Shin Megami Tensei 5's Lack of Storytelling

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I have a great deal of respect for the Shin Megami Tensei series.  Yes, the series has moments when creative decisions are made that I don’t agree with, and there are opportunities that it fails to take advantage of.  There are moments when the games can’t effectively accomplish their aim, some stuff that’s just plain bad, and there’s even been an SMT that’s a poor game in its own right.  And let’s not forget the fact that Atlus can’t make DLCs for shit.  Still, for all I’ve criticized this franchise, I think my enthusiasm and respect for SMT as a whole has been pretty clear for some time now.  From its SNES conception,* Shin Megami Tensei has been characterized by thoughtful, analytical creativity in its stories about the tenets and fundamentals of human systems of faith and belief, and the forms that they take.  Even if they don’t always hit the mark, because they always put in a demonstrable effort to be meaningful, I generally don’t hesitate to buy a Shin Megami Tensei title.

Well, I’m gonna start hesitating going forward.

I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not fair to compare Shin Megami Tensei 5 to Pokemon Generation 8.  Because it’s not!  Pokemon Sword and Shield is a game that actively refuses to tell you its story, repeatedly directing you away from the plot occurring in its background so you can focus solely on a paint-by-numbers Pokemon journey right until the game’s very end. But it’s not like Pokemon Generation 8 would have been a good RPG had its writers bothered to be writers, because the story it jealously guards from the player’s eyes is trite and silly, with incredibly artificially inflated stakes.  It’s a tale about 1 guy who’s neurotically, completely unreasonably fixated on a problem that’s incredibly far off in the distant future, and another guy carelessly, even more unreasonably determined not to take even a tiny, inching first step towards preparing to address that future problem.  It’s basically Linkara’s depiction of the Monitors, except 1 side is somehow engaging even less.

But Shin Megami Tensei 5, I have reminded myself more than once, is not like that.  SMT5 has some sincerely interesting concepts with a lot of potential!  Setting the game in a version of the mainline SMT series where Lucifer actually won the original conflict of Law vs. Chaos is a very interesting scenario that provides all kinds of possibilities to explore--so far we’ve generally only seen the series delve into scenarios where the war was diverted or extended in some outside way (SMT1, 3, and 4), and all of those stem from a starting point of God having the upper hand and Lucifer’s bunch being the underdogs rising up against Him.  To see how a scenario plays out where the original SMT conflict of Heaven vs. Hell naturally, without outside factors, ended with Lucifer victorious is an interesting idea.  Using this new setting as a springboard to explore a new angle on Law vs. Chaos,** since the icon of the former is gone and the forces of the latter are already in charge (so to change the world for Chaos’s sake would have to mean finding a new take on what it constitutes), is also an appealing concept.

And the incorporation of Garden of Eden mythology into the lore of Shin Megami Tensei in this game is really, really cool.  It’s a very clever, even brilliant stroke, of explaining why so many of the multicultural gods we encounter in these games are not exactly as incomprehensibly powerful and all-encompassing as they theoretically should be, by saying that the Christian God cast them down (which also neatly ties into His history of doing that with uppity angels) and stole their true divinity from them, their Knowledge, and put it into the tree whose fruit Adam and Eve then ate.  Just...SUCH a cool idea that perfectly connects on so many different levels to the story of Eden.

And what about the implications of the fact that Lucifer desires to be unmade, once he has acquired the Knowledge of God?  What a fascinating idea to explore from the angle of pondering why God created Lucifer to begin with.  Even more fun when considered in conjunction with the idea, shown by Abdiel’s corruption toward the end of the game, that a fallen angel can still be a servant of the spirit of God even while defying His word.  So many interesting concepts in this game!

So yeah, a comparison with Pokemon Generation 8 is, I remind myself frequently, unfair.  SMT5 has got some really strong, interesting ideas at its core, some of the best and most creative uses of both Christian mythology and the series’s own utility of world religions that we’ve seen since the series originated on the SNES!  The potential for intellectual exploration and analysis of Christianity and faith as a whole is, in Shin Megami Tensei 5, the highest that the franchise has seen in over 20 years.  To compare it to Pokemon Generation 8’s halfhearted take on Dad moaning about the electric bill as Junior leaves the lights on in rooms he’s not in is absurd.

And yet, unfortunately, that is the analogy that my mind keeps returning to.  Because while the potential of their ideas could not be more different, both Pokemon Generation 8 and Shin Megami Tensei 5 share the same utterly, wholly self-defeating flaw.  They each adamantly and uniformly will not tell their story.

SMT5 does not have any single infuriating plot gatekeeper like Pokemon’s Leon to repeatedly wave the player on over the game’s course, telling him/her “nothing to see here, move along.”  But SMT5 ultimately comes across as similarly lazy, because it just utterly refuses, from almost its start to almost its finish, to take the time to expound on its ideas, pace out its story beats (or even, really, possess an adequate number of plot points to begin with), develop the major actors in its cast, or delve in any meaningful way into the philosophies of Law, Chaos, and Neutrality that it presents to the player at its end.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 is narratively empty.

From top to bottom, there’s almost no aspect of storytelling in this game that feels complete, or even close to it.  It’s like the literary equivalent of an abandoned construction project.  The huge majority of the time you spend in the game is just empty gameplay, wandering through a handful of, frankly, largely uninteresting post-apocalyptic sets fighting enemies and perpetually pursuing moving quest markers.  Only occasionally is there any interruption of dialogue or exposition during these treks, most of the time with entities who are only stopping by to give a status update or not even present at all, with the lion’s share of storytelling taking place between major dungeon areas--but that lion’s share is short and rushed, cramming barebones plot beats into about 5 to 10 minutes so it can quickly ship you out to the next empty void of enemy encounters and ongoing games of Gold Skulltulla-esque hide-and-seek.

This means, first of all, that the cast members are generally stunted even by the minimal standards of the franchise--and let’s face it, character development is already the weakest point of the mainline Shin Megami Tenseis.  Aogami, for example, is the robot-demon-thing that fuses with the protagonist to become the Nahobino, and is thus a present entity in something like 95% of the game’s course.  And yet this abundance of time for him to develop is thoroughly squandered.  The substantial majority of his interactions with the main character are simply acting as a convenient signpost to direct you to the next quest marker.  On the rare occasions when he actually engages with the protagonist, it’s usually to offer a short, terse reaction or assessment of something which has happened.  Occasionally he’ll ask the protagonist a question, but since SMT5 has followed the series tradition of needlessly handicapping itself with a silent protagonist, these answers are 1-line, non-emotive responses that say virtually nothing and could not by any stretch of the imagination qualify as a shared communication experience.  The 1 and only character trait Aogami is given is a complete devotion to the protagonist, as he constantly, from the second chapter onward, states and restates his intention to protect the protagonist, support his decisions, empower him to achieve his goals, check under his bed for scary monsters each night, and so on.  Season 8 John Snow mumbles “MUH KWEEN” less ubiquitously than Aogami reassures the protagonist that he’s his wingman.

And where does this overwhelming, unreasoning devotion to the protagonist come from?  No idea.  There’s not a single scene in this game, not a hint of a personal conversation between them, that would even remotely explain why Aogami is willing to follow this kid to hell and back, willing to defy both his superiors and his own family for this dude, willing even to ultimately erase himself from existence because this androgynous adolescent thinks it’ll be a good idea.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 has the entire game in which to build some form of chemistry that can explain why Aogami is willing and able to defy his code, his familial instincts, and/or even his self-preservation for this kid he happened by chance to fall face-first into, and it just doesn’t do it.

And if the game won’t do it for the character who’s with you for its effective entirety, it should come as no surprise how faultily undeveloped the rest of the cast is, too.  Atsuta, for example, winds up being the Chaos Hero of the game, but there’s absolutely no development of him towards this destination--he starts as an austere defender of Tokyo, and since he’s told that the best way to protect Tokyo is to embrace Prime Minister Koshimizu’s path of Chaos, that’s the way he stays as he unquestioningly follows.  This guy is the human entity meant to be the face of 1 of the 3 major factions of the game, and there’s no development of his character, there’s no scene in which his convictions about protecting Tokyo are tested or even particularly explained, no conversation or monologue which establishes his coming to the conclusion that the best way of protecting Tokyo is a return to the days of the many old gods, nothing!  He just smiles and nods (minus the smile because Atsuta’s competing with the protagonist for the Least Capable of Human Emotion Award), and doesn’t put Koshimizu’s theory through the 20 seconds of scrutiny it would take to realize it’s absurd.  Shin Megami Tensei 4’s Walter does the Chaos Hero role proud compared to this empty schmuck, and Walter sucked.

For that matter, Koshimizu himself hasn’t got the narrative attention he needs.  He confidently states that Tokyo will be better protected by a world in which the multiple gods of Japan can oversee it, but he doesn’t go into any detail beyond that.  We’re given no indication of how the guy came to this conclusion (which is in contrast to his own damned experience as the sole director of the city for the last 20 years), and he doesn’t deign to explain his position or debate its opposition.  By contrast, SMT3’s Hikawa could actually reason for his Reason, and we could see the experiences that would clearly lead Chiaki and Isamu to their own paths (even if the latter was an idiot).  This isn’t just the half-baked posturing of some generic RPG antagonist, this is 1 of the major, fundamental paths of the game, and SMT5 doesn’t give either of its champions the time of day!  You can make the argument that the main SMTs have (excluding SMT4-2) always been focused on the intellectual, conceptual side of storytelling rather than the personal, emotional one, but characters like Atsuta and Koshimizu are still the mouthpieces of 1 of the game’s main philosophical angles--not developing them hurts the story’s bottom line, period!

The death of Tao should be a major, formative moment in shaping how the protagonist will desire to shape the world, and yet throughout the chapter in which she’s walking beside you, there’s almost no interaction whatsoever with her, and what little is there is focused entirely on moving the main quest forward.  Aogami can talk about how terrible the world is when “a dear friend’s death is a single drop in a sea of loss,” which is very poetic, but dude, the protagonist just met Tao like 3 days ago and they barely talked at all.  I have a better-established and more meaningful relationship with the guy who makes pizza at a local bar than the Nahobino had with Tao!  And in addition to badly undercutting the weight of what’s intended to be the most emotional scene in the game, the fact that Tao and the protagonist’s friendship has been so rushed and undeveloped makes her later resurrection completely underwhelming.  SMT5 was trying to pull the same thing that SMT1 did with the Heroine and SMT4-2 did with Asahi, but Asahi was an established character who’d interacted substantially with Nanashi, and even the Heroine felt like she had a better bond with her protagonist.  And this narrative negligence hurts Tao’s return twice further, because Tao as the goddess of creation is pledging to support the protagonist’s choice of what the world will be out of some confidence in his personal character that she supposedly witnessed during her time with him in the second chapter.  Where is this confidence coming from?  She didn’t know him, he didn’t know her, there is no basis for these elements of friendship and support that the game insists exist between them!

And oh, even after she returns, Tao still is given basically no character development whatsoever as the game rushes at breakneck pace toward its finale.  This character is in your party for nearly half the game, is meant to be a fundamental part of the story’s emotional component, and she’s no one to you!

She’s also apparently no one to anyone else, because after Tao is resurrected, she’s completely ignored by Dazai, Abdiel, Atsuta, and Koshimizu whenever you encounter them.  Yeah, no one comment on the fact that this chick is back from the dead and floating around as a creation goddess, or anything.  Not like Tao was a part of Atsuta’s friend group, or the Saint of Bethel, or the fundamental martyr whose death spurred the final stage of the war, or anything.  No, no one react in any way to her being back from the dead, that’d take like 2 minutes of dialogue and we can’t delay our headlong charge toward the ending for anything!

The writers’ disinterest with writing is just present everywhere!  The secondary players of Zeus, Odin, Vishnu, and Khonsu are only introduced minutes before the chapter begins in which they’re to be destroyed, even though they’re each major players in the game’s lore/history.  Atsuta’s sister Miyazu is introduced as though she’s supposed to be as major a character in the game as the Law, Chaos, and Neutral Heroes, yet the most she amounts to is being the plot device of the Khonsu sidequest--a sidequest based around how devoted Khonsu is to her, which means nothing to us since we see very little of Miyazu, and what little we see amounts to nothing more extraordinary than an NPC.  Amanozako is easily the best-characterized individual in the cast, and even her story is largely rushed through, an optional sidequest treated more as an afterthought than anything significant once it’s finally started.  Yakumo and Nuwa are the representatives of the Neutral path, the one that the SMT series actually wants you to choose, and yet they somehow are given even less screen time to make their case and show their character than the Law and Chaos representatives.  The monk guy is such a non-character that he makes Star Ocean 2’s Noel look like someone whose name I didn’t have to just look up by comparison..

The story goes from the first skirmish you see between Bethel and the demons, to the final battle!  This war that’s been going on for 20 years is settled the second you get involved in it, during a large-scale battle that you mostly don’t see!  The major villains of this grand conflict are introduced to you right before you kill them!

You know, the city of Tokyo is at the heart of both the Law and Chaos route’s motivation.  Both Dazai and Atsuta want to protect Tokyo specifically--the future of the world is to be decided by which path you choose, but the rest of the world’s fate is only tangential; the entities embodying Law and Chaos are acting specifically with the desire of protecting Tokyo, and to some degree the same is implied of the protagonist.  But Tokyo (the populated one you want to protect, that is, not the destroyed “real” one) is the setting in the game that you spend the absolute least amount of time in!  How can you base the primary, motivating conflict of the story on a love for a city, and then have the characters spend virtually no time in that city?  We’re expected to potentially identify with and respect Atsuta’s and Dazai’s devotion to Tokyo, yet we’ve spent no time in the city, seen none of its features or landmarks or culture or populace!  Previous mainline SMTs, and even several of the series’s spin-offs, have made Tokyo in its various forms their world map, shown its people and places over time--they gave it enough time and relevance to their events that you actually gave a damn about it, or at the very least, could believe that the characters would.  But the Tokyo that so much fuss is made of in this game is little more than a theoretical to the audience.

Characters are empty set pieces, events are paced terribly, important lore elements and plot devices are only established seconds before their activation in the story’s events, no philosophy is elaborated on, and there are even times when the game itself seems to have forgotten that it didn’t bother to show scenes it needed.  An example of the latter?  There’s a point at which Dazai talks about how Koshimizu is always checking with them and other subordinates to see how they feel about decisions that are made (as a counterpoint to Dazai, who prefers a stronger, more authoritative leader), except he never actually does this, at least not that I can see!  Need another example?  In the scene where all the remaining major players have gathered at the portal to the Empyrean, Yakumo comes up to them like the dramatically self-important loser he is and declares that it “sounds like you forgot about us.”  Uh, no, they didn’t forget about you, they didn’t even know you were in the running to begin with!  The game is acting like Yakumo has previously established himself to them all as a competitor for the throne, yet this is the first time he’s ever been on screen at the same time as Koshimizu, Abdiel, Atsuta, or Dazai.  Half of those assembled probably don’t even know who this guy is!  Yakumo, no one in this room could even be bothered to bat an eye at the fact that their dead classmate and/or saint Tao is floating in front of them, resurrected as a goddess; you think they’re gonna remember you?

Shin Megami Tensei 5’s pace reminds me of the old army saying, “hurry up and wait.”  It’s perpetually in a rush to blurt out the bare minimum amount of story elements that it can get away with so it can hurry you along to the next long, boring expanse of nothingness to repetitively, mindlessly fight enemies within as you wait for the next crumb of plot to be thrown hastily at you.  It’s a wonder they even bothered with the pretense of telling a story to begin with--it sure as hell seems like what Atlus really wanted was to follow in the footsteps of Fallout 76!

Now, it’s been pointed out to me that the mainline Shin Megami Tensei titles have always had, shall we say, a light touch, narratively speaking.  Their casts are almost always underdeveloped and unmemorable, and they don’t exactly do a lot of hand-holding when it comes to explaining their ideas and story progression.  That’s certainly true enough.  If an average RPG’s storytelling procedure could be likened to walking down a path, then mainline Shin Megami Tenseis could be seen as a set of large stones breaking the surface of a pond, a path on which you must carefully leap from 1 stepping stone to the next.  But if that’s what previous mainline SMTs can be seen as, then the narrative progression from story point to story point in Shin Megami Tensei 5 is a sadistic Mario Maker stage of giant pit after giant pit that are only barely technically traversable.  There is a world of difference between a light narrative touch, and an absent one, and SMT5 consistently goes with the latter.

I’m sorry that this rant has been 1 of my more unfocused ones.  There’s just so many different examples of Shin Megami Tensei 5’s failure to adequately tell its story, and its failure frustrates me so much each time, that I kinda just have to holler it all out in a jumble.  And make no mistake, it’s not just the lacking quantity of its writing--there are some serious issues with the writing’s quality, too, which we’ll be discussing more over the course of this year.  But by far the greatest obstacle that prevents Shin Megami Tensei 5 from being a good game, which it absolutely could have been with its core ideas, is the same great failing of Pokemon Generation 8: it’s just not interested in taking the time to tell its own story.














* Yes, I know Megaten has existed in some capacity or other since before the 16-bit era, but the series clearly came into its own as an intellectual property and pursuit as Shin Megami Tensei, and I’m content to simply labor under the idea that SMT1 was where it all really started.


** Well...sorta new.  SMT5’s take on Law is the idea of following the spirit and ideal of God even in defiance of His own will, which is a fascinating concept and gives us a new perspective on fallen angels, but...well, Shin Megami Tensei 2’s Law route did already basically do that.  Still, SMT5 at least finds an angle where defying the letter of God’s law in order to preserve its spirit doesn’t require one to punch God in the Face, so there’s a little difference, at least.