builds Ag across later levels is ideal. +9 Vi +1 Ag +8 Ma.

Nadeshiko: We won't meet for some time. It's fated that we part for now. But when the day arrives, come find me.

Mother: Good morning, Touya. Was something wrong last night? You were tossing and turning...you even called someone's name. Sounded like a girl's name! Was it Nadeshiko next door? Hey, why are you blushing? I'm just teasing, honey.
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.

Nadeshiko: I had a date set for today, but I won't be going anywhere now thanks to the police. Who with...? What's it matter to you who I date?
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.

Owner: The strange thing is, there's a weird old guy at the entrance to the park now.

The cafe serves essentially the same purpose as the bars and pubs of 1980s dungeon crawlers, in that it's both an accessible method of healing in the field (I have never ordered anything other than a Blended and refuse to pay 600 yen for a Blue Mountain) and the information hub early in the game. It's another of those inherited tropes carried down from its Wizardry-style antecedents.

Old Man: Are you Touya? You may be able to wield great power. Light and darkness. Law and chaos. The world's balance is on the verge of collapse. No matter which way it leans, the result will be the same. What would you do? Either way, there is no turning back now. Let me see your strength.
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.

Champion: Seriously? I'm dreaming in the middle of the day?
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.

Mother: ...I know I can't stop you. But if you die, what am I supposed to do then...?
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.

Summoner: My brethren! Come to this world, from the Expanse!
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...

The battle with Douman is partially scripted, in that we have the freedom to attack as we please but ultimately can't win before the vision ends automatically. We do get a peek at Gentleman and Champion's characteristics, with each armed with their basic Wind and Fire spells. This is an opportune moment to talk about the translation of demon races in the games, especially since Meta isn't a very good equivalent for the Choujin race. Douman's race in Japanese read literally is "great man" 超人 and is comparable to the German term ubermensch or its English equivalent the "overman." The race is normally reserved for the carnate forms of different alignments, and normally human characters at that; it's also rarely used and after SMTI only really comes up again in Strange Journey. The meaning of it is supposed to identify an exemplary pinnacle of humanity (Douman himself is derived from a Heian era sorcerer rather than an actual demon) so the Meta translation doesn't really convey the idea, but "Super" would be rather lame in English and "Uber" has been sullied by overuse on the internet. One approach would be to translate it as Hero (not to be confused with the Famed race) or simply Great. Many of the races in Shin Megami Tensei have problems with their translated terms losing the meaning of the original text in some form or another, and are exemplary of the kind of balancing act that translation plays. For another example, see the Kyoushin "Mad God" race being translated as Zealot.

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!

Old Man: If fate will it, you will surely encounter him again. Take caution when you do...
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.

Policeman: You're under arrest! Get him!
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.

While this censorship cuts out some of SMT's visceral charm, more alarmingly it also deletes a certain plot point regarding the policemen that tends to sway players' opinions on the Law versus Chaos alignments.

Young Man: ...Were you taken captive too? ...Oh. Are you...?

Gentleman: Touya, you have to listen to me. My girlfriend's gone missing. I tried to find her, but I was attacked by demons...While I was fighting them off, the police came and arrested me. I need to hurry and find my girlfriend...Could you help me find her?
>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 leaped at the worker!
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.

The hospital is Shin Megami Tensei's first real dungeon. It's not an especially memorable location in itself, but it's remembered for the things that happen inside of it. This is how most of the dungeons in SMT work. The smaller ones you tend to have the layout of memorized, not because of the beautiful scenery or unique concept, but because of the oppressive tone of conspiracy and the kinds of people you meet within it. The police arresting you for a murder you didn't commit, then handing over untried suspects to off-the-grid surgeons, and when you break out you find the whole job being run by demons and the hallways flooded with Pixies and Weredogs. The aesthetic is comparable to breaking into the Shinra building in Final Fantasy VII, a sense of being on the run even as you storm the castle, but your resources are infinitely more limited in Shin Megami Tensei.

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.

Man in Wheelchair: My last project was a teleportation device...The Terminal System. But my tests inadvertently brought demons to our world. I killed them, somehow, but was injured in the process. That painful experience led me to develop a new program. You know it as the Demon Summoning Program. Unfortunately, a man named Gotou was very clever...He realized the Terminal is connected to the Expanse. He's now trying to summon and control demons himself. So I'm disseminating my program to the people. The more people who can control demons, the better. Hopefully that will keep them from running rampant. Alas, the program seems rather difficult to master. If there's anything you need help with, I'll be here. I've unlocked the director's office on the second floor. Flip the last switch there, and the way out should open.
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.

Negotiation in SMT is fairly rudimentary. You open by either taking a friendly or threatening approach, then the conversation branches out into the demon posing a statement and you responding with a binary answer. Each demon has a few limited ways to recruit them, which can be somewhat unreliable, but in general I've found that being a self-centered jerk is the fastest way to get them to finally let you make an ally, yen or Magnetite pitch. On that note, Magnetite is an equivalent to the often-obscure food mechanics of past dungeon crawlers, which exists to fundamentally limit how long you can have demons active, but in practice the game throws so much at you in treasure chests (and eventually random encounters) that it's very easily ignored. It's not until Nocturne that the series really threw off the rules it's drawing its roots from, so the mechanic persists in II and if...

The hospital has five encounters; Therian Weredog, Fairy Pixie, Spirit Ghost, Spirit Preta and Jirae Knocker as the rare encounter. None of the Spirit-order demons can be recruited because they're Dark-aligned and so won't negotiate with you. SMT expects you to get accustomed to failure, and so it takes many attempts, but I use the time to grab up each of the recruitable demons. The Weredogs that I do defeat (you can only have one of each demon at a time) drop the Spiked Rod, an upgrade over the Attack Knife and another reason we don't buy weapons from the survival shop.

This is what Pixie's "character sheet" looks like. Her primary stats are In and Ma, and she comes with the Hapirma, Dia and Zionga spells. Hapirma inflicts a weird status effect unique to SMTI&II, Happy, which causes characters to pass their turn for as long as they're inflicted with it; it's a little redundant because sleep (inflicted with the Dormina spell) and paralysis do the same thing, which is why it hasn't come back for later entries. Dia is the same healing spell as Gentleman's, and Zionga is important as a very early second level single target lightning spell. Shin Megami Tensei only has two levels of offensive magic, so the leap between first and second in damage is enormous and Zionga will deal massive damage if Pixie uses it, and lightning spells can also randomly inflict paralysis based on the user's Ag. The catch is that Pixie only has enough MP for a single casting. So Pixie is a mixed magic attack, support and status effects inducer, but she's better at support than the other two categories. She also resists Expel and Bind, so light instant kill spells Hama and Hamaon will rarely hit her, while Shibaboo's 50% chance to inflict Bind will be cut down severely. Demons in the first and second games do not level up, so we'll want to fuse her into a stronger demon as soon as better things are available, but Pixie is fine for bringing in against the first boss.

Weredog meanwhile is focused on Vi so he has higher HP and thus better longevity in battle, but his other stats are lackluster. His extremely low St makes his physical attacks far less intimidating than they could be, and the same goes for his abilities Feral Bite. Abilities are different from magic in that they're innate to demons' physical characteristics, usually operate off of St rather than Ma, and don't cost MP. So Weredog deals free damage higher than physical attacks, but it's still pretty pathetic compared to Gentleman's Zan or Pixie's Zionga. Weredog also has Rakukaja, a party-wide defensive buff, and Diarama a single target second level heal. Buffs in SMT can stack up to +8 while debuffs can stack up to -4, so if you have the maximum eight Rakukajas cast and the opposing team has cast Rakunda the maximum four times, your side will still be at +4 defense. Buffs are important in SMT because each stage has a dramatic effect on the parameters they control, way more than in Final Fantasy. Healing magic in SMT has three levels, so Diarama isn't quite the ultimate single target heal. Weredog's role is primarily as a combination of buff and physical attacker, with emergency healing. Unfortunately he resists nothing and is weak to Gun/Elec so enemy Pixies can deal heavy damage if they get off a Zionga and human characters will give him a lot of trouble.

Jirae Knocker is In and Ma-oriented like Pixie, but with vastly better base stats. Like Gentleman he gets Zan, as well as the status-inducing Shibaboo and party-wide attack buff Tarukaja. Like Weredog, Knocker will be serving a buff role, but he's also our secondary magical attacker after Gentleman. Despite being amazing statistically for his level and for his spell list, Knocker is weak to Force, all types of magic and Almighty, which are absolutely awful elements to be weak to. Almighty is typically the endgame element of choice in Megaten, sometimes trading that role with physical attacks, and having a weakness to magic is crippling in general.

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...

>NO
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.)

Orias has Pulinpa, Dormina and Hapirma, so his main strategy is based on inflicting Panic, Sleep and Happy to prevent us from casting magic and wasting our turns. The catch to that is that he's not so great at dealing damage, so we still have a pretty big window to recover from the status effects and heal up. The protagonist tosses around healing items and occasionally does a low-effort physical attack, Gentleman casts Zan, Weredog buffs with Rakukaja and then goes into Feral Bite/Diarama, Knocker buffs with Tarukaja and attacks with Zan, and Pixie does one round of Zionga before focusing on Dia. Orias drops ¥480 and 200 MAG on defeat, and that's a wrap for the hospital.

There's a couple places to investigate coming out of the hospital. Now that Master Nankai's no longer blocking the way into Inogashira park, we can access the Cathedral of Shadows to the south, as well as check out how the overworld has changed since we've left the hospital, but our main goal is to head back to Kichijoji mall.

This man is skulking around where the police arrested us. In AG's translation he's very high-and-mighty about it, saying "I hear they arrested a psychotic murderer here. It makes me feel better to know that a lunatic like that is off the streets!" In Atlus' translation he doesn't have anything like the second line.

Kichijoji's Cathedral of Shadows is a small building divided between the Cathedral proper and a medicine shop. Mido holds the ceremonies for SMT's trademark fusion procedures, an occult marriage of magical and scientific knowledge that brings (traditionally) two demons together to create a new one. The term "Cathedral of Shadows" was first used in Nocturne, while AG translated it as Jakyou Manor, and the Japanese used is Jakyou no Yakata or "Mansion of Heathenism." This is more in line with what the house of fusion is like prior to Nocturne; it's a small estate run by a solitary occultist who's presumably sharing the rent with the local healer. Thematically the Cathedral is an outcast place where hidden knowledge and esoteric ceremonies are welcomed, a place for the suppressed religions of the old world and the things that the authorities would rather lock away. It's a specifically heathen ground which provides a starting point for fledgling devil summoners, and 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.

Shin Megami Tensei has three types of fusion; two-demon fusion, three-demon fusion and sword fusion. No special fusions as those were invented in if..., and sword fusion is limited to six specific swords designed to be used in fusion, but two-demon is normally enough for our purposes. While fusion will yield stronger demons than we can find in the field and should be pursued at all opportunities, it is a form of rule magic and the rules are binding. The law of subjugation prevents us from fusing demons past our level, and the rule of fusion is that the resulting demon's level will be the combination of the component demons' levels divided by 2 (exceptions are made by mythology.) Each combination of races also always results in the same race. Three-demon fusion uses an alternate ruleset to make stronger demons with more components, but often results in demons that are far too high level for us to summon.

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

Presently the fusion level limit is at 8, so Azumi is just barely out of our reach. Personally, I don't like the look of Weredog and Knocker's weaknesses, but Pixie blows her reserves so fast that it'd be much easier to dump her for Azumi. Since that's not an option, I throw Weredog and Knocker in the blender to make a Goblin and resolve to rerecruit Knocker later. The digitized CG images in the GBA/iOS ports are fascinatingly early 2000s in the same way that Soul Hackers is fascinatingly 1990s, but I prefer the cleaner look of the SNES fusion chamber.

Goblin is a worthy successor to Knocker, with Tarukaja (attack buff) Sukukaja (evasion buff) and Makakaja (magic buff.) His raw HP and MP are great, his stats are evenly spread from St/In/Ma and while his Ag is lacking as a result he has no weaknesses and resists Expel. It's one of those little support demons that you only really appreciate after you're familiar with the actual game mechanics.

In addition to the Cathedral proper we have the Ashram. This is one of three alignment-specific healing shops, with the Ashram being specific to the Neutral alignment. Each shop will heal your party for a fee, as well as sell healing items and items to prevent instant death. Each time you use one it slightly polarizes you towards its alignment, which as I've said before is on a scale from 0 to 255. The more you use the Neutral healing house, the more your alignment is pulled towards "Absolute Neutral" 128. Similarly, the more you use the Chaos aligned shop, the further your alignment swings towards "Absolute Chaos" 255, and the more you use the Law aligned shop the further you slip towards "Absolute Law" 0. Killing demons of particular alignments also affects your alignment on a very small scale, but the adjustments are so small that it's almost not worth mentioning. Right now our alignment is at about 123, so using the Ashram would pull it up. I'm going to be deciding which healing house I use based on which way my alignment has been swaying, but right now I don't need it.

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.

On our way to the mall I make a stop at the train station. From hereon out all of the police officers on the overworld map are replaced with soldiers, reflecting the declaration of martial law to contain the demons, and drawing on a particularly fearful imagery from Japanese history. For Americans, the idea of martial law is scary in the way that nuclear war is--neither of these things have been experienced by most Americans, nor has a real precedent been made to think it could happen as an everyday danger. Martial law in my country's history is all very far back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Japan however, the American occupation from 1945~52 is still collectively remembered through grandparents and the legacy passed down in public education. The image of martial law is also directly opposed to the strong antimilitarist sentiments of the general public, which while severely toned down since the 70s as the second World War has become increasingly distant from the current generations, is still a major obstacle towards the development of the Self-Defense Force in Japanese politics. It's comparable to McCarthyism in the United States, far back in history but still infamous enough to spark realistic fears when brought up.

Inside Kichijoji mall...

Ozawa: What the hell are you talkin' about, demons? Hey guys, let's beat this guy's ass!
>A gang has cornered a young man and is beating him.
Gentleman: That's so cruel...I can't allow this.

From an artistic perspective, this scene is framed interestingly. Shin Megami Tensei uses static sprites to represent its characters, with some minute movements for in-battle sprites. The visual novel-like presentation of the text and cast is built around the constraints of the 3D dungeon crawler gameplay, and as far as I can tell this mode of storytelling began in Japan with Megami Tensei. Movement is conveyed by characters fading out of the scene or fading to a different position on the screen, as if pushing down or sliding the pieces of a pop-up book. Only a very small number of important core characters like Champion get multiple sprites with different positions.

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?

Young man: That must mean that you're Gentleman...
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.

Champion enters the party far behind, still at level 1, but will catch up quickly as long as we take the time to build him on the world map. He gets Agi (Fire equivalent to Zan) but his most important early spell is Patra, which cures all of the Nerve ailments (basically anything mental rather than physical; Panic, Happy, Bind, Sleep, Silence and Charm.) So Champion is our primary physical attacker, with an ailment recovery role. Really, the most useful spells that he gets are all recovery or supporting, as he'll eventually be able to cure every ailment except for Freeze, Shock and Bind.

While building up Champion I went ahead and recruited the last recruitable demon that we're missing from the overworld map, Jirae Brownie, and also rerecruited the Weredog and Knocker that I fused for Goblin earlier. Foul Mou-Ryo also appears, but like Spirit Ghost is Dark-aligned and so cannot be recruited. Brownie is Knocker's awful little brother, with the same general stat focus but less of everything. His abilities are Sukukaja (evasion buff), Sukunda (evasion debuff) and the skill Happy Step (inflicts the Happy ailment.) He's weak to Force, magic and Almighty skills, so he's good for decreasing the likelihood of you getting hit overall and wasting the enemy demons' turns but comes with the same crippling weaknesses as Knocker. The real benefit of Brownie is that it gives us access to two demons of the same race early on, which if you'll recall the rule that we can only have one of each demon at a time, makes it naturally difficult to do this so early in the game.

With all five demons available that brings our available combinations up to;
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.

Fusing two demons of the same race will result in one of the eight Element demons, which are effectively in two tiers; the four primordial Greek Elements Erthys, Aeros, Aquans and Flamies, and the four Paraclesian alchemical Elements Gnome, Sylph, Undine and Salamander. Elements are important because they let you rank up or rank down another demon through fusion with the Element, depending on whether the Element has a positive or negative interaction with that demon's race. They let your demon move "up" an order into the next highest demon of the same race, but are also effectively the keys to powerful demons because you can also rank down the lowest level demon of a race and roll over the ranking table, ranking "down" that demon into becoming the highest level demon of its race. So for example, the Fairy race has a negative relationship with Erthys' attribute, so by fusing Pixie and Erthys we would get the highest-level Fairy demon, Lv64 Fairy Oberon. The law of subjugation still applies though, so we would need to be level 64 to fuse Oberon.

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.

Mother: I'm always ever so worried about you. But at least you're back safe now. I'm so glad...Come and give your mother a kiss...What's wrong? Why won't you come to me? You know I love you, no matter what. Come here, darling!
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.

Jaki Amanojaku is an ogre from the fairytale of the Melon Princess, where he impersonates the protagonist by wearing her clothes after she foolishly let the demon into her house against her parents' warnings. I approach this fight with Goblin, Pixie and Weredog in the back row; Pixie Ziongas once before switching over to Dia support, Weredog sets up Rakukaja and then goes in for physical attacks, and Goblin does those wonderful Tarukaja/Sukukaja tricks. Champion's physical attacks hit like a tank, ditto on Gentleman's Zan, and the protagonist fills in the gaps as needed. The worst thing that Amenojaku can do is use Makajama to silence Gentleman (he does) effectively neutering half of our damage dealing strategy. He has Tarunda to debuff our attack and Rakukaja to buff his defense, but it's more annoying than anything else. A lot of the bosses in SMT don't measure up to the trash mobs because there's nothing quite as intimidating as a swarm of eight phys-reflecting demons throwing out Shibaboo and Tentarafoo for Panic-Bind so that you can't even fight back against their Megidolas.

(There is no such enemy encounter in this game.)

Amanojaku drops ¥576 and 240 MAG on defeat.

>Touya obtained ID Card.

Gentleman: ...Don't be too hard on yourself. This wasn't your fault.
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 jumped in. It seems as though he wants you to take him along.
>Pascal the dog is tagging along.

And this is the biggest gameplay change from SMT SNES to SMT iOS. Just like the Game Boy Advance port, the iOS edition has vision items that let you see new screens from other characters' perspectives.

The scenes are viewed through the same Compendium menu used to see the demons you've collected, accessed from the main menu, and mainly focus on the last moments of particular characters. This is the first time I'm seeing these scenes, and I think it's the same story for most English-speaking players as they've never been translated before.

Accessing either the Demonic Compendium or the vision items requires logging into DDS-NET, and of course it's wrought with the same gaudy trappings as the rest of the game. Connect line 666; one wonders if this is what Aleister Crowley's internet would look like.

Using DDS-NET requires loading an existing save file to bring up the demon and vision item data from. Dictionary is this game's incarnation of the Demonic Compendium, while Visionary lets us see any scenes associated with the vision items in our inventory. The use of the ¥ in the DDS-NET board names is an interesting setpiece; because of the standard character set adopted for computing in 1969, the yen sign has the same byte value as the backslash in American character sets, and as a result is used wherever the backslash would be in Japanese computer systems.

This is also why computer file directories in the early to mid 2000s suddenly filled with yen symbols when you switched to a Japanese locality. I have no idea if this happens in Windows 8.

>The doorbell rings.

Voice: Excuse me, can I trouble you with a couple questions?
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!?

Mother: What...?
Policeman: I was just taking a look into what you were thinking...
Mother: Aaaaaaah!

Amano Sakugami: Heh heh heh...
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.