Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE's Hatanaka's Lost Potential

It wasn’t exactly a surprise to discover that Hatanaka’s a pretty crappy, empty villain.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE doesn’t reach for the stars in terms of putting time, effort, and creativity into the creation and development of its major characters, so to expect it to do so for its antagonist would be naive.  That it’s obvious from the moment he’s introduced that Hatanaka is going to be the “twist” antagonist, that he’s only ever seen a couple times before he makes his big villain move and Exits Stage Death with all his motivation and character reduced to a hamfisted exposition dump in those last few moments, that he’s so flat and careless as an entity that said motivation which he clumsily announces is literally the only thing we ever know about him...it’s all completely unsurprising in as slipshod a product as TMS#FE.  If it ain’t a cookie-cutter archetype following its set path as generically as possible, it’s got no place in this game’s cast.

Hatanaka’s motivation is also unsurprisingly vapid and silly--although the game tries to play it like his cause is some kind of high-minded venture, or at least that he believes it to be.  Hatanaka’s basically some self-important entertainment specialist who enables Gharnef’s apocalyptic endeavors because he caught a bad case of Lazy Man’s Nihilism and thus believes that the end of days will somehow be the ultimate form of entertainment.  The man wants to destroy the world out of artistic vision.  It’s the kind of laughably ridiculous, pretentious idiocy that you can only find in an RPG villain, comfortably at home with other pompous nonsensical morons like Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth, Wild Arms 5’s Volsung, Tales of Vesperia’s Duke, and so, so many goddamn more.  Standard fare for RPGs that have no interest in putting effort into their storytelling and cast.

But the shame of it is that Hatanaka’s concept as a villain, silly and dumb though it at first appears, could have actually been refreshingly relevant, novel, and even thematically elegant...and it would have been so easy to make happen, had Atlus been bothered to put even just a little effort into getting this form of villainy right.

Because think about it.  We’re talking about a villain whose schtick is doing evil, harming others, for content.  Even if it’s perhaps not quite as epic and compelling on its surface as villainy born out of a thirst for revenge, or a desire to shape the world to better suit his own preferences, a villain like this is actually quite relevant in the current age.  I mean, each day, how many people get harassed by prank douchetubers looking to turn the annoyance and uncertainty of innocent fast food workers, retail employees, and unassuming pedestrians just trying to go about their day into views and subscribers?  How frequently do we read about a trend on Tiktok that involves showing off something you’ve stolen, or hear about a Youtuber getting arrested because he recorded himself trying to derail a train?  We live in the age of Jack Doherty and Johnny Somali; in the midst of a social epidemic of online assholes recording themselves making other people’s lives worse in the pursuit of clout, a villain who helps initiate the world’s end just for the sake of content has suddenly become a very suitable, relevant kind of antagonist.

But Atlus manages to completely drop the ball with Hatanaka!  Because they had to go and slap some high-falutin notion of his doing it for the love of the art on him.  Hatanaka isn’t an evolution of the shithead with a phone recording himself as he harasses a Chipotle worker, he’s some silly, theoretical snuff filmmaker who wants to bring his form of media to the next level.  The scum-sucking worm who records himself challenging random passersby to a fight and then either running away or letting his bodyguards intimidate his victim into backing down isn’t making other people’s lives worse out of cinematic passion.  That loathsome cockroach who ran over a dog because she was streaming herself checking her phone while driving wasn’t up all the night before as she carefully reviewed every angle, meticulously prepared each inch of her car, and crafted all details of what was sure to be her magnum opus of expression.  The loser recording himself breaking into someone else’s home for a Tiktok prank isn’t doing it because he has a vision.

These people recording and posting themselves behaving badly and harming others are just doing it because they want attention and they want the money that comes with audience engagement on social media platforms.  There’s nothing more to it; it’s that simple and that pathetic.  So unfortunately, even though the idea of Hatanaka as an escalation of this comparatively recently emerged real life villain would have been an easy narrative feather to stick in its cap, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE completely fails to manage it.  His potential to become a commentary on an actual new-age villain of our world lost, Hatanaka just winds up in the Lazy Self-Important Poser villain category in a genre already absolutely filled to the brim with his forgettable peers.

And I’ll grant you, most of the real-world individuals and trends I’ve mentioned thus far have occurred in the last few years, while Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE was published in 2015, a whole decade ago and a year before Tiktok was even a thing.  But the 2013 - 2015 era of the internet was nonetheless more than rife with prank Youtubers bothering people for views and lulz (or even just pretending to do so--but staged or real, the concept ultimately boils down to the same thing for the audience’s engagement), so it was absolutely an established, disliked type of entertainer at the time that has only continued to progress since.  Not to mention, TMS#FE was rereleased in 2020 and had some stuff added and changed for it, meaning that they could have, had they the sense to do so, adjusted Hatanaka at the time to reflect the even-better-established-by-that-point clout-chaser kind of content-at-any-cost person.

And not for nothing, it’s doubly unfortunate that Atlus failed to see through Hatanaka’s potential as a clout-chaser villain because it would have elegantly fit into the overall dynamic of the game’s story and theme.  If Hatanaka had just been looking to create content through evil means for selfish intent rather than some crazy notion of art, then he could, with a little more narrative attention and involvement, have served as a good counterpoint to the heroes of the game.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE occasionally puts forth the idea that its heroes’ climb through the entertainment industry is a noble endeavor, that they’re doing it all for the sake of the fans and overall populace whom they entertain.  Well, wouldn’t it be a great thing, then, to have Hatanaka exist as a mirror to that idea, an example of a person who entertains only for his own benefit, to sell the desirable, noble heroism of the main characters all the better as they advance themselves in their craft specifically for the benefit of their fans?  It’d require a few more interactions with Hatanaka to set him up as such a foil, of course, but it wouldn’t be hard to accomplish, and he’d be so much more memorable as such, not to mention it would add a new dimension to the game’s overall story and theme that...well, TMS#FE would still be a long way away from being a well-written endeavor altogether, but it’d certainly be a step closer, at least.

It’s frustrating.  Atlus creates a villain who ends the world for the sake of content, right as the age of clout-chasing content villains has become established in the real world, and completely fails to give him relevance through a connection to that phenomenon when all it would have taken was the slightest rewrite of his motivations, one that would have made more sense in its own right anyway.  And in dropping this ball, they in turn miss an opportunity to make him a better villainous foil to the heroes that desperately could have used some basic storytelling artistry.  A Hatanaka with some relevance and narrative weight was right there, and Atlus just completely missed it.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Has No Audience

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect disaster in terms of audience appeal than Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE.  This game utterly fails every audience demographic that it’s meant to attract, with such multifaceted surety that it almost seems like it must have been by design.  Much like the gameplay of Lunar: Dragon Song, it does not seem credible that such myriad and unexpected manners of failure could accidentally coalesce in such a perfect manner; surely there are elements of sabotage at work here.

Okay, so first of all, let’s talk about what TMS#FE is supposed to be.  What it was presented and marketed as.  Promised to be.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is, in theory, a crossover between Nintendo’s second flagship RPG series, Fire Emblem, and Atlus’s genre superstar, Shin Megami Tensei.

And before we go any further, I think it’s important that we stop, take a moment, contemplate and reflect upon ourselves and this crossover concept, and consider deeply a very important question:

Um, what?

Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei?  Together?  I mean...I’m not against the idea, I guess, but I also don’t really see the common ground here?  They’re 2 RPG franchises that just have...very, very different approaches.  FE’s a tactical RPG whose titles have stories that are fundamentally character-based, always involve large-scale medieval-themed international (or occasionally intranational, like FE16) conflicts, and employ main villains that are usually some combination of dark fantasy cult, dark dragon, dark god, or gullible amoral moron.  There’s great emphasis on camaraderie, a lot of romance, plenty of epic heroism, and also for some reason incest is just a thing you cannot escape from.  Meanwhile, SMT is (most often) a turn-based RPG whose titles have stories that are narrative/theme-driven and usually austere, base themselves around and employ the lore and pantheons of practically every known religion and collection of superstitions of our species, and generally examine, analyze, and explore major religions and systems of belief, from Christianity to Hinduism to Luck to the Tarot, and what they mean about and for us as a species.  There’s great emphasis on the warring needs of order and freedom in human society and the human heart, a lot of fun intermingling of different faiths’ figures and concepts, great pride for Japan and Tokyo in particular, and also for some reason the protagonists are all silent because nothing is perfect.

What about these series makes it seem like they’d have enough common ground to make for a good crossover?  Their approach, their content, the way they style their narrative, their ranges in terms of art and intellectual value...FE and SMT seem as distinct and unlikely candidates to join together as Inspector Gadget and the musical Cats.  Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei?  That’s like trying to mash together, I dunno, Lord of the Rings with Paradise Lost, or Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books with the Bhagavad Gita.  What would a functional version of such a combination even look like?

...The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, I guess.  But Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is certainly no Chronicles of Narnia.

So yeah, right off the bat, the crossover element of this game doesn’t make much sense.  But hey, okay, yeah, so what, right?  So Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei have all the natural crossover chemistry of Uncle Grandpa and Steven Universe.  Big deal!  That doesn’t mean something involving them both can’t work.  I mean, it’s certainly no more ludicrous an idea than mixing together Final Fantasy and Disney, and look how that turned out!

...Oh God, look how that turned out.

Well...Kingdom Hearts is financially successful, at least?

Alright, bad example.  The point is, if you put in some effort, respect and celebrate each franchise, and use them to their best potential, surely this crossover could please devotees of both FE and SMT, and even allow each franchise to court new fans.

Unfortunately, “respect and celebrate each franchise, and use them to their best potential” was not a bullet point on the TMS#FE action plan.

First of all, Shin Megami Tensei?  I don’t know what it was doing when production began on Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, but it clearly did not make it into the office that day.  There is basically nothing in this game that relates to the SMT series.  There’s no conflict between Law and Chaos.  God, Lucifer, angels, demons, fairies, fiends, representatives of the pantheons Norse and Greek and Mesopotamian and Celtic and Egyptian and more, celebrated mythical heroes of fallen civilizations, quasi-religious figures of Japanese history and folklore, Barong, Alice, Amanozako, Krishna, Cerberus, Xi Wangmu, Medusa, Shiva, NONE of them are here.  There’s no overarching theme or examination of any religion or other faith.  About the only thing about TMS#FE you could say has even a faint whiff of Megaten about it is the battle system being a modified version of the press turn formula of SMT--and even if SMT’s take on turn-based combat IS basically the best I’ve seen, no fan in her or his right mind would ever diminish the franchise so disrespectfully as to say that the essence and significance of Shin Megami Tensei is adequately contained within its gameplay alone.  Oh, and I guess you can make the argument that the game’s dungeon aesthetic, its approach to sidequests, and its use of “summoned” assisting combat entities are reminiscent of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona...but that’s the very separated style of a subseries of SMT, not SMT as a whole, and it’s still obviously not a satisfactory, significant involvement of the franchise in this game for any Megaten fan.  You sure as heck didn’t see a great outpouring of positivity from SMT devotees the last time Atlus ripped itself off in this fashion with Conception 2, after all.

So in this touted crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem, there is effectively NOTHING of satisfactory presence of the former.  Did the Fire Emblem fans at least get something they’d want out of Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE?

Well, there ARE some elements of Fire Emblem actually present and involved...but if anything, that might just mean that FE supporters have more reason to be disappointed.  See, the predominant influence of Fire Emblem on Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is that, through convoluted but narratively convenient means, each party member is paired off with an incorporeal entity who acts as their Persona-esque partner (called a Mirage) in and out of combat, and these empowering entities happen to be a handful of characters from the Fire Emblem series--the protagonist’s partner is Chrom, Kiria’s is Tharja, Mamori is paired up with Draug, etc.  Aside from that, the only other Fire Emblem characters to show up in any significant capacity are Tiki, who’s an ally that upgrades the team’s abilities, and the game’s main villains, Gharnef and Medeus.  A few other FE characters trickle in momentarily here and there, but only as vehicles for brief sidequests, or quickly-dispatched boss encounters (often both).  Trust me when I say that the sidequest and midboss fodder have so little virtue unto themselves that they may as well just be cardboard cutout stand-ins with speech balloons taped onto them, for all the character authenticity or care they’re given.

So let’s see...Chrom, Caeda, Cain, Tharja, Virion, Draug, Navarre, Tiki, Gharnef, Medeus, and some very minor dabbling of a few others as sidequest and combat props.  So, 10 characters with change.  I guess that could be worse--sure as hell beats the pathetic showing Final Fantasy made in Kingdom Hearts 1, at least--but I still feel like one could expect a bit more Fire Emblem presence in a Fire Emblem crossover, you know?  It ain't exactly like the franchise is lacking for options in this department; you practically have 10 FE characters in your party coming out of the prologue of some of these games.

Also, it bears considering that ALL of these FE characters come from the same couple of titles, Fire Emblem 1 (or 11, its remake) and 13.  I get that 1/11 was the origins of the series and that 13 both takes place on that same world and was a huge success that finally, definitively broke into the mainstream American RPG market, but it still feels like a surprising waste of potential to have a franchise over a dozen titles strong, yet limit yourself strictly to only 2(-ish) of them.

Far more than quantity, though, it’s the quality of Fire Emblem’s presence that makes Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE such an embarrassing failure to its premise.  For starters, as the Persona-knockoffs whose main purpose in the game is assisting the main characters, Chrom and company are unavoidably restricted to secondary roles--and even that seems like a generous way of putting it.  By and large, the Fire Emblem characters in this game are reactive personalities whose dialogue and moments of character development just exist as responses to what’s happening around them or what the main character they’re paired with is doing or saying.  Rarely do they take initiative as their own beings, and on the occasions that they do start a conversation or sidequest, it’s usually specifically focused on discussing or advancing their partner as a character.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE very clearly views the iconic heroes it’s plucked from their renowned and storied franchise as nothing more than tools to benefit its own original cast.

And as if diminishing the Fire Emblem heroes to mere support roles wasn’t enough, they’ve all got amnesia for almost the entire game!  Yeah, not only are the FE cast forced to take a noticeable backseat in their own crossover, they don’t even remember who they are or anything about their own adventures until the very last stage of the game!  What, you thought there might be the occasional reference to the events and lore of Fire Emblem games in this Fire Emblem crossover?  Well fuck you, Atlus has other plans.  Chrom doesn’t remember Lucina, Caeda doesn’t recall Marth, Tharja doesn’t know who Robin is--wasn’t, like, obsessing over Robin something like 90% of Tharja’s entire personality and reason for existing?  Robbed of their past, the FE cast in Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE are just an assortment of vague personality stereotypes that merely suggest the characters that fans know and love.

Hell, they don’t even LOOK like themselves!  For whatever reason, all the FE characters besides Tiki and the villains have been redesigned to be almost unrecognizable.  Chrom looks like Fire Emblem just entered the public domain and someone’s trying to slap together a cheap horror-movie knockoff interpretation of him for a quick buck, and the rest, with their headwear covering their eyes and half or more of their faces, and their overbearing outfit redesigns, look like extras from some faux-psychological thriller anime.  You wouldn’t even realize who half of them were if the game didn’t explicitly name them!

So to recap thus far: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is touted as a crossover between Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei, only it’s got effectively jack shit to do with SMT, so it offers nothing to entice Megaten fans to be its audience.  And over on the other side, TMS#FE needlessly limits its use of Fire Emblem to 1 particular corner of the franchise, makes most of the FE characters unrecognizable shadows of their former selves who can’t even remember or reference their own pasts and exploits, and reduces their roles to secondary foils to its own precious baby OCs, so it offers close to nothing to FE fans to be its audience--I’d argue that its disinterest for its Fire Emblem toys is enough to drive that fanbase away, in fact.

Alright, fine.  So Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE has no audience with the groups it specifically courted.  That’s obviously a major flaw, but it’s not a death knell for the game.  After all, it could at least appeal to its audience simply as an entity in its own right, surely?  It doesn’t have to be a good crossover to be a good game as a whole; Kingdom Hearts 2 is a very good RPG even though it perpetually views both its Disney and Final Fantasy elements as mere obligatory stepping-stones to do what it actually wants to.  Is TMS#FE at least a good RPG on its own?

Ha ha ha
What
No?  Like, Jesus Christ, no
Look, Me, I know you were just asking that question as a way of transitioning to the next part of this rant but come on dude that was just too stupid a question to ask even rhetorically; you’re embarrassing yourself man

Yeah, no, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is not a good RPG by itself.  Aside from the entertainment industry angle--which we’ll get to in a moment--there’s not a lot to its overall plot that’s particularly interesting or different, and what messages it has basically just amount to the boilerplate “always do your best to do your best” bit and a vague encouragement to its player to never lose the excitement of consuming fresh new media products.  It ain’t a riveting foundation, and with a limp and uninvolved narrative voice for its characters’ interactions and plot twists that you either see coming or more often just don’t care about, it isn’t even making the most of that crappy premise.  Its villains range from the laughably exaggerated to the typical overwrought anime dingus who’s managed to come to the most absurd nuclear-option answer to an ultimately minor problem in the world; it’s hard to believe that fucking Gharnef, a bad guy underwhelming even by dime-a-dozen NES save-the-princess villain standards, is the most nuanced antagonist in the cast.

And the main characters might somehow be worse, a collection of empty caricatures and cliches who’d be as at home in a Kemco assembly-line “release it and then forget it ever happened” game as they are here.  Their personal arcs are uninspired and feel genuinely unimportant as their generic personalities rigidly reject internalizing any epiphany reached--not to mention that there are times when the lessons of these arcs are questionable, or just outright unhealthy (more on that in a later rant).  This is the cast that Atlus decided to award the entirety of their attention and effort, at the Fire Emblem crew’s expense?  I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Fire Emblem fan and I haven’t even played FE13, but Chrom alone weighs more as a character than the entirety of TMS#FE’s stable of OCs!

And also, Barry is there.  Jesus fucking Christ, Atlus.

So if you’re looking for a good RPG, something well-written or interesting or poignant or meaningful or creative, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE still isn’t your game.  Frankly, the fact that this game doesn’t (currently) make it onto my Worst RPGs List distresses me.  How can we live with ourselves as a species, knowing that Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is not the very worst thing we are capable of creating?  That it isn’t even in the top 20?

But hey, don’t worry if you don’t hold your entertainment to the same very picky and specific standards I do--even if you just want to play an RPG, any RPG, you’re still not TMS#FE’s audience.  Because this game seems to resent being an RPG just as much as it resents being saddled with the Fire Emblem characters.  Oh yeah, sure, there’s a plot with some hoopla about saving the world from these otherworldly forces that drain the passion out of the public using magical powers and it all leads up to stopping the evil schemes of an evil magic guy and his evil god he’s summoning, standard RPG stuff, but at no point does that feel like the story that has the writers’ interest.  The classic world-saving schtick is obviously just there to keep the narrative wheels greased and turning, to give the player something to do with him/herself between scenes of the game’s REAL focus: stories of a group of young people entering, advancing through, and branching out within the Japanese entertainment industry.

It’s not a natural fusion, and the juxtaposition between these sides is very lopsided.  It’s clear that the creators wanted to write a game about up-and-coming pop icons, musicians, and actors, and they either couldn’t figure out how or just didn’t especially care to really mesh that with the save-the-world adventure element.

And the thing is, there still could have been at least some merit, some potential audience, that this game could have properly captured, even then.  Because even if it’s certainly out of the ordinary, a story about the behind-the-scenes of Japanese idol culture and what its superstars do to rise up in the ranks and propagate themselves through the multimedia...well, it could be neat!  As the west becomes exposed to more and more of the creative works and culture of Japan (and some of its neighbors; K-Dramas are spreading like wildfire and just recently KPop Demon Hunters was a whole phenomenon) beyond just its anime, getting glimpses into how the industry works becomes more and more relevantly interesting to we overseas fans.  It’s not my first pick for the subject of an RPG, but then, “a kid and his mom wander around a hospital” wouldn’t have been high on my list of desired RPG premises, either, and I loved Rakuen, so hey, what do I know?

And yet, even for the rare, most likely purely theoretical audience who wants an RPG specifically about the journey of a rising star in Japanese media, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE still manages to disappoint.

Because, frankly?  The entirety of this game’s fixation on idols is entirely surface-level.  Skimming the surface level, even.  Each chapter’s and sidequest’s glance at the entertainment industry, from music to stage shows to modeling to movies to TV shows and on and on, comes off as someone’s guesses at the experience of being an idol, based on a conflict-of-the-day episode of Sailor Moon they kind of remember seeing as a kid.  The management’s supportive and almost always in the talents’ corner, the idols never burn out (and on the rare occasion they overextend themselves, it’s only out of love for the work), there’s no stalkers or otherwise overtly creepy and possessive fans,* no one in the industry uses their position or experience to do creepy things to naive or less popular stars...if it’s a problem that can’t be solved by believing in yourself just a little harder, then it doesn’t fucking exist in the idol industry, according to Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE.

This is the idealistically shallow, smile-and-nod perspective held by someone who’s only ever sat in the audience, and never given a second thought to the performances put in front of them.  I’d call it a pedestrian understanding of the idol industry, but frankly, it’s not even that--I’m a pedestrian who just likes watching some VTubers, and even just from doing that, I at least know the horrific war on human decency that Nijisanji’s been waging against its talents for years, for example, and they’re certainly not the first entertainment corporation in Japan to do so.  Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE’s portrayal of the life of an idol has all the nuance and insight that you’d expect from an excited 6-year-old.

So there you have it: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE simply has no audience it can appeal to.  It promises a crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem, 2 franchises which don’t have any particular common ground to meet upon.  It’s got functionally nothing in it for SMT fans, and it utilizes its very limited FE elements in such a dismissive, inept manner that it’s got functionally less than nothing for FE fans.  It doesn’t hold up on its own merits as an RPG, and it’s much more interested in being a niche story about rising to stardom in Japanese media culture anyway, so just an average RPG audience isn’t gonna get much out of it.  And even in terms of looking at the idol industry, the only subject the game actually seems to care about, it’s too infantile to satisfy any sincerely interested audience.  There’s no shortage of Shin Megami Tensei, nor Fire Emblem, titles to be found, a great many RPGs of noteworthy quality exist to be enjoyed, it’s hardly impossible to find a decent crossover game like SMT Persona Q or Super Smash Brothers, and hell, the existence of Hololive CouncilRyS RPG and Chrono Gear: Warden of Time means that there’s even alternatives, and significantly better ones at that, for anyone who’s really hankering for an idol-themed video game.  TMS#FE simply has no reason for anyone to play it.










* Well, there’s Barry, I suppose.  But his crap is played up for comedy, or at most, gently admonished as the overenthusiasm of someone who means well.  He’s clearly still meant to be seen as one of the “good guys.”