Rebuilding: SMT IV, Part Two (Establishing Identity)

Continuing a series on repairing and improving the disappointing Shin Megami Tensei IV...

Act One Summary

In the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, Flynn and his longtime friend Issachar journey to the castle city where, beneath the statue of King Aquila, they undergo a testing rite, hoping to become samurai. Becoming a samurai is the only way for low-class casualries can become high-class luxurors, and samurai are believed to be noble keepers of the peace. At the rite, the "mystical gauntlet" rejects Issachar, but chooses Flynn, and he becomes one of a small crop of new samurai, including fellow casualry Walter and luxurors Isabeau, Jonathan, and Navarre. The following day, the role of a samurai is laid out by their leader, Hope - they are charged with exterminating the demons within Naraku (the underworld), the entrance to which lies right beneath the statue plaza. The "gauntlet" is actually a computer wristband from a Demonica suit, with an in-built AI named Burroughs, who aids Flynn as he gets used to killing - and recruiting - demons.

During the days, Flynn performs his duties, but at night he is tortured by dreams in which these new people he has met - and a few others - suggest he will have to choose the path the world will take, either into ruin or into order. He is also entreated by a young girl, who wants him to help her "be reborn." Meanwhile, Navarre, who is pampered and arrogant, attempts to lay a trap for the two casualry samurai, but blunders into a demon domain and his spirit is crushed, causing him to quit.

It is soon revealed that all is not well in Mikado, as someone called the Black Samurai is distributing something called "literature" to the masses, and the enlightened casualry give in to rage or despair, becoming demons themselves, including the resentful Issachar. As Flynn's home village burns, the samurai confront the Black Samurai and she (who, unbeknownst to the samurai, is also wearing a Demonica suit herself) escapes, telling them that their answers lie in the City of the Unclean Ones, which lies at the bottom of Naraku.

The castle monastery, particularly Abbot Hugo, who is being advised by a mysterious "Sister Gabby," orders the samurai to violate their own code and travel deeper into Naraku in pursuit of the Black Samurai - if only to add more mystical relics (lost modern technology) to the monastery vaults. The samurai find, guarding the way further down, a Minotaur, who was one of the demons subordinate to Aquila himself, a sad and noble demon whose death leaves them with questions. As they travel on, they find man-made rooms storing strange "guns," matter-transporting "terminals," and signage implying that what is above - that is, them - is what's to be feared. Further down they find an observation deck and look out at a ruined Tokyo - "Naraku" has been the Tokyo Sky Tower all along, and ruined, post-apocalyptic Tokyo is covered in a stone dome atop which Mikado has sat for generations (it will become clear later, if not entirely well-conveyed, that time passes differently above and below), with "Naraku" as the only passage between them. After battling Medusa, they take an elevator the rest of the way down and find a pair of thugs answering to someone named "Tayama" - who Medusa had also mentioned - who call the samurai "angels from above" and flee.

Realizing they understood nothing of the world as it really was, the samurai set out to explore Tokyo and find the Black Samurai.

Initial Thoughts

The opening act of SMTIV is its strongest sequence. It's very clever - so clever, in fact, that I'm inclined, perhaps unfairly, to attribute it all to Kazuma Kaneko's original treatment of the material, and not any of the game's actual writers. It works better than any part that follows it, even if it's not a "complete thought," as it were, and it is essentially all tutorial. In rebuilding this game, we're going to do the unthinkable - make the tutorial section of the game much longer.




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What Makes An SMT Game?

The opening of any narrative should tell you what you need to know, and make it clear why you should care. One of SMTIV's flaws is that much of the game's first act is ultimately irrelevant - Mikado's relevance fades until it's essentially a MacGuffin in the various routes - determining its fate is one of the things you're choosing when you decide upon your ending. So let's make it clear what we need to establish - longtime fans know what sort of game they're going to play when they turn it on, and they just hope the beats are appropriately hit, but for new players, what makes a mainline SMT title? What sort of game is it, and what separates it from the many spin-offs of the series like Persona and so on?

At its most basic, all (well, no, most) games under the widest SMT umbrella are Japanese RPGs, with leveling and so-on, and the majority of those are turn-based. The mainline games, however, are concerned with two things: setting, and theme. The setting is post-apocalyptic Tokyo - except in the case of Strange Journey, which was another point of fan resistance when it probably should have been viewed as an evolution. The theme, however, is where it gets more interesting. Not so say other games in the genre have never had themes or ideas to support them - certainly Tetsuya Takahashi likes to coat his games with a firehose spray of ideas - but MegaTen games (prior to the current era) have had singularly focused concepts beyond their plot. The first Persona trilogy was concerned with psychology, using the Lovecraft stuff as a backdrop. The first Raidou Kuzunoha game was about the battle between modern and ancestral Japanese ideals. Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner was self-reflexive RPG commentary, and even the original Persona 3, before the spin-offs and the glut, was about the concept of free will as perceived through the relationship between player and avatar.

The mainline Shin Megami Tensei games, however, were about examining ethical questions in a fantastical context. There has always been a political component to this - the original SMT placed the player between an analogue of Yukio Mishima and American occupation and it was released in the years just before the Aum Shinrikyo incident, after all - but the scope was always grander, questioning ideals of obedience and independence in an ethical framework, which is on the one hand a very Japanese concept, but on the other universal in a way that was perhaps not initially intended. That many players are largely concerned with the edgy cyberpunk Christian-rattling trappings is unsurprising, but when the games work, they work. They don't all work equally, but there's a wealth of potential there to this day.

Aside from summoning demons and "demons" from world mythology (and until recently, treating these figures with a surprising, some might argue unnecessary amount of respect and research for a pulp-derived game series), though, and nebulous claims of game difficulty, the gameplay element the series is best known for is the dungeon design. Often long, always elaborate, and frequently complex, dungeons in SMT games feature very deliberate design. At times this might mean enormous and exhausting labyrinths full of fiendish traps and sometimes it might not, but even dungeons that amount to long corridors have clear intent and discernible purpose in how they affect the player. And there's pretty much always at least one enormous tower.

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Goals

The opening act of SMTIV has to do the following:

• Establish Mikado, its culture, and the samurai
• Introduce our "party members" (such as they are) and help us get to know them
• Set up the game's tone and themes
• Explain (or allow the player to learn) the various aspects of gameplay, and let them get used to them before the challenge increases
• Provide a driving force to the plot
• Be a good hook to draw you in

It does all of these to varying degrees, which makes it more successful than the rest of the game. It fails most with the theme, then with the characters, then with gameplay (sort of), and then with Mikado itself. We'll be looking at each in turn as we explain what we'd add and change.

Let's establish here, though, the reason that this opening act succeeds - why I find it so clever. It's an element that essentially exists in contrast to the goals that it's meant to achieve, and the developers either were afraid of committing to it, or didn't realize what they were doing, as different people assembled different elements of the game in isolation.

The unique element of SMTIV's opening act is that it lies to the player about the game's nature.

The structure of the game's first act is that there are cutscenes and optional dialogue with NPCs in a location entirely defined through menus, then the player returns to the same dungeon again and again, getting a little deeper each time, then they sleep before a new day begins. Story, same dungeon, sleep. Sometimes interrupted, but always returning to the pattern, until the quest for the Black Samurai sends them to the dungeon's bottom and the reveal happens.

That is to say: the game pretends it's a latter-days Persona title until the reveal of Tokyo.

Even as the narrative suggests the more clichéd history of RPGs, with its party led by a hero who sees his hometown burn and its faux-medieval trappings, the game structure is evoking the series' most popular entries in a misdirect. In the earliest hours, you could be forgiven for believing social links are going to open with Walter, Isabeau, et al as the game progresses, but the discovery of the old-school MegaTen world map at the bottom of the dungeon - which was really a tower all along - signals that no, this is a mainline game, and there will be no enduring friendships - everything will end in betrayal and desperate ethical choices. It's a fantastic reversal, intentional or no, and leaning into it would improve the game's overall arc, but the game has no faith in the player.

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Dreams

SMTIV establishes immediately that it's meant to be retro take by going back to the dream sequences that defined the original game (original SMT, that is, not the novel-inspired Megami Tensei games). The dreams allow you to name your character and set up that there will be "alignment" choices - that you'll be choosing between Law, Neutral, and Chaos routes. Neither Nocturne nor Strange Journey used these dream sequences, but the game will spend a lot of time paralleling earlier works. Nothing inherently wrong with this - we're coming back after a decade, some nostalgic fan service (in the original, non-sex-related usage of the term) is fine, and we'll be encouraging that element. For whatever flaws a game like, say, Final Fantasy IX might have, the "victory lap" aspect wasn't really one of them. And because we're spending so long in a "fake Persona title" of sorts structurally, establishing early for the longtime fans that the "real thing" is coming can be seen as brokering an agreement that if they roll with it, the game will get them where they want to go.

In retrospect, however, these dream sequences don't work as intended, because (again) the developers do not commit to the concept. In the original SMT, the dream sequences allowed you to name everyone before you got to meet them - as vague conceptual identities. Then those characters would go on to establish identities aside from their eventual fates, before falling into the extremes of their routes. In this game, however, you can only name your silent protagonist (whose canonical name, Flynn, will be used henceforth in this series of posts for the sake of convenience). This is because all characters but your own are voiced, but the consequence of that decision is that the dreams tell you that a supposedly fully-formed character with an identity begins by knowing their eventual fate, and then falling in line with it. As we'll see, the characters are not fully formed and their alignment locks are conveyed with any degree of logical sense, and so the entire game is weighed down with an inevitability that hurts both its plot and its thematic concerns.

Consider instead the following: if the new direction of SMTIV is meant to be more character-driven - with its reams of dialogue pages from chatty "party members" and more approachable nature to fans of games like Persona - then perhaps we should not immediately know which character should fall into each route. The original dreams used figures of light to represent these characters, rather than letting us see their faces initially. The first dream of this game, at the least, should be similar.

More to the point, as we'll get into shortly, the characters in the first act suggest that more than one route lies open to them based on their personalities - either because they were inconsistently written, or because the turn later in the story is too abrupt and poorly-established, or both. This game was marketed fully based on being placed between Walter and Jonathan, in an effort to grab longtime fans; but Strange Journey didn't need to be so overt (even there, it was very obvious), and for new players unfamiliar with the structural patterns behind MegaTen games, the story would be more gripping if you were not initially sure who would espouse what viewpoint.

The alignment paths should be natural consequences of character traits and the plot.

The initial dreams would be more enigmatic, less pointless, less obvious, and a bigger draw if they did not spell everything out for the player. If the dreams place different characters in each role in each dream, the dreams will feel like responses to what Flynn has learned about the other characters, while also teasing longtime fans who know what to expect. Perhaps Navarre is the law hero? Perhaps Walter is neutral? You can't know until you get to know the characters - not in "social links," but through their reactions to events that come later. Which gets to a more important point...

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Characters The cast of SMTIV are evenly-split between poorly-handled and ultimately-irrelevant. Navarre, Hope, and Hugo are dead-ends. The three alignment characters, on the other hand, are underdeveloped, causing their decisions to lack motivation. The opening act sets each of them fairly well, and suggests that most of them might have hidden depths, but none of it is explored. Let's break down what we know about each of the characters by the time the we reach Tokyo, assuming we've clicked around a bit for optional dialogues and such:

• Walter: Willing to do whatever's asked of him because the alternative is a hated life of poverty, he has a sass mouth but seems the most overtly compassionate out of all of them early on, other than having little patience for Navarre.
• Jonathan:Formal and prissy, Jonathan is also revealed to have a bit of an angry streak, a willingness to disobey orders for the right cause and a distrust of the monastery's motives, even if he thinks following their orders is the right thing to do. Is a rare Luxuror who doesn't look down on others.
• Isabeau: Very pious, but admits that she's been acting colder than necessary and vows to be friendlier. Her running gag about liking manga originates with listening to casualries who are distributing "literature" and keeps this part of it a secret.
• Navarre: Typical rich boy asshole. After being rescued he seems to go mad, and his family buys him out of service, nearly vanishing from the game entirely. What goes ignored is a weird choice: when giving a challenge quest "dare" - part of his trap - he is apologetic and overly polite in a strange way. Is it meant to be suspicious, or...?
• Issachar: Resentful at not having been chosen after waiting his whole life for that moment, swept-up in the Black Samurai's machinations, turns into a demon and killed.
• Hope: Ostensibly the leader of the samurai, but aside from the training mission and the village rescue, hardly interacts with or provides guidance to his charges. Does whatever he's told by the monastery, despite supposedly resenting his service because he had to leave a fiancee behind.
• Hugo: Officious, avaricious idiot. Happy to take advantage of events to supplant his own wealth. Is very blatant. His amount of knowledge, presumably gained from Gabby, tends to vary from scene to scene.
• Sister Gabby: Obviously the archangel Gabriel from minute one An enigmatic figure that the samurai consider wise, appears to be the power behind Hugo, she says and does little here
• K: Stupid Kurt Russell the Thing game was the last one go be in that one Mature, pragmatic voice of reason - a retired samurai who lost pieces of himself in a demon's domain and has mellowed out over the years
• STEVENStephen: ...We'll get back to this guy later.
• King Ahazuya: Is mentioned a number of times but appears so late into proceedings (far after the part of the game under discussion, in fact) that he seems like an afterthought.

A bit of a mess.

Let's start with the most important thing - if one were to judge their character by the opening act alone, having not seen (say) the box art and without the dreams spelling it out, it wouldn't be wholly unreasonable to believe Jonathan is a possible chaos hero as his faith in his society crumbles, or that Isabeau would be seduced by the "literature" contraband she's in love with as Issachar eventually is and become a chaos hero herself. Her piousness also fits law! One supposes that the idea is that she's equally tempted by both sides, thus making her the neutral hero, but since we never develop her character past these scenes at all aside from faintly suggesting she might have a crush on Flynn, her point-of-view (a sort of general "good, somewhat dorky person") rings hollow. Meanwhile, Walter seems to not have much problem with Law, per se - he hates Hugo abusing the law for his own gain, getting them to do things like violate the Samurai Code just to collect relics - just as Jonathan does. The primary difference is when they ask you whether you should still do it, Jonathan claims it's your duty and Walter is less on board.

Part of the problem is that in populating the opening of the game with a bunch of authority figures who countermand each other without fleshing the world out, it's not entirely clear whose "law" is "Law." When it's faux-Mishima vs. Americans on Japanese soil, it's easy to figure out who is who - the ethical question is whether it's better to submit to a law from outside, or to break all laws in the interest of an ideal. But SMTIV has a king we never see, a leader who doesn't lead, and a monastery who don't hide that they're circumventing the "law" and are corrupt. We don't even know for sure what "god" they worship. It seems like it's YHWH? And the rest of the game will back that up. But the monastery isn't the Messian Church of earlier games, although they arguably stand in for them - the world is a mash-up of medieval Europe and medieval Japan, who had two different views on Christianity. Since the conflict will always be obedience vs. independence, the beginning of the game needs to establish better whose rule the Samurai are to follow, so that "obedience" can be judged on its ethical weight, rather than in plot terms.

The other issue is that because the rest of the game to follow does not weight Mikado's story elements equally with Tokyo's, the game needs to either commit to its fake-out and never return to Mikado at all - making it a deliberate dead-end - or it needs to integrate it more fully with the rest of the story. We'll be getting into that more fully in later installments, but in immediate terms it means not cutting off character threads that can be useful later. This means Navarre most explicitly, but applies to everyone atop the Tokyo Dome.

Navarre is an interesting character conceptually, because it's not clear what role he's meant to fill. Eventually, we learn that role is "nothing," and it feels like a waste of time. It was such a waste of time that the game's sequel has made Navarre and a newly-introduced brother major characters in order to course-correct his inclusion. This was... perhaps an over-correction, but a stock character like Navarre is useful because he's an unstable element that can disrupt a smooth-flowing plot, which can create surprises. He can also fill a role of an adversary that can be beaten without devaluing the more powerful foes. Or he could be an example of how other Samurai are reacting to events.

There have been characters who fill a role like Navarre's in previous games. Ozawa in the original SMT was a petty thug who proved useful to one side and was elevated beyond his station, which made him a useful early foil. Otsuki in "If..." was a recurring villain whose transition from human to machine marked both the passage of time and the raising of stakes. Navarre could fill any of these roles usefully rather than serving as a way to pad out the tutorial segment needlessly. It's clear he is meant to show the prejudice inherent in Mikado's class system to prep the player for making choices later - class bullies originate in the original Megami Tensei pulp novels, after all - but he does not accomplish this in an interesting way, and the class struggle becomes irrelevant once you reach Tokyo.

The biggest problem when it comes to character use, and thus both world-building and the fleshing out of these characters before the turn in the plot, is pacing. Absurdly, the Naraku section of the game goes too fast to accomodate all the information the game wants to convey, and so the characters surrounding Flynn are forced to rapidly explain to, and then speak for, him in each scene and are not able to give their own perspectives (or backstory, or internal conflicts). This dovetails with the fact that Naraku is far too small to make logical in-world sense, and is the first in a series of disappointing dungeon experiences in the game.

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I'm reusing this dumb gag because I hadn't planned on posting a "flashback" post so early, sue me.

Dungeon Design

Dungeon design is such a hallmark of MegaTen gaming that I've written an entire essay on how Nocturne's dungeon design affected the storytelling. Good dungeons and bad dungeons, the design in MegaTen games has always been deliberate - they are meant to challenge, or to teach, or to evoke a certain mood, or have a certain pace. Not every single experiment has been successful, of course, but from their most punishing to their easiest, the more authored games of the series have featured dungeons that you could understand (even the randomly-generated tower floors of Persona 3 were meant to be literally exhausting in a thematic way). This is vitally important to a series like MegaTen, because the dungeons are meant to be times of reflection.

The primary purpose of RPG gameplay in a MegaTen title is to give the player time to think about their decision-making.

Whether you're considering the consequences of decisions you've already made, or contemplating what your response will next be to the world you find yourself in, the gameplay is meant to, through mood and atmosphere, provoke a "role-playing" aspect in which you are meant to actively inhabit the fictional world and treat your decision-making seriously. That some people seek to game the system before pressing "start" is inevitable, but if the story and the gameplay are working properly, some of your own natural reactions will seep in. This is why, to me, the "True Demon Ending" of Nocturne always feels like the logical ending for that character and his situation, despite the reasonable arguments some would make against it - and also why the way this game treats the neutral options is a fundamental betrayal of the formula - berating you for choosing them, then providing an excessively narrow window in which one can earn their ending, thus prompting metagaming in order to see it.

So Naraku has to provide time to consider the sheer volume of new information the game is throwing at you - world-building and characterization and new gameplay elements - as well as provide the gameplay style fake-out. But it also needs to fit the world that it's in, and it doesn't. Because an entire force of Samurai - at least a couple dozen - are meant to patrol it, but nobody ever ventures past the first few floors due to the Samurai Code. And it needs to feel like a cavern to the underworld at first, and then surprise (or "surprise") the player by revealing that it's actually the Tokyo Sky Tower - which is very tall, but does not have many floors. Much like the Eiffel Tower, the Sky Tower is mostly the top and the bottom, without a lot of "dungeon space" in between. And the dome itself can't be dozens of floors thick, either. It needs to be larger, but believably larger.

But more to the point, SMTIV doesn't have a lot of deliberate dungeon design. It has a few dungeons, far apart - the Tsukiji Hongwanji, for instance, has the feel of an actual dungeon - but mostly the game concerns itself with the environs surrounding each underground settlement - a few series of commercial real estate areas in each location - and a few other odds and ends, like parks. There are a lot of reused assets. I don't know how much of the 3DS cart's memory is used; I am sure the game didn't have the budget of, say, Persona 5, quite obviously. But it's obvious while playing.

One thing that starts off very enjoyable is the contrast between the curving spaces of Naraku and Tokyo with the rigid perpendicular corridors of demon Domains, which are a sort of retro throwback (but are also often randomly generated - like late Persona dungeon floors). The problem is that this system is overused to the extreme because there are so few actual dungeons and exploratory spaces, leading to fatigue and the feeling that the designs are lazy. Domains are a solid idea, overused because of the desire to reuse assets. Why not make them part of other dungeons at times, so that it feels more like an environmental hazard (especially as they disrupt the auto-mapper)?

It's probably out of the ream of "Rebuilding," then, to suggest dozens of entirely brand new location designs. But it'd be far easier to work with what we have than the game would have you believe. So let's work with Naraku, and use the extension of the dungeon to work on fixing the story.

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Rebuilding (Opening)

This is going to be loose, because I'm not rewriting the whole game from scratch, and because exhaustive detail isn't going to be fun to read.

We've already established how the dreams should be changed - far more ambiguous - so let's cut right to waking up on Lake Mikado at the game's start with Issachar. Issachar should mention, in a line or two, about their leaving their home village for this trip. He asks you how your parents took it, or how they're dealing, or if they encouraged you - then you get to choose an answer. This is not an alignment question (probably) - this is meant to give you, in two sentences or so, a little bit of an opportunity to inhabit Flynn and decide a single point of backstory, so you care more about him and can judge your subsequent choices based on who you think he is. This is not a superfluous detail, because the game is going to take time soon to burn the village and kill Flynn's parents - we should have thought of their existence prior to the event happening.

The ceremony and the beginning of the tutorial are more or less fine. I have a lot of issues with gameplay choices and difficulty that are not specific to this post, so we'll brush past these things for now. There needs to be some dialogue, though, regarding the recruiting and fusing of demons and the Demon Summoning Program, because it's dealt with here as a formality when it shouldn't be. The characters who are new to being Samurai suggest they'd believed demons to be only legends, but also it's known that King Aquila tamed them? And now we're going to be doing the same? The game brushes past it quickly because it's integral gameplay, but in previous entries, there was time spent setting up that this is the way of the "new world." Characters will react to this differently, and we should see that! Blowing past it in a couple of tutorial windows is unconscionable.

The challenge quests that start being offered at this point should be in a slightly different order - the "cursed gauntlet" for instance happens too early - you haven't accomplished anything as Samurai yet, you should not be allowed to undertake such a dangerous task. Slaying Chagrin and fetching moss is one thing, but this early in the game, progression is important. We'll talk a lot more about challenge quests next time, but in act one they could instead be used as a world-building tool. Optional bits of narrative in which we can get information on Mikado to flesh it out a bit.

To that end, once the "training" is over, eliminate that detail about not being able to leave the plaza except on holidays - because the game literally forgets about it the minute it's "temporarily" lifted. This way, you can do things like, say, have a Luxuror make a request that you can fill, causing you to talk to them in the city. These things don't have to be 10,000 words long, little details will do more than enough. Meanwhile, have Hope say one or two lines at beginning of each day before your explorations begin, making it clear he's an active leader. Again, one or two lines is enough. Then, move his "away day" - what was once a holiday - to the day that Navarre challenges you and then goes missing. This way, he's not around when the Samurai infighting happens, it's clear something's going on before the Sabbaths begin, and when he returns he'll note you've proven yourself by rescuing your fellows in his absence. Now you can start getting quests of a more significant nature, like fighting Ares.

While you're in the domain, you used to run into Stephen and the little girl here, but we're going to move this to a later bit.

Remove the bit about Navarre buying his way out. Hell, have the NPC say something along the lines of his brother tried to buy Navarre's way out, to spare the family the embarrassment, but Hope refused, because Navarre was chosen by the gauntlet, and they need able men - after all, Hope knows about the Black Samurai already, even if we don't. The domain experience cracked Navarre, but it didn't break him. Everyone expresses concern - and they way in which they do so might shed some light on their character - the chaos hero might point out that a cornered animal bites harder, for instance.

The bakery, Issachar, and the meeting with Isabeau afterwards all happen as normal. If you venture another floor down in Naraku, you'll find that the waterfall bridge is out. This area is expanded a bit, and has a room off to one side with NPC Samurai who say a demon broke the bridge and they're working to repair it, as Naraku begins in earnest past the bridge - the area after this floor is when we begin adding to it, and there's a bit more of the original plot to get through, first.

The rooftop scene begins the same, but they don't see Kiccigiorgi forest burn here. Instead there's a couple lines (and I stress "a couple" again and again because I think it's possible to do this with only sparse, succinct dialogue - we don't need to add hours of cutscene to the beginning to fix issues) where Isabeau mentions her dedication to duty - it's fun to read about romance, but she chose to become a samurai (and make an offhand nod to Hope's backstory nugget here, maybe). This prompts Isabeau or Jonathan (we have a little from Walter already) to reveal a small piece of information about their family or backstory, providing a little bit of character and motivation. If Walter is still the chaos hero, he might make a remark about wondering if duty is worth forswearing the rest of one's personal life and needs. The idea being, we get an echo of the previous rooftop scene by the end, but including Isabeau, to help legitimize the female character as being on equal footing with the others.

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Rebuilding (Outside Mikado)

The next morning, the Samurai are tasked by Hope with assisting in the destruction of another demon Domain, found outside the castle city - because they have recent experience with it. The reasons for adding a sequence of this nature are:

• If we're going to take Mikado seriously as a location, it either needs to be self-contained, or it needs to include more than one "outside" location, so that verisimilitude is possible. One village location and the castle makes it feel faker than either of the other options.
• To draw the day-by-day structure out a bit more before things fall apart, and give characters time to establish themselves.
• To set up the idea of demons outside Mikado before we get into the Sabbaths, as at first the game-as-played does not have the NPCs link the two, instead suggesting it's a recent phenomenon.
• To have Hope act as an actual commander a little more often, in a situation where the monastery won't overrule him.
• To set up some gameplay events in a "tutorial" setting - like grab-traps that are in the actual game, and multi-level Domains, which are not but should be, as fewer but larger domains would serve better than dozens of short ones.
• To have at least one gameplay sequence under the sunlight, to contrast with Tokyo's endless night.

If the goal is to reuse assets, making this domain in a forest cave would make that easy, but let's shoot for something else - perhaps a canyon or somesuch, where the characters can wonder if another passage to Naraku has opened, prompting the demons. There are campfire remains found, which we'll later understand are from Sabbath gatherings, the actual cause. This also makes the Samurai feel more proactive, rather than only reacting to the plot. If they've been doing this for a thousand years, surely some of their "adventures" were proactive, explaining the city's faith in them.

This doesn't have to be a long sequence. One possibility is to add Navarre back in here, ordered to go with them to prove he's fit to serve. We could see here that he is not well. This may not be necessary, however - when Hugo orders all Samurai to break the Code, we could hear then about him having been sent into Naraku with everyone else. He doesn't strictly need to be relevant again until we get to Tokyo. What makes this plot-relevant is that the meeting with Stephen and the "little girl" happens here, instead of in the previous domain, when there was already enough going on. Again, we're going to get back to this whole business later, so I'm going to largely skip it for the moment - but you should probably get some sort of COMP upgrade here. We'll talk about apps later, but Stephen should be unlocking at least some of these options himself.

Which demon should be in this domain? I don't have a strong preference. Someone stronger than Alarune, obviously, but it doesn't have to be a major figure. After they're defeated, the Samurai head home and Flynn has a short scene with one character on the roof - this character can be whomever he has the closest alignment to, since the game is still (of a sort) structured in the manner of a Persona title, though that structure will fall away soon. The important thing is that now is when they see the forest burning.

Kiccigiorgi forest happens similar to the original, but it's made a bit clearer that it's not the books specifically turning people into demons - people are allowing possession because knowledge of the way the world really is causes depair and resentment and hate that cause them to give in - and of course, people attacked become zombies and such. This is clearer and more fitting with previous games than the books literally "causing" people to turn into demons, but does not in any way stop the sheltered people of Mikado from viewing the events as being the fault of the books.

After the Black Samurai leaves, there's a brief new sequence. The men basically credit Isabeau with saving the day, she notes she couldn't have made it through the forest alone, they all grow a little closer together. One of them, though, points out Isabeau's manga reading, and she points out she doesn't feel different, has no change in her loyalty to Mikado, etc. Jonathan wonders if it's the pictures, Walter poses the possibility that it's because Isabeau is already a Luxuror and has nothing to be resentful for, and they wonder if it really is the books or not. She asks Flynn what he thinks, and there's an alignment question where you can reject or approve of her habit. Whatever you decide, she says she'll pray on it. This ties up some loose ends and makes their personalities and allegiances clearer, and also helps them not look like fools in light of what they've seen.

The next morning, Hope is not around. Gabby appears, being mysterious, and tells them briefly that Hope and Abbot Hugo are meeting with the King about the Black Samurai. Nobody is allowed to leave the village. She leaves before many questions can be asked of her; Isabeau can tell them her name, but not a lot more. It's expected there will be a meeting by sundown. Everyone expresses reservations about just going along like nothing happened. In Naraku, the bridge is repaired (you can get that key for the room in floor one with the treasure) and there are more quests.

If you go down another floor, rather than reach the Minotaur's door, you'll see that a new floor exists. This is where the dungeon design bit starts to matter. This floor is much wider than the other floors - it's something more like a traditional dungeon floor. It's here that dungeon gameplay starts getting introduced in earnest.

***

Rebuilding (The Labyrinth)

The game has been teaching lots of things thus far, but when it comes to "dungeon design," all we've gotten thus far are climb/crawl/jump points and poison floors, as well as locked doors needing keys. We've added the "Grab-traps" earlier and they can show up again here, but more to the point, this is a good time to add pitfalls and sleep floors. Pitfalls are more interesting from a design standpoint, because you're immediately dealing with multiple levels over verticality at the same time. And in a dungeon where the goal is to go further down, the idea that progressing downward is a trap, and that you must ascend to progress, serves psychologically to make the maze area feel more twisted than it has to be. It would also make sense to add a mechanic where Flynn can use his sword to strike a column or stalagmite to fell it, creating a bridge for when jumps are too far. These are all mechanics usable later in dungeons (as well as things we can't logically get to here, like false-walls, switches, etc).

The main thing here is that the bulk of the floor spirals towards the center. This is for two reasons. First, because at the center is the passage leading down, towards the Hall of the Minotaur. The Minotaur's role is to guard against both those coming up and those coming down, but the spiral structure anticipates the Minotaur as the figure at the center of the labyrinth, lending more creedence to his being chosen for this role on a mythology level. The second reason is that the player should be able to cut wormwood down as they travel the labyrinth, making a more straight path backwards to make it easier to escape. This isn't just for convenience, although shortcuts are good rewards to players in a dungeon; the real benefit is that by making the path simpler to traverse, the player will forget about the traps when doing challenge quests in this area - if they're doing a "carry" mission, where Flynn's actions are restricted, they'll want to take the shortest path through the maze, leaving it open to hit sleep floors, grab-traps, and pitfalls that were not dangerous during the initial, "tutorial" phase but are now potentially-lethal distractions in such a challenge quest. This also serves to make Naraku feel a lot larger the first time it's traversed, which helps it fit in the world better, but does not make it tedious in subsequent explorations, because of the many shortcuts.

(Having established earlier that there would be a larger number of optional challenge quests, I want to point out once more that all of this exploration is intended to be gradual, broken up with said quests.)

When you find the door to the Hall of the Minotaur, you should then be stopped by the Samurai Code. When you come back to the surface, the meeting is over and Hugo makes his big push for everyone to break the code and pursue the Black Samurai further down. What should probably happen here is that the King appears briefly - they are feeble and clearly Hugo has no trouble manipulating him. The king orders the code broken, but everyone involved knows it's Hugo (and Gabby) doing the pushing. But the King is the actual authority and so more emblematic of a Law issue - loyalty to a lord who may be unsuited to the role, versus individuality that flaunts the rule of the land. Your Law hero submits, your Chaos hero balks, and your Neutral hero acknowledges that despite motives, your goal currently dovetails, but you're not going to go out of your way to help Hugo (basically - it's too early to put things in such blatant terms). It also makes sense for the King to be near-bedridden, given the mythological reasons that he has the name he does.

Upon defeating the Minotaur - one of the game's few, true highlights - the characters descend to the staging area with the incense reward chests, the player's first gun, and the first terminal. The section after this should be longer. In the original game, Medusa occurs almost immediately after, and that's too soon. It's a tag-team boss followed by an immediate exit from Sky Tower, and the pacing of the exploration is ruined. This is especially notable because with the terminal here, it's easy to retreat for healing, which suggests a lot more dungeon ahead - after all, it's after a boss fight, so it feels like a checkpoint. Now, more maze-like terrain pushes the believability - the dome is only so thick - but the setup the game gives you makes it pretty easy to see how this next area might be prolonged. Make the scaffolding section longer, over more floors, for one. Secondly, you'll note that the stone and... the whatever it is, cocooning, the domain-like material covering some of the tower, it has paths that seem traversible a bit but are blocked by railings in the original games. Lose some railings and let people walk on the outside of the tower, climb ladders to less accessible scaffolding. It doesn't all have to be required to get to the stairway - chests and junk piles, some of which offer decent rewards for early game, will make the open area worth exploring more slowly. It's about the pace that the player is moving in, not geography size.

It might not be a terrible idea to shift the David quest down to this area. With more area to explore, you can chase the target demons around the scaffolding, and David can be slightly stronger - your first fiend comes after a more significant point, which is good, because in theory the fiends will be a lot easier to find in the "rebuilt" game. The original David quest was less difficult if you had a gun, but that's fixable with rebalancing. Hell, it might even be better if the hordes are still weak to gunfire - the new power you have gives you a sense of strength and progression, only to have it ripped away by a more difficult and complicated David battle. The quest is optional, after all, and if you do it and exhaust some resources you'll have to traverse the area twice, prolonging it without making it a lot bigger.

The samurai glimpse Tokyo. Then you have the Medusa battle. This is also fine. Her design is not really... well, that's a different post. We're dealing with structure and pacing at the moment. So that sequence is fine. So then you theoretically go right down the bottom. But this is also ill-advised. The Sky Tower has five floors at the bottom, and SMTIV blatantly teased a third boss that it's not going to deliver. We want to put that back in to complete the pacing of Naraku.

Past the Medusa area, you can use more usual "Tokyo" assets, interiors, for the gallery, gift shops, etc areas that are all now looted, empty, and abandoned. There should probably be a ton of poison floor areas though, as you climb down and up around a maze to find the exit of the Sky Tower. See, the original Megami Tensei game, the novel-derived one, that started the whole series, had a series of bosses in order. Loki's a special case, but the other major bosses are, in order: Minotaur, Medusa... and Hecate, of the crossroads - and thus, guardian between Tokyo and "the surface," and the moment when the "alignment" stuff is going to really start to matter, as Flynn's arrival in Tokyo is his crossroads. And all three are Greek, as well, which fits the "fake Persona 3" shtick that's been a structural element to the prologue and is now being done away with. There should be a final third of the dungeon leading up to Hecate, and she should be harder than Minotaur and Medusa - and with the absence of a terminal without climbing all the way back up the scaffolding (an option, to be sure) we should reinstitue a paid-healing room as previous games have had, in order to play fair.

If the Minotaur was about raw power, and Medusa was about ailments - which she was not in the original game, but bringing back the other status effects is a game-balancing issue we'll approach at a time when we're not wrapping up a post - Hecate should be about both. She should be the trial for which Tokyo is the reward. And she should pose to the Samurai the suggestion that, as we said, this is a deciding moment for them, that the "land of the Unclean Ones" will change them.

Upon her defeat, the Ashura-Kai should be out on the street, not in the building, because we have one last Greek demon to encounter - at the door is Cerberus, the Cerberus, the intelligently-talking one, who says something along the lines of "I wanted to see you for myself" and leaves without a battle. From both lands' perspectives, he would have been, essentially, at the gateway to the "underworld." As for what he's up to, we'll get to that another time.

***

I didn't get into a full description of how I'd lay out every floor of the Hecate section of the Naraku dungeon, but I'm not sure I have to. My point was about pacing and introducing a complexity of dungeon design so that further dungeons could use these aspects more fully. But this is meant to be a suggestion of how to better lay out the opening in order to set up a rebuilt SMTIV - the opening was always the part that worked the best in a vacuum, but the game starts to come further apart rapidly from here.

One final note: it's a shame, in a sense, that SMT has to reach towards Persona to survive, because there's already a branch of spin-offs that split the difference: the Devil Summoner games. A game with a tone (generally) closer to mainline, but still featuring a colorful cast and continuity nods to other games? That describes Soul Hackers to a tee, which is a far from perfect game, but great campy fun. An Atlus willing to commit fully could sell more than one type of MegaTen game, even with the dwindling Japanese game industry, by positioning their titles as competition worthy of dissatisfied fans of other franchises. Since at least Strange Journey, the western branch has been very disspirited in its marketing of non-Persona titles, which inspires little confidence in its audience. But I'm not holding the purse-strings, so my conjecture is barely worth the time I spend typing it.

***

Next time, on "Rebuilding SMTIV," we tackle Ueno, challenge quests, laziness, and whether an SMT game should be "open-world."