So I recently beat this game. I might have written about it before somewhere, but the SMT series has a very different take on religion then what you normally always see in the western world. The Christian God and the Devil are depicted as 2 dictators on the wildly opposing scales of morality. The binary of “good and evil” are thrown out the window in favor of the 2 absolutes “law and chaos”. Humans are- for the most part neutral, and cannot survive well in a world of complete law, nor a world of complete chaos. But humans are mostly weak, and will, after being liberated, be doomed to return to worshiping God or the devil eventually. It was revealed in SMT III that their exist a near infinant amount of universes where God and the devil fight over the souls of man. In some worlds, God wins, and in others the devil wins. Those worlds then suffer the consequences until someone (usually a mortal) steps in to shake up the status quo. Other Gods and demons from other religions exist trying to find their place in the realm of man amidst the fallout (usually by helping the one mortal with the power to set the future right again). Anyway, Ive always preferred the idea of law over chaos rather then Good versus evil, because what is Good is largely determined by the majority rule. Morality is then, determined by the majority rulers of the world a given being grows up in. For example, we believe that cannibalism or the act of eating a creature that was intelligent/ sapient ect. to be an evil act. Yet some very old tribes practiced ritualistic cannibalism of fallen warriors, and family members to honor the dead by absorbing the flesh and the memories into their own body. In the SMT world- the game progressively tries to steer you morally in two directions, yet the hardest end game option is usually the neutral human ending (and the ending I had to cheat to get ). You get a 4rth option- the nihilism ending where you choose to end the cycle of war between God and the devil by simply destroying reality with a singularity. That threw me for a loop and I’m glad the option was there. But I decided not to write a review for this one because I am currently in the middle of SMT IV : apocalypse/Final and wanna take in the gestalt of the story surrounding what happened in this version of Tokyo. I can defiantly recommend this game if you like a great story. Although if you were to play anything in the SMT series on handheld, it would have to be the upcoming remake of Shin Megami Tensei: strange journey. A game I found to be phenomenal 5 years ago. Seriously tho– Do play this game. If anything for Kazuma Kaneko’s amazing monster artwork.
If you are curious to see how fucked up the nihilism ending is here (fast forward to 5:50 if you don’t want any context): https://youtu.be/zSJWFJIeyc4?t=4
^ this little number found courtesy of Cerebralerror
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Artwork from “she who shall not be named”. Tbh I miss the hell out of sentient tank artwork. Also, Damn it, Im on a huge E-C2 kick and Amberchrome goes and does a halfway decent rendition.