If the premise as given is that
Shin Megami Tensei V is a storytelling flub, it's certainly not a novel conclusion to come to; that has largely been the narrative baseline of the series and larger franchise for the past decade or so. Whether one holds this view or feels frustrated by it, the reasons don't seem so mysterious or out of reach: major creative voices have departed, the series has increasingly felt the pressure of its own history and lineage, and past risk-taking is replaced by trend-chasing external to the voices and direction that defined the rebellious spirit of the works that gave the series form in the first place. It has been an inevitable process, and at this point I'm no longer gnashing my teeth at the futility of it; the series exists, and even thrives, in the shape it now has and my interactions with it are made tenable by a curated sense of compartmentalization. I can praise
SMTV for the set of game mechanics it presents; it is just as natural to deride it for the story it cannot convincingly tell.
For all the time I spent with it (and it is a long game), should I be pressed to detail or even describe what
SMTV is about, I'm not sure I could do it. Elevator pitches aren't crucial to telling a worthwhile narrative but the ability to summarize the central tenets and thematic matter of a tale isn't a boon to be taken lightly, especially in a series that at its most compelling has landed on those all-encompassing thematic throughlines.
Nocturne has its story of cyclical creation, rebirth and ideologies driven by significant personal interiority;
Strange Journey unites a multi-cultural cast to face the consequences of global environmental abuse and suffer the rage of mother earth in turn. These are the stories that stand out because they have a unique voice of their own that is not wholly dependent on the insistent and pervasive Judeo-Christian scuffle bubbling under the surface in the series's archetypical setups for its conflicts; they can function both independent and attuned to it if needed, but are never defined by it.
SMTV doesn't eke out a space for itself to say anything distinctive with; it feels like a work completely beholden to semiotics of past entries in a way that is both reverential and terrified of straying from those comfortable fixtures. This also is not new, as
SMTIV for its part was excessively cowed by adherence to the old status quos of the Super Famicom duology in a bid to seem superficially "authentic"--the only difference now is that
V looks to the third game for guidance instead.
Dancing in
Nocturne's shadow is a risky play to make, not least for the complicated reputation the game holds depending on personal context. In North America and Europe, for being one of the earliest games brought over in the franchise, the context of the game as a series-iconoclastic deviation has been largely lost and only restored if independently traced back in the years since; it was further muddled by the inconsistent and incongruous
Maniacs expansion material present in all English-language versions by default and which became definitive to the text as a result.
SMTV's using of
Nocturne's supernatural protagonist concept, Vortex World aesthetic, direct incidental nods and even the very brazen "do you know what happened 18 years ago? It was wild" premise that maintains the cosmology of the previous game all seem like a holistic attempt to both play to the fondness
Nocturne holds for English-language audiences, and for the home-grown developers to pay due tribute and so "repatriate" the outlier in the lineage as just as significant a player as the iconic foundations. It is an attempt to anchor the game's identity to a strongly-defined previous work, but the gesture rings hollow as the game does not hold sway over its own proceedings, so all that's left is empty gesticulation at past glories and the pandering inherent to such acts if they are so devoid of substance as they are here.
The misconception that
Nocturne "has no story" is a challenge that
SMTV rises to meet in its efforts to live up to its forebearer in imitating parts of the form but little of the function therein. The textual narrative of the earlier game had thematic weight on its own but it was amplified and made resonant through choices of direction and presentation--the framing of scenes, the lighting of them, the choices to withold information if it wasn't prudent. It's not a false dichotomy of little text vs. much text, but the recognition of what kind of writing to focus on and how to deliver it, and knowing that the visual presentation of characters is as much a part of the writing process as a script is.
SMTV's characters are as slight as the usual series standard in the arcs they undertake to reflect their alignments, but the pretense of a philosophical texture that does not exist still maintains throughout; as a result, the shifts in their portrayal appear as hokey and unearned to the role they've been allotted in the frankly artificial maneuverings of the narrative to reach its pre-ordained endpoint. Everywhere in the treatment there appear seams of undeveloped, dropped ideas and story threads, with plot points lectured and explained at the player in isolated bulks, the discovery of a world secondary to the insistence that it be justified by the contrivances of the plotting. The sense of troubled development shines through in how oddly lopsided the storytelling is, with one alignment hero receiving vast and consistent focus which both undersells the contributions of the others by contrast and exposes the lack of a compelling follow-through when their arc reaches its clumsily staged zenith, undoing the development attempted until then.
The artifice present in the evocation of a celebrated precedent is the larger unmaking of
SMTV's all wider labors in conceptualizing an identity of its own. Is it a pulpy modern occult yarn like what begat the series? Is it an internally-concerned journey of self-actualization in a devastated world? Is it reflective, somehow, of contemporary society in some insightful way through allegory or direct commentary? The game gestures at all of these in turn but never has the time, drive or commitment to develop any idea further than the echo or reverberation of thematic substance. It drops big ideas--what if your existence in the normalcy of today was a godly and illusory
Matrix scenario and the world had actually "ended"--and simply doesn't develop them as their stature would require to reach a point beyond mere proper noun chatter. It is at the same time terrified of ambiguity and feeling the pressure to overexplain itself, which sabotages the possibility of nuance in what is said or how it's conveyed; the anvils that get dropped are particularly damaging to the structure of the story as they find no good place to belong amidst all these storytelling inadequacies. The second "chapter" in particular takes a grand nosedive in introducing a bullying story that feels adrift in its placement and the stakes ostensibly involved; the jarring pretend-return to everyday routine is an attempt to shock the audience in its just as swift destruction, but it has no hope of eliciting much other than a shrug for how simultaneously abrupt and belaboured it is as a point of dramatic upheaval. The game rests at this uncomfortable juncture of being unable to reconcile between brevity and elaboration, undercutting itself at both ends as it goes. It presents a simplistic conflict of divinity and demonkind while attempting to imbue the fringe plotting with surface complexity, never finding footing beyond regurgitated clichés.
I did not find anything to hang to in
SMTV as a story in its basest components, and if I have any angle on more specific frustrations, it is unquestionably going to be its gender and other social politics evident in the text. Absent of a particular framing device, I'll just go through things that I noted in my time with the game.
This is the first series game I've played featuring Masayuki Doi's demon designs; it is his third overall, after
IV Apocalypse and
Strange Journey Redux. Doi's work is superficially aligned with Kaneko's precedent, and at its best--standouts here include Fionn mac Cumhaill, Kaya-no-Hime, Loup-garou, Hydra and the redesigned Angel--operates as the best-case successor his position with the series ostensibly entails, but there is a lot of friction in the execution of the concepts at large, particularly in the portrayal of women. As a generality, Kaneko's work integrated sexuality into his demon designs as a regular fixture, but the crucial division between exploitative sexualization was usually maintained; it is part of the remarkable artistic legacy he left behind. Doi cannot walk this line and nearly every subject is rendered a visual embodiment of a highly active Madonna-whore complex--the only universality is that women must be sexualized in either case, which is continually emphasized by different aspects of the game's presentation.
The first of these is most prominent among the more adult figures in the roster, like Anahita, Manananggal, Cleopatra, or Nuwa. It's through design choices in both the bodies and costuming, the posing of the subjects in key art, idle animations and signature attacks that the sex-object-first approach makes itself clear; these are figures whose femininity in myth and history are taken as synonymous with a kind of common seductive sensuality in how they're presented here, seeking to titillate through perpetually arched backs and emphases of bodily curves. It is an uninteresting, and contextually wholly inappropriate approach to take, seemingly only done because the "license" to do is pre-built in depicting a female figure of myth; male or genderless subjects are not subject to the treatment, rendering its intentions highly transparent.
The flipside or even uglier companion piece to this is the game (and series's) attitude toward its mythological women rendered as young girls. Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, but we are way past this with Doi to an extent that it's now an active and wilfully invoked predilection that he and the rest of the team making these decisions double down on. Amanozako's reimagining from a volatile and violent partnerless mother into an impetuous, tsundere stock character imp is the infantilization of a powerful woman so severe that it will never be unwarranted to specify; the dreaded context provided by the game actually makes things worse, as the protagonist and his godly half in Aogami are revealed to be Susano-o--Amanozako's father in myth, which means the game spends all of its run to weave this "naughty" adversarial interplay between parent and child in a dynamic that is one of the most central in all of its storytelling and absolutely horrid in its implications and undertones.
Demeter returns from
Strange Journey Redux, along with her terribly-designed brother Zeus, and she remains as massive an injustice to mythic authenticity in the exact same ways; mother goddess rendered a child, and while a bad choice on its own, there's always something more to exacerbate the surface foibles. In
SMTV, she's the center player in the longest string of sidequests available in the game, and while the content of said tasks isn't objectionable, the presentation of her during them really bears down on the intentions of the portrayal. In a complete break from common cinematography utilized by the game, during Demeter's dialogue the camera often adopts a first-person view to face her at close proximity and head on, to clearly communicate and sell the effect that she's (through her much more elaborate and painstaking animations and emoting) addressing you, the player. The
SMT protagonists may be self-insert avatars with little selfhood to speak of absent of what the player brings to them, but in this game's visual language you are always looking at the Nahobino while they face down whatever next opponent or exchange words with someone else. In this highly conspicuous instance meant to highlight an improperly diminutive girl-goddess, that relationship is suspectly severed.
The third of Doi's miserable trifecta comes in the form of Idun of Norse myth. While not explicitly a mother as sourced, Idun is associated with fertility and youth, and is a wife which comes with some associations of maturity even if older mythological text is not necessarily subject to the same contemporary ethics we view the world through. Regardless, a precedent exists in portrayals of Idun that it would behoove an interpretive text like
SMT to uphold, as it has woven as a core component of its appeal in the past. What Doi does instead is again deprive a woman of any suggestions of adulthood, and construct a completely incomprehensible bullshit etymology to justify the twisting of "Idun" into an "idol" in the commodified music and entertainment industry sense--an industry infamous for its chewing up and spitting out of young girls while profiting off of their sexualization, so I guess it would be ironic if any sense of self-awareness existed here. It is definitely what's happening here, as all of Idun's dialogue and sound clips, her animations in idle stances and attack motions directly reference that false thematicism that has no relevance to who she is or is supposed to be. At the same time, the sexualization is ever-present, as her miniskirt leaves her underwear exposed at neutral head-level, while visible garters frame her legs. It's so fucking tiresome and insulting to behold.
Demons are my first concern but it's not like the human cast fares any better. The aforementioned bullying storyline revolves around a character that only exists for its duration, Sahori, who is embroiled in the demonic intrigue intersecting with the cast's school and the demon Lahmu, her supposed Nahobino "other half" that the game concocts to contrive to tell its story with. As much as
Persona 5 sabotages the messaging in its own bullying chapters, it is equally failed here, in using Sahori as a sacrificial vehicle to introduce this shoddy power-up true-form concept to the game's internal lexicon, to be put into action with characters the game deems actually matter later on--Sahori is just here to be made into a perpetual sufferer and disposed of at the end to make a cast of dudes sad for the few minutes they continue to remember her. That is the inarguable intention of the arc as not one woman's death suffices but it's a bargain of two, as the saintly Tao is written out in the same moment of narrative table-clearing--it was getting a little crowded with all the excess estrogen, since as beholden as
SMTV is to series traditions, we all know only boys can survive the apocalypse and represent their respective ideologies. That Tao eventually "returns" as the titular new reincarnation of the goddess only further clarifies the strict gender essentialism and restrictive role-playing that exists in the story that no measure of a beautiful protagonist character can salvage.
The last and least emphasized member of the human cast's handful of women is Miyazu, the sister of Chaos hero Yuzuru. If Yuzuru is underplayed next to his counterpart and equal opposite Ichiro, Miyazu is close to nonexistent. She features in almost no mandatory, integral scenes throughout, and exists in a state of vague peril for her brother to be motivated by. Things change in that they don't really, at all, when a late-game questline involving one of the major--but similarly less featured--cultural deities in Khonsu has his optional storyline interwoven with her, where she's bizarrely rendered into his object of affection and safeguarding. Not only does this remove any possibility of Miyazu herself having an arc to develop her role in the game, it actively twists her existence into a motivator for a deity and demon, in casting Khonsu as a proactive figure and presenting a dramatic conclusion for the sake of his development. It's a reversal of the tenets that allow the series to tell the stories it does, with the fallible and dynamic humans contrasting and bouncing off against the capricious but essentially static myths and folklore around them. I don't understand or agree with the direction of the narrative in this semi-hidden corner of the game--even in the rare instance that it seems to break away from stale precedent, the ideas
SMTV contributes appear as misguided as the rest of it.
There was always something unappealing and grossly inappropriate behind the corner in the game, so here are some additional distasteful morsels that I encountered: in addition to Doi's crimes against demonkind, the specific usage of Kaneko veterans in the little-girl mold left me questioning the intent thanks to the surrounding precedent. Muu Shuwuu has already been tied to a sidequest in
Strange Journey that acknowledged (and tried to render comical) the pedophilic attention she might be a target for thanks to her depiction in the series, and she is very heavily featured in this game; she might in fact be the most common demon NPC one can talk to through the game. Alice only exists as a special fusion, but her fusion with Idun results in Mishaguji, the second-most infamous penis in the series. I could not find any precedent of a Megami and Fiend creating a Vile race demon in other games and their fusion tables, but I acknowledge I'm not an expert in those mechanics and may be reading a degree of deliberation and malice to something that is a result of the systems at a benign level. Still, several of those combinations toward Mishaguji involve the little girl demons as ingredients, so it's a connotation that arose whether I wanted it to or not. Moving on, the old-world collectables for selling include school swimsuits and maid uniforms, just in case you were in danger of forgetting the otaku intersections of the material. As a last and baffling bit of wish-this-wasn't-here minutiae, Adramelech's--a near slam dunk from Doi in being authentic to the Le Breton illustration, but at the last moment deciding to include unnecessary queerphobic signifiers because of the peacock connection--portrayal here dredges up a ghost of shitty pop culture past, in his body language and aural and textual exclamations lifting directly from early 2000s shithead comedian Masaki Sumitani, who rose to a degree of prominence in that era for his "Hard Gay" character and schtick, with overexaggerated flailing of his arms and exclaiming repetitive catchphrases like "hoo" and "sei." Adramelech is given these mannerisms here to further propagate the queerphobic intent of the portrayal, reinforcing it with retrograde bigotry.
~~~
How to feel about
SMTV? It's a game so removed of itself in its respective strengths and weaknesses that it might be impossible to land on a convincing aggregate of said impressions. I have chosen, for my own peace of mind, to remove myself from the friction between those differing takeaways, leaving me free to both commend and denigrate it at my leisure. It's not something I would easily recommend to others, but neither does it seem like something that will go on to haunt oneself in frustration toward what it could have been. Its ingenuities are mechanical and structural recontextualization of the series that can be retained, molded further, or dropped entirely going forward, and as a playground for those aspects it excels. Otherwise, I expected little, received less, and did not feel especially betrayed by the fact that I did. I guess that's the solemn reality of the series as it exists in the now, for better and for worse.