Rejecting God's Beatitudes, with Friends: a game review of Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse for the 3DS

So I'm wrapping up my time with Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, a semi-sequel/gaiden/off-shoot of the seminal SMTIV for the 3DS. I picked it back up on a whim, after buying it on sale for my oft-neglected 3DS at least 5 years ago, and I'm glad I did - mostly. It is more SMTIV, along with a healthy dose of Persona, but with a floater of that demon madness on top. And well, that bears some retrospective. 

I first heard of Shin Megami Tensei a long time ago, back in the PSX era, before 9/11 and the rigors of puberty. I read about this weird Japanese game, called Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, a sequel to a sequel of a series that had never been released in the US (to my knowledge. Either EGM or GamePro advocated for it, citing the strange systems in which you can negotiate with your enemies or extort them, and change the world through rumor-mongering. Also, it was modern Tokyo, with cool-looking teen girls and urban punks as your party. And I have to admit, the connections to a previous game, Persona 2: Innocent Sin, intrigued me - what was this untranslated world that I might never know? Why did they put this one out? Why did all the characters look to be made of porcelain or dank, dank mud?

Turns out, I didn't like the game very much. It was hard, the combat was slow, and worst of all, the encounter rate was painful, with a battle happening every few steps. But the tone, the setting, and the DEMONS intrigued me. You could gather angelic, demonic, and otherwise divine figures from a dozen pantheons. Also, there's a serial killer who may or may not exist, moving between people like a virus. It was stunning in 1999, all of my 13 or 14 years trying to figure this out, even if I really disliked playing it.

And then Persona 3 came out, some 7 years later, and they smoothed out all those funky edges. I played the original, FES, and even the PSP one (which was the one I actually beat). And after that, every SMT game suddenly became a white whale for me, trying to find SMT Nocturne under $50 (I got it as a gift eventually) or the Devil Summoner games with Raidou Kuzunoha (which I never liked, but really wanted to!). They had this mix of mythology and irreverence, and then Satan himself is there, and it's all treated with an even hand, a world inhabited by Ganesha as well as Jaki as well as Oberon, and you can capture them and make them fight. Or smash them together and make a new demon, you know, like Metatron. Like God.

I bought, I dabbled, and I enjoyed what came stateside, which was increasingly all of the SMT games. I never finished Persona 4 Golden, but I sure as hell smashed Persona 5, the most stylish game ever imagined. It dragged toward the end, and missed some of the unique highlights of P3 and P4, but it was 120 hours well-spent, or well enough. 

SMT IV, on the other hand, lingered on my 3DS. I would make it through a few hours, then stop - some difficulty spike slowing me, or some story beat missing. Or just getting around the freakin' world was a chore - Tokyo always gets destroyed in SMT games, remade in some post-Apocalyptic vision, but here it remade without glasses. Streets and blockages, walls and rivers, all blended into such a slurry of visual jargon, which combined with the Japanese names for neighborhoods and locale. It was hard to get around, and you needed to get around.

The game ends, though. I beat it. And it was a great ending, as I threaded the needle to the "True Neutral" ending, in which you side with neither heaven nor hell, instead creating a world for people. SMT III/Nocturne's "True" ending has you marching to heaven with all the demons of hell, to kill god. So this was a nice middle ground. Still, it was replete with grimness, demonic forces, and that tone - that the world could be inhospitable, horrible, and alien, and that you could only make the choices you could according to your own demented calculus. 

SMT IV's ending was so definitive, I was shocked Apocalypse got made. Then, starting it, I quickly got the jist - this was gaiden stuff. Side story stuff. Alternate telling stuff. Whereas in anime, that's kind of a shitty way to tell a story, here I found it more forgiveable. There was plenty of voice-acting, a story wholly made for this game's characters, and the gameplay was refined, expanded, and made more accessible (to a degree). 

That being said, it's not perfect, or a new classic. The addition of "Partners," in form of NPCs who join you and can offer assistance in battle, worked mechanically, but story-wise, they were a drag. In fact, most of the story, I uh...skipped, with the fast-forward button whirring the text by at a breakneck speed. If I caught a few sentences by speed-reading, that was enough - I got it. This was anime writing for a side story, and the stakes were low, but with my sped-up experience, I don't think it's a total waste. It does feel like a bridging of Persona with the SMT main series that I didn't really need. 

Then again, as much as I would defend this as not a cash-grab, there is DLC by the dollar-full. You can spend money to have in-game money, but only if you do a quest. There are cosmetics, new quests, and more such nonsense. That's fine, I say - let people spend money. Except, the end-game.

At about 80% of the way through the plot, the difficulty begins to spike. Which is good! SMT games should be difficult, making each battle a puzzle in which you maneuver your abilities, weaknesses, and position to unlock the boss' death. Preparation and leveling are key, and throughout the game, you can get by, partially thanks to the Partner system, but also because if you've played an SMT before, you know to grind your demons up and then fuse them, then repeat every few levels. 

But several of the systems don't cohere to this. Money, for example, is difficult to farm, or really to gather at all - you get Macca from relics found on the overworld or within levels, which you can sell, and these gathering spots refresh in realtime every 30 min or hour. Battles offer few ways to make any money, and gear becomes more expensive until it's entirely out of reach without literal hours of walking certain spots. Moreover, as you fuse your demons, your Compendium expands, from which you can re-summon demons to fill your party or serve as fusing fodder. And those costs also become out of reach very quickly. 

I currently sit at the end of the game, having hit max level on my main character and party of demons, but I've lost to the final boss several times. I did the Gamefaqs dance and found a strategy to make money, but it would take hours to gather enough to buy some of the ultra-rare gear I should be using at this stage. Maybe I could check out the secret dungeon, but even then, the difficult bosses you around too much, forcing your hand into playing the game in a whole new (and distinctly un-fun) way. 

This is not uncommon to SMT. In SMT III/Nocturne, the first mandatory fiend fight will put you on your ass if you don't prepare. But if you prepare, you can win! And it feels amazing. Here, at actual end of all things, I can prepare no further - I can only cross my fingers that the AI doesn't try this attack or that I time a certain buff correctly. It's frustrating, intentionally so, but not productively. The experience of the rest of the game is fading behind me, as I consider whether it'd be a better use of my time to just...stop.

Maybe I will, or maybe I'll slap my head against it a few more times, and see if I can beat God. Yes, it's actually YHWH, whose beatitudes your party individually rejects to weaken him. You deny God, and perhaps that should be difficult. But I just want to win, to see how it ends, even though I ultimately don't really care. I care to not care, which is maybe my own rejected beatitude, my own ultimate rejection of what I was given, this gift.  

And, after returning home, after writing the above, after kvetching over whether to just move on, I came home and resumed the final fight I had left in the middle of. And after a turn, I beat it. YHWH is vanquished, and all the teens go their separate ways, but to gather one last time, in true anime fashion, to admire an honorary statue of the MC. Stupid. But also, it was nice, for a moment.

I award this game three jumpmen.