Shin Megami Tensei 5's Cover Art

You know, the cover art for Shin Megami Tensei 5 is baffling.  Here, look at this thing:

OOPS!  All Asshats

I mean, first of all, it just looks kinda messy in general.  It’s as if some kid dropped a bunch of his stickers all in a pile, and just left them there, facing whatever directions they happened to land in.  I’m fairly sure that if I were to open up 1 of the boxes in which I keep my action figures I played with as a kid, the assorted jumble of superheroes and monsters and mutants that would greet me would be indistinguishable from this mess.  Heaven help you if you actually want to try to sort out whose limbs are where here; my sister and I spent a good 10 minutes on a Where’s Waldo hunt to nail down the positioning of Nuwa’s (the chick at the top) legs, and figure out that what appears to be a single leg shaped like an S on Khonsu (the green guy) is actually 2 separate legs positioned perfectly to be confusing.  If there is any possible way that transposing 1 character image on top of another will obscure the latter in a disorderly and misleading way, this cover finds it.

At a guess, I’d say that the artist was shooting for a quadrant setup, wherein the space behind the protagonist is split into 4 parts and each spot is occupied by a character symbolic to a game faction or 1 of the game’s 4 endings or something.  But with everyone asymmetrically facing different directions and stretching themselves out in an unruly clutter, whatever symbolic intent there may have been is totally ruined.  How the hell do you fuck up a straightforward, neat, orderly quadrant setup?  It’s not like this is a foreign idea to Atlus; they did the behind-protagonist-faction-split thing for SMT4-1’s cover art just fine.  But for some reason, this time around they’ve just made the whole thing look like the outcome of a failed game of Twister.

And let’s not mince words here: the art itself is pretty damned bad.  Like, it all looks okay at a glance, albeit a senseless jumble, but give this cover a bit of scrutiny, and you realize that this thing’s a damned disaster of bad proportions.  The Nahobino’s twisting himself around the way female bodies do in stereotypically bad 80s comic books, and there is nothing about the angling of his right leg and ankle that looks right to me.  And what the hell is going on with Khonsu’s legs?  The man’s left calf, which is closer to the viewer, is somehow smaller than the calf of the leg that is further from the viewer.  And Jesus Christ, look at Nuwa’s arm!  The woman’s got a branch like Sten from Breath of Fire 2, a monkey-man whose utility was having arms so long they were basically grappling hooks!  And you don’t even see the end of the thing in this picture; for all we know, that absurd little wrist the width of a ballpoint pen might extend another 4 feet before finally ending in her hand.  These characters look like they were drawn by a damned AI--and not one of the ones who draw my porn, either, those things understand proportions and perspective way better.

Still, cover art whose sin is merely bad quality isn’t something I’d usually rant on.  I mean, since I’ve already brought Sten to mind, it’s worth remembering that not once in the last 15 years have I said a single thing about the fact that Breath of Fire 1 and 2’s SNES box art in the USA looks like someone at Squaresoft/Capcom was going through a Rob Liefeld phase.  As amateurish and unappealing as Shin Megami Tensei 5’s cover art may be, surely it’s not significantly more deserving of scorn than Gobi, Ox, and Rand’s soulless Youngblood eyes, nor Bow’s pose and grin ripped straight out of a try-hard 90s drug PSA.  But SMT5’s cover art is more than just merely a tangled, poorly-designed mess.  What’s really perplexing about it is the content of that mess.

So, Nuwa and Abdiel (the angel), sure, you expect them to be in there.  They’re the major patrons of 2 of the game’s 3 factions, after all, and some of the most important characters in the game.  Hell, Abdiel’s 1 of exactly 2 individuals in the entirety of Shin Megami Tensei 5 that I could really qualify as actually having a story arc.  And it makes sense for Amanozako (the fairy) to be right there with the protagonist, since she’s the closest thing to a proper, real party member that the game can offer.

But what the heck are Khonsu and Hayataro (the canine) doing there?  Khonsu is the central figure of a goddamn sidequest in the game.  Sure, you have to have finished that sidequest in order to access the final, “true” Neutral ending, but that doesn’t actually tie him to the ending or story in any meaningful way.  If we’re going to count just any old entity whose event flag has to have been activated for you to reach the ending as someone important, we might as well throw the shopkeeper, some tutorial enemies, and Faceless NPC 14 in there with Khonsu, too; can’t beat the game without interacting in some way with all of them!

And Hayataro?  For real?  Hayataro is so inconsequential that I have to look up his name every single time I need to refer to him.  And I can say that with complete confidence in its accuracy, because this rant is to date the first time I’ve ever had to do so, and I highly doubt there’ll be a second instance.  He’s THAT insignificant.  I may have literally forgotten that Noel in Star Ocean 2 wasn’t just a random NPC, multiple times, as I played it, but at the very least I can still remember his damned name!  Atlus could not have selected a less material character to represent this game, short of just slapping a random-encounter enemy on there!  And frankly, even that’s debatable, because you’ll have spent more time in the presence of every random encounter enemy in this game than you will have in Hayataro’s.

And the space Khonsu and Hayataro occupy...with Abdiel on the lower right and Nuwa on the upper right, it seems obvious that Hayatero’s and Khonsu’s being in the opposite quadrants is meant to imply that they’re representing factions just as Abdiel and Nuwa do.  So that just makes this all the more puzzling.  Why in the world would Chaos be signified by Hayatero, the mere combat partner to Atsuta, and not by Koshimizu, the actual damn patron of the faction?  Koshimizu’s the obvious counterpart to Abdiel and Nuwa in the game.  Hayataro’s like the henchman of a henchman.

And what is Khonsu doing there at all?  I mean, yes, okay, Neutral has 2 separate endings it can get and, as mentioned, 1 of them requires you to have finished a series of sidequests in which Khonsu figures heavily, but even if we were to pretend that he’s got any actual thematic significance to the faction of Neutrality, he still is certainly not so important in his sidequest capacity that you could rationally consider him a patron of the faction like Nuwa, Abdiel, and Koshimizu are.  And why should we even pretend that far? The fact is still that Khonsu has no actual thematic or philosophical ties to Neutral, especially not the version of Neutral that this game’s ending champions--why is the guy who proves that demons can be benevolent to humans being touted as the symbol of an ending which bans all demons from existence?

I’m not even going to bother questioning why the fuck 1 of Lahmu’s tentacle mouths happens to just be sitting disembodied in the background.  There’s just not gonna be a good answer to that.

Lastly, in addition to talking about who’s on this cover when they shouldn’t be, let’s also talk about who’s not on this cover when they absolutely should be.  Namely: Tao.  Where’s Tao?  Shouldn’t she be here, too?  Tao is maybe the most important figure in her own right within this miserable excuse for a story, the nearest approximation you can get to the traditional SMT Heroine like Hiroko and Isabeau.  As I said earlier, I can only assume that Amanozako’s on the cover because she’s the closest thing to a consistent companion that SMT5 has to offer, so why wouldn’t Tao, the other substantial companion-ish ally in the game, also be here?  She’d be a good counterpart to Amanozako, in that regard, providing another case of the 2-sides-opposed thing that the quadrant setup allows for.  Not like there’d be much problem with adding her there, either; Tao would basically just be covering up Abdiel’s ballerina-posing leg ineptly overlapping with Hayatero’s limb, and Lahmu’s completely inexplicable tentacle-maw.  No great loss on any of those counts.  Then again, given the level of skill with symmetry that’s been evident thus far with this art, no doubt Tao’s presence there would translate into having her stretched into an unholy pretzel like some glitching asset in a Bethesda title.

As far as Shin Megami Tensei 5’s sins go, having a bad piece of cover art is about as light and harmless as they come.  This is absolutely 1 of those rants--those many, many rants--about a subject that I myself fully admit doesn’t really matter.  Still, egregious incompetence when it comes to the little things is so often the first warning sign that the same poor quality permeates a product to its core, and that’s certainly the case here.  With Shin Megami Tensei 5, you really can judge a book by its cover.