For the past decade and a half, I've taken the week after Thanksgiving off. Back in the day, this was when my wife and I decorated the house, did our Christmas shopping, watched lots of movies and ate lots of good food. After my daughter was born, this also became the week that we brought her to see Santa, make gingerbread houses, and all that fun stuff. In short, it's kind of the big week that we all look forward to to end the year out.
The other tradition that goes along with this is that I also tend to pick a JRPG to focus on that week. Given that my gaming time is relegated to after my daughter goes to bed and all the chores are done for the night, I often have trouble focusing on a bigger game. But when I'm on vacation, JRPGs just sound right. Don't get me wrong, I play JRPGs throughout the year, but Christmas vacation is pretty much always a JRPG now. I have fond memories of playing through Dragon Quest XI a few years back, while also watching A Teacher that same week. Talk about a weird juxtaposition. A couple years ago it was Tales Of Vesperia, which didn't blow me away but was at least an interesting game that I now have some nostalgia attached to. Last year it was Soul Hackers 2, which I pretty much adored and would consider one of my absolute favorite games of 2022. My intention was to mix up series year to year, so for 2023 I was pretty narrowed down to either Tales Of Arise or Sakura Wars (2019), but I don't know. I couldn't quite shake that I wanted to play Shin Megami Tensei III this year. I was trying to avoid playing two SMT games in a row for Christmas vacation. I was also trying to avoid playing a game I'd already started. But I mean, it almost doesn't count. I originally picked up the HD remaster of SMT III back in 2021 when it was released in the states. I played it for an hour or two and got sidetracked. So I mean, it doesn't really count as a replay. The other thing is this. As I write this, we are also in the middle of packing up our house. I mean, it's kind of chaotic. We've lived here for over a decade. We're about to pack up and move into an apartment that's less than half the size of this house in January. The whole point of it is to move back to the town that my wife and I used to live in before we bought this house to get my daughter into the school zone that we want her in. Then we'll sell this house. Then we'll start the process of house-hunting in our desired town. We could be living in this new little apartment for a month or a year. Who knows? It's both exciting and scary, and for the greater good of our family. With that in mind, maybe an apocalyptic game makes a lot of sense thematically. The Megami Tensei franchise is an interesting beast. First released on the Famicom, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (1987) was an RPG based on a sci-fi book about demons that come through computers. It's weird stuff. It was a hit in Japan, but the series didn't even arrive in the US until Jack Bros was released on the Virtual Boy in 1995. Spoiler, no one played that game. And it was a weird spin-off anyway. So the first real game that matters to westerners is Revelations Persona (1996) for the original Playstation. Persona, as we now know it regionally, was also a SMT spin-off that took the ideas from the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games and brought them to a modern setting. Think of it as a really messed up Earthbound or Pokemon. You explored modern day Japan (or maybe not exactly Japan in the localized version) and battled and recruited demons. It was dark, for sure. A sequel followed on PS1, though it was really only half of the Persona 2 experience. Persona 2: Eternal Punishment (2000) made it here, but its sister game, Innocent Sin remained in Japan until it was localized on PSP in 2011. Finally, in 2004 Atlus brought Shin Megami Tensei III to the west on PS2 under the title Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. You might think it's weird that they waited until the third game to localize, but honestly there were way more games in the Megami Tensei series by this point so just throw your hands up in the air and try to accept it. Luckily for us fans of the series outside of Japan, Atlus has done a decent job of localizing SMT mainline games since... though they've mostly been relegated to handhelds. Shin Megami Tensei IV was a 3DS exclusive and Shin Megami Tensei V has been a Switch exclusive (so far). It's puzzling, given the popularity of Persona 3, 4 and 5 that we're not seeing multi-platform re-releases of all of the SMT games by now. It's also a bit disheartening because as much love as Persona gets, I actually think I may prefer the mainline SMT games even more. They're less modern, and more like old school dungeon crawler throwbacks. I'm at least happy that Shin Megami Tensei III is available on PS5. I do wish that IV and V were as well. There are rumors, but we'll see. If you're a fan of the Persona games but haven't played the mainline SMT games (totally possible) this is what you need to know. Persona takes place in current day, and the demons are just kind of here undetected in our world. In the Shin Megami Tensei games you'll also be in the current day, but it's post apocalypse and the demons are very present. The world and themes of Shin Megami Tensei are often dense. To that end, it's no surprise that TS Eliot's The Wasteland would be referenced early on. The famous opening line of "Burial Of The Dead" is mentioned in passing, but in a game about a world being ended in order to restart a new world, it seems completely on point. Let us be reminded of that opening passage in full, here: "April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain." I was an English major twenty years (or a lifetime ago), and this poem rocked my world. As such, it's a welcome allusion here. Spring, oft painted as a time of new life and rejuvenation, is instead shown to be horrific. New life, or in this case rebirth, is visceral and violent. We don't come into this world peacefully, no. Instead we come in screaming and frightened, ripped from our comfort. In Eliot's poem, "winter kept us warm." That winter being the womb, or perhaps more pointedly, before the first world war. And yet, the phrasing can be applied in modern times to any catastrophe. Certainly, in Shin Megami Tensei it fits right in with the demonic apocalypse that kicks off the game's first hour. Winter was the general hibernation of the world, and then April hit and the world was destroyed in order to be recreated for the demons. As I write this, The Wasteland is a century old, and so you might consider its inclusion a cliche. But the horrific blur of violent rebirth it presents is completely appropriate. None of this even touches of the sexual innuendos of the original poem. "Breeding lilacs," and the "desire" of "dull roots." All of this fits in perfectly with the sometimes oddly banal yet over the top nudity in SMT games. While some of the more recent SMT games (Persona 5, Soul Hackers 2) do a pretty good job of telling you where to go next, I don't know that I could play Shin Megami Tensei III without a walkthrough. That's not a knock on it, just a fact. Had I played this upon release on PS2, I'd have been in my early 20s and time would have been in surplus. I mean, I think back to those days, and I spent so many nights alone in an apartment drinking cheap beer and playing Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics and whatever other PS1 RPGs I could get my hands on. I had a PS2 at the time, but I mostly used it to pick up PS1 games on the cheap or as a DVD player. But that's neither here nor there. The demon collecting in SMT games is always fun. I started out with the default Pixie and kept her even when she asked to leave. I picked up Jack Frost because how could you not? I grabbed a demon with several arms and swords because she looked cool. I kind of like the RNG element of these games, so if they ask me to evolve I let them. If they ask me to learn new skills I let them. Sometimes this shoots me in the foot. For instance, Pixie can no longer heal. But I don't know. I kind of enjoy the thrills and heartbreak that comes from the randomization. I will say that I'd have no chance of playing this game without a walkthrough of some sort. I definitely need at least an outline of where I'm heading next. The overworld map in Shin Megami III is completely baron. It is indeed a wasteland. Meanwhile, the various locations you'll visit - be them shopping malls or abandoned buildings are labyrinthian dungeons. There's rarely a locale that is not without its random battles to partake in. And every twist and turn of a maze is filled with doors that can lead to anything from nothing, or treasure, or boss battles, or whole new twisting and turning mazes within themselves. In many ways, Shin Megami Tensei III is a middle ground between old and new JRPG design. The 3D rendered graphics are inline with PS2 games of its time. And yet, there's plenty of throwbacks to JRPGs of yesteryear. In a lot of ways, dungeons feel along the lines of the many Wizardry clones that came out of Japan in the late 80s and early 90s. But what really hooks me is the themes of technology. While SMT games are often heavily steeped in religious imagery (from every religion you can think of), the angels and demons that make up the games are also rooted in a sort of sci-fi mythos. Personally, I adore the meshing of these themes atop the use of concepts of artificial intelligence and other technological existentialism. Basically, if you've ever fretted over the kind of dread presented in works like Ghost In The Shell or Terminator 2, then you should understand the draw here. Shin Megami Tensei games have often been summarized as demonic Pokemon. And that makes sense on some level. It's an RPG where you walk around and explore various regions while attempting to recruit monsters to fight on your behalf. It's just worlds darker than Pokemon. You don't trap pocket monsters in brightly colored balls. Rather, you negotiate with demons. They lie to you. Sometimes they swear at you. They're grotesque and sometimes nude. But it turns out that this evil take on Pokemon is just right for my winter vacation. As I said, my family is about to embark on a whole new chapter in our lives. We're moving to a new town. Well, a new town for my daughter, and an old town for my wife and me. We're destroying the world that we've known so well in a way to reset and rebuild a new life. Next year my daughter will start school and everything will change. Even my annual vacations will be readjusted to coincide with her school vacations. Shin Megami Tensei III may well be a masterpiece within a brilliant and long running series. Or it may just be the most appropriate RPG I could have played this winter. Or it may be both. Perhaps it's just lilacs out of the dead land. Poetically, it is beauty and new life stemming from chaos. And maybe that coincides with the juxtaposed anxiety and hope that I have about all that changes that are about to come into our lives.
0 Comments
|
Games
All
Archives
February 2024
|