There are some real storytelling chops there for such an early game, I'm genuinely impressed. This game is contemporary to FFV, and honestly while they're very different kinds of storytelling I think it can easily hang out with it? There are big, dramatic sweeps, world stakes, actual dramatic event, and a lot of fairly well-handled heroic failure - in fact so far the story has mostly been a downwards arc, with the protagonists failing to stop the apocalypse, then failing to save Noah... And now it's introduced antagonists with actual interiority and acting out of love. I'm impressed.
With that said, and to make another comparison with Final Fantasy since that's the series I'm LPing on my side - I have often complained, and always feel kinda bad about, the fact that Final Fantasy as a series went the route of "bosses are immune to most or all status effects that might actually matter in a fight," because it shuts down a huge chunk of the gameplay right in the spots where it matters. But SMT is showing what it'd be like if you went the other route, and let most bosses be vulnerable to status effects... And it sucks ass? It sounds like every boss battle is basically a cheese race where you either shut down the boss entirely with status effect so they can't do anything, or you get annihilated by their enormous offensive power (and their own status effect magic). You have to engage in lockdown tactics because enemies are vulnerable to them but too strong to risk fighting 'fairly', and while that is kind of in-theme for the ruthless, dark world of SMT's post-apocalypse it just... Doesn't sound fun.
I guess I'm glad it exists as an experiment and an illustration of why, for all my complaints, the ham-fisted "no boss is affected by status effects ever" approach of FF is still, while frustrating, probably better. But yeesh.
There are some real storytelling chops there for such an early game, I'm genuinely impressed. This game is contemporary to FFV, and honestly while they're very different kinds of storytelling I think it can easily hang out with it? There are big, dramatic sweeps, world stakes, actual dramatic event, and a lot of fairly well-handled heroic failure - in fact so far the story has mostly been a downwards arc, with the protagonists failing to stop the apocalypse, then failing to save Noah... And now it's introduced antagonists with actual interiority and acting out of love. I'm impressed.
With that said, and to make another comparison with Final Fantasy since that's the series I'm LPing on my side - I have often complained, and always feel kinda bad about, the fact that Final Fantasy as a series went the route of "bosses are immune to most or all status effects that might actually matter in a fight," because it shuts down a huge chunk of the gameplay right in the spots where it matters. But SMT is showing what it'd be like if you went the other route, and let most bosses be vulnerable to status effects... And it sucks ass? It sounds like every boss battle is basically a cheese race where you either shut down the boss entirely with status effect so they can't do anything, or you get annihilated by their enormous offensive power (and their own status effect magic). You have to engage in lockdown tactics because enemies are vulnerable to them but too strong to risk fighting 'fairly', and while that is kind of in-theme for the ruthless, dark world of SMT's post-apocalypse it just... Doesn't sound fun.
I guess I'm glad it exists as an experiment and an illustration of why, for all my complaints, the ham-fisted "no boss is affected by status effects ever" approach of FF is still, while frustrating, probably better. But yeesh.
Ironic that Final Fantasy is the JRPG series closely tied to D&D in its origins yet SMT is the one that most accurately captures the ethos of trying to run a dramatic boss fight in D&D rules-
Ironic that Final Fantasy is the JRPG series closely tied to D&D in its origins yet SMT is the one that most accurately captures the ethos of trying to run a dramatic boss fight in D&D rules-
With that said, and to make another comparison with Final Fantasy since that's the series I'm LPing on my side - I have often complained, and always feel kinda bad about, the fact that Final Fantasy as a series went the route of "bosses are immune to most or all status effects that might actually matter in a fight," because it shuts down a huge chunk of the gameplay right in the spots where it matters. But SMT is showing what it'd be like if you went the other route, and let most bosses be vulnerable to status effects... And it sucks ass? It sounds like every boss battle is basically a cheese race where you either shut down the boss entirely with status effect so they can't do anything, or you get annihilated by their enormous offensive power (and their own status effect magic). You have to engage in lockdown tactics because enemies are vulnerable to them but too strong to risk fighting 'fairly', and while that is kind of in-theme for the ruthless, dark world of SMT's post-apocalypse it just... Doesn't sound fun.
I guess I'm glad it exists as an experiment and an illustration of why, for all my complaints, the ham-fisted "no boss is affected by status effects ever" approach of FF is still, while frustrating, probably better. But yeesh.
For what it's worth, to touch on mechanics from later SMT entries, they do eventually find a balance where status effects are useful on bosses, without being complete shutdown machines. A lot of it comes down to effects having chances at interrupting actions, combined with bosses getting multiple actions per turn, resulting in an equilibrium where you can cutdown on a boss' damage output, while they remain able to respond, on top of different bosses having different weaknesses and resistances to status effects.
It's absolutely one of my favorite parts of SMT as a series, and I'm very glad they iterated on this approach and improved on it as opposed to going for a blanket ban on status effects for bosses.
When it comes to status effects and bosses, noone does it better than Etrian Odyssey in my opinion. Bosses can be somewhat reliably afflicted with basically anything that doesn't instantly end the fight...but a given enemy can only be afflicted with one status at a time, so you have to choose which ailment you want to go in on and in which order. You can fuck with their turn economy to buy time for yourself using Stun, Fear, Panic, Sleep, Paralyze or Blind, or you can deal more damage with Curse and Poison. What's notable is that after a few turns, when the boss recovers from the ailment, they gain a significant resistance to it - it's not impossible to apply it again, but after enough times eventually the boss will just become flat out immune so it's enough to make you think carefully about what ailments you want to apply and when.
edit: of note is that Fear and Paralyze give a 50% chance for an action to fail, Blind is similar, Panic reduces the enemy to basic attacks, Sleep wears off if you attack, and Stun only lasts 1 turn and doesn't work if you inflict it AFTER the target has acted. None of these just straight up remove enemy turns without some kind of drawback or condition.
Adding another layer to this are Binds - in which you can bind an enemy's head, arms or legs, and there's no restriction on how many binds you can apply to an enemy at once (meaning you can apply a total of one ailment and three binds at once). Binds are important because they not only reduce an enemy's stats, they also allow you to control the fight by limiting what attacks an enemy has access to. Bound arms mean the enemy can't punch you, a bound head means that the enemy can't roar etc etc. Most bosses have one part you really want bound ASAP.
tl;dr ailments and binds are an important and expected part of fighting bosses in Etrian Odyssey.
I'm pretty fond of the way that Cosmic Star Heroine does it, where status effects abilities don't have a chance to happen, but instead wear down an opponent's "Status Effect HP" and once that's reduced to zero the status takes effect. Status moves that don't work aren't wasted because they're still reducing "Status Effect HP" and after an opponent recovers from a status effect it takes more "status damage" to affect them again, so you need to be strategic and vary it up.
Also, after some cursory googling, the Gushing Jar is also variously translated as the Glancing Jar and the Sealing Pot. The vague consensus seems like Sealing Pot is the intended translation. I'm not sure why, since neither the hiragana, the romaji, or the pronunciations of the terms for Gushing/Glancing/Sealing seem terribly similar to each other. I suppose the dictionaries available to the translators at the time just sucked?
Okay "Sealing Pot" sounds a hell of a lot better and the eventual item becomes called the "Belial Pot" when he gets sucked inside so we're going to call it that from now on so I don't have to think about what the forces of Chaos are doing with Belial in the jar.
Okay I deadass did not realise you were obliquely alluding to Alice. I was like "oh yeah that's my buddy Alice but what are those mysterious Mister Red and Mister Black folks with her, that must be the mystery Squirt means".
To flash forward a little, I happened to vaguely remember that Alice in a lot of SMT games is connected to both Belial and Nebiros (for example, in Persona 5 Royal she can only be fused by combining the two), though obviously while I knew this I didn't know why or how. As far as I'm aware, SMT1 is the first time that the trio appear, and it's what sets up their long-running connection throughout the series.
It's kinda sweet that the two gay dads are there to help take care of their undead nightmare daughter for so long, I just groaned because traditionally both bosses are huge pains in the ass.
There are some real storytelling chops there for such an early game, I'm genuinely impressed. This game is contemporary to FFV, and honestly while they're very different kinds of storytelling I think it can easily hang out with it? There are big, dramatic sweeps, world stakes, actual dramatic event, and a lot of fairly well-handled heroic failure - in fact so far the story has mostly been a downwards arc, with the protagonists failing to stop the apocalypse, then failing to save Noah... And now it's introduced antagonists with actual interiority and acting out of love. I'm impressed.
With that said, and to make another comparison with Final Fantasy since that's the series I'm LPing on my side - I have often complained, and always feel kinda bad about, the fact that Final Fantasy as a series went the route of "bosses are immune to most or all status effects that might actually matter in a fight," because it shuts down a huge chunk of the gameplay right in the spots where it matters. But SMT is showing what it'd be like if you went the other route, and let most bosses be vulnerable to status effects... And it sucks ass? It sounds like every boss battle is basically a cheese race where you either shut down the boss entirely with status effect so they can't do anything, or you get annihilated by their enormous offensive power (and their own status effect magic). You have to engage in lockdown tactics because enemies are vulnerable to them but too strong to risk fighting 'fairly', and while that is kind of in-theme for the ruthless, dark world of SMT's post-apocalypse it just... Doesn't sound fun.
I guess I'm glad it exists as an experiment and an illustration of why, for all my complaints, the ham-fisted "no boss is affected by status effects ever" approach of FF is still, while frustrating, probably better. But yeesh.
It's really something, yeah. I wasn't expecting at all that we'd end up in conflict with a pair of demons who just loved a surrogate daughter so much they put everything they had into creating a paradise for her after she was unjustly killed years ago by the nuclear strike on Tokyo. It's some seriously neat storytelling.
And as for the battles...yeah, honestly, I can't really say I'm enjoying them a huge amount. I brought it up in the main posts a handful of times, but SMT1's battle system is just so incredibly swingy that it's hard to feel that anything is a fair challenge. I tried to softball it with Nebiros until the Die Instantly Spell got fired and at that point there was just absolutely no point in attempting to make things a little harder, but that meant that it was just turn after turn of the exact same attacks and spells in the exact same order because that was the Correct Formula to shut down Nebiros's actions entirely.
Later games will balance this better, changing up the system to make status effects less debilitating, changing how turn-order works so you're not scrambling to go first because a boss might just shut down your entire team and waste your turn, making elemental resistances and weaknesses much more important etc. and I'm really looking forward to it, because right now it kinda feels like the only thing that would stop me from beating any boss in the game at this point is the fact that I'd probably run out of MP to cast Zionga before any of the late-game bosses ran out of HP.
Thinking about it, it's really interesting looking back at this update and Alice again. One of the fascinating things about this LP is seeing how long running traditions in SMT originated, or where they've already started thinking about certain concepts, and Alice in particular feels like an interesting case?
You covered how she typically has some connection to Nebiros and Belial, and I'm here for them just being gay dads of the year with a side of nightmare atrocities, but just how she's presented is it's own thing. I'm used to Alice showing up as a mid-to-late game demon, with a dark specialty and of course her unique spell, but in SMT I here she's... just a little girl. Perfectly ordinary except that she died when the bombs fell and was brought back, with dads who wholly encourage the necromantic arts, and all she can do when you fight back is just sit down and cry. I have to wonder if there's going to be a transitional state to her that sets her up as a threat in her own right, or if later games just added her as a summonable demon as something of a callback.
I'm also curious if there's an interaction with her now that Mr. Red and Mr. Black are done for, with some closure there, or if the reanimation the two worked on just stopped working once they were gone.
I'm also curious if there's an interaction with her now that Mr. Red and Mr. Black are done for, with some closure there, or if the reanimation the two worked on just stopped working once they were gone.
She did vanish pretty much as soon as Belial was sealed, though it's unclear if that meant she just died, since everyone else in Roppongi just had their living illusion stripped away, or whether she could be restored somehow. I'll have to look around Roppongi one last time just to make sure I don't miss anything, because another meeting with Alice would be really nice.
We all know that Alice (and to a lesser extent her gay dads) would eventually become a recurring and beloved character in the larger SMT franchise -complete with a marketable catchphrase-, but as part of a RPG series of above-average size she has also become an inspiration for other Alice across the gaming world.
Specifically, she was explicitely one of the inspirations for Alice Margatroid from Touhou:
Mystic Square Omake Text said:
In any case, in Touhou Kaikidan a character named Alice appears.
So what? I've been hearing the word Alice thrown around a lot these days.
Well, it might just be me. This Alice character is not a clone of Esp,
but rather the Alice from Roppongi(for those who know!). It's from Megami
Tensei.
(I would also be highly surprised if Alice from Fate/Extra didn't have at least a little bit of SMT Alice DNA in her, if for no other reason than "Would you die for me?" sounds exactly like the sort of question the Black Alice would ask before their boss battle)
If there isn't any chaos-aligned demons, then he'll pick the highest-level neutral-aligned demon. If there's no neutral demons either, he'll pick the highest level Law demon. Nekomata is Neutral, by the way.
Welcome back to Shin Megami Tensei, the game that made me very sad last update.
It's been a little bit longer than I'd have wanted due to real life circumstances, but with this update we should be back on a weekly schedule, if not faster.
Where we last left off, Hero and Mary managed to defeat Nebiros, but not before he killed Noah's physical form, leaving his disembodied soul with no choice but to pass on to the afterlife. With an angel personally arriving to escort his soul to Heaven, we're down a party member as well as, frankly, some well needed moral support. It sucks, but at the very least we can attempt to do right by Noah one last time and free his girlfriend from her cursed unlife.
Speaking of, the first thing that I do after killing Nebiros is check back on the first floor. Demons are roaming around freely now, so presumably once I exit the building the barrier surrounding Roppongi is going to be gone too, but I want to see if the undead populating Roppongi will have become shambling corpses devoid of intelligence again, or if Belial and Nebiros's magic will maintain their personalities even after one is captured and the other is killed. Along the way, I take a quick look around for Alice, but unfortunately find nothing—it seems that she really did just vanish as soon as Belial wasn't around to maintain his part of the spell sustaining her.
It's an interesting question as to why Alice was so different to the others—she acted more like a materialized ghost rather than a zombie. Maybe her resurrection was more costly in some form, or they put extra effort into ensuring she wouldn't suffer at all by the possibility of realising she was a zombie? Either way, her spirit has been laid to rest once more.
A quick check into the Disco confirms that all the undead there are just as they were following Belial's sealing—Nebiros's death didn't cause them all to vanish, so presumably as long as Belial is still alive somewhere they are too. Mary, Noah's girlfriend and Hero's old friend, is still begging for a Soul Incense so she can die in peace, so that'll be our next step. How hard can it be to find one specific item in the entire post-apocalypse?
On the way out, we end up running into an extremely unlucky traveler.
Those two statements don't have to be contradictory, I'm sure the undead make great neighbors.
As soon as we step out into the light, we get to see what's become of Roppongi now that one of its masters is dead and the other has been sealed away.
Little bit of elbow grease and it'll be back to normal.
Yeah, uh, seems like they didn't even really rebuild it, just laid an illusion of the pre-apocalypse Roppongi on it. Understandable when you intend for it to last forever as a paradise for one little girl, but it does mean that we've lost yet another fragment of the past. As horrible as things were in concept for a group of people with no knowledge of the fact that they're undead monsters, it was nice to see things as they had been for a little bit.
I end up wandering around a little bit before realising that there's another yellow building we can enter to the north of Roppongi, which previously had been locked away by the combination of a bunch of ruined buildings preventing approach from the west and the barrier preventing approach from the south. With the barrier gone, it's easy to slip up to this new spot. It's the closest new place of interest and only becomes accessible upon completion of Roppongi, so presumably this will get us to where we need to go. The building leads us to a little underground walkway that we follow in a sort of spiral pattern, which then curves inward to a set of stairs leading even further below ground. It's sort of like a maze, with multiple dead ends and pointless detours along the way, which is a little annoying because it's using the same "underground" assets as before so there's not much to show visually.
The underground pathway is also saturated with the undead, though weirdly enough they seem to be mostly low level—we're talking Obatarians and even some basic Zombies, which are at this point so weak that they give Hero and Mary a solid 1 EXP each. It means that navigating is only tedious instead of painful, which I'm glad for. Nebiros drained a lot of MP, and I'm having to store up a bunch of demons to try and stretch my Magnetite since having three out at once eats it up faster than I can restore it from random encounters.
We head down another set of stairs, follow along a winding corridor, and meet with a…familiar face?
It took me literally five tries to screenshot his flickering soul.
Noah is back again, very, very quickly, and he has a favor to ask of us. The former police headquarters of Tokyo had a…
Uh.
I'll let Noah explain.
What.
Fucking what.
Noah helpfully guides us along, telling us that at the intersection just up ahead if we hang a right and follow the pathway we'll find Ginza, and if we go straight ahead we'll end up in the former police station. He begs Hero to help, saying that they're the only person he could possibly ask to help, and then vanishes. It's honestly a very Noah moment—it seems obvious enough that after being taken up into Heaven, he was made privy to knowledge he didn't have as a living human, either through somehow observing the world below or through being told directly by an angel. There is something very quintessentially Noah about immediately choosing to somehow manifest his immortal soul on the planet once again solely to beg Hero for help with solving an issue that could potentially threaten the people of the post-apocalyptic Tokyo, even something completely unrelated to any of Noah's own unfinished business like Mary. I genuinely think this is something he would do, and I find it a little charming.
On the other hand, fucking hell guys, he died literally five minutes ago! I had a whole thing about how sad the whole ordeal was, how the game cleverly built up the thought of somehow saving him only to have Nebiros suckerpunch us with the fact that he saw that plan coming and killed Noah's body as soon as he had the slightest opportunity. It was a horrible, tragic moment of self-sacrifice leading to false hope and eventual acceptance of parting with one of our longest, closest friends, and then he just shows up literally, literally five minutes later asking us to take care of the robot army the Japanese police force apparently had prior to the nukes going off while I'm attempting to lay Noah's one last regret to rest out of respect for him.
It's an absolutely bizarre kind of tonal whiplash. Is Noah just going to keep on showing up to point us to new threats now, where the only major change to things is that we can't use him to gun down enemies?
Baffling.
Anyway, moving on. We're going to Ginza, because Noah said Ginza first and because we need to find a healer and maybe some shops. Along the way, however, there's a conspicuously unmentioned room right at the intersection before we move in any direction, and entering inside it brings us face to face with an old friend.
An old friend who hasn't aged a single day at that.
Steven is happy to see Hero, once more asking if the Demon Summoning Program has been helpful, and once more highlighting a potential annoyance with the system that he's wondering if we wouldn't like to be fixed. Currently, the Demon Summoning Program only allows for the summoning of three demons, which coincidentally happens to be the exact amount needed to fill out a full party if you have two human characters tagging along with you. If you answer "yes" when Steven asks if you'd like to be able to control more at a time, he upgrades the Program, allowing Hero to command four demons at a time.
We've lost both Noah and Adam now, meaning that for the rest of the game we're likely to be rolling with Mary and Mary alone, so this is a very well placed upgrade—we can, once more, roll up to battles with a full team. The downside to this is, of course, the cost of summoning and maintaining demons. It's yet another drain on macca and yet another drain on magnetite. I'll have to be frugal with this, which means relying on the all-powerful SPAS-12 with Nerve Bullets to kill or sleep enemies before they can hurt anyone since I can't rely on having a bunch of demons all at once.
Steven wishes us well, and we exit out and head for Ginza as originally planned. Along the way, we run into a new demon for the first time in a little while!
The loa, or lwa, are spirits in Haitian Vodou and Dominican Vúdu. The lwa in Vodou act as intermediaries between humanity and the creator deity Bondye, with each lwa being distinct and having its own personality and preferences, offering and withdrawing aid and protection in accordance with how they feel about the sacrifices made to them.
I try talking to the Loa to see if I can recruit one, and it tricks Hero into coming closer. Upon agreeing to do so, it immediately unleashes Mudo, killing Hero and Mary and giving me a game over instantly.
The lesson is that if anyone ever attempts to talk to you, they're trying to kill you and you need to respond with maximum force immediately. There is no room for negotiation on a battlefield, there is only kill or be killed. I'm not salty, I'm enlightened.
We reload a little before this whole area and go through the same song and dance, speedrunning through our time with Noah and Steven and approaching Ginza once again, this time without being killed. The absolute banger Ginza theme starts playing as we march up two flights of stairs, and we find our way into Ginza, or at least some kind of underground area within Ginza.
Neat aesthetic.
Directly across from us is a Terminal, so we'll take the opportunity to save. With that done, it's time to explore!
This child is just hanging around in a room near the Terminal.
Child: "It was even bigger than the island at the mouth of the Sumidagawa river! I'm serious!
Interesting! An enormous floating building that wasn't in Tokyo beforehand kind of puts me in the mind of Noah's Ark when we've got influence from Abrahamic religions here—I wonder if the secretive location of the thousand-year kingdom is actually meant to be some kind of play on the Ark, a floating city separated entirely from the land that came before? Much to think about!
As we think about it, we're attacked by another new enemy.
Hakai-zo is a (mildly shoddy) romanization of the original Japanese, which is more properly "hakaisou", meaning sinful or depraved priest. Given that they've thrown their lot in with the demon-worshiping Gaians, that makes sense.
Not too rough, Nerve Bullets put him to sleep temporarily and then very permanently before he can act. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the next enemy, which is significantly more annoying.
Black Ooze is a variant of the old Slime demons, very likely inspired by the Black Pudding from Dungeons and Dragons.
Black Oozes have enormous amounts of HP and extremely high defense, reducing all damage from my strongest regular attacks to a mere 30, two rounds of which don't even make a dent in the creature's HP. Fortunately, I switch to Zionga, which the creature is seemingly weak to, taking 180 damage a pop…which still doesn't shift its little health icon to the "low health" pose. I'd feel bad about using Zionga to Shock-cheese the fight if the thing didn't clearly have so much HP that the only reasonable way of actually killing it this year would be spamming electricity. Two rounds of casts plus Hero and Yaksini attacking as normal is enough to kill the thing, though the idea of running into a wave of multiple Black Oozes is making me shiver a little.
We explore a little more, running into a hooded man who muses about how the Messians and Gaians both claim to be humanity's saviors, but from his perspective it looks a lot more like a mundane power struggle to try and seize control of the post-apocalyptic world. It's a cynical view but it's not necessarily wrong—the idea that their side could be the one to fix everything is a powerful draw, and the two are essentially at war.
Right next door, we find an armor shop, and this one actually has new shit!
Wait, Italiarmor?
I take a minute to peruse the wiki and figure out what it all does, and then end up shelling out a lot of money. The Tetrajammer is the best armor for both by a wide margin, which sucks up a good two-fifths of all my money, and the various other best in slot gear costs a pretty penny too. I'm left with a mere 650 macca to my name by the end of it, but Mary and Hero are kitted out in the best gear money can buy now, which is always nice. Unfortunately we have to pass on the Italiarmor, because it's not best in slot.
I bet the previous owner pasta way suddenly.
Loading up on armor means I'll have to forego any weapon upgrades for the moment, but I don't mind that too much, the SPAS-12 and Nerve Bullet combo is working wonders so far.
I wander around a little more, finding some shops here and there, most notably a Junks that sells the [X] Stone lineup, items that act as a one-use cast of the weaker multi-target or stronger single-target elemental damage spells. Handy for pinging a weakness in theory, but in practice they're too cumbersome to be useful since we're working on very limited inventory space—I actually had to start selling equipped items I planned on replacing because I flat out couldn't buy anything from the armor shop until I freed up some space in the inventory, and each variety of stone will take up another inventory slot. I don't foresee myself using them a lot, so I pass it by. Along the same corridor, however, I find something very interesting—a new door, this one named "Rag's".
Italiarmor, French words, the post-apocalypse really is going to hell. If I see the British I'm turning off the game.
Uniquely among shops here, Rag's doesn't actually have a Buy or Sell menu. Once we go past the welcome text, we're given the option to select Items, Elements, or (very helpfully), Hear Explanation. That third option prompts Rag to explain the system—Item Exchange is a system where we give him a gemstone he wants, and he'll give us an item in return. Each gem corresponds to a specific item—for example, a Garnet will net us a Mazio Stone, an Amethyst a Fuma Bell (an item that prevents low-level encounters for a time), etc.
Pretty simple stuff, but there's one particular trade that catches my eye.
Oh yeah, it's all coming together.
Funnily enough, while the Soul Incense is obviously what we're aiming for here, the next screen informs us we can trade a Ruby for yet another Gushing Jar. I cannot possibly imagine why we would need two, but I choose to put that out of my mind and think about more pleasant things, like whether Mary is going to simply vanish into thin air when we give her the Incense or whether she'll just undergo rapid decomposition.
Once the item roundup is complete, Rag then moves onto explaining Element Swap. We give him three gems, and depending on which three gems we give, he'll give us an Element in return. What's an Element you ask? Great question!
I've been avoiding talking about this for a bit mostly because the system of Shin Megami Tensei makes Elements awkward to use, so bear with me for a bit. The way fusion works in the series is by looking at the race of the demons to be fused, as well as what specific demons are being used. A Jirae race demon and a Fairy race demon being fused together will result in a Brute race demon, as an example. From there, the specific demons and their levels play a part in determining which demon you get out of it—every race of demons goes in ascending order, starting from the weakest example of their race (e.g Pixie for the Fairy race) and finishing with the strongest. Fuse together two weak demons, you get a demon that might be one step up. Fuse together two strong demons, you continue to climb the ladder. Basically, fusion will (almost) always make you stronger.
So, what happens if you fuse two demons of the same race? You get an Element!
Elements come in two sets of four flavors. The first set, the weaker kinds, are Earthys, Aeros, Aquans, and Flaemis. The second, stronger set, are Gnome, Sylph, Undine, and Salamander, the four elementals in the writings of Paracelsus. Their function is to operate as a sort of "rank up" or "rank down" for demons, depending on their race—fusing a demon with an Element will result in a demon of the same race, but either one or two "ranks" lower or higher. Fusing a Fairy Dryad with an Element could give us any result between a Jack Frost (-2), Pyro Jack (-1), Gandharva (+1), or Rusalka (+2).
Essentially, Rag's is offering us a way to secure specific Elements without having to mess about with demon fusion, in theory making it much easier to get specific demons without having to muck about with different combinations of demon races. In practice, we're running into the issue that demons can't ever actually grow in strength and there's absolutely no way to get back any demon you fuse away, so trying to secure specific demons instead of just constantly fusing upwards is mildly silly.
The biggest value of this little divergence is that I won't have to explain Elements again when they actually become more relevant, but for the moment I really don't see myself using them, especially when gems are rare and the items are potentially much better. Anyway! We snag the Soul Incense from Rag's and make a beeline back to the Terminal so we can teleport over to Roppongi again and finally grant Mary some peace.
Along the way, we hear some neat rumours—firstly about an island that appeared out of nowhere at the mouth of the Sumidagawa river, and secondly about the Kusanagi-no-tsurugi that's somewhere in Shinagawa. Juicy!
It's only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Terminal to the disco, and once we make it inside it's just a few quick steps before we're in front of Mary once again, and for one last time.
Hope you meet Noah soon.
Upon being exposed to the Soul Incense, Mary begins to scream in pain, yelling about her body as her sprite begins to fade in and out. The pain vanishes as soon as it arrives, however, and we're left with Mary at peace with what's happened, and what's about to happen.
With one final word of thanks, and a confirmation that she really, truly does feel at peace after thirty years of horrifying undead existence, Mary dies.
Hero is really and truly alone now, huh?
When the game started, Hero had their mother, their beloved dog Pascal, and even a close childhood friend in Mary. You could even stretch it to Mary's father the doctor, who was clearly fond of Hero. Even as things began to get worse, Hero still made new friends—for a short time, Hero was working together with Adam and Noah at once while still having everyone they loved around them.
Then things continued to get worse—their mother died, their beloved dog vanished into the Terminal network, their newest friend sacrificed herself for their sake, their entire world ended…but even in the post-apocalypse, they had something. Noah and Adam were still there, right up until Adam confirmed he never really cared that much about the party, and right up until Noah sacrificed his life for Hero's. The Mary that we're traveling with now is a reincarnation of the one that Hero knew—as much as she can talk about being bound to them inextricably, she's still a different person.
The only connection Hero had to the life before the nukes fell was Mary, not the Resistance leader, but their childhood friend, and they had to personally mercy kill her at her own request because she perished in nuclear fire and was then denied death by a pair of demons who wanted her to act as a doll for the child they cared for. Even if it was entirely at Mary's request, Hero severed that final connection with their own two hands. We obviously don't get any sort of dialogue or internal narration about it, Hero is firmly a featureless protagonist, but if you take a step back and consider it from that perspective…well, it's bleak.
I wouldn't want to be Hero at any point in this game, but especially not now.
We head back to Ginza to do a little more exploring, partially because I want to fill out the map and see if I can find a Heretic Mansion, and partially because the enemies there are tough enough to give me a pretty nice chunk of EXP and money when I kill them. Along the way, I find some new tidbits from NPCs
Hysterically, the old man clarifies that these aren't meant to protect the public in any capacity, the police just wanted autonomous drones to attack people who tried to get at the station. Average cop behavior.
Midway through, I end up losing Yaksini, and I decide to have Mary use Traport to take us to the Terminal so I can warp back to Shibuya and do some healing and fusing. I need to start recruiting more demons, and the ones I have in stock are taking up space, so a-fusing I go.
Unicorn and Dwarf make Stonka. The SMT wiki claims this is the name of a bull made out of bronze from Bulgarian mythology, but I can't find anything to back that up.
Elf and Lilim make Isora, more properly known as Azumi-no-Isora. We've actually already covered Azumi before, so it seems like the game split Azumi-no-Isora into two separate fishy aesthetic demons, of which this is the more powerful.
I also try to fuse Apsaras with Bai Ze to form Cockatrice, but I'm given a nasty surprise—I hadn't been back to the overworld yet, but so I hadn't seen my little spinny thing. Delivering the Soul Incense to Mary has shifted my alignment back to Law. I can sort of see it in the sense that I'm technically killing a monster, but c'mon, how on earth is Law both the alignment of unprovoked nuclear armageddon and generally being a nice guy?
Anyway, we managed to free up two spots, so that's something. To make a long story short, there's not much more to Ginza that we can actually work with right now—shops, yeah, and more powerful demons too, but having slipped back to a Law alignment I don't want to start trying to recruit demons that are seemingly more Chaos aligned since that just won't work. Instead, once I teleport back from Shibuya, we'll just make a beeline back to the intersection and go to the police station to destroy their army of military drones that were obviously instrumental to their efforts. The intersection door is directly opposite the Terminal, so it's easy enough to make my way down the straight hallway and hang a right to get to the police station, and as soon as we take the elevator up…
Goddamnit.
Dark room, baby! Hate these. My hatred is compounded by the appearance of a new foe or two.
I'm not even going to cover this battle, they're machines in an RPG. One shot of Mazio kills them all.
This one took a shot of Zionga to kill.
Anyway, those are going to be the main enemies here. The automaton weaponry is up and at 'em and we've got to shut it all down, probably by killing whoever it was that started it up. This place was inaccessible from the Roppongi side until just now, so whoever it is is probably more aligned with the Gaians who seem to control Ginza. After making it through the dark corridor we're given the choice between using the stairs to go up a single floor and using the elevator to jump to any floor we want, but in this case the stairs are a trap. I wasted a bunch of time looking around and there's genuinely no treasure or point of interest on any of the first three floors from B1F to 2F, with the sole exception of the invisible holes that drop you down a level. Even better, these holes are situated in the dark areas of the police station, and drop you into dark areas too. I hate this place and want to burn it to the ground.
We take the elevator all the way up to the third floor, and this one actually has two points of interest! The first is a Vitality Incense, which is nice. The second is another goddamned hole. I find my way to the second floor elevator, miraculously avoiding falling down to the first floor like I'm playing a purgatorial version of Snakes and Ladders, and this time head up to the fourth floor, which has a Luck Incense and a Speed Incense for the taking. Neat!
The robots have been dropping stuff, like a Hand Grenade that acts as a one-use Zan, and a Dragon ATM that acts as a one-use Mazanma, the multi-target strong force damage spell. Those "Bundle o" items are Bundles of Yen, which are what my old money became when I lost it all.
Along the way back to the elevator, we also run into the third variety of the police robots.
It's kinda cute that it has the flashing lights built into the top, but ACAB.
Hero and Mary unleashing the double barrels kills these just as easily as every other robot, so we make it to the fifth floor without much trouble. It's more of the same for the first part, though a big shock comes around when an actual demon appears.
Something called "Watcher" with that design obviously calls to mind the Beholder of DnD fame, but given they share their Yoma race with divine subordinates such as the Apsaras and Kinnari, it's probable that these are meant to call to the Watchers of the Book of Enoch.
The Watcher ends up whiffing some basic attacks and going down, which is a little bit of a disappointment for how weird it was showing up out of nowhere. That said, given that the police were apparently gearing up for subjugating the Tokyo suburbs with their army of mechanized soldiers, a demon that's just a giant eye called a Watcher is appropriate for whatever surveillance state they planned on creating.
Eventually, we make it out of the dark rooms, cross the corridor, and come face to face with a familiar foe.
ID Card locked door, my beloathed.
Hilariously enough, the door is broken, but broken in a way that actually benefits us. We can waltz right on in, which I do!
After taking the time to heal up Mary and spend some of my hard earned macca on summoning some demons, of course. Wouldn't want to run into a boss fight unprepared!
The door opens up to another short corridor that leads to an entrance, and as soon as we enter we uncover the mystery of what's actually happening here.
Oh. He's actually just…called that.
Mad Scientist: "The Control System for the robotic police force is working!" Mad Scientist: "With the robots under my command, I'll slaughter the humans, the demons—Everyone!" Mad Scientist: "I'll send every last living thing in this city to Hell! Heeeeeheeheehee!" Mad Scientist: "...What are you doing here!? You're not trying to stop me are you!? I won't allow you to interfere with my plans!!" Mad Scientist: "Take care of them, my robot sentinels!"
With that, he sics a group of T9SC/Ps on us.
I don't even know. I was expecting something interesting, but this dude is literally a Saturday morning cartoon villain. He wants to kill everyone for reasons and is using a hitherto-unmentioned robot army to do it.
Look, I'm sure I could figure out a backstory for him—he's old enough that he's probably pre-nuke somehow and the whole experience plus thirty years in the post-apocalypse probably pushed him to snap in some way, but I can't pretend I'm not disappointed that after our last antagonists were a pair of genuinely interesting demons acting solely out of love for a little girl they bonded with who died too young and who deserved a happier life, our next antagonist is just a man whose parents named him Mad Scientist because they hated him.
Anyway, the boss battle—well, not really a boss battle, more of a horde battle. It's the same hyper-weak-to-electric machines we've been killing all dungeon, and this time I'm backed up by a bunch of demons instead of going it alone with just Hero and Mary. The caveat is that there are so many robots that my multi-target attacks can't actually hit all of them, which means that for every robot I'm putting to sleep or stunning, there's another robot that's going untouched. Each robot can also call for reinforcements, which seems to only work occasionally but still results in them replacing the one robot I killed pretty much instantly, and doing a regular attack that hits anywhere between 2 and 8 times. That adds up, especially since they deal about 15 damage each hit. 30 damage ain't much, 120 is. The result is a battle I end up playing a little more carefully than normal, taking time to heal up anyone that gets hurt just in case the next robot decides to hit them eight times because they pissed in the robot's cornflakes that morning, but ultimately not much of a challenge.
Not much of a reward either, eesh.
The Mad Scientist seems to have vanished, and we're given the choice immediately after the battle to destroy the Control System. Given that it seems to only work to control the robots that were no doubt trained on actual cop behaviors and are thus a danger to all human life, we choose to bust it up.
At which point it spins up a grim looking green face and declares that it's activating its emergency systems and proceeding with the extermination of all invaders. Neato, a real boss!
The Defense System sucks, unfortunately. It has two moves, a regular attack that deals heavy physical damage to everyone on the team (heavy enough to require healing instantly), and an electric attack that targets between 1 and 3 members of my party, sending them into Shock for the rest of the round. That's it, except for its enormous HP and defenses. Unfortunately for me, the Defense System actually resists electricity rather than being weak to it, leaving Isora and Mary to deal borderline scratch damage against the thing. We're back to another round of "the boss cannot be allowed to act because it's too dangerous", except rather than having to worry about a potential instant kill it's more just cutting out the tedium. With Mary, Yaksini, and Ame-no-Uzume on board, we have three casters of Diarama, so death isn't ever really a possibility. It's just a long, slow grind against a boss that isn't very interesting.
Shin Megami Tensei, the first game, really struggles on bosses. It doesn't help that any enemy can only have up to three moves, and the AI isn't really sophisticated enough to use them in any interesting pattern. The game is definitely at its best when it's giving me interesting people and locations to visit, but unfortunately for a series that's grown to have some fantastic bosses in some incredible systems, the very first game has only really ever given me a mild challenge at best, and total pushovers or unstoppable monsters at worst. It's a bit of a shame, though I can say with confidence that it will improve.
Until then, however, we ever so slowly grind down the big computer's HP.
I'm installing BonziBuddy as we speak you bucket of bolts, your days are numbered.
When I say slowly grind, I do mean slowly. We exhaust the total MP of both Mary and Isora casting Zionga, and a lucky dodge allows the Defense System to oneshot Ame-no-Uzume and bring multiple characters down to the double digits. I don't think any boss has exemplified the sheer swinginess of Shin Megami Tensei's battle system like this, because if the Defense System had been allowed to act twice, I'd simply have lost. The winning move isn't to figure out the strategy that allows you to overcome the challenge, it's to never let the enemy play the game at all.
The only good thing about the Defense System is the massive payout it gives me, 30K EXP for Hero and Mary both, rocketing them up a solid 4 levels in one fell swoop.
Oooh, shiny.
It wasn't really much of an army, truth be told, but you seem pretty beat up about it so I'll let that one slide.
We'll be cutting it there for the moment, partially because this is a decent ending spot and partially because it's very late and I don't really know where else to go. Maybe Noah will show up and give us some more friendly post-mortem advice?
Idle curiosity drives me to wonder what originated this sort of floaty-face depiction of AI. Not SHODAN, System Shock came out two years later than SMT I. In the last few years, Google has become garbage for looking up anything about AI and Wikipedia doesn't have a neatly packaged answer for me. Oh well.
The pivot to suddenly having to deal with the robot cop army blindsided me, even for SMT that seems kind of a swerve.
Was it already an idea before the nukes dropped, I wonder? Did the Tokyo Police Department realise they just fucking hated everyone and decide to start building a murderous robot army or was it all the aptly named Mad Scientist?
On the other hand, fucking hell guys, he died literally five minutes ago! I had a whole thing about how sad the whole ordeal was, how the game cleverly built up the thought of somehow saving him only to have Nebiros suckerpunch us with the fact that he saw that plan coming and killed Noah's body as soon as he had the slightest opportunity. It was a horrible, tragic moment of self-sacrifice leading to false hope and eventual acceptance of parting with one of our longest, closest friends, and then he just shows up literally, literally five minutes later asking us to take care of the robot army the Japanese police force apparently had prior to the nukes going off while I'm attempting to lay Noah's one last regret to rest out of respect for him.
It's an absolutely bizarre kind of tonal whiplash. Is Noah just going to keep on showing up to point us to new threats now, where the only major change to things is that we can't use him to gun down enemies?
I try talking to the Loa to see if I can recruit one, and it tricks Hero into coming closer. Upon agreeing to do so, it immediately unleashes Mudo, killing Hero and Mary and giving me a game over instantly.
Funnily enough, while the Soul Incense is obviously what we're aiming for here, the next screen informs us we can trade a Ruby for yet another Gushing Jar. I cannot possibly imagine why we would need two
Actually I looked this up and this may be related to something absolutely hysterical that you fortunately managed to avoid by going in the intended order;
You can go to Roppongi before dealing with Ozawa in Shinjuku, but if you do and you pick up the Gushing Jar Ozawa will just refuse to let you get near him so you're effectively softlocked. You have to discard the key item you worked so hard to get so you can go fight Ozawa and proceed with the 'Adam takes estrogen and fucks off to join a Discord server' arc. I hear that doing this causes the Gushing Jar to reappear in the chest you first found it in so you're not actually actually softlocked but being able to trade for another copy at the junk shop may be a failsafe for the failsafe in case the player doesn't think to check a chest they already emptied.
When the game started, Hero had their mother, their beloved dog Pascal, and even a close childhood friend in Mary. You could even stretch it to Mary's father the doctor, who was clearly fond of Hero. Even as things began to get worse, Hero still made new friends—for a short time, Hero was working together with Adam and Noah at once while still having everyone they loved around them.
Then things continued to get worse—their mother died, their beloved dog vanished into the Terminal network, their newest friend sacrificed herself for their sake, their entire world ended…but even in the post-apocalypse, they had something. Noah and Adam were still there, right up until Adam confirmed he never really cared that much about the party, and right up until Noah sacrificed his life for Hero's. The Mary that we're traveling with now is a reincarnation of the one that Hero knew—as much as she can talk about being bound to them inextricably, she's still a different person.
The only connection Hero had to the life before the nukes fell was Mary, not the Resistance leader, but their childhood friend, and they had to personally mercy kill her at her own request because she perished in nuclear fire and was then denied death by a pair of demons who wanted her to act as a doll for the child they cared for. Even if it was entirely at Mary's request, Hero severed that final connection with their own two hands. We obviously don't get any sort of dialogue or internal narration about it, Hero is firmly a featureless protagonist, but if you take a step back and consider it from that perspective…well, it's bleak.
I wouldn't want to be Hero at any point in this game, but especially not now.
Hysterically, the old man clarifies that these aren't meant to protect the public in any capacity, the police just wanted autonomous drones to attack people who tried to get at the station. Average cop behavior.
Well yeah, cops are notoriously terrified of the wind and acorns and people with wallets, of course they'd want Metal Gears wildly firing nukes at everything that moves within a 100m radius like someone who just discovered the ammo-swap glitch in Lonesome Road.
Unicorn and Dwarf make Stonka. The SMT wiki claims this is the name of a bull made out of bronze from Bulgarian mythology, but I can't find anything to back that up.
☝️🤓 uhm actually the SPAS-12 is a single-barrel shotgun despite what Half-Life 2 may have led you to believe the 'second barrel' beneath the barrel is actually the magazine tube where shells are stored before being fed into the chamber by either the manual pump action or the semi-automatic-
The door opens up to another short corridor that leads to an entrance, and as soon as we enter we uncover the mystery of what's actually happening here.
Oh. He's actually just…called that.
Mad Scientist: "The Control System for the robotic police force is working!" Mad Scientist: "With the robots under my command, I'll slaughter the humans, the demons—Everyone!" Mad Scientist: "I'll send every last living thing in this city to Hell! Heeeeeheeheehee!" Mad Scientist: "...What are you doing here!? You're not trying to stop me are you!? I won't allow you to interfere with my plans!!" Mad Scientist: "Take care of them, my robot sentinels!"
With that, he sics a group of T9SC/Ps on us.
I don't even know. I was expecting something interesting, but this dude is literally a Saturday morning cartoon villain. He wants to kill everyone for reasons and is using a hitherto-unmentioned robot army to do it.
Look, I'm sure I could figure out a backstory for him—he's old enough that he's probably pre-nuke somehow and the whole experience plus thirty years in the post-apocalypse probably pushed him to snap in some way, but I can't pretend I'm not disappointed that after our last antagonists were a pair of genuinely interesting demons acting solely out of love for a little girl they bonded with who died too young and who deserved a happier life, our next antagonist is just a man whose parents named him Mad Scientist because they hated him.
It might be stolen valour because I ain't ever seen an episode of Phineas and Ferb in my whole-ass life but I still feel the urge deep within my soul to make some kind of Dr. Doofenschmirtz joke because genuinely what the fuck is going on, they just slapped some shit in the videogame to fill an hour or two.
The Mad Scientist seems to have vanished, and we're given the choice immediately after the battle to destroy the Control System. Given that it seems to only work to control the robots that were no doubt trained on actual cop behaviors and are thus a danger to all human life, we choose to bust it up.
They're not trained on actual cop behaviours because the robots met you head-on with equal footing rather than lighting your house on fire in the dead of night or kettling you-
Idle curiosity drives me to wonder what originated this sort of floaty-face depiction of AI. Not SHODAN, System Shock came out two years later than SMT I. In the last few years, Google has become garbage for looking up anything about AI and Wikipedia doesn't have a neatly packaged answer for me. Oh well.
The Mad Scientist seems to have vanished, and we're given the choice immediately after the battle to destroy the Control System. Given that it seems to only work to control the robots that were no doubt trained on actual cop behaviors and are thus a danger to all human life, we choose to bust it up.
Is there an option to try taking control of it yourself, or is this purely an optional boss fight you can walk away from? I could see the former working well as a Law vs Chaos clash - will you take up the power of unquestioned robot authority For Good (but it needs time to rebuild, approximately the entire rest of the game), or destroy it because no-one should have that much power/you don't trust the computer?
Then again, you've got a decent setup for a Law vs Chaos clash even without that. Do you support a seemingly reasonable intellectual seizing power with a robot army, allowing him to shut down both local factions and begin to rebuild civilisation? Or do you reject an unfeeling iron hand and unchallenged dictator, seeing the danger of a metal boot stomping on human faces?
Unfortunately the game names him Mad Scientist and has him want to kill absolutely everyone for unclear reasons, so hey-ho.
Is there an option to try taking control of it yourself, or is this purely an optional boss fight you can walk away from? I could see the former working well as a Law vs Chaos clash - will you take up the power of unquestioned robot authority For Good (but it needs time to rebuild, approximately the entire rest of the game), or destroy it because no-one should have that much power/you don't trust the computer?
Then again, you've got a decent setup for a Law vs Chaos clash even without that. Do you support a seemingly reasonable intellectual seizing power with a robot army, allowing him to shut down both local factions and begin to rebuild civilisation? Or do you reject an unfeeling iron hand and unchallenged dictator, seeing the danger of a metal boot stomping on human faces?
Unfortunately the game names him Mad Scientist and has him want to kill absolutely everyone for unclear reasons, so hey-ho.
Unfortunately there's no choice but to approach it to try to destroy it—I imagine that if Adam and Noah were here, they might have argued about it—Adam probably would have wanted to claim the army for himself as his own personal force, whereas Noah might want to use them to police the world to try and reduce attacks by demons, but Hero and Mary basically seem content to just wipe it out before it could become a threat.
It's kind of a shame, because as you say there's a fun dynamic there for Law and Chaos, but oh well. Hopefully the next story beat is a little more in-depth than Mad Scientist Who Wants To Kill Everyone.
Actually I looked this up and this may be related to something absolutely hysterical that you fortunately managed to avoid by going in the intended order;
You can go to Roppongi before dealing with Ozawa in Shinjuku, but if you do and you pick up the Gushing Jar Ozawa will just refuse to let you get near him so you're effectively softlocked. You have to discard the key item you worked so hard to get so you can go fight Ozawa and proceed with the 'Adam takes estrogen and fucks off to join a Discord server' arc. I hear that doing this causes the Gushing Jar to reappear in the chest you first found it in so you're not actually actually softlocked but being able to trade for another copy at the junk shop may be a failsafe for the failsafe in case the player doesn't think to check a chest they already emptied.
It might be stolen valour because I ain't ever seen an episode of Phineas and Ferb in my whole-ass life but I still feel the urge deep within my soul to make some kind of Dr. Doofenschmirtz joke because genuinely what the fuck is going on, they just slapped some shit in the videogame to fill an hour or two.
Unicorn and Dwarf make Stonka. The SMT wiki claims this is the name of a bull made out of bronze from Bulgarian mythology, but I can't find anything to back that up.
Cursory investigation seems to suggest that this traces back primarily to a 1973 book by Sato Arifumi (a Japanese mythologist, essentially) contending to be an encyclopedia of 'World Yokai.' It looks like some of the entries in that book (and its subsequent reprints) are, to say the least, quite speculative. The entry on 'Stonka' uses a tapestry of Theseus fighting the minotaur and there's apparently another entry which makes up a monster to go with Goya's 'Saturn' (random aside: I never know how to credit this properly because Goya absolutely never called it Saturn Devouring his Son, but that's the title everyone in the universe knows it by. It's a title that was given to the painting by others). This tracks with other stuff we've seen from this era of Megaten where a lot of the demons are just pulled from 'loosely factual' occult magazines and encyclopedias that would have been peaking in popularity in the 70s and 80s. It seems likely that 'Stonka' is at most a melding of other myths about bulls and otherwise could just be the complete invention of Sato. Name and oddly specific narrative about a hero with a golden sword aside, stories about monstrous bulls exist everywhere that bulls exist.
This tracks with other stuff we've seen from this era of Megaten where a lot of the demons are just pulled from 'loosely factual' occult magazines and encyclopedias that would have been peaking in popularity in the 70s and 80s. It seems likely that 'Stonka' is at most a melding of other myths about bulls and otherwise could just be the complete invention of Sato. Name and oddly specific narrative about a hero with a golden sword aside, stories about monstrous bulls exist everywhere that bulls exist.
It's genuinely quite interesting yeah, there's not much of an effort to go through some serious academic rigor to ensure that everything is completely accurate, so it's fun to see the sort of things that would have been popular around the time take shape and end up expressed through the format of a video game a decade or so later.
Also belatedly I want to acknowledge that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants with these posts. People much smarter and better researched than me did a lot of the heavy lifting for the hypothetical origins of Momunofu (previous post) and Stonka (the most recent one):
