Ha yes that is definitely absolutely what i was referring to
Let's Play Every Shin Megami Tensei Game In Order Of Release - Now Playing Shin Megami Tensei
- Thread starter Squirtodyle
- Start date
- Let's Play
just say no. radiation cannot enter your body without your consent. everyone knows that
Oh, this seems fun! I've played some of the newer SMT games and am very slowly working my way through SMTVV, but haven't really considered trying the older ones.
...seeing how obtuse some of the old mechanics can be, I'm not sure I can regret it much. Definitely seems worth it to experience in some way though, if only to see how it all got going.
...seeing how obtuse some of the old mechanics can be, I'm not sure I can regret it much. Definitely seems worth it to experience in some way though, if only to see how it all got going.
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- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's definitely been really interesting and I'm looking forward to continuing!
One thing that threw me off like nothing else was the fact that Press Turns don't exist in the first game, and realising that such an iconic part of the game's feel that's bled into almost every modern spinoff in some way, shape, or form was an addition to the series later is fun.
- Location
- Alberta
If nothing else, he certainly does end it thus.
Shin Megami Tensei - Part 9
- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Shin Megami Tensei, the game that has taken perverse pleasure in proving that my early fears about it being too easy were extremely unfounded.
When we last left off, we found a chained up girl being hailed as the Messiah for the Messian cult, who has seemingly been possessed by a demon. The only way to save her is to get a psychic from Shinjuku to let us travel inside her mind and purge the demonic corruption before it's too late. No one mentioned that girl being Mary, but no one mentioned her not being Mary, so it's a bit of a tossup at the moment.
First things first, there were a few treasures that I missed in the building on account of all the dark zones and the brutal murder that Adam and Noah underwent.
I did laugh a bit when I realised that the reward was the one kind of incense I can't actually use, because Adam and Noah are going to dip eventually and Hero is much like a six year old in that they can't spell for shit.
First up was a Magic Incense that left me helplessly giggling at how useless it was in the immediate sense, though it'll be great for Mary when and if we eventually get her back on our team. The final piece of treasure isn't super useful immediately either—we find a Diamond in another chest, which goes into a special part of my inventory I can't access through the Use or Equip menus. I vaguely, vaguely remember later games in the series having a mechanic where you can trade gemstones for special rewards, so presumably we'll find something like that here, but for the moment we're stuck with some potentially great rewards we can't really use.
The trip outside is rough. There's a spell in later games called Traesto that allows you to instantly teleport out of a dungeon if I'm remembering right, and looking back on some of my past stuff I realise that the adorable little Cu Sith had it as part of its skillset. I would kill for that right now, but unfortunately Cu Sith got fused away and there's no such thing as skill inheritance in Shin Megami Tensei, so I'm going the long way back. I summon up Ame-no-Uzume and Elf to pad out the party with Noah and Adam dead, and then realise that I never actually did a writeup for Elf when I recruited her, so I'll do that now.
Elves originate from the Norse Álfar, mentioned in early texts alongside the Aesir, but have evolved in many different directions throughout the years, from the tiny, invisible creatures that caused sickness in some Celtic societies, the renowned craftsmen of the svartálfar, to Tolkein's immortal beings of wisdom and power.
I seem to be able to summon and use Neutral demons regardless of my current alignment, which is very nice. Another demon with Diarama is handy, but the key benefit to Elf is that she's got Zionga in her arsenal, which judging by my battle with Thor is basically capable of permanently locking down a single target with Shock as long as I cast it every turn. With 110 MP, that's more than 12 casts at maximum, so I should be good to go on single targets.
That said, if I run into another horde of six Lilim, I'm just booking it, no questions asked. I'd love to recruit one, but I've never run into an encounter with just one Lilim solo which I'd really need if I was going to risk multiple turns negotiating.
Incidentally, along the way for our exploration to clear out the building, we found another rumour that we'll check out eventually.
I'm pretty fond of how we have, for lack of a better term, Messian civilians here too? I speculated that this might be a Messian safehouse at first, but I think with the chained up Messiah, the two varieties of militant Messians, and the rest of the demons crawling around plus the shop, healer, and Mansion on the ground floor it's pretty safe to say that this is some kind of known rest spot in the post-apocalypse. The ground floor is relatively safe to stay around, but the upper floor is covered in shadows and crawling with demons.The Messians must have decided to hide their ailing Messiah away here specifically because it's a dangerous location, so you have their military forces working to protect their civilians and the Messiah while also not necessarily trying to exterminate wandering demons that can act as another layer of defense, as long as they don't get too close.
I still haven't met a single Gaian, though, so hopefully I'll run into them soon. Ideally it'll also involve opportunities to swing my alignment back to Neutral, because all story stuff aside it's driving me nuts knowing I'm working with suboptimal demons because some of my potential fusions are Chaos.
Throughout my explorations, I ultimately end up falling down another unmarked floor, which turns out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. I'm further away from the exit than I'd like to be, but I'm much closer than I was when I was stuck upstairs, so it's just a quick hop, skip, and a jump back to the healer and then to the shop to pick up some revival items just in case. It was very silly of me not to get more than one after testing to make sure they worked, but now that I've paid for that mistake it's one I won't make again.
With everyone healed up, cured of paralysis, and brought back from the brink of death, it's time to make our way to Shinjuku via that handy Terminal on the first floor.
You're just as hideous as the day I lost you.
As you can see above, the layout has not changed whatsoever, and so that means that our first stop is the gun shop, just in case. As I wander, I first assume that I'm getting lucky, and then start realising with a sense of pure childish wonder that there are no more random encounters in the Shinjuku mall. There are fewer demons here than there were before the world ended! Is Ozawa keeping the place clean because it's his seat of power, or is there something else going on here? Hard to tell right now, but I choose to celebrate my newfound freedom by doing what I wanted to do ages ago and fill out the map by grabbing every square.
In the strictest possible sense, filling out the map is a waste of time, but it does give us the opportunity to get the vibe on what's going on around Shinjuku nowadays.
Something tells me this isn't the fun kind of brainwashing.
We don't hear much more about the brainwashing, but it seems like Ozawa's doing his best to ensure he keeps his power by any means necessary. The existence of a private police that presumably take their orders from him and only him does go a long way towards explaining why the mall is free from demons—aside from keeping the people inside safe so he can continue to rule over and exploit them, Demon Summoners can only summon demons after making contracts with them. Anyone with a COMP will be forced to leave the relative safety of Ozawa's kingdom if they want to gain the power to oppose him, and honestly I wouldn't be shocked if he's simply insisting on people handing over their COMPs before they're allowed inside. Maybe we only got around that by teleporting in via the Terminal?
Anyone with a COMP can use those, though, so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'd at least have put some guards around there if I knew it was a point of failure, so maybe Ozawa doesn't care too much about other people with COMPs around. He certainly had a big enough ego back before the apocalypse that I can see him assuming no one could challenge him one on one at this point since the four party members and Gotou vanished and/or died.
Next door we find a Messian, confirming at least that Ozawa allows them to stick around, and they've got something interesting to say.
First of all, the wording of "days gone by" suggests that there's a greater timeskip than I originally thought—for macca to have become a currency it would have needed some time to establish, but now we have people talking about the pre-apocalypse in terms like "days gone by" that feel like there's a lot more time between the two periods. Maybe that's why we didn't recognise Mary, if she is indeed the Messiah? She aged, we didn't? It'd also explain why Ozawa seems so confident, if the strongest Demon Summoners were gone for five or ten years rather than just a few weeks or months.
The Messian continues on, explaining that the former Governmental Office is swarming with demons and anyone who walks in makes it roughly two steps before getting devoured by the hordes inside. Even more worrying, we're warned that both of the towers contain an incredibly strong presence, though there's little detail available about them. Sounds to me like a dungeon, though the wording here is strong enough that I'm thinking this is an actual warning rather than a wink-wink nudge-nudge hint at where to go next. We've gotten enough little hints at where to go that I'm comfortable leaving this for the moment.
We also run into more evidence of Ozawa's corruption.
The girl from Little Nightmares goes on to loudly exclaim that she hopes Ozawa dies, before suddenly swerving and starting to fear that the private police may have heard her, because if they did then she'd be brainwashed like the rest. So, yeah, Ozawa's established a minor totalitarian regime that goes as far as to literally steal from children and will brainwash and imprison them too, in case we didn't already think he was a dipshit.
We also find a man wistfully thinking about how Roppongi is some kind of peaceful paradise, which sounds good for about five seconds until he explains that his justification is that nobody who packed up and moved out of Shinjuku has ever come back, so obviously it must mean that it's much nicer. I can think of about twelve different explanations for that and none of them are pleasant, so I'll keep Roppongi on the radar as somewhere No Good for the moment.
Throughout my exploration, I've been finding a couple of new spots—there's a Heretic Mansion there I'm convinced wasn't in Shinjuku beforehand, as well as a Junk shop, but here, here we find the Holy Grail. A store labelled "Weapons", an arms dealer who grumbles about how we better be here just to buy and not cause trouble, and the most beautiful shop menu I've seen all game.
Why is the M16 Rifle genderlocked to men???
Gun upgrades and bullet upgrades. I could kiss the shopkeep if I wasn't convinced they'd shoot me for it.
The M16 is a straight upgrade in almost every way, 43 power and 5 accuracy to the Machinegun's 34 and 3 respectively, and the SPAS12 is an upgrade again, 55 power and 8 accuracy. The downsides, such as they are, are that the M16 has a variance in hits from 2~8 and the SPAS12 from 2~4, compared to the Machinegun's 3~6. Quite frankly that isn't remotely enough of a downside for me to turn down a 21 power increase, so rationalising that Adam and Noah got to have their cool alignment weapons I splurge on Hero and buy them a shiny new SPAS12 with Nerve Bullets. Our gun power shoots from 44 to 70, and now we once again have a solid chance of putting any enemy we hit to sleep.
I decide to take pity on Adam and Noah and buy each of them Nerve Bullets too, even though I know they'll vanish before too long. The key point is survivability, and 350 macca for a pretty intense power boost is nothing.
Across the way is the Armor shop, which is even more important than the weapons, because the armor we can buy now not only increases our defense, it increases our base stats. The armor vendor helpfully informs us that he's dug up some great bargains for us, then admits that some of the merch actually was dug up.
Absolutely hysterical man.
The main pain point here is that armor is expensive, and I don't have nearly enough to kit out everyone after buying my fancy new shotgun, so I comfort myself with the thought of Noah and Adam's inevitable betrayal and pour everything into a new outfit for Hero.
Oooooh yeah. It's all coming together.
Hero walks out of the store with a solid 50 Defense, 40 Evade, a +2 to Strength, and a +1 to Speed. It's not going to make them some kind of Doomslayer, but it is going to make them a lot more durable on top of their existing 20 Vitality. The Neutral legendary weapon is taunting me, but hopefully soon I'll get a chance to be a bit more chaotic.
Speaking of Chaos, I finally run into the Gaians and the healing spot I theorised they had in Shinjuku. They're, uh, interesting.
To clarify on this, mister Gaian thinks that's based because only Lucifer has the power needed to thrive in this world.
Very normal.
I can't begin to describe the architecture of the Gaian church besides noting the various statues of what look like oni or angry gods and noting that it's very much not the typically Christian/Catholic vibe of the Messians, though if anyone else can describe it any more accurately I'd love to get your take on it. I'll be coming here for healing for the foreseeable future, seeing as how I need to shift myself Chaosward.
Okay, that was a lot of exploration! No word on where we actually need to go next, but in absence of specific directions I found a set of stairs that go up, so we're gonna check out the second floor. This one differs plenty from the first in that random encounters are back, so I take the time to test out Hero's new kit on a set of five Werecats. Adam and Noah each do 29 damage per hit with their Machineguns and the Nerve Bullets, while Hero does a whopping 58, literally double their damage. It's enough to easily carry me through the encounter, even though I returned my demons to ensure that I wouldn't eat up more magnetite than I need to.
Speaking of demons, we find a new one.
You all know what a corpse is. I'm mostly just concerned that this should be the plural form, given that it looks like a Halo 1 Proto-Gravemind.
Corpse is a joke. It can hit for about 27 damage on Noah and Adam, but they hit Hero for 14 damage each time and Hero shoots them for 63 damage and more often than not puts them to sleep. Hero re-enacts the plot of their favorite zombie schlock by blowing the Corpse to bits and is rewarded with a level up. Just as I'm celebrating, I'm brought face to face with a sad reminder of this game's insane restrictions.
Momunofu is another of those figures with very little information available on English websites—the SMT wiki claims that it's a type of shikigami that serves the pre-Shinto god Arahabaki.
They can hit, but they can't hit hard, and even Tarukaja and Sukunda can't help them much with that. They go down easy and we continue onwards, up another set of stairs to the third floor. We run into more Gaian Suicide Squads along the way, but unfortunately they have not been levelling up alongside us, and two sets of bullets from Hero and Mary were more than enough to take care of them way back when. As is now, with three multi-target guns all rocking Nerve Bullets, they go down incredibly quick. We're back to "the firing squad mulches all opposition" for the moment and, you know what?
After that last building, I'll take it. Maybe I'll even go back and kill some Lilim just for catharsis.
After two waves of Suicide Squads, we finally find something new, a Gaian elite troop.
Oni-Jorou literally translates to "demon prostitute". I don't have any joke here, she's just aspirational. You go, girl.
Oni-Joro has three skills, two of which inflict either Shock or Paralysis, so she has to go down immediately. Significantly more annoying than the Temple Knights, that's for sure, but fortunately there's only one of her. She's incredibly tough, though, taking a full six rounds of all three shooting at her and the one attack she gets off in between being put to sleep deals half of Adam's health in one shot. We get a remarkable 1300 EXP from her too, so she's basically a miniboss. Not bad!
Just past the Oni-Joro, however, we're stopped.
The pale silver jacket with pointy shoulders is such a look for the private police.
Unfortunately we don't have an appointment, so we're turned away. The presence of Gaian rank-and-file as well as Gaian elite also suggests that Ozawa has formed some kind of alliance, which isn't too big a surprise. He was Gotou's second-in-command before, and Gotou was the one who was leading or at least inspired the creation of the Gaian cult. No luck on the psychic, so we're back to exploring Shinjuku mall—they mentioned that people were being taken to underground prisons and brainwashed, so maybe down in the basement where the Resistance used to be?
Bingo. Wendigos are evil spirits in Algonquian folklore that possesses humans and drives them to consume other humans, typically seen as an embodiment of greed and gluttony. Pop culture tends to portray them as giant deer-people or basically yetis, but neither of those is really accurate.
Wendigo stops us and asks us if Ozawa sent us here, and Hero decides to be a little bit chaotic and lies that he totally did. Wendigo doesn't actually disbelieve us here, it just declares that it doesn't care if Ozawa did send us, because the only one it'll let pass is Ozawa himself. The music switches to the tense pre-battle track you get before you select your commands, and we go for it. Wendigo opens with Mabufula, the second-tier multi-target ice magic, and it freezes all my crew solid. The upshot is that it dealt damage in the low double-digits and only slightly higher with its melee attacks, so all I have to do is wait for my party to thaw out and they shoot it to death.
Directly behind it, we find a strange man.
The man introduces himself as Psychodiver, objectively the coolest name ever, and explains that Ozawa makes use of him as a tool to brainwash those that he drags underground. Ozawa enslaved him as soon as he learned about Psychodiver's power, and forces him to brainwash people day in and day out. He's locked up whenever he's not working, and if he ever refuses, Ozawa's demons will kill him immediately. It makes sense—Ozawa values his brainwashing abilities and made them very public as a threat that his people live under, but he doesn't value them so much he'd be willing to risk someone ever using them against him. Psychodiver can only live under Ozawa's command, otherwise he has to die for Ozawa to feel safe.
Ordinarily I'd be against trauma-dumping on someone you just met, but I think I can make an exception considering the circumstances.
As soon as Hero introduces themself, Psychodiver starts ranting about how their aura sticks out like a sore thumb and how they have some abnormal vibes. He correctly surmises that Hero (and I) both want to know what on earth he's talking about, so he clarifies.
I'm sure glad I headcanoned Hero as nonbinary, or else I'd be laughing really hard at Psychodiver pointing a gnarled finger at them and yelling "HETEROSEXUAL".
This all but confirms the Messiah is Mary, because Psychodiver explains that whoever this destined partner is, she's in a lot of trouble, and if Hero doesn't save her right away then they'll probably end up dying too. That ends the conversation, which is kind of wild when we need Psychodiver to save her in the first place, but I suppose until we take out Ozawa there's no way we can realistically bust him out.
We end up having to do a little sleuthing here, and the solution is to find the Disco. I can't remember going here previously, but it's already been mapped out, so I guess I must have? At the door, a woman with a flat-top haircut half the height of her head takes our coats and cover charges, and we're left to explore. Dead ahead is the bartender, who talks about how there actually is one person who came back from Roppongi, and when he did he came back white as a sheet after having barely escaped with his life.
This rumour hasn't been as popular as the rumour that Roppongi's a paradise, which makes sense. When you live in Ozawa's totalitarian mini-state, it's a lot more heartening to imagine that there is somewhere better you could go to if you really wanted rather than imagining that your current situation is the best one possible.
The bartender leaves us off with a vaguely ominous note that the man could only say one thing: "The count fears the pot…"
We tuck that tidbit away for later and explore around some more. The disco is full of people singing Ozawa's praises, one woman talking about how much she loves strong men like Master Ozawa, a hooded man talking about how coexistence with demons is the only way to survive in the world and so Master Ozawa is truly the wisest, a private policeman who…
Yeah.
Moving past his drunken ranting, we run into another woman talking about how Roppongi is rumoured to have an even bigger, better Disco, but she decides she's fine just where she is because Master Ozawa keeps her safe.
The only person to break from the party line is a panicked, hooded man who rants about how Roppongi isn't a safe haven, but rather a city of the dead, full of shambling corpses and dashed hopes.
This is all interesting stuff, but the real meat here is down the stairs at the back of the Disco. Another hooded man realises that we're all from out of town, and he spills the beans on Ozawa as fast as he can. Ozawa struck up a deal with the demons that protects humans that live under his rule—as long as they obey, demons won't touch them. Ozawa's private policemen call themselves that, but they're really just thugs, probably former yakuza that Ozawa worked with before the apocalypse, and since Ozawa doesn't pay any attention to the day to day operation of Shinjuku they're the de-facto rulers, doing whatever they want, whenever they want, with no way to oppose them.
The biggest juicy tidbit, however, is that Ozawa isn't quite the top dog he portrays himself as. The word on the street is that Ozawa didn't enter into his agreement as an equal player, but rather a subordinate—he himself is working for an even more powerful demon, and is forced to do their bidding. Unfortunately, before the man can share more, someone finds us.
He vanishes, and in his place a private policeman arrives, angrily asking what we were talking about. We're given the opportunity to run, which we do right away, and then left to ponder our next location.
Well, I say that, but it's not exactly difficult. The only other place we could go to now is Ozawa himself, now that we know his deal and we know that Psychodiver is under his control. Once we take him out, things will likely collapse into a power vacuum in Shinjuku, but a small dictatorship isn't exactly a great way to live either, and we desperately need to save Mary. After a quick stop to the Gaian church to heal, onwards and upwards we go!
As soon as we push past the guard, we're attacked by a new demon.
Worms come from the Old Norse "ormr", the term used to describe flightless, serpent-like dragon such as Fáfnir. The term "wyrm" from Old English is sometimes used to describe legless, wingless dragons in the modern day, though that's far from a universal assessment.
Originally I'd thought that this was scripted, but they're painfully weak, going down in just one round of gun attacks, so I guess I just got lucky. We push through to the door you can see on the left, and we finally come face to face with Ozawa.
Oh, it has been a long time, huh?
Ozawa pre-apocalypse was a young man—he lead a street gang and was taken on by Gotou as a second in command, but he took the position in hopes of further political power and it seems like he's finally made that a reality. His hair has gone grey with age and he's dropped his casual coat and pants for a snappy suit. Even so, he still stands with the same contemptuous slouch despite the decades.
Ozawa doesn't seem to recognise us, asking us politely what he can do for us as the opener of the conversation, but Adam explodes on him immediately, yelling (accurately) about how Ozawa hasn't changed even a little and how he's just as corrupt as he ever was. He then drops a very specific timeframe that I wouldn't have been comfortable calling, but hey, we have specifics now!
He looks older than 50ish to me, but hey, 30 years in the post-apocalypse probably ages you 60 in real terms from stress.
Ozawa laughs him off and calls him "boy", asking him sarcastically to think things through. Those who obey Ozawa can survive in the harsh world of the future without worry, and those who don't will die. What's the harm in that?
Adam takes this poorly, threatening to attack right away, and Ozawa gives a theatrical sigh over how Adam refuses to listen to reason, before revealing exactly which demon he's made himself subordinate to.
Notably, Ozawa addresses him as "Master Take-Minakata", even as he demands that he get rid of us. Take-Minakata is a Japanese deity, traditionally portrayed as the son of the god Ōkuninushi. He attempted to resist Amaterasu's takeover of his father's territory, but was defeated in a wrestling match by Take-Mikazuchi, who tore off his arms and left him to flee.
In a first for the game, Take-Minakata manages a surprise round against our party, and in one shot takes off roughly 2/3rds of everyone's HP. Noah immediately advises that we flee, which we do automatically as Adam laments that we'd made it that far and yet still had to run. We're forced out the door, beaten badly enough that we need healing, so there's nothing for it but to run back to the mall.
Along the way, Adam stops us.
Devil May Cry, eat your heart out. SMT was doing it a whole decade earlier.
I'll transcribe this bit directly, since it's pretty important.
Noah: "Good God, are you insane, Adam!? If you fuse with a demon, you'll no longer be human anymore!"
Noah: "What good will defeating him do if you have to throw away your humanity to do it!"
Adam: "Noah! You wouldn't understand…"
Adam: "If you'd have gone through what I have, maybe you'd see my point of view…"
Noah and Adam both fall silent, and we're left to continue along.
I wonder what Adam is talking about here.
On one hand, this could point to some deeper trauma in Adam's past that spurred him on to be this way. He's a bit of a study in contrasts—his angry rant about the beggar looking for charity suggests that he holds people who can't provide for themselves in contempt, but Adam's story has consistently been about his lack of power and need for support, and his righteous anger towards Ozawa is something that Adam himself insists is born of Ozawa's cruelty towards the innocent. He seemingly can't stand someone incapable of standing up for themselves, but he also despises someone throwing their power around to oppress others.
I don't think he's lying, but I also don't really think he's being honest with himself here. Adam hated Ozawa even before the apocalypse, and while it's true Ozawa was throwing around his power as the second in command of a military coup, we only see Adam's real anger let out when Ozawa and his gang beat the shit out of him and he's left to grab onto us as a way to get revenge. When it seems like we'll have more important things to do than that, he straight up dips so he can work with the Resistance to take out Ozawa specifically.
There's a consistent pattern of Adam failing in some way or another and then doing something extreme to compensate for when he takes his next swing at it. He tries to take on the gang by himself, fails, and allies himself with Hero and Noah. The trio try to fight Ozawa, let him escape, and Adam joins up with the Resistance to head an operation specifically to kill him. He fails that, joins back up with Hero and Noah and goes through En-no-Ozuno's training in the Kongokai, is forced to retreat, and now he's convinced that if he can obtain a source of demonic power for himself, he can accomplish his goals.
It's possible that there really is something in Adam's past that has left him so angry and so vengeful, but frankly I'm unconvinced that it's the true source of his feelings. I think that he's still mad Ozawa proved himself stronger way back when we first met, and while his indignation about Ozawa's cruelties and tyranny is genuine, he's probably using them more as an excuse to make his anger a thing of righteousness.
Well, we'll see how it goes.
We make a quick pit-stop in the Gaian church to heal up, and then we go to our one-stop-shop for all our demon fusion needs.
Where better to perform a profane ritual to merge your body with demonic power than the Heretic Mansion?
Adam cries out that he needs more strength to defeat Ozawa, then corrects himself. He needs it to fight and survive in this dog-eat-dog world that Tokyo has been transformed into. In his own words—nobody will pick on him again. Nobody will defeat him anymore.
Then—
Wait hang on—
I DIDN'T GET A CHOICE HERE WAIT—
ADAM YOU RATFUCKER DID YOU JUST STEAL MY GODDAMN DEMON
I'm beyond flabbergasted. Adam just didn't have any fucking demons at all, despite explicitly being a Demon Summoner. This bitch just waltzed in, talking all that good shit about needing personal power to survive, and then just helped himself to my Nekomata!
God, what an asshole. I cannot wait for you to go mad with power so I can smack you upside the goddamned head for that.
I notice that his HP is significantly higher than it was before, so I go to check his status screen and I'm kind of shocked, because this wasn't just a story beat.
That's about a 10 level jump.
I didn't get to allocate any of those stats and I can't quite remember what they were before, but Adam's Strength is now the highest of the party by far, and his Speed and Vitality equal Hero's. In one go, he's rocketed up to the strongest of the party if you look at pure statlines, though Hero still outdoes him in terms of firepower.
As a result of his jump in levels, he's also learned four new spells. The most important of these are Agilao, the second tier single target fire spell, and its multi-target version Maragion. He has also learned Estoma, which prevents demons with a lower level than Adam from appearing as random encounters, and Makaraka, which negates all enemy magic for one turn.
Incidentally, the full artwork of his new demonic form looks like this.
Peak performance.
Next time on Shin Megami Tensei, we help Adam get revenge on Ozawa.
When we last left off, we found a chained up girl being hailed as the Messiah for the Messian cult, who has seemingly been possessed by a demon. The only way to save her is to get a psychic from Shinjuku to let us travel inside her mind and purge the demonic corruption before it's too late. No one mentioned that girl being Mary, but no one mentioned her not being Mary, so it's a bit of a tossup at the moment.
First things first, there were a few treasures that I missed in the building on account of all the dark zones and the brutal murder that Adam and Noah underwent.
I did laugh a bit when I realised that the reward was the one kind of incense I can't actually use, because Adam and Noah are going to dip eventually and Hero is much like a six year old in that they can't spell for shit.
First up was a Magic Incense that left me helplessly giggling at how useless it was in the immediate sense, though it'll be great for Mary when and if we eventually get her back on our team. The final piece of treasure isn't super useful immediately either—we find a Diamond in another chest, which goes into a special part of my inventory I can't access through the Use or Equip menus. I vaguely, vaguely remember later games in the series having a mechanic where you can trade gemstones for special rewards, so presumably we'll find something like that here, but for the moment we're stuck with some potentially great rewards we can't really use.
The trip outside is rough. There's a spell in later games called Traesto that allows you to instantly teleport out of a dungeon if I'm remembering right, and looking back on some of my past stuff I realise that the adorable little Cu Sith had it as part of its skillset. I would kill for that right now, but unfortunately Cu Sith got fused away and there's no such thing as skill inheritance in Shin Megami Tensei, so I'm going the long way back. I summon up Ame-no-Uzume and Elf to pad out the party with Noah and Adam dead, and then realise that I never actually did a writeup for Elf when I recruited her, so I'll do that now.
Elves originate from the Norse Álfar, mentioned in early texts alongside the Aesir, but have evolved in many different directions throughout the years, from the tiny, invisible creatures that caused sickness in some Celtic societies, the renowned craftsmen of the svartálfar, to Tolkein's immortal beings of wisdom and power.
I seem to be able to summon and use Neutral demons regardless of my current alignment, which is very nice. Another demon with Diarama is handy, but the key benefit to Elf is that she's got Zionga in her arsenal, which judging by my battle with Thor is basically capable of permanently locking down a single target with Shock as long as I cast it every turn. With 110 MP, that's more than 12 casts at maximum, so I should be good to go on single targets.
That said, if I run into another horde of six Lilim, I'm just booking it, no questions asked. I'd love to recruit one, but I've never run into an encounter with just one Lilim solo which I'd really need if I was going to risk multiple turns negotiating.
Incidentally, along the way for our exploration to clear out the building, we found another rumour that we'll check out eventually.
I'm pretty fond of how we have, for lack of a better term, Messian civilians here too? I speculated that this might be a Messian safehouse at first, but I think with the chained up Messiah, the two varieties of militant Messians, and the rest of the demons crawling around plus the shop, healer, and Mansion on the ground floor it's pretty safe to say that this is some kind of known rest spot in the post-apocalypse. The ground floor is relatively safe to stay around, but the upper floor is covered in shadows and crawling with demons.The Messians must have decided to hide their ailing Messiah away here specifically because it's a dangerous location, so you have their military forces working to protect their civilians and the Messiah while also not necessarily trying to exterminate wandering demons that can act as another layer of defense, as long as they don't get too close.
I still haven't met a single Gaian, though, so hopefully I'll run into them soon. Ideally it'll also involve opportunities to swing my alignment back to Neutral, because all story stuff aside it's driving me nuts knowing I'm working with suboptimal demons because some of my potential fusions are Chaos.
Throughout my explorations, I ultimately end up falling down another unmarked floor, which turns out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. I'm further away from the exit than I'd like to be, but I'm much closer than I was when I was stuck upstairs, so it's just a quick hop, skip, and a jump back to the healer and then to the shop to pick up some revival items just in case. It was very silly of me not to get more than one after testing to make sure they worked, but now that I've paid for that mistake it's one I won't make again.
With everyone healed up, cured of paralysis, and brought back from the brink of death, it's time to make our way to Shinjuku via that handy Terminal on the first floor.
You're just as hideous as the day I lost you.
As you can see above, the layout has not changed whatsoever, and so that means that our first stop is the gun shop, just in case. As I wander, I first assume that I'm getting lucky, and then start realising with a sense of pure childish wonder that there are no more random encounters in the Shinjuku mall. There are fewer demons here than there were before the world ended! Is Ozawa keeping the place clean because it's his seat of power, or is there something else going on here? Hard to tell right now, but I choose to celebrate my newfound freedom by doing what I wanted to do ages ago and fill out the map by grabbing every square.
In the strictest possible sense, filling out the map is a waste of time, but it does give us the opportunity to get the vibe on what's going on around Shinjuku nowadays.
Something tells me this isn't the fun kind of brainwashing.
We don't hear much more about the brainwashing, but it seems like Ozawa's doing his best to ensure he keeps his power by any means necessary. The existence of a private police that presumably take their orders from him and only him does go a long way towards explaining why the mall is free from demons—aside from keeping the people inside safe so he can continue to rule over and exploit them, Demon Summoners can only summon demons after making contracts with them. Anyone with a COMP will be forced to leave the relative safety of Ozawa's kingdom if they want to gain the power to oppose him, and honestly I wouldn't be shocked if he's simply insisting on people handing over their COMPs before they're allowed inside. Maybe we only got around that by teleporting in via the Terminal?
Anyone with a COMP can use those, though, so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'd at least have put some guards around there if I knew it was a point of failure, so maybe Ozawa doesn't care too much about other people with COMPs around. He certainly had a big enough ego back before the apocalypse that I can see him assuming no one could challenge him one on one at this point since the four party members and Gotou vanished and/or died.
Next door we find a Messian, confirming at least that Ozawa allows them to stick around, and they've got something interesting to say.
First of all, the wording of "days gone by" suggests that there's a greater timeskip than I originally thought—for macca to have become a currency it would have needed some time to establish, but now we have people talking about the pre-apocalypse in terms like "days gone by" that feel like there's a lot more time between the two periods. Maybe that's why we didn't recognise Mary, if she is indeed the Messiah? She aged, we didn't? It'd also explain why Ozawa seems so confident, if the strongest Demon Summoners were gone for five or ten years rather than just a few weeks or months.
The Messian continues on, explaining that the former Governmental Office is swarming with demons and anyone who walks in makes it roughly two steps before getting devoured by the hordes inside. Even more worrying, we're warned that both of the towers contain an incredibly strong presence, though there's little detail available about them. Sounds to me like a dungeon, though the wording here is strong enough that I'm thinking this is an actual warning rather than a wink-wink nudge-nudge hint at where to go next. We've gotten enough little hints at where to go that I'm comfortable leaving this for the moment.
We also run into more evidence of Ozawa's corruption.
The girl from Little Nightmares goes on to loudly exclaim that she hopes Ozawa dies, before suddenly swerving and starting to fear that the private police may have heard her, because if they did then she'd be brainwashed like the rest. So, yeah, Ozawa's established a minor totalitarian regime that goes as far as to literally steal from children and will brainwash and imprison them too, in case we didn't already think he was a dipshit.
Throughout my exploration, I've been finding a couple of new spots—there's a Heretic Mansion there I'm convinced wasn't in Shinjuku beforehand, as well as a Junk shop, but here, here we find the Holy Grail. A store labelled "Weapons", an arms dealer who grumbles about how we better be here just to buy and not cause trouble, and the most beautiful shop menu I've seen all game.
Why is the M16 Rifle genderlocked to men???
Gun upgrades and bullet upgrades. I could kiss the shopkeep if I wasn't convinced they'd shoot me for it.
The M16 is a straight upgrade in almost every way, 43 power and 5 accuracy to the Machinegun's 34 and 3 respectively, and the SPAS12 is an upgrade again, 55 power and 8 accuracy. The downsides, such as they are, are that the M16 has a variance in hits from 2~8 and the SPAS12 from 2~4, compared to the Machinegun's 3~6. Quite frankly that isn't remotely enough of a downside for me to turn down a 21 power increase, so rationalising that Adam and Noah got to have their cool alignment weapons I splurge on Hero and buy them a shiny new SPAS12 with Nerve Bullets. Our gun power shoots from 44 to 70, and now we once again have a solid chance of putting any enemy we hit to sleep.
I decide to take pity on Adam and Noah and buy each of them Nerve Bullets too, even though I know they'll vanish before too long. The key point is survivability, and 350 macca for a pretty intense power boost is nothing.
Across the way is the Armor shop, which is even more important than the weapons, because the armor we can buy now not only increases our defense, it increases our base stats. The armor vendor helpfully informs us that he's dug up some great bargains for us, then admits that some of the merch actually was dug up.
Absolutely hysterical man.
The main pain point here is that armor is expensive, and I don't have nearly enough to kit out everyone after buying my fancy new shotgun, so I comfort myself with the thought of Noah and Adam's inevitable betrayal and pour everything into a new outfit for Hero.
Oooooh yeah. It's all coming together.
Hero walks out of the store with a solid 50 Defense, 40 Evade, a +2 to Strength, and a +1 to Speed. It's not going to make them some kind of Doomslayer, but it is going to make them a lot more durable on top of their existing 20 Vitality. The Neutral legendary weapon is taunting me, but hopefully soon I'll get a chance to be a bit more chaotic.
Speaking of Chaos, I finally run into the Gaians and the healing spot I theorised they had in Shinjuku. They're, uh, interesting.
To clarify on this, mister Gaian thinks that's based because only Lucifer has the power needed to thrive in this world.
Very normal.
I can't begin to describe the architecture of the Gaian church besides noting the various statues of what look like oni or angry gods and noting that it's very much not the typically Christian/Catholic vibe of the Messians, though if anyone else can describe it any more accurately I'd love to get your take on it. I'll be coming here for healing for the foreseeable future, seeing as how I need to shift myself Chaosward.
Okay, that was a lot of exploration! No word on where we actually need to go next, but in absence of specific directions I found a set of stairs that go up, so we're gonna check out the second floor. This one differs plenty from the first in that random encounters are back, so I take the time to test out Hero's new kit on a set of five Werecats. Adam and Noah each do 29 damage per hit with their Machineguns and the Nerve Bullets, while Hero does a whopping 58, literally double their damage. It's enough to easily carry me through the encounter, even though I returned my demons to ensure that I wouldn't eat up more magnetite than I need to.
Speaking of demons, we find a new one.
You all know what a corpse is. I'm mostly just concerned that this should be the plural form, given that it looks like a Halo 1 Proto-Gravemind.
Corpse is a joke. It can hit for about 27 damage on Noah and Adam, but they hit Hero for 14 damage each time and Hero shoots them for 63 damage and more often than not puts them to sleep. Hero re-enacts the plot of their favorite zombie schlock by blowing the Corpse to bits and is rewarded with a level up. Just as I'm celebrating, I'm brought face to face with a sad reminder of this game's insane restrictions.
Momunofu is another of those figures with very little information available on English websites—the SMT wiki claims that it's a type of shikigami that serves the pre-Shinto god Arahabaki.
They can hit, but they can't hit hard, and even Tarukaja and Sukunda can't help them much with that. They go down easy and we continue onwards, up another set of stairs to the third floor. We run into more Gaian Suicide Squads along the way, but unfortunately they have not been levelling up alongside us, and two sets of bullets from Hero and Mary were more than enough to take care of them way back when. As is now, with three multi-target guns all rocking Nerve Bullets, they go down incredibly quick. We're back to "the firing squad mulches all opposition" for the moment and, you know what?
After that last building, I'll take it. Maybe I'll even go back and kill some Lilim just for catharsis.
After two waves of Suicide Squads, we finally find something new, a Gaian elite troop.
Oni-Jorou literally translates to "demon prostitute". I don't have any joke here, she's just aspirational. You go, girl.
Oni-Joro has three skills, two of which inflict either Shock or Paralysis, so she has to go down immediately. Significantly more annoying than the Temple Knights, that's for sure, but fortunately there's only one of her. She's incredibly tough, though, taking a full six rounds of all three shooting at her and the one attack she gets off in between being put to sleep deals half of Adam's health in one shot. We get a remarkable 1300 EXP from her too, so she's basically a miniboss. Not bad!
Just past the Oni-Joro, however, we're stopped.
The pale silver jacket with pointy shoulders is such a look for the private police.
Unfortunately we don't have an appointment, so we're turned away. The presence of Gaian rank-and-file as well as Gaian elite also suggests that Ozawa has formed some kind of alliance, which isn't too big a surprise. He was Gotou's second-in-command before, and Gotou was the one who was leading or at least inspired the creation of the Gaian cult. No luck on the psychic, so we're back to exploring Shinjuku mall—they mentioned that people were being taken to underground prisons and brainwashed, so maybe down in the basement where the Resistance used to be?
Bingo. Wendigos are evil spirits in Algonquian folklore that possesses humans and drives them to consume other humans, typically seen as an embodiment of greed and gluttony. Pop culture tends to portray them as giant deer-people or basically yetis, but neither of those is really accurate.
Wendigo stops us and asks us if Ozawa sent us here, and Hero decides to be a little bit chaotic and lies that he totally did. Wendigo doesn't actually disbelieve us here, it just declares that it doesn't care if Ozawa did send us, because the only one it'll let pass is Ozawa himself. The music switches to the tense pre-battle track you get before you select your commands, and we go for it. Wendigo opens with Mabufula, the second-tier multi-target ice magic, and it freezes all my crew solid. The upshot is that it dealt damage in the low double-digits and only slightly higher with its melee attacks, so all I have to do is wait for my party to thaw out and they shoot it to death.
Directly behind it, we find a strange man.
The man introduces himself as Psychodiver, objectively the coolest name ever, and explains that Ozawa makes use of him as a tool to brainwash those that he drags underground. Ozawa enslaved him as soon as he learned about Psychodiver's power, and forces him to brainwash people day in and day out. He's locked up whenever he's not working, and if he ever refuses, Ozawa's demons will kill him immediately. It makes sense—Ozawa values his brainwashing abilities and made them very public as a threat that his people live under, but he doesn't value them so much he'd be willing to risk someone ever using them against him. Psychodiver can only live under Ozawa's command, otherwise he has to die for Ozawa to feel safe.
Ordinarily I'd be against trauma-dumping on someone you just met, but I think I can make an exception considering the circumstances.
As soon as Hero introduces themself, Psychodiver starts ranting about how their aura sticks out like a sore thumb and how they have some abnormal vibes. He correctly surmises that Hero (and I) both want to know what on earth he's talking about, so he clarifies.
I'm sure glad I headcanoned Hero as nonbinary, or else I'd be laughing really hard at Psychodiver pointing a gnarled finger at them and yelling "HETEROSEXUAL".
This all but confirms the Messiah is Mary, because Psychodiver explains that whoever this destined partner is, she's in a lot of trouble, and if Hero doesn't save her right away then they'll probably end up dying too. That ends the conversation, which is kind of wild when we need Psychodiver to save her in the first place, but I suppose until we take out Ozawa there's no way we can realistically bust him out.
We end up having to do a little sleuthing here, and the solution is to find the Disco. I can't remember going here previously, but it's already been mapped out, so I guess I must have? At the door, a woman with a flat-top haircut half the height of her head takes our coats and cover charges, and we're left to explore. Dead ahead is the bartender, who talks about how there actually is one person who came back from Roppongi, and when he did he came back white as a sheet after having barely escaped with his life.
This rumour hasn't been as popular as the rumour that Roppongi's a paradise, which makes sense. When you live in Ozawa's totalitarian mini-state, it's a lot more heartening to imagine that there is somewhere better you could go to if you really wanted rather than imagining that your current situation is the best one possible.
The bartender leaves us off with a vaguely ominous note that the man could only say one thing: "The count fears the pot…"
We tuck that tidbit away for later and explore around some more. The disco is full of people singing Ozawa's praises, one woman talking about how much she loves strong men like Master Ozawa, a hooded man talking about how coexistence with demons is the only way to survive in the world and so Master Ozawa is truly the wisest, a private policeman who…
Yeah.
Moving past his drunken ranting, we run into another woman talking about how Roppongi is rumoured to have an even bigger, better Disco, but she decides she's fine just where she is because Master Ozawa keeps her safe.
The only person to break from the party line is a panicked, hooded man who rants about how Roppongi isn't a safe haven, but rather a city of the dead, full of shambling corpses and dashed hopes.
This is all interesting stuff, but the real meat here is down the stairs at the back of the Disco. Another hooded man realises that we're all from out of town, and he spills the beans on Ozawa as fast as he can. Ozawa struck up a deal with the demons that protects humans that live under his rule—as long as they obey, demons won't touch them. Ozawa's private policemen call themselves that, but they're really just thugs, probably former yakuza that Ozawa worked with before the apocalypse, and since Ozawa doesn't pay any attention to the day to day operation of Shinjuku they're the de-facto rulers, doing whatever they want, whenever they want, with no way to oppose them.
The biggest juicy tidbit, however, is that Ozawa isn't quite the top dog he portrays himself as. The word on the street is that Ozawa didn't enter into his agreement as an equal player, but rather a subordinate—he himself is working for an even more powerful demon, and is forced to do their bidding. Unfortunately, before the man can share more, someone finds us.
He vanishes, and in his place a private policeman arrives, angrily asking what we were talking about. We're given the opportunity to run, which we do right away, and then left to ponder our next location.
Well, I say that, but it's not exactly difficult. The only other place we could go to now is Ozawa himself, now that we know his deal and we know that Psychodiver is under his control. Once we take him out, things will likely collapse into a power vacuum in Shinjuku, but a small dictatorship isn't exactly a great way to live either, and we desperately need to save Mary. After a quick stop to the Gaian church to heal, onwards and upwards we go!
As soon as we push past the guard, we're attacked by a new demon.
Worms come from the Old Norse "ormr", the term used to describe flightless, serpent-like dragon such as Fáfnir. The term "wyrm" from Old English is sometimes used to describe legless, wingless dragons in the modern day, though that's far from a universal assessment.
Originally I'd thought that this was scripted, but they're painfully weak, going down in just one round of gun attacks, so I guess I just got lucky. We push through to the door you can see on the left, and we finally come face to face with Ozawa.
Oh, it has been a long time, huh?
Ozawa pre-apocalypse was a young man—he lead a street gang and was taken on by Gotou as a second in command, but he took the position in hopes of further political power and it seems like he's finally made that a reality. His hair has gone grey with age and he's dropped his casual coat and pants for a snappy suit. Even so, he still stands with the same contemptuous slouch despite the decades.
Ozawa doesn't seem to recognise us, asking us politely what he can do for us as the opener of the conversation, but Adam explodes on him immediately, yelling (accurately) about how Ozawa hasn't changed even a little and how he's just as corrupt as he ever was. He then drops a very specific timeframe that I wouldn't have been comfortable calling, but hey, we have specifics now!
He looks older than 50ish to me, but hey, 30 years in the post-apocalypse probably ages you 60 in real terms from stress.
Ozawa laughs him off and calls him "boy", asking him sarcastically to think things through. Those who obey Ozawa can survive in the harsh world of the future without worry, and those who don't will die. What's the harm in that?
Adam takes this poorly, threatening to attack right away, and Ozawa gives a theatrical sigh over how Adam refuses to listen to reason, before revealing exactly which demon he's made himself subordinate to.
Notably, Ozawa addresses him as "Master Take-Minakata", even as he demands that he get rid of us. Take-Minakata is a Japanese deity, traditionally portrayed as the son of the god Ōkuninushi. He attempted to resist Amaterasu's takeover of his father's territory, but was defeated in a wrestling match by Take-Mikazuchi, who tore off his arms and left him to flee.
In a first for the game, Take-Minakata manages a surprise round against our party, and in one shot takes off roughly 2/3rds of everyone's HP. Noah immediately advises that we flee, which we do automatically as Adam laments that we'd made it that far and yet still had to run. We're forced out the door, beaten badly enough that we need healing, so there's nothing for it but to run back to the mall.
Along the way, Adam stops us.
Devil May Cry, eat your heart out. SMT was doing it a whole decade earlier.
I'll transcribe this bit directly, since it's pretty important.
Noah: "Good God, are you insane, Adam!? If you fuse with a demon, you'll no longer be human anymore!"
Noah: "What good will defeating him do if you have to throw away your humanity to do it!"
Adam: "Noah! You wouldn't understand…"
Adam: "If you'd have gone through what I have, maybe you'd see my point of view…"
Noah and Adam both fall silent, and we're left to continue along.
I wonder what Adam is talking about here.
On one hand, this could point to some deeper trauma in Adam's past that spurred him on to be this way. He's a bit of a study in contrasts—his angry rant about the beggar looking for charity suggests that he holds people who can't provide for themselves in contempt, but Adam's story has consistently been about his lack of power and need for support, and his righteous anger towards Ozawa is something that Adam himself insists is born of Ozawa's cruelty towards the innocent. He seemingly can't stand someone incapable of standing up for themselves, but he also despises someone throwing their power around to oppress others.
I don't think he's lying, but I also don't really think he's being honest with himself here. Adam hated Ozawa even before the apocalypse, and while it's true Ozawa was throwing around his power as the second in command of a military coup, we only see Adam's real anger let out when Ozawa and his gang beat the shit out of him and he's left to grab onto us as a way to get revenge. When it seems like we'll have more important things to do than that, he straight up dips so he can work with the Resistance to take out Ozawa specifically.
There's a consistent pattern of Adam failing in some way or another and then doing something extreme to compensate for when he takes his next swing at it. He tries to take on the gang by himself, fails, and allies himself with Hero and Noah. The trio try to fight Ozawa, let him escape, and Adam joins up with the Resistance to head an operation specifically to kill him. He fails that, joins back up with Hero and Noah and goes through En-no-Ozuno's training in the Kongokai, is forced to retreat, and now he's convinced that if he can obtain a source of demonic power for himself, he can accomplish his goals.
It's possible that there really is something in Adam's past that has left him so angry and so vengeful, but frankly I'm unconvinced that it's the true source of his feelings. I think that he's still mad Ozawa proved himself stronger way back when we first met, and while his indignation about Ozawa's cruelties and tyranny is genuine, he's probably using them more as an excuse to make his anger a thing of righteousness.
Well, we'll see how it goes.
We make a quick pit-stop in the Gaian church to heal up, and then we go to our one-stop-shop for all our demon fusion needs.
Where better to perform a profane ritual to merge your body with demonic power than the Heretic Mansion?
Adam cries out that he needs more strength to defeat Ozawa, then corrects himself. He needs it to fight and survive in this dog-eat-dog world that Tokyo has been transformed into. In his own words—nobody will pick on him again. Nobody will defeat him anymore.
Then—
Wait hang on—
I DIDN'T GET A CHOICE HERE WAIT—
ADAM YOU RATFUCKER DID YOU JUST STEAL MY GODDAMN DEMON
I'm beyond flabbergasted. Adam just didn't have any fucking demons at all, despite explicitly being a Demon Summoner. This bitch just waltzed in, talking all that good shit about needing personal power to survive, and then just helped himself to my Nekomata!
God, what an asshole. I cannot wait for you to go mad with power so I can smack you upside the goddamned head for that.
I notice that his HP is significantly higher than it was before, so I go to check his status screen and I'm kind of shocked, because this wasn't just a story beat.
That's about a 10 level jump.
I didn't get to allocate any of those stats and I can't quite remember what they were before, but Adam's Strength is now the highest of the party by far, and his Speed and Vitality equal Hero's. In one go, he's rocketed up to the strongest of the party if you look at pure statlines, though Hero still outdoes him in terms of firepower.
As a result of his jump in levels, he's also learned four new spells. The most important of these are Agilao, the second tier single target fire spell, and its multi-target version Maragion. He has also learned Estoma, which prevents demons with a lower level than Adam from appearing as random encounters, and Makaraka, which negates all enemy magic for one turn.
Incidentally, the full artwork of his new demonic form looks like this.
Peak performance.
Next time on Shin Megami Tensei, we help Adam get revenge on Ozawa.
Kittynapping!
And in regards to the Gaian Temple it reminds me off a darker version of a South east Asian temple hall . Just with a dash of satanism, Collection Highlight: Temple Hall
And in regards to the Gaian Temple it reminds me off a darker version of a South east Asian temple hall . Just with a dash of satanism, Collection Highlight: Temple Hall
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
The aristocracy has a well-documented fear of weed.
1337Procrast
Fire Emblem Enjoyer
- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Peak fiction.
I was going to join you in righteously condemning Adam for stealing another person' Pokemon, but then I realized he just really wanted to become one with a catgirl and now I'm fully stanning for him. Absolutely understandable, he's just like me fr fr.
Only knowing Shin Megami Tensei through common knowledge and Internet discussions, it's really fascinating to me that 'policemen' are associated with Chaos and not Law so far. Ozawa's private police is clearly Yakuza that dress like they're in a Sci-fi movie from the 70s/80s, but that they care about presenting themselves as the legitimate order (eh) while being Chaos-aligned is the reverse of the urban Mad Max landscape I was expecting.
Curious to see if future depictions of Law followers will surprise too, even if 'medieval knights in post-apo Tokyo' wasn't expected either.
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
Knowing this game so far, no matter who this girl turns out to be, odds are her name will be Mary.
... If I ever play through this game myself, I kinda want to run with a Tokyo Godfathers theme and name the girl Kiyoko.
This is solid evidence that in the world of SMT, Demonlayers are more powerful than Demonslayers.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm picturing a timeline where smt turned Adam into a cat girl here and we got to start the trans cat girl memes decades early.
What an innovation for the industry it could have been!
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
Honestly, if it's been thirty years and there was both a nuke and three decades of demons rampaging around with two cults and a mafioso running Tokyo, I've got to say the city is looking remarkably decent considering.
- Pronouns
- He
Why is the M(ale)16(and up) Rifle genderlocked to men? It's a mystery.
Clearly Adam would have approved if the beggar stole your money instead of asking. Not his though. That's different.
Wait what form is Noah's power up going to take?
Wait what form is Noah's power up going to take?
Something something balance between order and chaos something something.
Obviously he "taxes" someone of their demons and fuses with them... Wait, what do you mean, governments are chaos-aligned?
Oh! It's the power of love! Neighbour Mary and Noah will fuse into a perfect androgynous being!
Highest-level chaos-aligned demon.
- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Huh, the way it showed up on the actual fusion screen was flicking through all my demons like it was a roulette.
Makes sense that he'd prefer the Chaos demons, though, albeit it's extremely funny to imagine Adam picking Nekomata and Hero and Noah giving him the flouride stare the entire time as he desperately tries to explain why it's optimal for him to fuse with the naked catgirl.
Makes sense that he'd prefer the Chaos demons, though, albeit it's extremely funny to imagine Adam picking Nekomata and Hero and Noah giving him the flouride stare the entire time as he desperately tries to explain why it's optimal for him to fuse with the naked catgirl.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
As someone who's played SMT 3 I just had to look up what you meant by "Naked Catgirl" and wow, they toned that down some. Almost the inverse of what's happened to the Angel.