Shin Megami Tensei 5's Neutral Figurehead

Maybe I should be more fucking careful what I wish for.

You may remember that after playing Shin Megami Tensei 4-1 and SMT Devil Survivor 2, back when each was still at least a relatively recent release, I wrote a rant in which I expressed dissatisfaction and concern with the fact that Shin Megami Tensei seemed to be headed in a direction of mistaking Neutrality for Indecision.  Isabeau and Daichi, the representatives of the Neutral faction in each title, were both irresolute hand-sitters completely paralyzed by an inability to make a decision or formulate a plan of action to further their cause.  In a series which takes pains to make its Neutral story path a distinct option unto itself rather than a middle-ground, this kind of figurehead for the faction is even less appropriate or satisfactory for Shin Megami Tensei than it would be for any other given game with plot routes based on diametrically opposed philosophies.

Well, the good news is that Shin Megami Tensei 5 has put that fear to rest!  Guess I got what I wanted.  Its Neutral Hero is by no means a sufferer of indecision!  This guy knows exactly what he wants to accomplish, and doesn’t hesitate for a moment to pursue that goal.  No wishy-washy whining like with Isabeau, no helpless navel-gazing like with Daichi.  THIS Neutral figurehead knows from the start what he’s about.  Because this time around, Shin Megami Tensei has chosen its Neutral representative to be...

Yakumo.

Yakumo is the one that Shin Megami Tensei 5 puts in humanity’s corner.

Yakumo.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Okay, Atlus.  Let’s just...let’s just review something here.  The Neutral path in Shin Megami Tensei?  It’s the one whose motivations are necessarily founded on the concept of doing what is best for humanity as a whole.  It’s the side that recognizes that human free will should not be trampled by the forces of an overbearing God, and also recognizes that a human’s life has value even if he/she isn’t powerful and ambitious enough to compete against demons.  That’s why Neutral is generally all about finding a way to successfully spurn the forces of both Heaven and Hell, so that humanity is able to both govern itself with its own laws, and also possess the freedom to pursue its joys and desires without paranormal competition.  You can argue the potential virtues of Law and Chaos to the interests of humanity in the long term as much as you like, and that’s fine and good and interesting--but at the end of the day, Neutral is the only Shin Megami Tensei faction that by definition has to prioritize the welfare of human beings first and foremost.

So do you see, Atlus, why making fucking YAKUMO of all goddamn people your Neutral Hero is a really boneheaded move?  Tell me you get this.  Please.  Please tell me, Atlus, that you can, at least in retrospect, understand why it was stupid to make the hero of humanity a guy who has said, and I quote, “Listen, without the will to fight, the will to live is meaningless.  If someone can’t fend for themselves, they’re better off dead anyway.”  

Sure, that’s the guy I want leading Team Humanity.  Yup, yup.  I want a guy who thinks the life of a therapist or a retail worker or a plumber or a farmer or an artist is worthless because this average untrained, peaceful human being doesn’t want to be forced into a battle for his life against a 7-foot-tall bipedal leopard dual-wielding broadswords.  Yeah, I think that the best person to put in humanity’s corner is the man who thinks that cerebral palsy is no excuse not to be out on the battlefield, personally exchanging blows with a chimera the size of a tour bus.  Stop lazing about, Nana, you think that just because you’re a 94-year-old retired social worker, you’ve earned the privilege not to be locked in brutal combat with Chernobog, Slavic god of evil and death?  No special treatment, you doddering layabout, trade that walker in for a battleaxe and be useful!

As incredibly boring and stupid as Isabeau was, as much of a disgrace as she was to the Neutral faction that she supposedly represented, at least I believed the game’s claim that she actually cared about her fellow human beings and wanted what was best for them.  All of them, not just the ones who would be personally useful to her cause.  Isabeau, at least, is not a person who I could see brow-beating an orphanage about the fact that its residents weren’t all out on the front lines of a war, being horrifically incinerated by a towering fire giant.  Atlus, you made the narrative guardian angel of humanity a man whose philosophy resents infants because they aren’t coming out of the womb clutching an AK-47 and demanding to know where that son-of-a-bitch Lucifer is.  What the actual fuck.

Hey, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we have an entire long, meandering chapter in this game that was founded on what a terrible thing it was that a girl had been bullied so much that she’d been easy prey to the temptation of the demon Lahmu?  I seem to remember that when this weak girl, Sahori, had been harassed to the point that she finally did something to fight back, it ended in violent tragedy for absolutely every single person who got involved--Sahori, her friend Tao, the bullies, probably several students who just happened to be in the building at the time, and Lahmu himself all died at the end of this venture, and even the protagonist only survived because the chick he was standing near just happened to be the goddess of Tokyo.  I’m sorry, was the overall agreed-upon takeaway of that entire situation somehow not the fact that it was terrible and tragic that Sahori was bullied?  Were we not intended to feel sorrow for the weak and innocent girl who was cruelly driven into a corner where she finally lashed out, to the destruction of everyone?  And yet, after taking a clear stance of sympathy with the downtrodden and passive, Shin Megami Tensei 5 then offers us a hero of humanity who would have done no more than sneer at Sahori for not being strong enough to fight off her bullies by herself.

Oh, and it only gets worse if what his page on the Megaten Wikipedia says is true.  See, it’s like this.  This callous, shitty perspective on the value of human life that makes Yakumo a considerably worse person than a substantial number of the demons and angels he scorns?  It’s only relevant because his Neutral faction plan is to destroy God’s throne, so no one can ever control the laws of existence again.  This means that no one can abuse the power of the position and impose their will upon all of existence, but it also means that no greater Law- or Chaos-allied power is gonna be able to come riding in to save humanity from the existence of living in a postapocalyptic world inhabited by innumerable powerful and frequently hostile demons who usually view humans as no more than resources or collateral.  So of course, in this scenario of Yakumo’s success, humanity will no longer be subjugated by the will and whimsy of an all-powerful higher being, but it will also have to scrape and claw for survival in a violent, inhospitable world.  A fact that doesn’t bother Yakumo morally, though, because as we’ve established, he’s the kind of guy who’d look at the corpse of a 6-year-old who got caught in a crossfire, and sneer that it’s the kid’s own fault for not being strong enough to fight back.  What an asshole.

BUT, this incredibly stupid and obscenely immoral philosophy might not even be genuine.  Now, full disclaimer: I do not recall seeing the following information in the game itself, and given that I moronically played that pile of crap enough times to have seen all of its endings, I doubt it’s something I missed.  I am assuming that the Wikipedia page is drawing on other canon sources like developer notes, or manga tie-ins, or the like.  It’s not something I can verify myself, at any rate.  We’re going to proceed with the belief that the page is accurate, until given indication otherwise.

So like I was saying, Yakumo’s shitty ideology may not even be honest.  Because, according to the Wikipedia page for Yakumo, he and Nuwa’s original plan was not to destroy God’s throne, but to use it themselves, and decree a world for humanity alone, with no gods or demons in it whatsoever (as seen in the “true” ending of the game).  In this scenario, humanity as a whole would be protected from these external paranormal threats to its freedom and welfare.  There wouldn’t be a long, bloody war for humanity’s survival and freedom; the weak and the peaceful would be safe and content inasmuch as humanity itself would allow them.  But Yakumo later changed his plan to the throne-breaking one with the every-man-for-himself rationale, because he and Nuwa fell in love, and since she’s a creation goddess from Chinese lore, wishing for a world without any demons and gods and whatnot would mean a world without her, too.

Yes, that’s right.  Yakumo didn’t decide to plunge humanity into a brutal, prolonged battle for survival against horrible odds because of an earnest belief in fending for oneself; that was only a convenient stupid doctrine he adopted after the fact.  He didn’t pursue a path which would result in the loss of countless innocent lives, and ultimately cost our species its capacity for gentleness and civility as only the strongest and most vicious emerge from the constant battles, because he actually believed it was the best course of action for humanity.  No.  It was decided to condemn countless people to violent ends and countless others to a harsh life of constant toil and struggle because Yakumo didn’t want to stop getting his peepee waxed.

Now again, I need to point out that this information on Yakumo having changed his life goals based on whether or not a snake woman was gonna be around to suck him off is based on what I read on the Wikipedia, not on what I have witnessed myself in the game.  It’s possible that this isn’t canon, but rather some wiki-user’s educated and highly believable theory.  On the other hand, the users of the Megami Tensei Wiki also have a purview of many more official sources than I do, and it’s not exactly unbelievable that this pretentious absolute turd of a human being would sell out his entire species for a handy.  I see no reason to doubt this is part of Yakumo’s canon.

But it’s still worth remembering that even if that Wikipedia page is full of crap, even if Yakumo didn’t decide that human lives would have to end in pain and terror so that he could get laid, he’s still a man to whom human lives have no inherent value.  Sociopathic simp or not, Yakumo is still an apathetic, pompous dick who proudly boasts a belief that a human being’s worth begins and ends with his or her willingness and ability to leap into lethal combat with monsters and demons.  And rather than making him 1 of the less sympathetic spokespeople of a Chaos route, or the face of some shitty Meritocracy faction like SMT Devil Survivor 2’s, or a natural selection Reason like Chiaki in SMT3...Atlus had this loser be the representative of the Neutral faction.  The faction that’s supposed to first and foremost be about doing right by humanity, ALL of humanity.  Brilliant work, Atlus, you’ve actually made me miss fucking Isabeau.  Just truly amazing stuff, you absolute fucking wads.

Final Fantasy 6's Separate Group Control Feature

Final Fantasy 6 introduced an interesting gameplay feature in the form of occasional sequences during the game’s course in which the player would separate the cast into multiple parties, and control these parties semi-simultaneously to accomplish a task through cooperation.  In some instances, there would be an invading group of enemies on a map, and the player would direct multiple teams of the heroes to intercept the attackers, while other uses of the mechanic involved multiple teams exploring a larger dungeon whose puzzles required cooperation as each team opened up new paths for the other(s).  It was a neat idea, and surprisingly well-executed considering its newness.

But the way the game implemented this feature is really weird, too.  Cuz, like...we can all agree it’s a fairly memorable aspect of Final Fantasy 6, right?  The last dungeon is a cooperative venture between 3 parties, and the battle for Narshe is 1 of the most signature elements of the game as a whole.  This multi-group control feature is definitely 1 of the things you strongly remember as a part of the experience of playing it.  And yet, this distinctive feature of Final Fantasy 6 occurs a mere 4 times in the game’s entire course!  That’s the initial Narshe fight with Locke and his team of deus ex machina moogles defending the sanctity of Terra’s naptime, then the climactic Narshe battle between the reunited heroes and Kefka’s invasion force, then later the cooperative exploration of the Phoenix’s cave, and finally the triple-team tower takedown at the end of the game.  The developers went to all the trouble of inventing, coding, and nearly flawlessly implementing this feature, just to only ever actually use it 4 times.  That’s like once every 10 hours, give or take.

And it’s even more a weird waste than it initially appears from those numbers.  Because that initial Narshe battle is basically just a tutorial for the system, not a sincere iteration of it.  It occurs extremely early in the game, and with the moogles doing all the heavy lifting, it’s hard to screw up so badly you lose.  And story-wise, the scenario would have been accomplished just as well by having Locke, Mog, and a couple backup moogles face down a couple pursuing enemies as a single fighting unit the way the rest of the game is handled.  So this really is just a tutorial session for the multi-group control dynamic.  A tutorial...for the single, solitary instance to follow in the game where you’ll be participating in a multi-group battle.

Which is another oddity of integration of this feature: the climactic multi-team combat aspect of it is only ever used half of the time it comes into play, even though it was this particular focus which the tutorial specifically trains the player for.  And it’s over and done with so early in the game!  The battle for Narshe is, what...30% of the way into Final Fantasy 6?  A third of the way through the game, you get your first real test of cooperative fighting as a group of teams against an enemy force, and it’s also the very last time.  Everything involving this feature past that point is just cooperative dungeon exploration.

And that’s pretty peculiar, too.  Because first of all, the first time it happens is a good, what, 80% of the way through the game?  Potentially more; getting Locke back on the team could very well be the final sidequest the player engages in before heading to Kefka’s tower for the finale.  So that’s a weird time to be dropping the fact that there’s a whole other application of this multi-group control feature which by this point the player has possibly forgotten about altogether.  And while the game would certainly be incomplete without having Locke around to finish the journey, it IS technically completely optional to even go through this cave to begin with, so there’s also every possibility that the joint venture through the final dungeon will actually be the first time the player deals with this avenue of the feature.  Not that the player needs a trial run or anything, the feature’s very simple to figure out, but still, it seems odd.

I mean, it’s not like there couldn’t have been more instances in FF6’s story where this feature was implemented.  The Magitek lab is a large enough dungeon that a little tweaking could’ve made it a good initial foray into the joint dungeon exploration.*  And the Floating Continent’s size, layout, and position in the story (coming into play just as the full team reunites and gains new members, at the most pivotal moment in the plot) is begging for a test-drive of the 3-group dungeon exploration that’s featured at the game’s end.

Meanwhile, a multi-group battle scene in which the team defends a town from an attacking band of monsters would have been a great opportunity to use the mechanic to further underscore the harsh realities of the new world in the game’s latter half.  It could be really cool: Celes arrives in town, the monsters attack, and the player has to direct 2 teams of fighters, populated by only Celes, Sabin (if he’s been recruited), and some woefully underpowered NPCs, to fight off half a dozen or so monster units.  It’d further hammer home the desperation of existence in this world, show how outclassed the survivors are against the beasts running amok, and even give an opportunity for Celes to develop her character; it could’ve reaffirmed her hope and her devotion to the cause of good by showing her that there’s still real, tangible good she could accomplish in this world, and people who needed her to do just that.  Phunbaba’s second attack on Kohlingen would’ve been another good opportunity for this feature; have the jerk bring some buddies, have the player use a couple teams to engage the attacking demons, make a proper epic battle out of it.  He still could’ve blown away the majority of the combatants after the rest of his allies had been beaten, given Terra her chance to shine, but the whole scenario would’ve been kicked up a notch.

The way that FF6 handles its multi-group scenarios just seems odd to me.  There’s so few of them for such a notable feature, and the way they’re paced is truly puzzling.  There were definitely other opportunities over the course of the game for additional instances of multi-group battles and dungeon exploration which would have made sense and been fairly easy to incorporate.  It’s certainly not a negative for the game, of course, but it seems like there was a lot more opportunity for the feature to be a positive than was realized.  In spite of its placement in some key scenarios, this feature winds up only being a fun and interesting novelty in Final Fantasy 6, when it could have been an iconic signature like, say, the army battles of Suikoden, or the ship combat of Skies of Arcadia.













* It would’ve made more sense from a plot perspective, too.  I mean, if you’re gonna invade the Empire’s own home turf, you’d think you’d want your full team on that.  Yeah, protecting the Esper in Narshe is important and all, but with Figaro as a buffer to the southwest and with the Empire’s initial attack force having been demolished with a long and complicated process to build up a new one in South Figaro, if it can manage to at all, Narshe is pretty well protected.  Hell, it’s basically now the heart of Returner territory.  Keeping 2 of the Returners’ best agents behind to protect the Esper at this time doesn’t make sense; it’s like benching 2 of your all-stars during a championship game so they can protect the gatorade cooler.

Also would’ve been more sensible from a gameplay standpoint.  Taking 2 (or more) party members out of the player’s hands for the entire sequence of raiding the Magitek factory is a bad decision to begin with, particularly when they’ve likely already been absent for a while given how inconvenient it is at that point in the game to backtrack and change party members.  And it even would’ve numerically added up basically perfectly - 2 groups with a maximum of 4 characters means a total of 8 spots that can be filled by 6 regular characters to choose from (Celes, Sabin, Edgar, Cyan, Gau, and Locke) and a seventh part timer in Shadow (if you’ve hired him), with the last slot being open for upcoming addition of Setzer.

Shin Megami Tensei 5's Nahobino Fusion Scene

As awful as the ending of Shin Megami Tensei 5 is, it’s worth noting that the preceding events of its finale are disappointing garbage, too.  Case in point?  The Nahobino fusion scene.

So, in the Empyrean, the final dungeon (if a linear path with no real detours containing a total of 5 fights altogether can be called such), you reach a point, towards its end, at which you catch up with your faction’s allies (Atsuta and Koshimizu if you’re Chaos, Dazai and Abdiel if you’re Law, Yakumo and Nuwa if you’re Neutral), and your faction’s enemies.  When you get there, you find that your comrades have managed to get their asses kicked by your foes.  And I mean that your buddies got thoroughly wrecked; they’re down on their knees, barely keeping it together, while their foes don’t look to have suffered a scratch.

So I’m justifiably annoyed from the start as I roll up on this debacle, cuz like...really?  You assholes couldn’t have at least softened them up a little for me?  I’m already clearly gonna have to clean up your mess here anyway, but you couldn’t have at least landed a goddamn punch beforehand for my benefit?  There isn’t even a speck of dirt on our mutual foes, guys, these fuckers look immaculate and I know that that’s not from any association with the Virgin Mary. I know because she’s in my party and I checked with her.  She says she had nothing to do with it, y’all just weak as shit.

How the hell did my allies lose this fast, for that matter?  I entered the portal to this place, like, 30 seconds after everyone else.  These fuckers must have been speedrunning defeat!  Forget being brought down by their foes--there shouldn’t have been enough time for them to kill themselves, for Nocticula’s sake!

But at any rate, the horses you’ve backed are getting turned into glue when you find them in the Empyrean.  So you show up, and you find that you’re just in time to watch the victors of this off-screen skirmish decide that now’s the time to finally fuse together and become the Nahobino they were meant to be.  And watch you most certainly do, because Zon Kuthon forbid the protagonist of Shin Megami Tensei 5 ever, ever not indulge in Voyeuristic Paralysis Syndrome whenever he’s given the opportunity.  Make even the slightest attempt to stop his enemies from merging together to form a real, actual fucking god?  Nah, not when there’s more important stuff for the protagonist to do, like standing motionlessly and staring emotionlessly.  More on THIS little bad habit in a forthcoming rant, believe you me.

So yeah, with nothing stopping them, your faction enemies do their little fusion thing, and...fuckin’ hell, just thinking about this is giving me an aneurysm because it’s so goddamn stupid.  They fuse together, and your allies are killed by the Dragon Ball Z power-up winds that result from it.  I mean for fuck’s sake, guys.  It’s not enough for you assholes to make record time at getting the shit beaten out of you off-screen, you have to make the cherry on top dying to a breeze?  Jesus Christ, your faction allies in this game make Shin Megami Tensei 3’s ISAMU look less pathetic by comparison.  At least when HE decided to up and die even when his faction was the winning team, he did so from the wounds he received from his off-screen battle.  He wasn’t murdered by lethal hype.

Hey, here’s a question: where the hell was YOUR wave of destructive power-up wind, huh?  I’m talking about way back at the beginning of the game, when the protagonist first joined with Aogami to become the Nahobino.  Didn’t see any radiating burst of power then!  And it would’ve been handy, because the circumstances for that joining was that our hero had run afoul of a handful of minor tutorial monsters and Aogami was trying to protect him from them.  Why do a couple of secondary characters becoming a Nahobino release such a shockwave of raw power that it kills off experienced demons and demon hunters, but when the blasted protagonist does it, it doesn’t even lightly nudge a single level 3 experience-fodder enemy?

The whole thing really devalues and cheapens the characters you’ve allied with, too.  Let’s say that you’ve chosen the Chaos route, for example.  Doing so means that the very first and only time you see Koshimizu in any kind of combat situation, it’s specifically to watch him get trashed.  Isn’t this the same joker who’s been talking up how much better it’ll be if Tokyo is protected by a posse of local gods like him?  Not instilling a lot of confidence in that future with your career win-loss record of 0-1 there, Champ.

And it’s even worse if you’ve sided with Law.  Because the last time you saw Dazai and Abdiel, Dazai was showing off the fact that his baseball cap was apparently weighted training clothing and taking it off quadrupled his power level.  More importantly, Abdiel achieved the climax of her character arc and went through a cool, intimidating transformation, becoming a fallen angel as she embraced the need to defy God in order to achieve His goals.  So we go from the culmination of Abdiel’s story, the impressive and perhaps even chilling fall she undergoes to become a terrifying dark avatar of blasphemy, to...colorful wind disintegrating her after an enemy effortlessly beat her off-screen.  

Yeah, I sure do love it when a character goes through a whole personal arc to achieve a higher state of being for absolutely no goddamn reason whatsoever.  “My gods, the power!  The POWER!  I’ve never felt anything like it!  By my estimate, I am now strong enough...to bruise my enemy’s knuckles a little as he beats my ass into the pavement!”

Objectively, I also recognize that this sequence is bullshit if you picked the Neutral path.  I have to admit, however, I find it more difficult to be affronted by this scenario, because getting to see that sneering, arrogant fuckwit Yakumo get his self-important ass handed to him like the sad weak little shit he wants to pretend he isn’t...well, it's better for my mental state than professional therapy.

Even just the fact that any of this is happening at all at this point in the game is dumb and makes no sense.  Why the fuck were these 4 idiots all battling normally before you show up, anyway?  Everyone’s in the Empyrean with the intention of taking God’s throne because each pair can become a Nahobino, and only a Nahobino can actually use said throne to dictate the nature of the world.  So why the ACTUAL FUCK did NONE of them choose to power up BEFORE this moment!?  If you find yourself battling against enemies who are of comparable strength to you, and everything is on the line, wouldn’t your first move be to transform into your ultra-powerful god form to gain the advantage?  Actually, rewind.  If you find yourself in a race to get to God’s throne and use it before your competitors, wouldn’t your first move be to transform into the Nahobino form that can actually make use of said throne, so that you don’t have to waste time doing so once you’ve actually made it there?

No, actually, rewind even further--why not just transform into one’s god form before even entering the damn Empyrean realm to begin with?  What benefit was there in not just doing it from the get-go?  If we go by the example of the protagonist, there’s no time limit on the Nahobino fusion, , no stated plot restriction preventing them from doing so.  It’s not even like it’s an irreversible process; we’ve seen Aogami and the protagonist separate multiple times at will.  Atlus, if someone gains the ability to become an honest-to-themself god, with no downsides whatsoever, there’s no one alive who isn’t gonna DO that immediately!  Especially if they have something very important to accomplish which such a transformation could help facilitate!

It gets even more idiotic when you realize that the losing pair in this scene are also just as capable of transforming into a Nahobino.  It’s dumb enough that the victors wait until AFTER their success is guaranteed to unleash their secret weapon, but your faction allies basically have just chosen to die, because they’ve refused to play their trump card even as they get absolutely demolished.  It’s like people who refuse to use up their best healing items during a game’s final battle, only somehow even more moronic.

Jesus Christ this game is garbage.  On the rare occasions it actually deigns to DO something with its story, this is the kind of stilted, irrational, careless schlock that results.  And I’m still not even done with taking Shin Megami Tensei 5 to task for its failures yet!  There is more, significantly more, to come!  You wouldn’t think you could write more sentences about how bad a game is than there are in the game’s own script, but I’m pretty sure I’m gonna get there, if I haven’t already!