Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Stray Thoughts

Yeah, it’s probably not a big surprise that I’ve got some thoughts on this game, and yeah, it’s probably not a big surprise that they’re generally not complimentary.  What WILL be a big surprise is if any of these stray thoughts are actually entertaining.  But you’re here anyway, you’re already 2.5 sentences deep into the rant, and sunk cost fallacy is a thing, so you may as well ride this out and read what I’ve got to say, right?



- Ah, yes, well of course Itsuki is a generic nothingburger whose widely-admired virtues and personality all boil down to basic, minimal common decency.  After all, all the girlies in the game are artificially crafted to like him!  I mean, come on, what’s Atlus supposed to do, write a pandering wannabe harem anime protagonist who actually has a personality?  Come now, have some sense of propriety, these things are simply not done.


- For heaven’s sake, Atlus, if you’re gonna have a minor character whose online handle is TikiIsMyWaifu, couldn’t you PLEASE have used Adult Tiki for this game?  It’s not like you didn’t already have a version of Tiki who’s a fully legal adult available to you--Tiki’s a grown woman in Fire Emblem 13, and that’s 1 of the extremely few games that you’ve arbitrarily limited your tiny pool of Fire Emblem involvement to.  There was absolutely nothing preventing you from using the same grown Tiki that Chrom knows; why INSIST on bringing up the idea of making a child character one’s waifu when you had a version of her in stock and ready to ship who’s actually above the age of consent!?  I get that having an interest in fictional, animated characters is distinctly different from having and acting on such feelings in real life, honest I do, but why even create this situation to begin with when you absolutely didn’t have to?!  You could just as easily have had Tiki=Waifu crushing on a grown woman instead of creeping on a prepubescent; Fire Emblem Awakening Tiki was right there!

Oh, and of COURSE this is the only character in the game who’s shown to have same-sex preferences.  Thanks a bundle for perpetuating the shitty trope of equating homosexuals with predators, Atlus.  Really just A+ fucking content from you guys.  Of all the things to accurately copy from your SMT games in this Persona knockoff, THAT had to be it, huh?


- Maybe this is just the bias of a westerner who indulges in his share of omelettes and then some, but the whole city-block-sized giant “Cosmic Egg” thing just comes off as silly to me more than anything mystical or awe-inspiring.

Also, Krishna did it better in Shin Megami Tensei 4.  Which isn’t good, because he was a little punk in that game.


- “Good thing Barry was so close by.  Sounds like he caught this thing early.”

Caught this thing early?  It’s an egg as tall and wide as a 4-story building, Kiria.  How long exactly do you think it was going to go unnoticed either way?


- There comes a point at which Mamori needs to learn how to prepare food for real in her cooking show,* and Tiki has to make her a special paring knife out of an ore that the team has to locate.  So you get the ore, you bring it to Tiki, she makes the knife, and suddenly Mamori’s got THIS thing in her hands.  Did this just become a crossover with Crocodile Dundee, too?  In what universe is that a paring knife?  People have gone to WAR with smaller swords than that!


- Gharnef’s villain backstory is pathetic.  The man basically decided he wanted to end the world because Senpai didn’t notice him.  And yet THIS is the 1 and only villain, out of an entire 20+ installments of the Fire Emblem franchise, that Atlus decided to use in this game.  Sure, it's not like FE is brimming with great villains otherwise, but even braindead evil morons like Anankos, Julius, Jedah, Edelgard, and Manfroy are better than a guy throwing a genocidal temper tantrum because he didn’t feel seen by boss-chan.

The odd thing is, even the cast of this game seem to agree with me that Gharnef’s a chump.  Eleonora herself (correctly) jeers that Gharnef’s backstory “sounds like a dumb B-movie plot!”  Uh, yeah, well, that’s some nice lampshading and all, Atlus, but it was still your decision to use this guy over any other baddie that’s shown up in Fire Emblem’s more than 30 year history!   Such a weird dissonance this game has with its intended fanbase.  You’ve made this crossover in the hopes of appealing to fans of Fire Emblem, and so now you’re openly mocking the writing of 1 of its most foundational installments?  I 100% agree that a guy deciding he wants millions of people to die because he got passed up for a promotion is absurdly lame and dumb, like classic “Lex Luthor wants to kill Superman because he went bald” levels of idiotic, but I ain’t the one whose bottom line might suffer for saying so, Atlus!


- So Hatanaka’s villainy is revealed, and things are heating up, inasmuch as they ever do in this game which listlessly drifts from 1 scene marker to the next.  The heroes are informed that it’s too late for them to stop the resurrection of the shadow dragon, a piece of information that they don’t once think to even question because I mean why not just inherently trust the statements of your main adversary?  So they go back to Tiki to see if she can plot-convenience up a remedy for their predicament, and it’s decided that their best course of action will be to wait and hope that she can remember something that will lead to a solution.  And as this happens, the game starts playing this confident, heroic, hopeful music.  And it’s like...dude, dial it back a bit.  The plan you are playing this inspiring do-or-die theme for is “Let’s sit back and see if the prepubescent amnesiac happens to remember something useful by sheer chance.”  If this were The IT Crowd, Moss would be busting out a pair of glasses fitted for a Lego figure.


- Tsurugi’s last character arc starts with him asking Itsuki for help because he’s going to be playing a role as a villain, and mentions that until now he’s only ever played leading parts, so he’s having trouble figuring this one out. The trouble he’s having? He doesn’t know how to play a part where his enmity for the hero also involves respecting the hero as an adversary, because before this point, Asswipe McGee has been on a quest of vengeance, so he’s never done anything but hated his opponents.

Except that this is the dumbass who joined the party after first testing their worth in combat!  “That is why I wish to learn of this respect that is born of a fight.”  Bitch the reason you’re sitting here right NOW is because that’s precisely what you DID, it was the FIRST THING you EVER did as a member of this team!  This is like if Batman was having trouble connecting to Dick Grayson because he just couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose his parents!  It’s like if Velvet Crowe heard Barret Wallace tell the story of how he lost his arm and thought to herself, “There but for the grace of Maotelus.”  It’s like having Superman watch the original Star Wars, see the scene where Grand Moff Tarkin blows up Alderaan right in front of Leia, and Supes starts shaking his head and chuckling, “Man, I’d sure hate to be THAT chick!”


- The Fire Emblem characters are treated so dismissively that when they finally, after being in the dark about who they are for the entire game, regain their memories during the ending, it’s off screen.  They really are regarded as nothing more than props to the crappy original characters right to the end--this moment of finally recovering who they are, where they’re from, the entirety of their extremely eventful lives, is done ONLY because it serves the purpose of giving them a reason to return to their world and say goodbye to Itsuki.  The biggest moment with the most potential for character development for Chrom, Tharja, and the rest, and it’s still performed strictly within the confines of how it relates to the main cast.


- Man, this game can’t even pull off its idea of combat being the characters performing on a battle stage to a packed crowd as effectively as Pokemon Generation 8 later did.  The most indolent, worthless gobshite installment in the entire already criminally lazy Pokemon franchise still put more work into getting its showmanship-for-the-crowd theme right than Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE did!


- So, basically, the lesson of Chapter 2 that Tsubasa learns is that if a part of your job (in this case, a photoshoot) demands something of you that you feel uncomfortable with, then you feeling that way is disrespectful to the staff and your fans, so suck it the fuck up because collectivism owns you now.  Yeah, that’s great, Atlus, thanks for the super healthy message about self-respect and personal boundaries.


- At the end of the game, the Fire Emblem cast are gonna leave to return to their own world, with the stated plan that they’re going to follow the example of Itsuki and company, and bring the performing arts to their own world to make it better.

Uhh, you guys do know that you already HAVE those, right?  Like, dancers are an actual, established job class in Fire Emblem.  You all KNOW some!  Stop acting like this whole idea of entertainers is some new alien concept!  And don’t give me some crap defense of “Oh but now they know just how powerful and wholesome it is to have performers who inspire others” or some such drivel.  Fire Emblem dancers already use the energy and morale that their dances inspire to give allies a free extra turn in combat!  Chrom, watching Olivia dance has given you the energy to insta-kill 2 different guys with crits at the same time before, but it’s only after seeing some teen muster up the energy to be an extra in a stage show that you fully appreciate the value of the performing arts?


- And since we’re on the subject of the FE characters returning to their own world at the game’s end, they’re knowingly going back in spite of the fact that their doing so opens the door for the big bad guy to be able to revive in their world again!  Yeah, it’s great that you guys feel confident that you can take him out if that ever happens, but you’re still weighing the cause of “let’s increase our high schools’ theater club budgets” against the possible revival of a dragon that can end the goddamn world!  A cause that, again, really isn’t even necessary because entertainers ALREADY exist in your damn world!

Hell, even if you CAN reliably guarantee that you can whup Medeus’s ass again, there’s probably still gonna be a lot of death and destruction that happens in the process.  Sure hope whatever innocent people happen to get caught in that eventual crossfire will agree that inflicting Hamilton on an already suffering populace was worth losing their lives!


- “I...can touch you...
I can’t believe this!  I can touch you, big brother!”

Oh, of course.  Of course.  Of all the things to accurately copy from the Fire Emblem franchise for this crossover, THAT had to be it, huh?


- You know what the absolute wildest thing about this whole game might just be?  The title.  I mean, aside from the fact that it's the typical fanciful vocabulary gobbledygook that RPGs monikers are so very fond of.  Because look at it.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions.  TMS.  It's SMT--as in, Shin Megami Tensei--backwards.  Which isn't peculiar in and of itself, as a naming quirk, but when you combine it with the second part of the title, #FE...well, that obviously specifically references the fact that this game is tying itself to and incorporating Fire Emblem (albeit very reluctantly, as I have mentioned).  And you know what that feels like to me?  It feels like Atlus expected to create a side-franchise out of this.  You just know that the TMS was where the title started from; I guarantee that the acronym for this game wasn't just Dyslexic Megaten by happy chance.  And by putting in Fire Emblem's title contribution as a deliberate, direct second part, Atlus had all the pieces in place for more games to follow this one, games that would swap the FE for the initials of whichever other outside series was being used, and would keep the semi-SMT part of the title static (since that's the part of the "crossover" that would by necessity remain the same).  You just know some boardroom goon was, at 1 point, leaning back in his reclining chair and getting hot and bothered as he imagined all the profitable places this proposed series was going to go.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #MH, the Monster Hunter sequel!  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #TLoZ, the iteration that scraped the bottoms of Hyrule's barrels!  TMS#U, gotta get that sweet indie Undertale cash!  TMS#DQ, TMS#FF, TMS#KH!  TMS#SMTP, as the crossover becomes an ouroboros!  The possibilities were endless!

And that's what makes the title of this game so crazy.  Because imagine knowing that the game you're releasing is this one, and expecting that audiences were going to want more.


- “We’ve all learned so much from you--your bonds, your dedication... We want to take those experiences home.”

Oh YEAH, sure, Chrom, you bet.  You fought in a fucking WAR surrounded by friends and allies with whom you formed everlasting bonds (read: A rank Supports), alongside your daughter whose desire to save her world and history broke time itself, against armies and monsters of terrifying power...but no, it’s a handful of little pop stars singing and dancing that really inspires you.  Every drop of sweat, tears, and blood shed by your comrades as they stood by you with death on the line, every painstaking, stressed moment in which Robin pored over maps and directed you with the weight bearing down of knowing that she/he could be the one sending you to your death, every oath and affirmation of a desire to safeguard the security and dignity of the nation...that all at best only equals the inspiration you derived from Eleonora occasionally screeching about wanting to get into Hollywood, huh?

You know, I can just see it now: the aftermath of a hard-won battle against Grima’s forces.  Battle-weary warriors sit bleakly around a campfire, reflecting on how close they came to defeat today, how relentless their opponents were.  Severa’s hissing in agony as she finally tends to a deep gash across her back, left open and untreated for hours after she’d helped her almost fatally-wounded mother limp back to the healer’s tent and stayed, angry tears in her eyes, by Cordelia’s side until finally the healer could say for sure that she’d pull through.  Lucina sits apart from the rest, head in hands, trying to find the courage within herself to keep hoping.  Olivia dances for any who will watch on feet that have barely been at rest for a cumulative 20 minutes in the last 24 hours, because it’s the only way to help others that she knows.

Chrom looks about at his battered and struggling allies.  Rises.  Clears his throat, and meets each of their eyes.  “Things are grim,” he gravely acknowledges.  “But no cause is hopeless, my friends.  There are heroes out there, worlds away, whose dedication, whose bonds, whose heroism, prove that anything is possible.  I’ve seen them achieve miracles, and if we follow their example, so, too, can we.  Come, listen to my words, and let them inspire you as greatly as they have inspired me.

“So this one time there was a guy who had to do a guest segment on a show about cooking microwave dinners...”










* Honestly, I’m surprised she’s managed to evade learning this for so long; she’s an 11-year-old female in Japan, after all.  It’s a wonder law enforcement hasn’t shown up at her door before now with an empty bento box and a court mandate.