Rebuilding: SMT IV, Part One (Overview)

Rebuilding is a marriage of criticism and pure self-indulgence where I try to repair a narrative game that showed potential but didn't work. Some degree of familiarity with the game in question is probably recommended.

I've been replaying Shin Megami Tensei IV in preparation for its upcoming sequel, SMTIV: Apocalypse (called SMTIV: Final in Japan), and experiencing all over again all the things I didn't like about it the first time. The first game did well financially - in terms of a portable-release Japanese RPG in this generation - but it's a not very hidden secret that the sequel's a saving throw by developer Atlus after a wave of complaints. A lot of people liked SMTIV, but few loved it, and many were very, very angry. Myself, I was just disappointed. On the old Project: Ballad blog, I had a long-running letter series with critic David Brothers at the time of the game's US release, and while there's much there I'd just as soon forget, it served as a very public record of the transition from anticipation to enjoyment, to reservation, to frustration, to finally abandonment. I tossed the thing shortly after the reveal of the Black Samurai's identity, and didn't come back to it until this past month.

In replaying with full knowledge of the game's story from beginning to end and fewer expectations, I can see lots of places where the game does work, but even more where it does not than I even noticed at the time. The game tries to walk a fine line between what a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game has always been and what the company's modern audience wants it to be, and it fails - but more than that, it suffers from a surfeit of ideas and the inability to fully carry any of them out. The potential is all there.

Word is already out on the sequel, and it seems to have doubled down on both sides - fixing many long time fans' complaints, but also pushing further to make the game closer resemble spin-off titles that sell better, like the Persona series, and the friction is frustrating to many - though perhaps few will see it that way, as many gameplay decisions are thought through more fully in this second game, and for many that will be enough.

In this series, we're going to go through the game(s) one step at a time, one sequence at a time, and see if we can't more fully realize what they were attempting to do, in a way that is more respectful to the series' history, its fans, and also to our intelligence as consumers of narrative media.

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To be clearer: It is not just the relationship between two different styles that hampers SMTIV. Straight off Wikipedia:

The development team, which was dubbed Team Maniacs, included both staff who had worked on previous Shin Megami Tensei titles and newer staff who had not. There were differences in thinking between the two, which led to conflicts. As an example of this, game director Kazuyuki Yamai said that some of the staff would be used to contemporary games featuring "sweet" female characters who "say nice things", and as a result would want to add that "sweetness" to Shin Megami Tensei IV; meanwhile, Yamai saw the series as having "bitter" content, and thought that it would not be possible to add "sweetness" to it. Additionally, the staff members had differing images of the meaning of Shin Megami Tensei; Yamai thought that the good points of each staff member's interpretation should go into the aspects of the game they were in charge of, while not deviating from the "bitterness".

...I think we're all clear to what "sweet female characters who say nice things" translates, in 2010's-era animespeak. We'll get to that in due time.

More to the point, Yamai is quite open that the team in charge of SMTIV were not all on the same page regarding what the game should be. They had a ready-made template to work from when it came to making a "classic" mainline Shin Megami Tensei game - that is, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey for the DS, which is a great little game - but that classic game did not sell well. There are a number of reasons for that, and one of them would have been instantly solved by putting the number "IV" on that game at launch, rather than getting cold feet; this could have been "V" and for many people it is (others feel very strongly about being very literal with numbered titles, just ask the Kingdom Hearts audience). But whatever the reasons, it didn't sell, and so the decision was made to update this game more fully for modern audiences, rather than go so blatantly retro.

The results are what we got. This article gets into a great deal of specifics behind complaints with SMTIV. I explicitly don't agree with every single argument presented here, but many of them are cogent - there are obvious plotholes, certainly, but the bigger issue is with pacing, as I'll be exploring. Also, I'm less convinced that deviation from the thematic concerns is an inherent betrayal; the problem, as with most everything in the game, is that it won't commit.

Put simply: SMTIV's cardinal sin is a failure to commit to anything: tradition, character, structure, aesthetic, design, or theme.

If the game is meant to be character-driven, the characters need to be fleshed-out and have individual motivations beyond their eventual alignment route identifiers; if it's meant to be plot-driven, then it needs to build to each plot point in a narrative arc, rather than rush out each plot point in turn like machine gun fire, as though nervous the player will put the game down. If the game is meant to divorce itself from artistic tradition with guest artists, it needs to have dozens and dozens of artists doing scores of the demon designs, so that each one is a surprise (while perhaps leaving a few, like mascot Jack Frost, untouched for continuity's sake), rather than a few lazy, un-researched designs in prominent roles and then hundreds of Kaneko-drawn demons showing an overwhelming unified aesthetic that the guest-drawn demons cannot possibly compete with. If the game is meant to do away with complicated dungeons in favor of an open world sprawling location, then it can't introduce a half-dozen short but more complex dungeons that will evoke memories of well-crafted and deliberate level design in earlier games. You need to make choices when creating any work; Team Maniacs here is the dog with two bones, constantly dropping one in every sequence to grab the other. In attempting to please everyone, they fully pleased no one, and disappointed many.

The second-most damaging sin, however, and one that the aforementioned article is quick to point out, is that there are aspects of SMTIV's conservative politics that come off as odious - some may well be inadvertent, but some, like the treatment of female characters, is a case of adhering to a "tradition" that is completely unnecessary to the core of the experience (compare even Zelenin's two-dimensional growth to Isabeau's and note that artist and series godfather Kazuma Kaneko doesn't necessarily find a passive, agency-less female lead to be a necessary element; indeed, one might argue that the treatment of Ms. Takao in Nocturne was meant to be criticism of that character trope in the earlier games).

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So, how will we repair the narrative of Shin Megami Tensei IV? The idea behind "Rebuilding" is to attempt to keep to the original creators' intentions, rather than essentially inventing a whole new game; this suits fine, as the game has a terrific hook. It's said that the initial concept for SMTIV was from Kaneko - the idea of old world samurai stepping into a traditionally-SMT post-apocalyptic demon-filled Tokyo, their values clashing with the setting. You can't improve that concept. When the early promo images surfaced, I assumed there would be a heavy time travel element, with perhaps three eras, the samurai time, the post-apocalypse, and our own. What we received instead was something different, but still conceptually viable in every way, the idea that Tokyo is their Hell, literally below them. We'll be sticking with the basic character layouts and plot outline that SMT IV has laid out, and adding to it, putting meat back on the bones.

What this series will allege is that the game would have worked better if it held to more traditions, not fewer, in design and structure, and saved its updating primarily for the depth of the characters and their relationships.

The funny thing about references to older games is that a new fan won't notice them in a series like Shin Megami Tensei, because many of those references are largely accurate to their original myths, and others largely concern themselves with which of those demons get more attention. For a newcomer, these concepts are not inherently unapproachable because everyone will have heard of at least some of these myths. What some players might find off-putting is the series' bleakness, or its obtuse nature, or its difficulty. These are more easily-updatable without compromising integrity (though, I suppose, certain types of gamers might argue the last one).

At least one aspect of SMTIV is the deliberate referencing of earlier games frequently, if perhaps over-earnestly, as if to prove to longtime fans that this game still belongs in the series. But it is also the first mainline game in ten years; some degree of nostalgia is earned, if deployed correctly. And so this series will be using elements of earlier games judiciously in rebuilding the story into a more workable narrative that better fits the ideas behind the series as a whole.

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Next time, on "Rebuilding SMTIV," we'll begin with the game's first act, discussing what makes a mainline SMT game, and why this is the first game whose tutorial level should have been twice as long.