Here's a positive note that I won't be able to put anywhere else: the soundtrack to SMTIV is pretty great. It's not the best in the series, by any means, but it's catchy and it fits the mood pretty consistently and they did a pretty good job. I enjoy it, it's in my rotation with other game scores.
Anyway, let's get into this mess. Welcome to Tokyo!
***
Ueno - Summary
After a moment's pause, the samurai question where they begin their search, but Hugo immediately radios in with a quest for them - to find the Counter-Demon Force base (He does not explain what the Counter-Demon Force is, and the samurai do not ask). They head out into post-apocalyptic Tokyo, and the world map, to explore. The area is largely contained to just around Ueno - to the north, the boat to go up the river is occupied, and to the south, a hoard of Kelpies have destroyed a bridge and are running riot. What the samurai find is that Akihibara is utterly decimated and a craterous desert wasteland, but Ueno's subway station has become a shelter for "Unclean Ones" to live out their days.
Many are "Demon Hunters," who use a bulletin board similar to the ones the Samurai use to trade information and post requests of Hunters in order to deal with wild demons and find "relics" in the remains of the city. But "Hunters" are not the law in Tokyo - that appears to be the Ashura-Kai, a Yakuza-like organization who seems to keep the electricity running and the food changing hands. But they're clearly also a citywide protection racket, and everyone is at their mercy. At the Hunter's Association, a bill is posted asking to eliminate a Peallaidh at Shinobazu Pond, directly above the station. He forced the Kelpies out, and the Kelpies want the demon's head in exchange for passage across the river towards Kasumigaseki - where someone tells them the Counter-Demon Force base lies. They slay the creature, and take the foul head to the demons, earning their loyalty (as a bridge) henceforth, and they cross the river.
***
Believability
In retrospect, the moment that telegraphed the game's sloppiness is a pretty small and petty detail. In SMTIV, you can dress your avatar Flynn in various costumes; the armor that affects stats and weaknesses has a cosmetic component. The concept behind the game in general, the hook we discussed in the previous entry, is the idea of a feudal samurai descending into the post-apocalypse, which conjurs a great deal of visual imagination - obviously, since it's been done a few times.
If you actually role-play your role-playing, you can picture this composed samurai strapping on hockey pads and army helmets to adapt and to blend in, it's a terrific visual. But... the equipment selections don't reflect this. The cobbled-together sporting equipment isn't in the first town's shop, it's in the second - first there's military wear dressed up as traditional wear (perfect for a nationalist hero, about which more at some point). Everything in Mikado was super-archaic, medieval suits of armor and such - or the game's standard uniform, which is a deliberately Jedi-inspired take on samurai wear, which is honestly pretty stylish. When you get to Tokyo, shouldn't you find first the most ramshackle and low-rent equipment, as befitting the desperate nature of living in the post-apocalypse? Then, as you move to dwellings that are more settled in - places run by the Ashura-Kai or the Ring of Gaea or whatever other groups might be vying for power - you find better equipment, as these groups are hoarding them, as befits their role in the story. Why can't you wear the lantern-head outfits that the generic hunters wear? Shouldn't that be for sale somewhere? It's not like there's no place for sillier outfits, if that's a goal - there are entire locked-off black market stores in Ginza that sell gimmick outfits. This seems pedantic, but my point is that it's emblematic.
Every aspect of a narrative game contributes to its ability to tell a story.When you're playing a more traditional RPG, a Dragon Quest or a Final Fantasy, and you find the great kingdom's royal treasury only has leather armor, but the poor village closer to the end boss has diamond armor, it takes you out of the narrative. Everyone notices these things, there's a million jokes about them. SMT games rely upon the mood staying consistent for you to buy into its ethical quandries to work. Otherwise you might as well put a UI scale like Mass Effect (or, uh, Catherine - although in fairness in that game the persistent overt judgment is a little more thematic), sliding back and forth on the screen as you answer questions. This is not to suggest that jokes don't have their place - MegaTen is silly, and it always should be on some level, pretending otherwise is the bastion of young teenagers trying out their first game with cussing - but gags should be deployed strategically, in places where a break for levity keeps the game from collapsing beneath the weight of its self-seriousness.
Should there be customizable costumes at all? I actually don't have a problem with their inclusion, just with how they're handled. But with a fully-customizable and nameable avatar, the inability to select that avatar's gender starts to feel like a burden. I wonder if they might've considered the idea if it weren't for not wanting to write two versions of dialogue for a bunch of demons. But probably not. Atlus's games have grown more conservative (as we'll definitely be seeing as we go on!) as the last few generations have gone on, and the days where (say) Satomi Tadashi could argue on film that Tatsuya and Jun's romance in Persona 2 might well be canonical, as somewhat half-hearted an attempt as that may have been, feels like a distant country. If the rest of the game worked properly, it would be easier to ignore how possible this option would be. But so very little of the narrative requires Flynn to be male specifically, and the details that do are generally fairly easy to adjust. Imagine how, with no dialogue changes at all, Issachar's resentment would read completely differently for a female protagonist.
At any rate, this section of the game is meant to give the player an introduction to Tokyo, its situation, and how gameplay has changed. Not breaking "immersion" is especially crucial at this stage, and setting the tone more carefully would help. After all, the menu-based navigation is now gone, and we have a wide-open world to explore... sort of.
***
Non-Linear Gameplay
Most mainline MegaTen games have sequences where the leash is let off a bit; the goal may be relatively clear, but there is, even in small-scale, a number of places you can visit at once, because moving about the world and taking in conditions is meant to influence how you think it should be changed. If the anarchy (if you'll pardon the term) is disquieting, you find yourself empathizing with law; if the fascist rulers scare you, you'll gravitate towards chaos.
The addition of challenge quests, which are more significant, though more awkwardly handled, than in Strange Journey, begs the question - could there be an open-world MegaTen game? What if the rivers were crossable from the moment you arrive in Tokyo, that the only restricted zones were the ones that you needed to swear allegiance to enter. You could travel around and solve quests at your own pace, visit different parts of the city and take in the sights, only nudging the plot forward when you felt the time was right. This is not an inconceivable proposition! And SMTIV teases this at times, because you can blunder (or swagger) into high-level domains very early and take your chances, from time to time. But it won't commit to this idea in any tangible way, because many, many locations that are reachable early are empty rooms or one-line dialogues from NPCs, establishing only that a quest will be here, but only when the game decides you're ready for it.
By the time you move from Ueno to Shinjuku and see how similar their designs are, and have passed by many of these empty rooms, the joy of exploration will have more or less dissipated, because for the most part you've seen all there is to see in SMTIV. The eventual parallel worlds gimmick is the only twist in this formula. We'll cover this more fully at a later date, but the Government Center in Shinjuku is a perfect example of how the lack of dungeon design affects the game as a whole, because you battle your way to the door of a tower, only for the tower to be another NPC room with a boss fight, no different than a dozen ones outside - it's just that this one is important because the alignment choice is significant enough.
If we're taking it on faith, then, that we can't create hundreds of new assets to redesign tons of new explorable locations (and this will only trip us up further as we go on), then what value can we place on exploring? The primary reward left to us is narrative. If the writing is good, or at least interesting, receiving bits of it can feel like a suitable reward - it can't fully supplant gameplay rewards, the new weapons and demon unlocks and so on - but you can't fill the belly with swords alone, either. The design of the game as established needs to utilize the challenge quest concept more fully, or else cut it from the game and make the sidequests more traditional.
***
Challenge Quests
Much like with the gauntlet "app" system, the challenge quests in SMTIV read as the work of someone who knows something worked in Strange Journey but didn't understand how or why. Aside from a spare few, most quests in SJ were encountered in the wild, often by accident. The quest-givers thus marked a location and provided a landmark in the samey-looking tunnels of the various regions of the Schwartzwelt. They also served to populate those spaces and make them feel somewhat more alive. Random encounters are an abstraction, so to make the space feel "full of demons" there needs to demons that can be interacted with in the space in a non-combat setting. Even if you did not engage in many of these sidequests, interacting with these demons helped the labyrinths not feel like empty corridors, to whatever degree you found it effective. Moreover, the best of them were unpredictable - walking through the wrong door could get you caught up in a chase with Alice, in a conflict with Yggdrasil where you see your future self, or even lead a squad of your countrymen into a conflict with your first fiend. These made the space feel more dangerous - you might be well-prepared for the random encounters of a particular region, but a sudden EX Mission could land you in a fight that strikes at the opposite weaknesses, or is on a different level-scale. Not all of these quests were fully-baked, per se, but they were conceptually sound and fit with what you were doing.
The challenge quests in SMTIV do not fit any of these goals. They are always acquired from the same place - bulletin boards - and it's always clear what task you'll be performing. You may not know David awaits at the end of a horde hunt, but you know that you're seeking out combat from foes that do not match the random encounters. ...I should clarify that I am of course aware that some quests are gained in conversation - this is a solid design decision, and it's better implemented than its precedent, the demon rumors in Persona 2. We could stand to have more if it. It doesn't change the fact that the majority of quests amounts to reading the bulletin board, going to a location used for no other purpose, getting a few lines of demon dialogue, beating a boss, and then either the quest ends or you take an artifact to deliver and then end it. Why aren't there more like the "wine" quest, where happening upon Hugo at a specific point has him push you into fetching an item, from which we learn details about him we didn't previously know? Cliché details, sure, but it doesn't change that it works better than ticking lines off a ledger.
It's unfortunate, because a number of the challenge quests have better writing, and better incorporation of the mythologies of various demons, than the main story. They just don't go far enough with it. Here are a few examples:
- At one point, Hugo and Gabby say they're posting more quests to the board. You look at them, and you have a series of relic recovery quests. Despite the grumbling about Hugo and Gabby abusing the board, though, some of these requests are for K and Hope. They all involve technology being co-opted for samurai use. Some are tied to the oni, but not all of them. Why not use this as an excuse to explore how Mikado learning about Tokyo and interacting with it is changing them? They call it the land of the Unclean Ones, but it's not only the monastery who is happy to grab up things like fridges and laptops. Either have all four items be pieces of a computer that the monastery wants for illicit use, guarded by the four oni, or have the quests focused on different kinds of people in Mikado becoming more like the people in Tokyo - this knowledge will affect how the player views both places!
- Nozomi gives Flynn a camera, and he can use it to provide photos for various quest-givers. Why aren't some of these pictures of things that are hard for the player to get to as well as the person requesting? Hell, why are they only places? What if you have to talk to a demon to get its picture? What if someone wants you to get evidence of a crime, or an affair? What about a quest where you need to solve a riddle to figure out what to take a picture of? The camera quests do not have to be filler - each could offer a different task or challenge.
- The game locks out guest "party members" when doing a quest, presumably to control the circumstances in which you complete it. But why not have quests where the "party member" is locked? Nozomi is a party member at times, so why not have a quest that Jonathan wants help with, that locks you to having him along until it's done? You know what moves he has, this can be a liability as much as a benefit, and you can play with that in the encounters in that location.
- Everyone in Tokyo is starving and without medicine, and the game restricts how many of each recovery item you can carry - why not have some quests that require the good healing stuff? If you can only have ten bead chains and there's only so many to be found (outside of the black market I guess?), a quest that wants one may be a gamble for a player who's having trouble getting through (see again: game rebalancing).
***
Trust
I actually like the quests in Xenoblade Chronicles a great deal. Are there a lot of filler quests? Yes, and I don't like that, per se. Nor do I like, as here, that there are so many that amount to performing the same actions. I understand the "MMO-like" criticisms to a degree, and it's a far from perfect game by far. But there's a specific reason that I like them and it's how they're designed to progress. I'd argue that in some ways they're the more natural evolution of Persona's "social link" system, because they focus on trust and community. Doesn't sound very SMT-like, I know, but bear with me for a minute, I have a point to make.
Here's how the progression of quests in Xenoblade works: the party comes to a new town where they don't know anybody (in the hometown, it's just that you're not viewed as a "hero" yet or whatever). As you run around and talk to the game's two hundred-odd NPCs, you can build a social map of all of them, tying everyone in the world together through their relationships, and mending these relationships by doing sidequest stuff. That's the "social link" part. But when you come to a new town and you're introducing yourself to everyone, they don't come out with their problems at first, because they don't know you. Each town itself has an affinity meter that fills by doing these quests. So at first you get random trash jobs from no-name folks (Hell, in Xenoblade Chronicles X, they even use a "hunter association" style bulletin board for the trash jobs!), and that raises your standing in the community, and people start opening up to you about their problems. As the affinity grows, the quests get more interesting - you eventually start examining the world's history and breaking up drug rings and preventing deaths; and eventually people get to know your party enough that they point out things about the characters that they hadn't realized about themselves, opening up new skill branches.
Now, in a mainline SMT game, there shouldn't be "affinity meters" and social links. We're all in agreement there. Tying the world up in a friendship bow is a Persona shtick - though I'll point out that uniting a community would be a better use of a Persona 5 than the incestuous friends-only knuckle-under to conservatism that Persona 4 was - but the mechanic of building trust with the locals in a new place is a pretty reasonable concept to apply here to how challenge quests might progress and develop, rather than dumping them on the bulletin board after each event flag. As strangers in a strange land, Flynn and company would reasonably want to prove themselves as valuable - they want information and shelter.
I got into this a bit in the previous entry, as I suggested that the order in which the Mikado challenge quests are given in the first act didn't make logical sense, as you've only been a samurai for a week at best. The same principle applies everywhere. Nobody wants to clutter up SMTIV with tons of "Chagrin extermination" quests, but low-level and simpler quests being used to unlock higher-level and more interesting quests allows the player to feel like they're genuinely interacting with the world, and providing a reason to do quests that have smaller rewards early on. Not every quest can unlock a demon, or there won't be enough fusion fodder without doing the quests; but a player agreeing to handing over that bead chain because there's a chance that will be the quest that tips Ueno's invisible "trust level" far enough that Kresnik will ask for help with Kudlak (for instance), that's a more interesting idea. It also gives a player something to do in their game if they're not ready to go into the next one of those dungeons that we're supposedly adding to this game.
And that is one of the best uses of challenge quests - they're entirely optional, so farm out some of the long-time references to those, rather than the main story. Strange Journey got this right - Barong and Rangda, Mara, Kresnik and Kudlak, Alice, all EX Missions. Half of them are downright missing in this game (on a narrative level - they're empty-calorie minibosses), which feels unnecessary, and too many of the series regulars got shunted into New Game Plus only quests here. You can't argue that they didn't want to overload on references to earlier games, as so much of this plot blatantly draws from the earlier ones. Put them in for the fans, because they're optional. And as far as the more significant longtime players, like Loki and Izanami... well. We'll be getting back to the main plot eventually.
One last thing, though: the VR battles, the "puzzle battles," I love those things. They are a legitimately fantastic idea, and it amazes me that it's taken so long to come up with this concept. I'd play a whole separate game of just MegaTen battle puzzles. Hell, even a cellphone game of that, just hundreds of preset enemies and parties, figuring out how to win as they get harder and harder and more and more complicated. It's silly to space them out, though - they are a learning tool, far more valuable than most tutorial messages - Hell, there's not even any consequences for failing them, you can retry over and over. You can't say it's to hide what demons are coming along later, as the fusion/compendium's new design reveals most of them pretty darned quick. Add a bunch more, but make them only load in one at a time. As soon as you beat one, let Burroughs download the next one, so they don't clutter your list. A skilled player can burn through them really fast, getting to the good rewards, and a newcomer learning the ropes can tackle them one or two at a time as they get more confident. Instantly more rewarding. And a fun way to see match-ups you'd never otherwise see, since these puzzles clearly work with high level and low level demons side-by-side.
***
Crafting
So there are some quests in SMTIV where you collect vendor trash. Except they're not really vendor trash, since you can't sell them. You can instead repeat the delivery quests over and over. This is not good design. It's not good design because going through the all the clicking for low-payoff quests is tedious; it's not good design because having a dozen demons consistently drop tons of their whatever-it-is and having nothing else in the game drop that sort of thing stands out, telegraphs the quest, and feels artificial; and it's bad design because they clutter up the key item menu when you might want to check which keycards and member IDs and such you've picked up. There's a menu option for relics that you'll likely never look at because the quest items are in a different window - and since you can't read Flynn's cute description of the relics until you turn them in, why would you browse through it? ...Come to think of it, why can't you read the descriptions before you turn them in? It's not the guy identifying them, it's Flynn doing it. I assume the game decides the value of the random items only at the time you turn them in?
As always, SMTIV's developers refuse to commit to a design decision. It's like they would implement an idea and it would get cleared by the heads of development but the budget would get immediately slashed so they couldn't follow through, and it happened every time. If you're going to have vendor trash in a game, then do it. If you're going to half-ass it, don't bother. Most people wouldn't miss it.
The concept of the "relics" fits the world you're establishing, and the idea that sometimes you'll want to get stuff from slain demons also fits, conceptually. So let's say we won't cut either of them. As always, we're going to try to play with what we've been given, here, so the goal is to make this stuff not lazy. Here's my recommendation. Let the relic menu tell you what you've picked up, and let you choose whether or not to sell what you've found. Then, dump the demon pelts and claws in the same menu, and leave the key items for actual "key items." Next, make all demons have a chance of dropping vendor trash when they die, but have it be a lesser chance than the current 100% for a quest, without taking it into "lengthy grind" territory (relying that heavily on the random-number generator is not actually fun - looking at you, Fiends and Famed's). You can only get the demon vendor trash through killing them, not recruitment, so this gives you a reason for combat at all times, and trading off between that option and talking now has a little more interplay.
Some relics and some demon drops are used in quests. There's no way to know which before the quest occurs (aside from a FAQ, you cheater). I do think that if an item is one-of-a-kind, it shouldn't be sellable - I'm not a monster. But what do you do with the rest of the garbage? Sell it? Well, yeah, a lot of it, because it's still the most reliable way to make money. But put in a very basic trade/crafting system, so that you have to manage your resources a bit. Not "crafting" the way western games do it, obviously, where you sit around and cram mushrooms together, but "six claws and four talons will get you this sword" crafting, where it's basically a shop with a different currency.
Why do this? Because resource management is appropriate to the tone of the post-apocalypse. It always has been and always will be. You know how at the beginning of SMTIV, most of the armor costs way too much to bother buying? And if you're not doing the DLC, money takes a long time to add up in a way where you feel comfortable spending a lot at once? That should be the tone with all of your items. If you use your vendor trash in quests and to make better equipment, then you won't have money unless you actually buy the gauntlet app with points so that you can ask demons for money. But you don't have points, so do you go relic-hunting, or do you hold off on your items for now so that you have some cash? After all, demons want money if you're recruiting!
We're going to be talking about combat rebalancing later, so we'll be getting back to this, but the game should pose challenges and in its current form it often doesn't. It should have an easy mode and it's fine to offer DLC for people who don't have the patience for that stuff - those are options and they don't take away from someone else's experience. But the difficulty is less about a gamer's misguided and misplaced pride in achievement and more about the tone the game is setting. You're meant to feel like you're battling to survive. The game in its optimal form should convey that tone in gameplay, not just narrative, so that the two elements support each other.
When it comes to how useful the "crafting" system would be, however, I actually think the best usage would probably be in upgrading gear, not making new gear. This has the side-benefit of making the player's preferred outfit potentially viable for longer, because you can improve it at high cost. But it's also less damaging to verisimilitude if you're bolting fangs and layering thick pelts over and under your armor, rather than taking a bag of teeth and hammering them into a sword. And this way, different vendors can offer different things in different locations, and you'll also have a reason to, maybe, utilize facilities in Mikado that usually are abandoned after the early game. Maybe the blacksmith actually forges stuff now! Maybe you need to find a particular expert in a certain part of Tokyo in order to improve your guns.
At any rate, I also think sword fusion should be available after a certain point, even if that's more of a Devil Summoner thing. I think that if you can potentially hold twenty-four demons in stock and make recruitment twice as easy with app upgrades, having another use for filling that compendium is also a balancing tool, and unlike a lot of spin-off ideas, there's nothing about it that would especially violate the themes at play here. Sacrificial fusion was already a thing, after all. And if you're constantly upgrading your sword in that fashion after a certain point, it might not be a terrible idea to offer a gameplay mechanic where you can upgrade the other parts of your gear.
Gear including the COMP, er, gauntlet, I'd say. Rationing app points makes... a certain amount of sense, but the way everything unlocks almost entirely in act one and then just iterates is a waste. We'll get back to this with combat rebalancing, again, but... why not have unlocking some of the new functions, or even the ability to purchase said functions with points, be a progress reward or an exploration reward? What if Burroughs can download mods off the smartphones that everyone else in Tokyo is using to summon demons, and thus finding discarded phones can lead to upgrades? That can be a quest reward or even a hard to find chest-type item. Certainly some of them should come from Stephen, since he keeps showing up and running his mouth - it's his program, after all, and he used to offer the upgrades. Hell, finding memory boards for the COMP is not a new gameplay idea.
If one of the criticisms of the challenge quest system is that the rewards other than demon unlocks are usually not worth the effort involved, it behooves one to find a wider variety of reward - and also make individual rewards more valuable due to scarcity and resource management.
***
Character Quests
This is a potential idea. I'm wary of exploring it too fully because it skirts the "social link" line a little closely for a mainline MegaTen game. But let's stick a toe in and see how we feel. SMTIV positions itself as more character-based than previous entries, because the characters tag along more and constantly talk. We've argued here already that these characters do not fully develop. So aside from writing better dialogue, how can we explore this idea?
I mentioned above the possibility of guest-locked quests. It stands to reason that if you can run an errand for Hugo, of all people, with voiced cutscene dialogue, you should be able to do so in some fashion for your fellow samurai. The risk is that the player weighs alignment choices based on loyalty and friendship rather than the ethical divide for the character, but the quests could, in theory, provide a greater understanding of the varied points of view and a better understanding of the characters who will make these choices, to see if their logic holds. This also goes for the supporting cast - since SMTIV is posing the ideologies through a series of characters that you may or may not trust, it would help to understand their motivations better.
These situations could be stock, even, so long as they provide a useful counterpoint, or a way for the player to make a decision. Here are some off-the-cuff examples. I didn't spend a lot of time ginning them up, because the intention isn't to write the game:
- K enlists Flynn in checking on a personal matter. Hope's abandoned fiancee may have been seen at a Sabbath. Hope cannot go himself, as hint of association would be politically bad for the samurai - Hugo could entreat the king to have the samurai fall fully under the monastery's remit. You venture to the place where sabbaths had been held (maybe the new domain area we created, or a new forest map, or something) and find that the woman is possessed, like Issachar. After defeating this boss, do you report finding anything? Law suggests duty over all, Chaos suggests keeping it quiet to keep the samurai free of the monastery's grip. Perhaps there's even a neutral option where you get K to disseminate the information covertly. Whatever you choose, Hope calls you to his office and reveals he knew, and we learn a bit about him and his thoughts.
- Perhaps one reason that Jonathan is compassionate to the casualries is that he grew up with a Casualry nurse or nanny, and that woman is now in danger, accused of breaking a law. It doesn't even have to be demon-related, per se - if there's a wide variety of quests, some could be dialogue-only, like Nozomi's intial camera quest was - but this situation could show us Jonathan's point of view at the time the quest is made available, and we can decide how she's dealt with.
- K could have unfinished business with a demon domain from before he retired that we can help him with. Not so obvious as the one who took his limb and eye, but one that he was never able to slay. We could learn about his backstory this way. It could even be a situation where the demon was defending themselves at the time, and points out that there's little honor in sending another to finish the job if K was not able to do it himself. Avenge K or let the demon go?
***
Manga
Isabeau's only trait should not be her interest in manga. She should be fully invested in the narrative, as the other characters are, when she is present in a scene. If you want this to be one of her character traits, there are ways to do this that feel less demeaning to the character. Try this on. You approach Isabeau in an NPC room at some point and if you didn't scorn her habit earlier, she admits that after praying on it, she opened her book to a random page and found that the protagonist was interested, as she is, in a politically seditious book - this is true in Rose of Versailles, Oscar reads L'Organt, and this is presumably the basis for this character trait in Isabeau. You can respond to this meta revelation that it seems dangerously convenient or seems like a sign from a higher power. If you're continuing to encourage her, a longer-running challenge quest can be to collect the missing volumes - one of which, we know, is in the Ginza black market area. Her manga interest can thus be relegated to an optional challenge quest from here on out, and you get the presumed bonus from having a running gag without it defining a character who should have a stake in actual matters relevant to the world at large.
We'll address the Black Samurai and Ikebukuro later, but since I want to close the manga issue indefinitely, look how easy it is to rewrite those lines of dialogue without losing the general idea, assuming the rest of the scene were to remain the same:
Isabeau: No matter where we go, we are still within the Domain... I had high hopes of this place. I heard there would be books to be found here...My revisions are in bold type. With the barest minimum of change, Isabeau can still reference her character trait, you can still get the joke in that you're so in love with, and this time Isabeau herself isn't the punchline. I can't even call it "laziness," because it seems pretty clear to me that devaluing the female companion character was a deliberate aim.
Walter: Eh? What were these "high hopes" in expectation of...?
Isabeau: Oh... I am ashamed to admit that... er...
Walter: I haven't the faintest what you're on about...
[The Black Samurai appears]
Walter: Hell's bells!
Jonathan: We meet again at last, Black Samurai!
Black Samurai: As I knew we would. Welcome to Tokyo... Samurai of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado. You, girl... It's a shame you won't ever find out how your manga ends.
Isabeau: ...Wh-What?
Black Samurai: After your last volume... Oscar finally reunites one evening with her childhood friend and...
Isabeau: Hey!
Walter: She is a madwoman. We have her outnumbered in a demon's Domain and still she japes.
Isabeau: What it seems is that the deaths of our countrymen are not petty enough cruelties for her!
Black Samurai: Hahaha... So, how are you liking Tokyo? Are you used to things here yet? Since, after all, Tokyo mirrors the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado.
Jonathan: What an insult...! How dare you utter such nonsense!
So, y'know, a "rebuilt" SMTIV wouldn't do that.
***
Quest Gameplay
We've talked a lot about quest narratives and quest rewards, but what about quest gameplay?
The trick to further developing challenge quests is to provide a wide variety of tasks - so that they are unpredictable and not tedious - while not straying far from the gameplay. One or two minigames - adding numbers, pushing blocks, gambling - is a maximum, a seasoning that you must be very spare with. In SMTIV the combat and negotiation come first, gameplay-wise, followed by talking to NPCs, and so of course quests should reflect that focus.
The types introduced here are generally fine, they're just oft-repeated. Traveling to a location for a boss battle, or braving a Domain to do the same, is fine in smaller doses. Chasing demon sprites, hunting deliberately elusive demons, running away from demons, and fighting multiple waves in a row make for good variations. Navigating a brief dialogue tree is interesting if it's not over-used. We've talked about ways to adjust the "taking a picture" quests, and the "carrying someone or something" quests work if the level design supports the challenge. More of the ones the player rarely does, fewer of the ones they do often is the key here. The game barely bothers with specialized fusion requests, when that should be an easy slam dunk - probably because the fusion mechanics are so simplified. What other quest variants do we add? Cashing in rare items and adjusted vendor trash mechanics, yes, but also "talk to (negotiate with) a certain demon," "solve riddle," "find hidden location," and more quests that involve choices. Choose who to give a macguffin to, choose which of two demons(/angels?) to slay, etc. And some combat quests - the most significant ones - involving exclusive dungeons or explorable areas.
The idea is to make the quest system more substantial specifically because a game leaning this hard on plot and ostensibly on characters needs to flesh out its world to be fully believable, but this material should be optional for a player who isn't interested beyond the main thrust of the alignment paths.***
Rebuilding: Ueno
After a moment of taking in Tokyo, Hugo calls as he does in the original, but does not immediately download a map of Tokyo to the gauntlet. He instead claims that the monastery is consulting ancient texts of Aquila's time for more information on the Land of the Unclean Ones (still calling it "Tokyo") in an attempt to sound both magnanimous and useful. The lower-screen map only fills in as you travel around anyway, so until the samurai reach Ueno itself, leave their exact position more ambiguous, so that it feels like the samurai actually have to explore. As you visit each place and the gauntlet does that scan-data thing, it can fill in the location marker on the map, so that subsequently it's easier to find than the way they're currently labeled. A lot of people have issues with how the world map is handled; we can give this a sense of progression, where at first you're marking areas, then later areas are marked for you. We'll cover this in a later installment, but the full Tokyo data can be given to the samurai once they reach the Counter-Demon Force base. That's not especially far off, if we're taking the most direct route at all times.
The mission Hope gives them is to find information at first - the immediate goal should just be to establish a "base camp" of sorts - a place with shops and a terminal - so that recovery from the Hecate boss battle, and travel back and forth to Mikado, are possible before we get down to progression. It is obvious (in retrospect) that Gabby wants them to find the Counter-Demon force base so that she can get information on where the archangels are being held - it's literally the only information they could possibly have that would interest her - but they're held by the Ashura-Kai, so that should be where you get the information from. So let's edit the priorities of these characters at the beginning of exploring this strange land.
One area in which I'll admit to being less than fully-proficient is Tokyo geography, and so when it comes to adding and removing locations, I'm not the best judge when it comes to what to use. Strictly in terms of game flow, however, this moment of the game should give the illusion of freedom. The player has been stuck entering and exiting the same dungeon for hours, and they have a world map for the first time. A couple of chest and broken bridges should not be all that greets them. When exiting Midgar for the first time in Final Fantasy VII, for instance - not the greatest game, but always useful as a common reference point - the player feels as though a sense of claustrophobia has lifted, even though the number of locations is very limited (the destination town, a small ranch, and a cave that's dangerous to approach). Even if they're mostly being funneled here, they should feel as though there are a number of options. We can accomplish this with a number of adjustments, assuming the world map is staying roughly comparable:
- Change the roadblocks: Presuming the Kelpie river crossing is still the final objective, the river crossing to the north could be open (since it doesn't lead anywhere overly significant, plot-wise) or instead of claiming the boat is in use, have the scummy Hunter in charge of the crossing charge an unfair amount of Macca, hoping to rip you off. Most players will thus bypass it, to return later (when the amount has lowered), but players who grind or abuse DLC can pay the fee early if they want. The suggestion that you could do this, even if it's unwise, feels less like an enforced "broken bridge" and more like an available option, even if it's still functionally useless.
- Akihabara: the destruction of Electric Town means nothing to the samurai, and they don't even comment. It's presumably meant to convey the degree to which Tokyo has been destroyed to the player, but the postage stamp-sized desert area does not convey much visual information and fails at being affecting. Make an optional dungeon here - you could even reuse desert and ruins assets from elsewhere if you need to - this area could be a mostly-open area with tough encounters but good relic payoffs, if you can find them (as befits Akihabara) and another location you can use for challenge quests. Having an additional explorable area here will make this section feel more open, and people will be giving each other tips on how best to rush through early to find, say, memory boards or cell phones in order to get app upgrades earlier.
- Make a pit-stop: If it's possible to add more to this area, geographically, more explorable zones or optional quest locations, then one might consider having a small location closer to the Sky Tower that acts as a pre-town "pit stop" for the player to recharge after Naraku. Consider a one-screen exterior, with maybe one NPC-room and a pay-healer but no terminal. If this hypothetical option were implemented, the demons out in the streets could be more difficult, because a healing source is available before finding Ueno. It might even serve to make the player slightly nervous - that terminals might be hard to find in Tokyo. If this option were chosen, it might be worth adding an extra street area or two in Ueno before finding the entrance to the subway tunnel, making reaching it more of an accomplishment. After all, upon reaching it, there will be facilities to replenish resources before tackling the terminal guardian, and after that terminal is open free healing is a warp away.
The general layout of the Ueno tunnel, the Ueno streets, and Shinobazu Pond is pretty okay for an early "outside" dungeon. Given how interlinked they are, and how close healing services are, I'd recommend adding some extra bits of wormwood to Shinobazu Pond, so that slipping in and out of the vents and manholes - and entering from the outside - have more use as an exploration mechanic. Opening a route and ducking back to cover becomes a valid tactic, so it's a bit more of a maze. Don't overdo this aspect, because too many entrances and exits and the dungeon will be tedious.
So our samurai reach the Ueno underground. Each "town" in the game should have a different feel, especially as many of them look near identical except for the general floor plan, something that we can hopefully correct in some instances. Ueno's feel should be "desperate and cut off," because they're a very small settlement that can't even get to the other locations because of the issue with the river. They should be largely pathetic - by which I mean more so than other towns - so that when we see what the Ashura-Kai have built in Shibuya, or what the Ring of Gaea have built in Ginzu, it feels like they've accomplished something, and we can weigh their successes versus the costs. The NPCs still explain who the Ashura-Kai are, but there's a bit of a manic edge to their dialogue because they can't get supplies from their supposed benefactors. We're a distance away from the "Reds" and most of the thugs - the downside stuff is in Shinjuku - and we'll get Gaea's upside in Ikebukuro, so the Ashura-Kai should seem fairly benevolent here, the wheels that are keeping society moving, at worst a necessary evil. But here is where we get sold on the Hunter's Association, because not only is it similar to the samurai, but with the Ashura-Kai largely absent, it's the independent contractors (the neutral party) who are keeping everyone alive.
The party should have a brief moment of conflict here. Chaos Hero sees the Land of the Unclean Ones and points out that there are children here; this place seems little different than Mikado on the face of it, and they should perhaps do what they can to help. Law Hero points out that they are not happy with the state of things either, but they have been ordered to hunt down the Black Samurai immediately; Mikado is in need of aid, because the Sabbath situation continues to grow, and they have only violated the Samurai's Code to come here at all because their people are in desperate need. Neutral Hero suggests that their immediate mission is information, and if that dovetails with helping out people in need, all the better. This works especially well because the last time the neutral hero suggested "stay the course" (regarding Hugo's orders) it was more aligned with law, versus now when it's less - things are still in balance in that regard.
So the game opens the cargo bay doors and lets challenge quests rain down. The goal is to learn about Tokyo, but it's not clear immediately what sidequests will prompt forward motion - that's okay! This is essentially the only time in the game that you can get away with this. Once we have a direction set, the game can't afford to lag, but after the enforced super-linearity of the game's fake-out opening act, this is a time where you can catch a breath. In theory, a rebuilt SMTIV will be on average more propulsive, with more linear events, and longer dungeon segments where the goal will be clear-cut - as long as you're careful with how you structure this bit, it won't feel like wheel-spinning. What will help is if Shinobazu Pond is harder and more dangerous than it is in the original game - as you're dipping in and out of it, you're using the quests available to get stronger in various ways, acclimating yourself to "Tokyo culture," probably even dressing like them now - when you catch up to the Black Samurai, it's important that Tokyo gameplay feel more present and "real" than Mikado did, so that her words have weight. We're going to go back to Mikado more in a rebuilt version, but until we catch our quarry, we don't have a strong reason to return except for healing and quests.
The hunter in the bar who directs you immediately to Peallaidh doesn't exist here, but if you visit the Kelpies, they'll mention that nobody gets near the river - they don't mention the aggressor's name either, but it's clear some other demon displaced them and they're enraged about it. Your comrades make it clear that there's too many to battle (you could even theoretically have a mechanic where they throw hordes at you eternally until you choose to flee, if you like). But one of the early-available quests is Nozomi's, and in addition to giving you the camera, she now mentions that she took some photos of the old Counter-Demon Force base.
It makes sense to puff up Nozomi's role a little - most of her material is optional, but she was liked in SMTIV for a reason. She's a decent enough character early on, before the game starts making fun of her incompetence as a hunter, which is the same misogynist streak that brings Isabeau low. While the sequel's... gone in some kind of direction with her, you can have a few more scenes with her here without overselling her. She still leaves after your little bonding moment, but the mention of the base gets Gabby on the line and she says that you should head for that based. "But what about the Black Samurai?" you ask, and Gabby can say that the base's data may be able to corrobrate the records from Aquila's time that the monastery is studying. Law Hero asks if they think it will help with what the "literature" is doing to the citizens, and Hugo, cagey, can point out they won't know unless they have the data.
It's theoretically possible to have slain the Peallaidh by now, but if not, you now have a reason to cross the river, so you can finish that quest next. Obviously the wording of the quest takes out the weird "foreign demon" part. And you can still have the cute gag with nobody wanting to carry the head, but it's the scene when you reach the Kelpies that should be markedly different. It's played basically as a joke, that the demons all line up to form a bridge, but this is an opportunity to show how the characters are changing. Flynn bears the severed head of a slain foe and strides across the backs of weaker demons who cower before him as crosses the river. This should be a moment of strength - and the Chaos Hero specifically should be awestruck at the idea of it, strength striding across the weak. Demons have been scary before this - not always literally, they've fought Chagrins and Onmorakis and what have you, but conceptually they're scary - but now they fear you. This should be the very first moment that the Chaos Hero sees a spark of potential in the idea. They don't suddenly tip into their alignment or anything, but it's an acknowledgement of actually occurring events and a natural place to begin people's growth into their roles.
The head should stay as a key item - Flynn carries it forever after as a burden, because Tokyo is changing him. Just as you stop thinking about the key item in your menu, Flynn stops noticing the smell - in the wasteland of Tokyo, after all, everything is life persisting in the refuse.
***
Next time, on "Rebuilding SMTIV," we talk about difficulty, game balance, and probably the Counter-Demon Force Base.
This analysis seems like horrible nitpicky garbage.
ReplyDeleteHere's a better look at SMTIV and IVA:
https://byjarinjove.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/a-thematic-analysis-of-shin-megami-tensei-iv/
https://byjarinjove.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/smtivathemes/
https://byjarinjove.wordpress.com/2017/10/18/thematic-analysis-of-shin-megami-tensei-iv-apocalypse-ii/
ReplyDeleteAdded a new one, since yours is so terrible.
I speak truth based on facts and evidence regardless of how others percieve me. You must be willing to face adversity for your beliefs.
Deletejust wanted to say i enjoyed the read. the game world in smt4 is very gripping, so i can see the motivation for your critique is to really bring to most out of this world and drag the player into it.
ReplyDeletei think a lot of your suggestions have a lot of merit.