Shin Megami Tensei IV *SPOILERS ABOUND*

Yeah she instead had a single Jack Frost nearly usurp her, proving she's even less competent.

Hey, don't diss Jack Frost! They're mascots for a reason, you know-ho! Not to mention that one Jack Frost proved tough enough to earn a Wake-Up Call Boss entry on this wiki.

NOTE: I am aware that some people did not find that boss particularly hard (such as myself, since I went in with Magaon). I do ask that no one insult anyone for finding any boss difficult. Different people have different experiences with the game, after all.

Seriously though, I saw Nozomi dealing with him the way she did being like how a recess monitor deals with a bratty kid hogging the slide and declaring that they rule over the playground because they have the slide.

Also, there was no "nearly usurping Nozomi." The only near-usurpation that happened was in King Frost's delusions.

edited 28th Jun '17 11:31:04 AM by dragonfire5000

No one is insulting players. We're insulting Nozomi for being weaker than she was in IV, which is quite a feat.

Wasn't saying anyone was insulting players at the moment. Was putting it out there just in case some moron decides it's perfectly fine to make fun of someone for finding King Frost difficult just because they themselves didn't. I've seen too many fandoms with such people in it.

Also, no, she's not weaker in Apocalypse. The Nozomi in Apocalypse eventually learns to use bullets that can pierce resistances. the Nozomi in IV, on the other hand:

• Ends up being the Walter to Asura's Minotaur
• Ends up trapped in several Wicker Men and needs Flynn to yank her out every time
• Has to concentrate on summoning Black Maria, so we don't really get a chance to see how much she has improved since the Wicker Men incident.

edited 28th Jun '17 11:34:37 AM by dragonfire5000

Yeah and then:

• She nearly gets overthrown by a King Frost weaker than said Wickerman Horde.
• Gets her Fairy Forest taken over easily by Titan.
• Can't even hit Nanashi with a sneak attack in the Anarchy boss fight while exploiting his empathy towards her.
• Can't even use Inannas fertility powers to heal the giant tree and has to let it be restored naturally. Danu has to use her powers to make Dagda instead.
• Makes a dumbfounded decision of telling the Association that they released Krishna, then throws a sassy comment when people get irrational over it.

Her track record is just as abysmal.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:23:54 PM by OmegaRadiance

A few things I should point out:

• Being taken out by being an Assist Character doesn't mean much due to Story and Gameplay Segregation, and being taken out just means it takes few turns for the assist character to jump back into the fight. Lucifer and Merkabah can still be taken out by random encounters, after all, and they don't jump back into the fight (lazy bums). And depending on who you use to challenge King Frost, King Frost might not even have a chance to fight Nozomi at all, so "King Frost nearly beats Nozomi" isn't even an objective truth of the game.
• King Frost doesn't ''nearly take over the forest" just because he says so, just like how the Emperor saying all he wants about wearing new clothes doesn't change the fact that he's not wearing anything at all.
• The thing about Krishna says nothing about her being "weaker." It just means that she personally thought telling people earlier instead of letting them eventually find out and being pissed out it being hidden from them would work out better, and that she severely underestimated how pissed off and unreasonable people would become.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:00:25 PM by dragonfire5000

He took over a mystical spring and would have forced them to obey him eventually, Nozomi couldn't do anything and it required Napaea acting on her own to get help.

That was never her reason for doing it. Only the fanon reason. It was always to make Nanashi and Asahi to "take responsibility" for their actions, when they aren't even the first or sole individuals to be manipulated by demons.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:02:46 PM by OmegaRadiance

Wasn't Nozomi hampered by the fact that Napaea stole her smartphone?

And that part about King Frost "forcing all people to obey him eventually" still doesn't mean he "nearly took over the forest" then and there. Getting all the people to agree that the Emperor is wearing new clothes didn't change the fact that he doesn't have clothes on.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:01:51 PM by dragonfire5000

He had cut off the supply of Reiki or whatever it was that a Fairy demon mentions early on. And he got powerful enough from it to become a King Frost.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:12:32 PM by OmegaRadiance

Um...this is what Napaea says after Nozomi chides her for taking her smartphone:

I'm not seeing the "Nozomi being stubborn about not needing help" bit here...

Also, yes, the Jack Frost becomes a King Frost. Any kingship over the Forest still existed in his head at that moment, and he still did not "nearly beat Nozomi," especially if you didn't even use her as an Assist Character.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:09:39 PM by dragonfire5000

Oh sorry bout that, but that does prove she wasn't capable of handling King Frost. Which still proves my point. She couldn't handle him at all. It took kids younger than her to help, which still speaks badly of her competence despite your assistance on "Assist Characters" doesn't prove a thing.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:19:06 PM by OmegaRadiance

...I take it you meant "assertion" instead of "assistance?"

It's probably a difference in interpretation, but I didn't see Nozomi needing assistance for dealing with a King Frost to be proof of her incompetence. After all, she's probably grown up knowing just how dangerous demons can be if you don't have your own demons to help out, so she thought it'd be better to have some aid (and maybe having more people present would cause King Frost to back down more easily). Also, I would assume that the average Hunters that try to strike it out alone more often than not ended up as demon chow, so I'm not surprised that she thought it'd be better to get help, just in case. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I also don't hold the fact that younger individuals had to help out against her and don't think it really says much about her overall competence. Since Nozomi has frequently pulled her weight in combat whenever I used her, she never really came across as "more incompetent" than she was in IV. Then again, I never had Nozomi do anything stupid against Asura in IV, so maybe I've just been luckier.

I'll freely admit I'm more likely to cut characters from various works more slack than other people might. But yeah, even with the King Frost thing, I still don't see her as more incompetent in Apocalypse than she was in IV. It'll just have to be something the two of us agree to disagree on.

Actually, now that I think about it, they missed a great opportunity in Apocalypse. A Titan shows up as a boss in that game, and considering who Flynn's original voice actor is, we could've had an Attack on Titan joke there. Ah well.

edited 28th Jun '17 12:45:46 PM by dragonfire5000

Agree to disagree then.

Yeah I found Nozomi a very helpful party member in Apocalypse, nothing at all like the Asura debacle in 4.

Watching her fill the Trumpeter horde full of holes was amusing to watch.

Trumpeter abuse does tend to be hilarious, so long as it's not the Trumpeter in your party being bashed around.

Is this in general? If so, this should also be in the general SMT topic.

I personally think that Nozomi is different from IV; I like her a lot less for several reasons, but I wouldn't exactly say "weaker". I mean, that Titan she was apparently so weak to not be able to defeat kicked my ass a good couple of times, even with my demons.

I also dislike how she blamed for the "unsealing Krishna from the ark thing", when Dagda forced me to unseal it anyway, when I realized it was a bad idea, so I didn't actually do anything with the Ark (and then Dagda has the gall to try and use the angry hunters to prove his point). She also says that she'll "try to make sure that they go easy on you", but what do you get in the morning? "You are suspected of treason."

If anything, though, she's way stronger; carried me through the beginning of my first playthrough. To be honest, though, I do agree with her point on acting like an adult; which is why I was disappointed how we weren't the ones to report what happened at Kanda-no-Yashiro.

edited 28th Jun '17 8:13:00 PM by PastryPerson

I've mentioned before that my interpretation is that Nozomi reported what Nanashi did (or was forced to do) because she may have felt that it was better to just let people know right then and there instead of having them find out later and be pissed off even more because it was kept a secret. She probably didn't expect the Hunters to be murderously angry enough to want to lynch Nanashi.

The fact that she says that she'll try to make sure the other Hunters go easy on Nanashi and Asahi, to me, suggested that she doesn't really blame them and understood on some level that they were led astray.

Yeah, but that's part of the reason that I feel like we should've told everybody ourselves. That way, it'd seem less like we were betraying everybody.

Yeah she didn't do it for the reason Dragonfire assumes she does,'otherwise they would have pointed it out because the partners aren't all that subtle about things. Hallelujah is the best at it but he's had years to get good at hiding his hybrid nature.

Nanashi choosing to do it himself would have worked a lot better, because Nozomi doesn't even provide anything close to helping with the situation and just makes a lame comeback about Hunters picking on kids, when she started this all herself.

It would have been easy to see Fujiwara ourselves and have him determine it, because he was the only one keeping his head cool for that situation. And the Hunters were all too quick to label him a traitor for it.

Nozomi is an idiot, because anyone could have seen how the masses would have reacted, but what does she care? It's okay to have difference of opinion as long as you're human, so people killing themselves for the Divine Powers is OK in her eyes.

Titan was easy if you use the ailment he's weak too. Or am I remembering that wrong and it's just the normal ones?

edited 28th Jun '17 8:42:01 PM by OmegaRadiance

Considering that it took Krishna spilling the beans before your companions find out about how he got let loose, I can see Nozomi wondering how long Nanashi and Asahi planned to keep silent about the whole thing and if they even planned to tell anyone at all. And again, while she does chide them and say they need to take responsibility, she's not as harsh as she could've been, considering just how much damage the Divine Powers have already wreaked on Tokyo (such as Shesha killing and eating everyone he sees).

Also, considering how badly Gaston reacts to finding out, I also assumed Nozomi decided she should be the one to report it so that the Hunters don't hear Gaston's version first, a version which I'm fairly certain would've been quite a bit more venomous and condemning. Again, she probably didn't realize just how pissed off the people of Tokyo were about the whole "setting Krishna loose" thing even with her trying to smooth things over.

I found what Nozomi did to be perfectly understandable. After all, she herself found out about it through Krishna, so it's not a faulty assumption that Nanashi would've kept silent about the whole thing so long as no one brought it up.

edited 28th Jun '17 8:46:17 PM by dragonfire5000

She wasn't thinking of that when she did it. At most due to having no idea how long the game goes on for it could easily have been a day at worst for each change of the moon, and they were trying to fix the mess instead. So a few days could have passed at most.

IV we know went for six months.

Gaston has no influence in the Hunters because he's one if Merkabahs Samurai. If anything he should have told them, which never happens.

No one had asked who released Krishna either, which says more about the people of Tokyo than anything. Heck the fact that they tried to murder Asahi to coerce Flynn to submitting could easily be used against Krishnas point. Not a good way to thank your rescuers after all.

edited 28th Jun '17 8:52:28 PM by OmegaRadiance

I'm still not convinced what Nozomi did was stupid. Sure, if I was in Nanashi's place, I wouldn't be happy about being reported, but what she did was understandable. For example, if you started a fire that burned down your school and killed a bunch of your classmates, even by accident, hell yeah people are going to report what you did when they find out. And considering the amount of damage Shesha wreaks is far worse than just a school being burned down...yeah, Nozomi didn't do anything wrong in reporting what happened.

edited 28th Jun '17 8:55:13 PM by dragonfire5000

No, I actually meant that I wished we had the option to say something about Kanda-no-Yashiro, Odin, and everything before all that happened in the first place.