I'm slowly working my way through the Shin Megami Tensei games. This series is an exquisite gem in gaming history, and if you have never played a Shin Megami game (lovingly known as Megaten by fans), do yourself a favor and track ANY of them down and play. So far I have yet to find a bad seed among the bunch, though I admit there are many I haven't played.The first one I am going to focus on is the namesake of the series: Shin Megami Tensei. While I know it isn't the first game in the series, it is still a good starting point.
It was first released for the Super Famicom back in 1992. To give some context, in 1992 I was 11 and innocently playing Super Mario Kart on my SNES. My fragile little mind would have been torn to shreds if I had known at that same time, people in Japan were summoning demons and fighting the forces of Satan and God.
But that just scratches the surface of what Shin Megami Tensei is. Going back now, and playing SMT, it is obviously a dated product. You play the game in first person, all the walls in the buildings you are in look the EXACT same, and there is no on screen map. Just seeing that after booting up the game, I didn't think I would last five minutes, without giving up this experiment. Luckily I hung in there, and it paid off. Despite it being technically dated, the story and mechanics were interesting enough to keep me in it for the long haul. And honestly, the monotony of the scenery helped add to the overall eerie feeling of summoning demons and using them to fight for you.
The game is also, full of shockingly mature content, which I know wasn't as big an issue in Japan as in America, but regardless, knowing Nintendo's track record, it seems like they didn't even bat an eye at releasing this in the East. That makes the sting of Mortal Kombat and its sweatblood all these years later, still hurt.
Some examples of some of the mature subject matter include (spoilers ahead) having your character come home from his first battle with the forces of hell, only to find that your mother has been eaten by demons. And they do a good job of making your mother a character you care about, so her death is both shocking and sad. Imagine if in Earthbound, another game with an important matriarch, Ness comes home to find his mom has been devoured by aliens. Your mind would snap. Of course in this day and age games could get away with this with no problem. And again, in Japan I'm sure this wasn't nearly as big of a deal, but now that I'm in my late 20s, and when I saw this on screen rendered in 16 bit graphics, I was taken aback. Powerful stuff.
Of course, the earlier Megaten games were all about the evil's of Western religion, so the thing that gets the biggest critical eye glowering down upon Megaten is that in SMTII you fight God, and kill him. Maybe it was because I knew that was coming, or the game had prepared me for such a confrontation, but that whole part doesn't bother me as much. It is a statement of its time, and therefore is culturally important.
I got sidetracked there for a bit, but that does lead me into the next part of SMT that is so genius that, even though a ton of modern games use this mechanic now, only SMT got it right.
There are three endings to the game. Law, chaos, and neutral. Law is God. Chaos is Lucifer. Neutral is... well... neutral. In modern games they try to divide Good/Evil paths, the neutral path is always the most boring, because you have to keep both sides happy.
Well in SMT, Neutral is the proper path and it works from the assumption that BOTH Law and Chaos are wrong. Ultimately this means that Taoism is the proper religion because it is about balance. Again, it goes back to how us Westies totally screwed up their religious practices in the East. I can't say I blame them either because after playing so many Megaten games, they end up being pretty good Taoism propaganda. Though I doubt any real Taoist would agree with anything they see in a Megaten game.
The justification for God being bad in SMT is that He wants to create a 1000 year kingdom with only a couple thousand Christians. Which, I could be wrong, but I believe that is more Mormonism then traditional Christianity. However, regardless, it still makes the point that most Christians believe only they get a free ride to Heaven, while everyone else burns for eternity. Seems pretty bad when you think of it like that.
Chaos is chaos, in that they just want to see the world burn. In SMT II Lucifer makes a pretty compelling argument for Chaos, but I'll get into that with SMT II at a later date.
In any case, the game is a pretty powerful piece of video game art, and I think it's statements about religion need to be analyzed further when you get into arguments about the cultural impact of video games, or at least video games as a means to express political and social messages.
I know this went on a while, and I probably have more to say about SMT then the other games in the series, so I'll try to keep it briefer from now on.
