Shin Megami Tensei Series

I liked Jimenez the entire damn game. I also gave Zelenin a lot of crap in the past while being aware of her experiences. I guess I just singled her out because she was against the whole premise of the series and that tends to bother me.

Still, if you saw what she saw I'd imagine anyone would do the same...

edited 1st Aug '14 9:56:15 PM by HamburgerTime

Not really "anyone", no.

To use an extreme example, after 9/11 the grand majority of Americans was hungering for some Arab blood and Bush's aproval rating had gone up to 80% around the time he declared he was going to lead a "Crusade against Terrorism", but it still does not changes the fact that after a few years of war and constantly being bobarded by horrible atrocity after horrible atrocity the American people quickly became more and more disillusioned with the whole thing and started wishing it would all just end.

Zelenin saw what Jack's Squad did with their demons, she definately was able to know that several crewmen had been helped by the Demons they summoned, she saw the friendship that Jimenez and Bugaboo shared, I heavily doubt that Drake was the only one going around befriending and helping Demons by doing their Quests and even if he was he would likely have told someone on the Red Sprite.

These together are all more then enough reason for her to start questioning her prior assumptions about the Demon Race. But she didn't, rather, she prefered to keep stuck in her mindset that "Demons can't be trusted".

I don't dislike her, but despite her role as a scientist I don't think that Rationality and a capability to control her emotions are part of her good points.

The former is what Arthur does, and the latter is more Drake's thing.

edited 2nd Aug '14 3:00:18 AM by SaintDeltora

i agree, though im pretty sure the reason she didnt question her beliefs is because of mastema's manipulations.

honestly what baffles me more than anything is that she apparantly never tried to summon higher leveled angels than what mastema gave her.

if she's fine with angels, even if they're basically summoned and can be considered the same as demons, she should probably be a little more open to keeping herself alive, even if she has to use an extremely limited selection of demons to do it.

She never bothered learning how to use the Demonica because of her fears. That Divine Power was a literal Crutch Character for her.

edited 2nd Aug '14 7:47:04 AM by VeryMelon

I wonder what happened to that Power. It didn't look like Asura killed him...

@ Deltora: you called him "Drake." Heh. I'm kinda flattered. If you didn't know, that's not his Canon Name (he doesn't actually have one, though in the screenshots in the manual he's called Langdon Alger and Lance Murdock), just my own name for him.

edited 2nd Aug '14 8:11:29 AM by HamburgerTime

I know it is not his canon name.

Regardless... I do like how it sounds, and it has a certain amount of notoriety around these parts, so why not using it?

I called him Master Chief.

I called him "Knives Nagase" in my first playthrough.

I was thinking on naming him Steve Rodgers if I ever manage to get a chance to play it again.

Elijah Gaedren.

You guys realize that Zelenin was more or less raped by the demons, right? Maybe not sexually, but in every other meaningful sense she was.

I think we realize that, we were talking about how other people around the 'net don't, because she's Lawful and an Ice Queen to Mr. Fanservice I guess.

I'm not saying she has no negative traits or anything, though. Deltora's right in that her "No demons period" stance arguably jeopardizes the mission (or at least makes it more difficult than it needs to be) at several points.

edited 2nd Aug '14 2:52:18 PM by HamburgerTime

...or in a less extreme and more specific and accurate way of saying it, she was tortured mentally and physically over an extended period of time, experimented on and made to watch or listen to her team-mates have the same done to them but to a much more lethal extent.

what also probably isnt helping is mastema whispering in her ear (though it cant be denied she desperately needed the support mastema gave her) and asura needling her about her insecurities and insisting that her colleagues just see her as a sex object and nothing more, and jiminez's abbrasiveness and complete refusal to give her an inch regarding bugaboo (who to be fair, went through experiments and torture just like zelenin and never really did anything wrong to her)

she apparantly just completely missed the parallel subtext during the raid on jacks HQ though, because i dont recall her ever giving a shit about that.

Yeah, one of the aforementioned negative traits is insisting Jack's Squad should be shown mercy just for being human, even after all they've done.

Really though, it's been years since I played Strange Journey so my opinion of Zelenin right now is just going off memory. I'm not sure what I actually think if her now.

edited 2nd Aug '14 5:17:39 PM by VeryMelon

Seems that, maybe Devil Survivor 1 aside, in most games, Law is presented as being very, very malignant. Though indeed in the case of Strange Journey, you can understand why Zelenin feels how she does.

SMT IV outright turned the Archangels into horrifying, Stalinist dictators who were alien looking Eldritch Abomination types.

Makes me wonder what would happen if SMT ever became big in the states, I know a certain News Network would flip its lid...

edited 2nd Aug '14 5:07:50 PM by NickTheSwing

Lucifer himself is only really fleshed out on Chaos in IV, but he's also extremely unpleasant, and not even all that suave like he is in previous appearances.

To this day I'm not sure if the writers of SMT actually dislike Western/Abrahamic religion, or if they just thought it'd make a cool story.

One kind of interesting thing SJ did is make the single most loathsome villains in the game Neutral.

edited 2nd Aug '14 5:13:08 PM by HamburgerTime

The writers have nothing against God or his angels, they are just using them to represent the ideals of Lawful philosophies and how far they can go at times. Heck, you can say the same for Lucifer and the demons; they just represent Chaos philosophies and how far they can go.

Say, random question, but is Ronde generally considered the only below-par SMT game? I've never heard much bad said about any others (though I've heard Giten is... strange) apart from the people who hate the Dating Sim elements in Persona at least.

I hear some of the Devil Children games get pretty bad. (but not the subseries as a whole, mind. Specific games).

But yeah. Outside that, Giten gets ribbing for how faux-edgey and shlochy it is, and how repetitive the dungeons get, but is also considered pretty fun for its innovations. From what I've heard.

edited 2nd Aug '14 7:41:00 PM by Otherarrow

I've actually heard some discussion as to whether Giten is part of the franchise at all. Though if it isn't, what could it be? A mockbuster? Interestingly, according to the Wiki it was the first appearance of Asherah and Morax (who would go unused until SJ dusted them off), as well as the Demon Whisper system.

Giten's status is unclear, but it's both an interquel to SMTI and a psudeo-sequel to a official SMT spin off manga (that was also adapted into an OVA) and, if I recall, a lot of the folks who worked on it also worked on the older games.

We don't know who actually developed it, but Atlus didn't publish it directly.

Also, it blatantly draws from both SMTI and Kaneko's demon designs (even if it reinterprets them to...varying levels of success) so if it was completely unofficial, you know lawsuits would be abound.

Did Kaneko work on Giten? I know he worked on the Devil Children games, even making artwork for certain demons like King Frost, Frost Ace, etc.

Edit: Also I decided to play the first Majin Tensei since I beat the Neutral route of the second one.

edited 4th Aug '14 2:06:08 AM by OmegaRadiance

I don't know. He didn't do the character art, at least.

Has anyone noticed that among all the demon families, Fallen seems to vary the most from game to game? Probably because of the whopping pool of 72+ candidates for the family, I guess. Still, several Fallen demons from the first two games have all but disappeared these days, though Andras popped up in Persona 4 and Agares and Gagyson in the Devil Surviviors.