Love me a nuanced, well researched and thoroughly in-depth look at the historical, political, cultural, ideological, and religious themes of SMT Thanks again Glibb and Larrue
Wow, so this is the 30th anniversary. Amazing tribute documentary. I love learning about the first and second game. This makes me realize they probably could not make a plot as symbolic as the first Shin Megami Tensei game if they tried.
Im not going to lie, as a christian it was very interesting to see some of the actual inspirations for the messian cult, never knew about all those conspiracy theories going around the templar knights. On another note this video was great! All that research and hard effort really came through! Congrats to you two!
@@arbatel6527 I’d raise an eyebrow if you mentioned anybody else, but yeah, pretty much Martinists. Some of the esoteric cosmic strains of Russian Christianity maybe, but then again, many of them became Martinists
The best thing about smt4 is why Walter and Jonathan chose to give up there life's. Walter fearing he get old and grow to attach the system and all things he'll make. Jonathan fearing he was too weak to survive in a world without law. At the same Lucifer was following orders and some Angles were playing by there own rules.don't even get me started the demon Gene thing.
@@2tehnik I just remember him saying that there are people with strength and confidence who don't have to rely on others and how he's not one of them. He confessed that he was afraid. But he knows giving up his life he make a world where people like him wouldn't be afraid
I also like how they twist the roles that chaos hero and law hero had in smt 1. Law hero, ever since he was recruited by the messians, was a dogmatic, unshakable follower of law. Jonathan has doubts all throughout, and in the end chooses law because he wants to prevent chaos, not because he believes law is good. Chaos hero comes from a place of weakness. He fuses with a demon to make up for his weakness, and once he has power, he leaves you behind to find himself powerful allies. Walter isn't ever shown as weak. He joins chaos out of idealism, he believes that something immutable like one's birth shouldn't be the measure of one's status, but power (that one can work towards??). And throughout this, he doesn't turn his back on his friends, finally only fighting them if it's necessary. It's nice to see that while paying a lot of homage to the first game, 4 also subverts some of its points.
@@noelvyhnanek5951 the best thing I liked about smt five with seeing the law was on the back foot and that they would start an alliance with whole bunch of different beliefs to take down chaos
This proved to be a rather fascinating history lesson outside of the game itself, and I appreciate the effort you put into this piece. Also shoutout to casually calling Crowley a loser lol
Well, to be fair, Crowley shot himself in the foot. In that sense, yes, he's a Loser. Had he not been into playing games and messing with people, he could have EASILY transformed how people viewed religion...I mean...haha, moreso then he did. Keep in mind, I'm not referring to SMT Crowley here.
Very humbling to be reminded that no matter how much knowledge I think I have about any given subject, the volume of things I don't know will ALWAYS be far larger. Thanks for telling me some things I didn't know about one of my favorite series ever, and giving even more context for both the MegaTen games and Japan in general.
It is just so sad that people often dismiss the stories of these older games just cause they don't have loads upon loads of exposition. And also sad how the modern titles just seem to miss what made the older games so special. These days the writing just comes across as incredibly haphazard compared to how tightly written they used to be and a lot of the ambition and desire for originality is all but gone.
1:19:21 bruh, just now I noticed the color themes of the main character being green, law hero being blue, and chaos hero being red. How did I not notice that before?
If you look closely, you'll notice in the PSX re-designs that their eye colors are also coordinated based on alignment as well. They actually change post-transformation.
I agree about the issue of providing 3 “choices” yet each choice isn’t very well thought out or developed in the games. For instance in a lot of games no matter what route you take, you end up fighting the same final boss and experience almost all of the same events. And often even the endings seem to differ very little. I would love to see an SMT game with distinctly different storylines, progression, and events based on the route you take early on.
@@renren47618 I agree DS:OC did it the best so far. At least making Day 7 and the ones with Day 8s feel unique. Even having some variations to the same “boss”. That’s why o would love to see an SMT where at least the 50% point the routes start veering in wildly different directions.
Very very thought provoking and interesting, especially from a world historical and theological framework. I couldn't help but notice that you guys didn't bring up Masakado.
Thanks for the kind words. That's exactly what we're trying to do here lol. That said, Masakado comes up briefly during the Neutral section. I didn't think it was warranted to go in-depth on the figure's usage in the series here since I have other videos that'll discuss him already planned.
A little surprised to not see any mention of the fantasy novels that first came up with the Law/Chaos alignment system (though the video is long and well-researched enough as-is). There's a line that goes (paraphrasing) "The idea of a world of law sounded so vague that it made (character) change the subject of the discussion to practical politics." and that stuck with me because I think that conveys the idea of alignment really well. Law and Chaos may be cosmic forces, but they're so vast and flexible that they can ultimately represent more or less whatever the speaker wants from them. And that's why they work so well as stand-ins for political ideologies. How often do we see people standing up for "freedom" talk about how we should take away the freedoms of others? In the end, Law and Chaos are just words that people and demons use to justify their actions.
While I do think there's some truth to this, I think it would've obfuscated part of the point of the video, which is that the alignments are meant to reflect real ideologies/concepts. It's really easy to take that point, then go on to think this means the alignments have no basis, and their content doesn't really matter (not to say that's what you meant). Though I would say there is a sense of ATLUS trying to have their cake and eat it too, where both are kind of the case at the same time.
I believe that Devilman is the pinacle of reference for a lot of tye stuff i enjoy.. Smt, Berserk, etc. It even became my influence for my comic series.
i watched this video in the background and i absorbed most of the japanese history alongside smt lore, i didn't know real life japan used demons in the world wars. crazy
1:30:38 this is my biggest complaint with the franchise and it's fans is that almost every game has a correct ending that is clearly better than the other, excluding maybe strange journey, most choices have a correct option.
@@KidCapes maybe this seems controversial but I think embracing the idea that there is a correct path might actually be better for the franchise. Maybe take the devil summoner approach and apply it to mainline whilst keeping it's grandeur of apocalypses. pull a square enix and really reinvent itself for smt 6
I'd rather they keep that to spinoffs. It's one thing to have a "good" and a "bad" end in something like SH where the difference is whether or not your friend lives but in mainline SMT the different alignments are explicitly political. There's probably ways you could get around that if you were creative like the MC just not siding with anyone or them basing games around specific ideas instead of them trying to show differences between extreme ideologies, but as for the "standard" structure of mainline SMT, I wouldn't be a fan of that.
@@KidCapes I think there's a lot of ways to tell a mainline story without alignments, and I think it would be preferable to have what you suggested games be based around one idea or the mc not siding with one. I think the lack of player agency from influencing the story might be beneficial because not only is it harder to screw up a more rigid story but also one alignment can't be better than another because in this hypothetical they wouldn't exist. That's my opinion though, I just don't go for smt for alignments.
They definitely could, my thing with that is that I'd just rather them try to keep a certain "identity" with mainline and keep the experimental stuff to spinoffs. (Or maybe do something like make it a non-numbered mainline, then make it its own sub-series if it's successful.) I don't necessarily play SMT *for* the alignments but it's tied into why I do, and I think doing something like that with a spinoff is like a shorthand for "hey we're just trying something real quick, the normal stuff will be back later." There's plenty of stuff they haven't explored with the standard alignments that I think they really should get around to.
A good lesson history although the japanese making this game missed crucial point, if they wanted to make a criticism of Abrahamic and/or Christian faiths: 1. Gnosticism isn't a middle ground, as most gnostic sects abhor physical/material existence. The body was a prison to the soul and we have to try leave this physical existence. There are even some sects (although I think they're more related to neo-platonism) that think it's legitimate to kill other people because you would "freeing" them from their material and corrupt existence. Another critic made to most Gnostics is that they claim the God of the OT isn't the same of the NT, which Jesus always say otherwise. For example. "He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." Luke 16:31 and "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." Matthew 5:17. Both passages imply the Prophets were right and we know they worshipped the God of the OT. 2. The neutral endings convey the message that Humanity as to rely on themselves and not gods but this gets a bit trickier because in Christianity, God is a Human. "Who for us Men, and for our Salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made Man" as per the original unaltered Nicene Creed. Even in the Bible, Jesus has the title of Son of Man. The Trinity is one of the most difficult Christian concepts to understand (How can YHWH, Jesus and the Holy Spirit be God, not "parts" of God, all three fully God). Because of that, christian sects that reject the Trinity and other religions like Judaism and Islam view Christianism (especially Catholicism/Orthodox) as almost being pagan. Because is such a hard topic, when many want to criticize and/or analyze Christianity, like the japanese and Atlus, they ignore one of the most fundamental aspects of Christianity, which is the Trinity and God being Human in the person of Jesus Christ. The demons, gods, angels and whatnot view humans as below them, ignoring that according to Christianity, God humbled Himself to be Human and even sacrificed Himself for our sake, when commonly, you'd be sacrificing things to gods and demons - not the other way around. Although many religions institutions have proved to be susceptible to corruption, saying they don't want free will is actually a corruption of Christian beliefs - you're supposed to choose to worship God out of your own free will and because it's also the logical thing to do. God could have easily created good toy soldiers without free will but He didn't, because if He had, an angel wouldn't have had the free will to rebel against Him and woman and a man wouldn't have had the free will to sin. What I mean is religious institutions not always practice their very own beliefs right, despite nothing being wrong with the beliefs themselves, but I see many times people criticizing both as if they were the same.
Regarding the last point on neutral being presented as the objectively "good route"...im pretty sure thats only the case in games like smt 1 and the smt 4 duology,but beside that smt 2 favors chaos by quite a bit and nocturne encourages u to go for the true demon ending
Nocturne Maniax is a unique case, because it's a rerelease with a single new route and I'd say the original release favors Freedom. Also, I would argue that SMT2 does not really favor chaos (at least not in the same way the games tend to for neutral). It's more like the game focuses on it so little so that you basically only see it from chaos' PoV. Further, the plot in SMT2 is loosely inspired by anthroposophy which holds Satan and Lucifer as two spiritual extremes that humanity needs to balance with Christ in the middle. (I was gonna include that in this video, but it got cut for the Satan video I made and then eventually got cut from that as well. I'll prolly make a solo video about it at some point.)
@@KidCapes i see I guess it makes sense from that perspective that the player could see a chaos PoV that way. Ive always thought smt 2 favored chaos as the ending have lucifer illustrate things in a way that makes it the good choice when u see the mutants being free for example...even tho for me chaos in smt 2 did have its shortcomings that lucifer seemed to sugarcoat but thats mostly my interpretation which admittedly is a bit lacking on my end
@@GanonAutumn777 Yea, I can definitely see how someone could come to that conclusion, because the negative association does frame it that way. It helps to contextualize the ending when you remember SMT2 is a continuation of 1, so Lucifer likely has the same goals. Not to mention, that every SMT2 ending is about freedom from authoritarianism so it's not like it's specific to chaos.
Something kinda dumb I wanna put out there, the id represents chaos - self-destruction in turn for desiring power. swift justice and not listening to other people's morals, might makes right, and personal freedom above all. Ego - ergo neutral neither listening to id (chaos) nor superego (law), negotiating both sides of the coin, progressing to strive between the balance, and the superego - which is law, listening to the contemplation of the society's morals and well-being, communion and bureaucracy, good-will and creating a sort hypnosis towards a common strive. Most importantly Law demands Purity and therefore anyone is tainted with Filth is beyond saving. The four top archangels in SMT2 were trying to speed up the Thousand Year Kingdom, and therefore God's image by the collective conscious was called out into fruition and distorted. A deist being that exists outside of Time thrusted back into the problem of Evil. Satan tested men's hearts for the great purge via the Medigo Ark. Of course Chaos doesn't have a good side either. The demons wanted to co-exist with humans (and not totally to enslave them and eat them for revenge for their uprising in Strange Journey), but the demons outmatch the humans in natural strength. Without technological advances like the lightsaber made by Law, humanity would have no chance against the demons. The Almighty Lucifer has no use for bureaucracy nor the Order of Gods, just his castle and Lucifuge who mints his crytocurrency Macca. Lucifer like Mem Aleph wants the demons and humans to have their own say in what they think is right. Humans are disposable. Mem Aleph is more biased for the demons of course, so she knows that demons will enslave the weak humans to do the bidding for weak humans. Who cares though, for Jimenez is a demi-fiend. For once Lucifer was once Neutral, until he hardened into Chaos. He saw that God was a Tyrant not unlike himself. Except God wasn't a good, charismatic Tyrant like himself. And what is the head being chopped off becoming a new Tyrant? As it is explained the Law and Chaos factions are fated to duel for eternity by YHWH. What does Steven have in store for the Messiahs of the mainline games? We don't know. Also in SMT 2 post game iirc, the Shinto god/goddess are mad at the Hewbrew gods for taking over their National(ism) religion. Who can say or who knew that Moses's God would continue to burn the bush and spread like wildfire. Oh yeah Chaos, is also very mafia/thug life like. It's very gimme money and I can provide protection, and our bonds are like family, but you gotta die if you betray us kind of deal.
It's extremely frustrating because the general idea behind how shin megami tensei stories are written is the narrative is what matters more than the individual characters, but it's a way in which stories aren't really written anymore so a modern audience doesn't understand it? Like you look at the cast in SMTIII and it's about how they represent the ideologies presented in the game and how they could shape the world, so it doesn't matter if they aren't fully fleshed out because they're vehicles to present ideas. Strange journey emulates this exceptionally well too. But I think with the way modern fandom works, people want characters they can latch onto and talk about which is why typically a lot of games with weak plots can do extremely well in a cultural sense because the character writing is strong enough for people to relate with. For the record, I'm not saying a character focused story is a bad thing (I like it too) but mainline megami tensei is the one series I wish would stick to those strong narrative cores since to me that's what the identity of shin megami tensei is to me; a strong narrative that's almost philosophical allegory,, even more than the wholed "modern setting with magic and demons" aesthetic. Anyway, great video! Really enjoyed it.
This is true but SMTIV is a special case because it's trying to twist what SMTI and II were doing. I think it's depiction of mechanical archangels fits well within that theme even if it wasn't intentional though.
@@KidCapes I didn't mention anything about the new designs. Although I do think they are radical and cool. It's expanded in IVA that Akira pledged a false pact with the Angels because they were cornered. Look how that turned out and the humans reverted becoming illiterate.
civvies? Anyway, this isn't really true. Mikado starts without technology, but the archangels are generally ok with importing technology from Tokyo. I mean, half of the pretense as to why Hugo sends you and co. there is to get relics. And ironically, the game seems to imply that Hugo thinks of hunting Lilith down as secondary.
@@2tehnik It's true that technology broadly is important to Mikado in SMT4, but (I think) they were referencing the part of the video where I was talking about transhumanism and people being transformed by Law? But honestly, now that I say that, I guess even that isn't really that accurate either considering the Demonic Gene?
@@KidCapes I guess but I’d only count the IVA dlc as contributing to that. Iirc in the Demonic Gene manga, it’s at least as useful for Chaos as it is for law, and in og IV it’s not a thing.
It's actually hilarious to me how silly Dazai is portrayed. Some of what they were going for isn't bad, but making the basis of his ideology "I need someone to tell me want to do" is ridiculous, especially when coming almost 30 years after a game like SMT2. Not to mention the fact that him taking the throne implicitly undermines that notion in the first place.
The end result is that lie to the audience backfires as ironically the audience seeks favor balance to the alignments and for every ending to be legimate, resulting in both Law and Chaos becoming more legitimate in the process. Not even the hard attempt to course correct, SMT4A, was able to dissuade the paying customer. (though it was not probably not helped by SMT4A throwing SMT4's nuance and characterization out the window to force characters to become nothing but strawmen)
Are you sure? To me it seems like most people share the same take as Atlus: Neutral is the only real and sane option, and the other two are crazy extremes.
@@2tehnik Yes, I seen more people support Chaos than I ever have seen support Neutral believe it or not, SMT4A's Neutral bias is commonly cited as one of its weak points and many of the prominent SMT UA-camrs also rather support the other two. Tony4You for instance is a supporter of Law. Besides if there isn't enough fan demand and it isn't making them more money why else go back on their vision of only Neutral mattering to make Law and Chaos more viable?
Can Steven be counted as Neutral in smt I? He seems to just appear sometimes to help you keep with your demon summoning program, and only endorses some general idea of helping humanity fight demons using it. But I'm not sure I remember him knocking down law and chaos in any way. Iirc smt II is pretty much the same. But I haven't played it on Neutral so I'm not sure.
This goes back to what I was saying on neutral, that some of its representatives are not presented as as such to the player. Just strictly going by SMT1's plot I'd agree it's dubious, but the fact that his design was meant to represent rejecting gods along with all the explicitly Neutral themed stuff in SMT2. In that Visionary Item I mentioned, he actually talks about how the Demon Summoning Program itself is for maintaining the balance.
one question, if politics and ideologies can be represented by the alignments, socialism or communism will be law or chaos?? communism has a revolutionary agency to change the world but instead of wating a world where the strong will win over the weak, they want a world of equality, the elimination of class structure, while socialism has an authoritatian state controling the means of production, communism says that the people control the means of production and the economy, law also want equality at the cost of freedom while chaos wants freedom and revolution at the cost of equality and peace
It's obviously not going to be 1-to-1, but the answer is basically law. I kinda go into this a bit in the Law section of this video, but Law is essentially like a Facebook boomer's perception of communism where you lose all sense of identity for a false equality along with being represented by New World Order conspiracies.
@@KidCapes also a thing that found weird is that fascism is law because of the authoritarian nature of states like WWII italy or germany but also have a lot of chaos things with a lot of social darwinism, they were a lot of pagan nazis who belivied that germans are stronger that jews and other races and they can do whatever they want just because they are "stronger"
@@KidCapes i know that is not going to be 1-to-1, but i like to analyze the smt alignments with real politics and ideologies bc can talk a lot about human strugles and differents points of view but i wish if atlus can do more versions of law and chaos that just god iron fist vs survival of the fittest, law and chaos can be a lot of things
Chaos is definitely much more closely associated with fascism. That said, my understanding is that law sometimes has those aspects as well because it's kinda depicted as like a totalitarian conflation of communism and fascism (as implied in the previous comment through the New World Order).
My opinion is that they are not particularly interested in portraying those different sides of law and chaos because the dynamic of the series is framed in the favor of neutral. Portraying them as reasonable would be pretty counter-productive, granted there are examples of the contrary
it's cool to see Law vs Chaos interpreted as two different kinds of authoritarianism instead of Left vs Right, which truly doesn't map at all (mostly on the "Law is left" side, "the strong dominate the weak" is a...pretty adequate summary of white- uh I mean right-wing politics) I wonder if the critique of the neutral path is entirely fair in light of that, though--rejecting authoritarianism is something most people instinctively recognize as good, even if they do themselves have authoritarian tendencies. less "picking no side" and more "picking no gods, no masters"/the ascendency of people over systems of domination. but I ain't played SMT1+2 so idk if I'm missing something in that read
In my opinion, "Law is left" isn't necessarily wrong, it's just that Law represents the idea of the left from the point of view of someone who sees it as a boogeyman. Also I might be misunderstanding but, "the strong dominate the weak" is part of Chaos ideology, not Law. Law believes in supporting the weak (at least nominally). The reason I think this critique of neutral is fair is because ATLUS themselves is framing the conflict this way. They made the pieces and put them on the chessboard. So while Neutral definitely like a good thing in-universe in most cases, I question why ATLUS did it this way. Especially in the context where these sides are supposed to represent real political ideologies, but are largely depicted as outlandish strawmen that most reasonable people wouldn't side with.
Good vid, I liked the law and chaos parts in particular
I'm glad I got to work on this feature length film, I'm never doing it again
Love me a nuanced, well researched and thoroughly in-depth look at the historical, political, cultural, ideological, and religious themes of SMT
Thanks again Glibb and Larrue
Wow, so this is the 30th anniversary. Amazing tribute documentary. I love learning about the first and second game. This makes me realize they probably could not make a plot as symbolic as the first Shin Megami Tensei game if they tried.
Technically, the anniversary was Oct 30th. But yea, SMT1 is really interesting in that way I think.
Im not going to lie, as a christian it was very interesting to see some of the actual inspirations for the messian cult, never knew about all those conspiracy theories going around the templar knights. On another note this video was great! All that research and hard effort really came through! Congrats to you two!
You’ll be interested in Martinism, messians irl
@@arbatel6527 I’d raise an eyebrow if you mentioned anybody else, but yeah, pretty much Martinists. Some of the esoteric cosmic strains of Russian Christianity maybe, but then again, many of them became Martinists
The best thing about smt4 is why Walter and Jonathan chose to give up there life's. Walter fearing he get old and grow to attach the system and all things he'll make. Jonathan fearing he was too weak to survive in a world without law. At the same Lucifer was following orders and some Angles were playing by there own rules.don't even get me started the demon Gene thing.
> Jonathan fearing he was too weak to survive in a world without law.
He never comes of as self centered honestly.
@@2tehnik I just remember him saying that there are people with strength and confidence who don't have to rely on others and how he's not one of them. He confessed that he was afraid. But he knows giving up his life he make a world where people like him wouldn't be afraid
I also like how they twist the roles that chaos hero and law hero had in smt 1.
Law hero, ever since he was recruited by the messians, was a dogmatic, unshakable follower of law. Jonathan has doubts all throughout, and in the end chooses law because he wants to prevent chaos, not because he believes law is good.
Chaos hero comes from a place of weakness. He fuses with a demon to make up for his weakness, and once he has power, he leaves you behind to find himself powerful allies. Walter isn't ever shown as weak. He joins chaos out of idealism, he believes that something immutable like one's birth shouldn't be the measure of one's status, but power (that one can work towards??). And throughout this, he doesn't turn his back on his friends, finally only fighting them if it's necessary.
It's nice to see that while paying a lot of homage to the first game, 4 also subverts some of its points.
@@noelvyhnanek5951 the best thing I liked about smt five with seeing the law was on the back foot and that they would start an alliance with whole bunch of different beliefs to take down chaos
This proved to be a rather fascinating history lesson outside of the game itself, and I appreciate the effort you put into this piece. Also shoutout to casually calling Crowley a loser lol
Well, to be fair, Crowley shot himself in the foot. In that sense, yes, he's a Loser. Had he not been into playing games and messing with people, he could have EASILY transformed how people viewed religion...I mean...haha, moreso then he did. Keep in mind, I'm not referring to SMT Crowley here.
Very humbling to be reminded that no matter how much knowledge I think I have about any given subject, the volume of things I don't know will ALWAYS be far larger. Thanks for telling me some things I didn't know about one of my favorite series ever, and giving even more context for both the MegaTen games and Japan in general.
It is just so sad that people often dismiss the stories of these older games just cause they don't have loads upon loads of exposition.
And also sad how the modern titles just seem to miss what made the older games so special. These days the writing just comes across as incredibly haphazard compared to how tightly written they used to be and a lot of the ambition and desire for originality is all but gone.
This is one of the best video essays one can squeeze out of smt.
1:19:21 bruh, just now I noticed the color themes of the main character being green, law hero being blue, and chaos hero being red. How did I not notice that before?
If you look closely, you'll notice in the PSX re-designs that their eye colors are also coordinated based on alignment as well. They actually change post-transformation.
I agree about the issue of providing 3 “choices” yet each choice isn’t very well thought out or developed in the games. For instance in a lot of games no matter what route you take, you end up fighting the same final boss and experience almost all of the same events. And often even the endings seem to differ very little.
I would love to see an SMT game with distinctly different storylines, progression, and events based on the route you take early on.
The closest you have to that is Devil Survivor and even then the routes are mostly samey gameplay wise.
@@renren47618 I agree DS:OC did it the best so far. At least making Day 7 and the ones with Day 8s feel unique. Even having some variations to the same “boss”. That’s why o would love to see an SMT where at least the 50% point the routes start veering in wildly different directions.
Banger incoming
Very very thought provoking and interesting, especially from a world historical and theological framework. I couldn't help but notice that you guys didn't bring up Masakado.
Thanks for the kind words. That's exactly what we're trying to do here lol. That said, Masakado comes up briefly during the Neutral section. I didn't think it was warranted to go in-depth on the figure's usage in the series here since I have other videos that'll discuss him already planned.
Ohhh....this is good. Great work, my man. Great work.
Interesting video, SMT/Megaten deserves more love.
Very good video essay! You should be proud of this and have way more views.
A little surprised to not see any mention of the fantasy novels that first came up with the Law/Chaos alignment system (though the video is long and well-researched enough as-is). There's a line that goes (paraphrasing) "The idea of a world of law sounded so vague that it made (character) change the subject of the discussion to practical politics." and that stuck with me because I think that conveys the idea of alignment really well. Law and Chaos may be cosmic forces, but they're so vast and flexible that they can ultimately represent more or less whatever the speaker wants from them. And that's why they work so well as stand-ins for political ideologies. How often do we see people standing up for "freedom" talk about how we should take away the freedoms of others? In the end, Law and Chaos are just words that people and demons use to justify their actions.
While I do think there's some truth to this, I think it would've obfuscated part of the point of the video, which is that the alignments are meant to reflect real ideologies/concepts. It's really easy to take that point, then go on to think this means the alignments have no basis, and their content doesn't really matter (not to say that's what you meant). Though I would say there is a sense of ATLUS trying to have their cake and eat it too, where both are kind of the case at the same time.
This was an amazing video but now my brain is fried
*lol* Same here. SMT: The True Wordly Thinking Man's Dungeon Crawler RPG!
I believe that Devilman is the pinacle of reference for a lot of tye stuff i enjoy..
Smt, Berserk, etc.
It even became my influence for my comic series.
Great mythological, societal, and historical analysis
another great one
Always love to see your work man, keep it up!
Fantastic video
shape your destiny, expect in SMT 1 where nothing you do matters, at least that's how it feels playing 2 after 1
I'm so glad I stumbled upon this channel!
There's not enough Megaten content out there.
i watched this video in the background and i absorbed most of the japanese history alongside smt lore, i didn't know real life japan used demons in the world wars. crazy
This is awesome
1:30:38 this is my biggest complaint with the franchise and it's fans is that almost every game has a correct ending that is clearly better than the other, excluding maybe strange journey, most choices have a correct option.
There's an argument that SJ does as well but I think it does a better job than most at the very least
@@KidCapes maybe this seems controversial but I think embracing the idea that there is a correct path might actually be better for the franchise. Maybe take the devil summoner approach and apply it to mainline whilst keeping it's grandeur of apocalypses. pull a square enix and really reinvent itself for smt 6
I'd rather they keep that to spinoffs. It's one thing to have a "good" and a "bad" end in something like SH where the difference is whether or not your friend lives but in mainline SMT the different alignments are explicitly political. There's probably ways you could get around that if you were creative like the MC just not siding with anyone or them basing games around specific ideas instead of them trying to show differences between extreme ideologies, but as for the "standard" structure of mainline SMT, I wouldn't be a fan of that.
@@KidCapes I think there's a lot of ways to tell a mainline story without alignments, and I think it would be preferable to have what you suggested games be based around one idea or the mc not siding with one. I think the lack of player agency from influencing the story might be beneficial because not only is it harder to screw up a more rigid story but also one alignment can't be better than another because in this hypothetical they wouldn't exist. That's my opinion though, I just don't go for smt for alignments.
They definitely could, my thing with that is that I'd just rather them try to keep a certain "identity" with mainline and keep the experimental stuff to spinoffs. (Or maybe do something like make it a non-numbered mainline, then make it its own sub-series if it's successful.) I don't necessarily play SMT *for* the alignments but it's tied into why I do, and I think doing something like that with a spinoff is like a shorthand for "hey we're just trying something real quick, the normal stuff will be back later." There's plenty of stuff they haven't explored with the standard alignments that I think they really should get around to.
this is so good!
Didn't even know Violence Jack was a sequel to Devilman, now I wanna read those two manga since they inspired Megaten.
This is by far one of the best SMT videos I've ever seen! Thank you for the many suggestions you gave me
Well done
A good lesson history although the japanese making this game missed crucial point, if they wanted to make a criticism of Abrahamic and/or Christian faiths:
1. Gnosticism isn't a middle ground, as most gnostic sects abhor physical/material existence. The body was a prison to the soul and we have to try leave this physical existence. There are even some sects (although I think they're more related to neo-platonism) that think it's legitimate to kill other people because you would "freeing" them from their material and corrupt existence. Another critic made to most Gnostics is that they claim the God of the OT isn't the same of the NT, which Jesus always say otherwise. For example. "He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." Luke 16:31 and "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." Matthew 5:17. Both passages imply the Prophets were right and we know they worshipped the God of the OT.
2. The neutral endings convey the message that Humanity as to rely on themselves and not gods but this gets a bit trickier because in Christianity, God is a Human. "Who for us Men, and for our Salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made Man" as per the original unaltered Nicene Creed. Even in the Bible, Jesus has the title of Son of Man. The Trinity is one of the most difficult Christian concepts to understand (How can YHWH, Jesus and the Holy Spirit be God, not "parts" of God, all three fully God). Because of that, christian sects that reject the Trinity and other religions like Judaism and Islam view Christianism (especially Catholicism/Orthodox) as almost being pagan. Because is such a hard topic, when many want to criticize and/or analyze Christianity, like the japanese and Atlus, they ignore one of the most fundamental aspects of Christianity, which is the Trinity and God being Human in the person of Jesus Christ. The demons, gods, angels and whatnot view humans as below them, ignoring that according to Christianity, God humbled Himself to be Human and even sacrificed Himself for our sake, when commonly, you'd be sacrificing things to gods and demons - not the other way around. Although many religions institutions have proved to be susceptible to corruption, saying they don't want free will is actually a corruption of Christian beliefs - you're supposed to choose to worship God out of your own free will and because it's also the logical thing to do. God could have easily created good toy soldiers without free will but He didn't, because if He had, an angel wouldn't have had the free will to rebel against Him and woman and a man wouldn't have had the free will to sin. What I mean is religious institutions not always practice their very own beliefs right, despite nothing being wrong with the beliefs themselves, but I see many times people criticizing both as if they were the same.
Regarding the last point on neutral being presented as the objectively "good route"...im pretty sure thats only the case in games like smt 1 and the smt 4 duology,but beside that smt 2 favors chaos by quite a bit and nocturne encourages u to go for the true demon ending
Nocturne Maniax is a unique case, because it's a rerelease with a single new route and I'd say the original release favors Freedom. Also, I would argue that SMT2 does not really favor chaos (at least not in the same way the games tend to for neutral). It's more like the game focuses on it so little so that you basically only see it from chaos' PoV. Further, the plot in SMT2 is loosely inspired by anthroposophy which holds Satan and Lucifer as two spiritual extremes that humanity needs to balance with Christ in the middle. (I was gonna include that in this video, but it got cut for the Satan video I made and then eventually got cut from that as well. I'll prolly make a solo video about it at some point.)
@@KidCapes i see
I guess it makes sense from that perspective that the player could see a chaos PoV that way.
Ive always thought smt 2 favored chaos as the ending have lucifer illustrate things in a way that makes it the good choice when u see the mutants being free for example...even tho for me chaos in smt 2 did have its shortcomings that lucifer seemed to sugarcoat but thats mostly my interpretation which admittedly is a bit lacking on my end
@@GanonAutumn777 Yea, I can definitely see how someone could come to that conclusion, because the negative association does frame it that way. It helps to contextualize the ending when you remember SMT2 is a continuation of 1, so Lucifer likely has the same goals. Not to mention, that every SMT2 ending is about freedom from authoritarianism so it's not like it's specific to chaos.
This the best SMT ost mix ever
Your best video yet
Oh this goes so hard. Thank you for the political context. I never knew.
Nice job capes!
Something kinda dumb I wanna put out there, the id represents chaos - self-destruction in turn for desiring power. swift justice and not listening to other people's morals, might makes right, and personal freedom above all. Ego - ergo neutral neither listening to id (chaos) nor superego (law), negotiating both sides of the coin, progressing to strive between the balance, and the superego - which is law, listening to the contemplation of the society's morals and well-being, communion and bureaucracy, good-will and creating a sort hypnosis towards a common strive. Most importantly Law demands Purity and therefore anyone is tainted with Filth is beyond saving. The four top archangels in SMT2 were trying to speed up the Thousand Year Kingdom, and therefore God's image by the collective conscious was called out into fruition and distorted. A deist being that exists outside of Time thrusted back into the problem of Evil. Satan tested men's hearts for the great purge via the Medigo Ark. Of course Chaos doesn't have a good side either. The demons wanted to co-exist with humans (and not totally to enslave them and eat them for revenge for their uprising in Strange Journey), but the demons outmatch the humans in natural strength. Without technological advances like the lightsaber made by Law, humanity would have no chance against the demons. The Almighty Lucifer has no use for bureaucracy nor the Order of Gods, just his castle and Lucifuge who mints his crytocurrency Macca. Lucifer like Mem Aleph wants the demons and humans to have their own say in what they think is right. Humans are disposable. Mem Aleph is more biased for the demons of course, so she knows that demons will enslave the weak humans to do the bidding for weak humans. Who cares though, for Jimenez is a demi-fiend. For once Lucifer was once Neutral, until he hardened into Chaos. He saw that God was a Tyrant not unlike himself. Except God wasn't a good, charismatic Tyrant like himself. And what is the head being chopped off becoming a new Tyrant? As it is explained the Law and Chaos factions are fated to duel for eternity by YHWH. What does Steven have in store for the Messiahs of the mainline games? We don't know.
Also in SMT 2 post game iirc, the Shinto god/goddess are mad at the Hewbrew gods for taking over their National(ism) religion. Who can say or who knew that Moses's God would continue to burn the bush and spread like wildfire. Oh yeah Chaos, is also very mafia/thug life like. It's very gimme money and I can provide protection, and our bonds are like family, but you gotta die if you betray us kind of deal.
This is one of my favorite video essays on UA-cam.
oh my god the quake of kento goes heavily with persona , its just changing what is the quake
Amazing video!
More like this 🙏
It's extremely frustrating because the general idea behind how shin megami tensei stories are written is the narrative is what matters more than the individual characters, but it's a way in which stories aren't really written anymore so a modern audience doesn't understand it? Like you look at the cast in SMTIII and it's about how they represent the ideologies presented in the game and how they could shape the world, so it doesn't matter if they aren't fully fleshed out because they're vehicles to present ideas. Strange journey emulates this exceptionally well too. But I think with the way modern fandom works, people want characters they can latch onto and talk about which is why typically a lot of games with weak plots can do extremely well in a cultural sense because the character writing is strong enough for people to relate with.
For the record, I'm not saying a character focused story is a bad thing (I like it too) but mainline megami tensei is the one series I wish would stick to those strong narrative cores since to me that's what the identity of shin megami tensei is to me; a strong narrative that's almost philosophical allegory,, even more than the wholed "modern setting with magic and demons" aesthetic.
Anyway, great video! Really enjoyed it.
Correction: Law isn't always about technology since in SMTIV. They keep the civvies in check in a stable feudal society.
This is true but SMTIV is a special case because it's trying to twist what SMTI and II were doing. I think it's depiction of mechanical archangels fits well within that theme even if it wasn't intentional though.
@@KidCapes I didn't mention anything about the new designs. Although I do think they are radical and cool. It's expanded in IVA that Akira pledged a false pact with the Angels because they were cornered. Look how that turned out and the humans reverted becoming illiterate.
civvies?
Anyway, this isn't really true. Mikado starts without technology, but the archangels are generally ok with importing technology from Tokyo. I mean, half of the pretense as to why Hugo sends you and co. there is to get relics. And ironically, the game seems to imply that Hugo thinks of hunting Lilith down as secondary.
@@2tehnik It's true that technology broadly is important to Mikado in SMT4, but (I think) they were referencing the part of the video where I was talking about transhumanism and people being transformed by Law? But honestly, now that I say that, I guess even that isn't really that accurate either considering the Demonic Gene?
@@KidCapes I guess but I’d only count the IVA dlc as contributing to that. Iirc in the Demonic Gene manga, it’s at least as useful for Chaos as it is for law, and in og IV it’s not a thing.
dope video!!! just a heads up, when speaking poetry, its proper to not pause at line breaks unless they end with a piece of punctuation
Glibbb Capes
And then Dazai came out of nowhere and became the cringiest of all Law rep's
It's actually hilarious to me how silly Dazai is portrayed. Some of what they were going for isn't bad, but making the basis of his ideology "I need someone to tell me want to do" is ridiculous, especially when coming almost 30 years after a game like SMT2. Not to mention the fact that him taking the throne implicitly undermines that notion in the first place.
@@KidCapes smt2 is a slap to the face of Law. zayin/satan doesn't deserve to be called "Law rep".
Out of curiosity, what makes you say that
@@KidCapes Because zayin/satan rebelled against YHVH, who is final boss even on Law route. I never wanted to go against YHVH.
COMMON GLIB BANGER
The end result is that lie to the audience backfires as ironically the audience seeks favor balance to the alignments and for every ending to be legimate, resulting in both Law and Chaos becoming more legitimate in the process. Not even the hard attempt to course correct, SMT4A, was able to dissuade the paying customer. (though it was not probably not helped by SMT4A throwing SMT4's nuance and characterization out the window to force characters to become nothing but strawmen)
Are you sure? To me it seems like most people share the same take as Atlus: Neutral is the only real and sane option, and the other two are crazy extremes.
@@2tehnik
Yes, I seen more people support Chaos than I ever have seen support Neutral believe it or not, SMT4A's Neutral bias is commonly cited as one of its weak points and many of the prominent SMT UA-camrs also rather support the other two. Tony4You for instance is a supporter of Law. Besides if there isn't enough fan demand and it isn't making them more money why else go back on their vision of only Neutral mattering to make Law and Chaos more viable?
LOL, people salty about Strange Journey's Redux release because it made Law and Chaos more positive, and Neutral more negative.
Can Steven be counted as Neutral in smt I? He seems to just appear sometimes to help you keep with your demon summoning program, and only endorses some general idea of helping humanity fight demons using it. But I'm not sure I remember him knocking down law and chaos in any way.
Iirc smt II is pretty much the same. But I haven't played it on Neutral so I'm not sure.
This goes back to what I was saying on neutral, that some of its representatives are not presented as as such to the player. Just strictly going by SMT1's plot I'd agree it's dubious, but the fact that his design was meant to represent rejecting gods along with all the explicitly Neutral themed stuff in SMT2. In that Visionary Item I mentioned, he actually talks about how the Demon Summoning Program itself is for maintaining the balance.
35:35 what is this from?
here from the r/megaten discord
Anyone know the ending song? 👀
one question, if politics and ideologies can be represented by the alignments, socialism or communism will be law or chaos?? communism has a revolutionary agency to change the world but instead of wating a world where the strong will win over the weak, they want a world of equality, the elimination of class structure, while socialism has an authoritatian state controling the means of production, communism says that the people control the means of production and the economy, law also want equality at the cost of freedom while chaos wants freedom and revolution at the cost of equality and peace
It's obviously not going to be 1-to-1, but the answer is basically law. I kinda go into this a bit in the Law section of this video, but Law is essentially like a Facebook boomer's perception of communism where you lose all sense of identity for a false equality along with being represented by New World Order conspiracies.
@@KidCapes also a thing that found weird is that fascism is law because of the authoritarian nature of states like WWII italy or germany but also have a lot of chaos things with a lot of social darwinism, they were a lot of pagan nazis who belivied that germans are stronger that jews and other races and they can do whatever they want just because they are "stronger"
@@KidCapes i know that is not going to be 1-to-1, but i like to analyze the smt alignments with real politics and ideologies bc can talk a lot about human strugles and differents points of view but i wish if atlus can do more versions of law and chaos that just god iron fist vs survival of the fittest, law and chaos can be a lot of things
Chaos is definitely much more closely associated with fascism. That said, my understanding is that law sometimes has those aspects as well because it's kinda depicted as like a totalitarian conflation of communism and fascism (as implied in the previous comment through the New World Order).
My opinion is that they are not particularly interested in portraying those different sides of law and chaos because the dynamic of the series is framed in the favor of neutral. Portraying them as reasonable would be pretty counter-productive, granted there are examples of the contrary
no mention of teito monogatari?
it's cool to see Law vs Chaos interpreted as two different kinds of authoritarianism instead of Left vs Right, which truly doesn't map at all (mostly on the "Law is left" side, "the strong dominate the weak" is a...pretty adequate summary of white- uh I mean right-wing politics)
I wonder if the critique of the neutral path is entirely fair in light of that, though--rejecting authoritarianism is something most people instinctively recognize as good, even if they do themselves have authoritarian tendencies. less "picking no side" and more "picking no gods, no masters"/the ascendency of people over systems of domination. but I ain't played SMT1+2 so idk if I'm missing something in that read
In my opinion, "Law is left" isn't necessarily wrong, it's just that Law represents the idea of the left from the point of view of someone who sees it as a boogeyman. Also I might be misunderstanding but, "the strong dominate the weak" is part of Chaos ideology, not Law. Law believes in supporting the weak (at least nominally).
The reason I think this critique of neutral is fair is because ATLUS themselves is framing the conflict this way. They made the pieces and put them on the chessboard. So while Neutral definitely like a good thing in-universe in most cases, I question why ATLUS did it this way. Especially in the context where these sides are supposed to represent real political ideologies, but are largely depicted as outlandish strawmen that most reasonable people wouldn't side with.
@@KidCapes yeah the sentence was confusing, "the strong dominate the weak" was a description of chaos there!
not gonna watch it
you still boost the algorithm by clicking on it and commenting too lol
So true
@@Petabik you still boost my nuts by replying to me owned
@@MegamiTensei2 as if you had any use for them
@@Petabik :(
This channel is criminally underrated. Your work on every video is impeccable Kid Capes. 🫡