Shin Megami Tensei Series

Mastema is a coward. As long as he thinks he can get what he wants later he won't show his true colors.

Its when his plan is this close to fruition or it all tumbles down that he shows his true nature.

And you know on that note, and I realize what a surprise this will be given I'm known for defending her, I'm... actually liking Zelenin less this run. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate her, she's still an awesome character, but some of her traits now grate on me for reasons I'm not sure of entirely.

For starters, somebody here (can't recall who) said she is, in essence, racist, and I can't get that out of my head. There's not much difference between her and, say, a soldier who comes back from a tour in Iraq blaming all Arabs for what he suffered there, is there? As well, for a scientist she sure makes a lot of rather illogical decisions guided by emotion, notably refusing to use demons at all despite ample evidence of the assets they provide the team. Hell, by the time you bust her out of the joint you've probably recruited most of Mithras' staff to help you!

So yeah, still like her, but I don't see her as the total innocent guilty of nothing but being out of her depth that I used to...

Eh, if she doesn't want to use demons because of how traumatizing her experiences were that's her right.

Oh no, I completely understand that. Hope I didn't come off as victim-blamey. I just find it kind of odd she doesn't really acknowledge the necessity of using demons to the team at all.

Edited by HamburgerTime on Nov 20th 2018 at 10:31:34 AM

She half heardly does in her first encounter, but her own irrational self makes clear the idea of herself ever using it is out of the question. She'd rather die.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Nov 20th 2018 at 9:56:28 AM

I think it was me who made racist parralels earlier

Welp, I've reread the thirty or so last pages of the thread and I'm quite happy to see that I stand by everything I said to badguy. And that the very first sentence I made about the game without playing it actually hits the nail of my main problem with its plot.

Also holy shit hamburger zeus destroyed you. I first tried the guy without even trying !

although I think i was like 7 levels higher than you were.

Am I weird for collecting every single possible demon source ? Did I overdid it ?

I'll give some thoughts later in the night once i'm done with the game on the plot. Spoiler alert, i've got a second round of trashing to give to zelenin.

Edited by Yumil on Nov 21st 2018 at 6:17:00 PM

No, you are not weird for collecting every demon source...says the guy who also collects every demon source possible.

...how did you manage the one-try Zeus? Wasn't the constant muting and buff canceling so annoying?

I got Zeus on my first try as well, though I went in with a lot of Elec resistance and was fortunate enough to have a lot of Dekaja and Dekunda stones.

I think he never muted me. I just spammed luster candy with king frost, salvation/alluring squall with ishtar, and acid breath with hecatoncheires. And maybe a mirror attack If he ever casted charge ? Don't remember if him specifically did it. Oh yeah, I did had an armor that resisted lightning.

I entered, basically saw 'oh yeah, he casts lightning and is weak to wind", came back with demons without a weakness to lightning and with hitters that had wind attacks and handed his ass to him.

Edited by Yumil on Nov 21st 2018 at 6:52:52 PM

If I recall your first sentence anout Redux was about when Alex gives them that talk right?

Cause she had to learn firsthand that Violence was never the answer to the problem herself as we venture through the Womb of Grief. Her compendium even mentions she wanted action instead of communication.

Right, so now that I know that I can carry over Stigmata Strike, I need to get it onto a Demon with Fire resistance (or possibly null / absorb / reflect), I need to know how to do that. Right now, the highest level Demon I can make with Raphael as Fusion Material is Lakshmi. I already have one, but I'd just start with her. What Demons can I get to from there that would be better for this battle?

I ask you guys because I can't find any comprehensive list of what can be fused into what on any wikis (probably because the list is far too vast, and varies from game to game).

The sentence I'm thinking about is something in the lines of "did somebody ever pointed it out to them in the vanilla game ? because I feel that should be something that should be told to them" while talking about bugaboo.

Yeah no one pointed it out. And since we're a silent MC we dont converse even though that seemed to be the bedt time too. Instead it was solely wih the demons who preached down to humanity demanded answers.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Nov 21st 2018 at 11:25:19 AM

It feels kinda odd that in SMT If, Luster Candy is not a skill. but an item instead.

Maybe it's a literal candy?

That.... actually makes alot of sense!

Alright, Mem Aleph down, empyrean ascend done, now to face shekinah. while my dinner boils I'm gonna do what I said I would do.

Well, that one was hard. I can really feel my overlevelling wearing off. Had to use an hecatoncheires throughout the whole fight for luster candy and oh boy is he fragile.

So, badguy's big point of content with redux was that the original strange journey was not built for a happy ending and that zelenin and Jimenez were not written to be redeemable.

Since wasn't one to take kiddy gloves, I'll do the same. This is horseshit.

Vanilla Strange journey "wasn't written with the possibility of a redemption for those two in mind" ? No, strange journey requires you that you, the protagonist let both of them sink into the abyss to work at all.

Let's start with Zelenin. i already said it a while before that the whole "not using the demon program" is full of holes the story should be pointing out rather than me the player, but I dismissed it back then at not too problematic.

And then mastema gave an angel to zelenin to defend herself. Up until this point, I would have kinda bought that the strike team, not being familiar with SMT cosmology, could not be aware that angels are, in fact, demons too, just with another alignement. But here mastema is visibly giving to zelenin a demon we have fought and may have in our party. I'm fairly sure zelenin was around when I fought some of those guys, actually !

The fact nobody is pointing this out to her is astounding. Beyond pointing this out to her, which would already be neat, I mean, I've got a dozen of law aligned demons ! Even restricting oneself to angel-race demon because why not, I think I could hand you a whole team of those ! With neat skillsets to go with it ! I've said it before, but if you die or make the whole mission fail because you couldn't get over yourself, that's sorely on you !

Was this scene added in redux ? please tell me this scene was added in redux.

But even if it was, the whole transformation scene is baffling. mastema lays out the specifics of the the transformation, let zelenin think about it, and the only thing you character can do is volunteer to be the angel instead ? Come on, how bad with people do you have to be not do anything better than this in this situation ?

I-I don't even know what I'm supposed to read in the "volunteering instead" option. She's the one bitching over her own helplessness (oh yeah, shame that angel of mastema got powercreeped and there was no way to make any better angels OH WAIT), do you think you will help her by taking that from her ? Or is this supposed to be read as a selfish attempt at power grab ?

There's obvious points to make against this transformation ! First, it technically makes her a demon, You Are What You Hate much since at this point it should be obvious angels are a category of demons, Second, it's fucking mass brainwashing, for someone who's so obssessed with being morally clean that doesn't really mesh well, and third, something the game confirms nicely just after that sequence, don't you have family and friends to go back to on earth ? you know, the thing Mastema told you would be impossible.

None of those objections in a vacuum has any importance. But the fact there is so much to say to zelenin that could get to her and change her mind and that nobody is doing it is the sin there.

Also, arthur is blatantly incompetent in that sequence. "Crewman smartass, escort zelenin to mastema once more". WHY ? You see what is happening to Jimenez, right ? And you also know those are starting to become loose cannons since you accurately predict they're about to drop the mission right before they do so a bit later, so how could you reach the conclusion that letting her go get a shiny powerup from an unknown and poorly understood creature would do anything good ? You understand humans mental weakness perfectly everywhere else in the plot but not there ? COME ON.

The only reason arthur allows that is because the script needs it to work. And to work, the script requires not only the protagonist but literally everyone on the red sprite to not do anything about Zelenin's blatlantly obvious issues. and as a crew member outright states, there are therapists on the red sprite.

And I don't buy the "we're a silent protagonist so we can't help it". Bullshit. Joker too was a silent protagonist but that didn't stopped him from being characterized as an endlessly supportive friend in his game.

Speaking of which, the only way I found to sit through this without having the story collapse on itself was to headcanon half a dozen interaction between protag!Joker and zelenin that takes advantage of joker's past. There'd be a great scene to write with zelenin aditting she was a huge supporter of the phantom thieves back then and what they were doing for society, with joker having the benefit of hindsight and being older pointing out the inherent problems with the whole heart stealing thing, and also pointing out differences between the situation (namely that while yes let's call what he was doing brainwashing, he never did it indistinctly to large groups of people), something that would raise legitimate doubts in Zelenin but not enough to stop her, only for joker to double down on it when seeing what happened to Ryan's squad. yeah, we brainwashed people, but we made them regret their actions and actually atone for it, we didn't made them mindless religious drones !

And suddenly, if you start voicing all of those objections throughout the whole game, then there's nothing natural about Zelenin falling in place of a law zealot, and it would actually make a lot of sense she would relent in her ways and pull herself back from the brink if on top of that she learned her plan is doomed to fail horribly.

The problem of redux isn't that it betrays the original strange journey script, it's that he highlights the original script of strange journey was stupid for never adressing any signs of visible moral decay from both zelenin and jimenez.

"but that wasn't the point of the story !" yeah but you don't write a game with a protagonist seeing his friends experiencing moral decay and corruption in the span of an entire game while witnessing all of the steps towards and then do nothing about it. It just makes you come off as an immense asshole.

And maybe the point of the story was to highlight how much of an asshole we are for doing nothing about it ! Yeah sure, but you know what I have to say about a game with an unlikeable main character that I'm still expected to root for ?

I Don't care what happens to those people.

Jimenez's transformation at least is written more intelligently. It's the only possible outcome to an unexpected situation and he takes that decisions as a result of his good character traits expressing themselves rather than under the impulse of his negative ones that no one did anything about. Jimenez becoming a demon makes sense.

Too bad they forgot to actually make him villainous.

Like sure he's visibly unhinged, but not enough to start talking about killing you or the crew, just taking out his frustration on jack's squad, which has done more than enough to deserve it. Even the game thinks it, as stepping back and watching jim rip apart jack is the neutral choice and opposing him gives you law points. If you don't take the chaos choice of killing ryan, that's the only act of villainy he ever commits in neutral.

And then suddenly I should believe he's unredeemable because he shows up and decide to atnagonize me ? What even is his goal in this scene ? Oh yeah, he's gonna save all of humanity of the curse of being born human ! How altruist ! tell me, where was that altruism of yours in the entire rest of the game ?

Either Jimenez is directly under the control of mem aleph at this point and he has no moral agency, either he's still in control and then he choses to turn against the one people he legitimately regarded as a friend for some beliefs he didn't believed in an hour ago.

Also, can we talk about Bugaboo ? Saying that vanilla jimenez wouldn't have cared that he fused with bugaboo out of compassion is complete ass because no one ever brings up the topic before alex, therefore any kind of conclusion about how he would react in vanilla strange journey is baseless speculation.

"Strage journey's writing was perfect." Yeah I'm gonna give that a hard no.

The problem of alex slapping some sense into the zelenin and jimenez isn't that it betrays the themes of strange journey vanilla. It's that it draws attention to the fact the vanilla script never even considered what it was talking about, and never had anyone trying anything of the sort at any point of their downfall and this was dumb.

I don't think redux is much smarter about it, having alex redeeming them at the peak of their insanity rather than on the way to their downfall, and it overkills the fact you could have prevented a huge waste of human life simply by being a decent friend to them, but i'll take late over never.

It's not a matter of "not being interested in telling that kind of story", it's a matter of not ackowledging a key component of the type of story you are talking about. This is like a story about vampires without adressing the vampire's weakness.

so, that was strange journey. Well. It was a good game and I'll keep some fond memories of it, but I got through the story by headcanoning the protag a lot more than it should have been needed. Otherwise, it was complete story collapse for me.

Edited by Yumil on Nov 21st 2018 at 1:20:36 PM

If you don't like "You have no choice but to watch your friends toboggan down the slippery slope" scenarios, this might not actually be the series for you.

it's not that I don't like it. Jimenez and zelenin brainwashing the red sprite crew is still sending chills down my spine. This entire scene is the one thing I'll remember from that game. I'm just asking for it to not feel half-assed and railroaded into it because the plot couldn't figure out counter arguments to the most basic support a human can provide to another.

I have no pathos for them becoming monsters because them slipping of the slope comes of as unearned.

That aside, yeah, I've figured out this series isn't for me. I don't like the gameplay enough to put up with 90% of that and 10% of a plot.

Edited by Yumil on Nov 21st 2018 at 1:23:37 PM

I guess you could atleast give a try to other spin-offs that dont follow the steps of the mainline games 100% such as Devil Summoner, Last Bible or Devil Children. just to put a few examples.

Try IV Apocalypse as well if you want more plot and character development in your SMT.

Actually I was using the silent Mc as a complaint if I was misunderstood, but yeah the scenes involving the Power were in the original too.

Zelenin suddenly becoming deep Law is mainly due to her becoming an angel, I thought. Angels are (mostly) like that in SMT.