SMTIIIN Step 1: Surviving The Hospital
I am, genuinely, fairly excited to get into this series. Both SMT, since I've been wanting to give it a real shot for quite a while, and this blog series, as I've been waiting for about as long to actually try and make a website with actual content on it. But first, there're some things that have to be cleared up. To start: I'm playing SMT 3: N on the Switch, via the HD Remaster, on Normal difficulty. I've heard this game is particularly hard, and that there is a downloadable "Merciful" difficulty; fuck that shit. I want to play the game as it was meant to be as accurately as I can, but I'm already struggling with learning Japanese, and I don't have the money to buy an original PS2 copy, nor can my aging laptop emulate it. I've played the intro to this game before that way, and bounced off of it due to the standard 10ish fps I managed to hold that whole time. I'm good, thank you. Let's get actually, for real, started.
Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne starts proper in an overcast Tokyo. The night before, I spoke to Takao, the mysterious high school teacher who seems to be trying to reboot the world, and while speaking to her, set my own name. The first thing I see of the game itself is this, the light pouring excessively from the windows of the Shinjuku Medical Center. I'll soon visit it in the waking world, in all its grimy and empty reality, but here, in a dream, the oncoming world that Takao represents is brilliant and bright and in-your-face. The second thing I see, where my character first truly visually exists, is a dull subway station - dressed dorky as hell, wearing shorts with the longest fly I've ever seen in my life, cleats, and a jacket & sweater combo that just Does Not work.
I stopped to talk to the gate attendant in that subway, and he told me that there were riots just a day ago, in Yoyogi park, not too far from here. Later, I'll meet a guy not given a name or a face, and he'll tell me three people died to a demon attack that night. At the entrance to the park, a reporter for an occult magazine named Hijiri tells me that it was a battle between two cults in disguise - while the rest of the world thinks it was a clash between a civic organization and the developers of a strange building being built smack dab in the middle of Yoyogi. He tells me he's going to the medical center too, but I head there on my own. While meandering on the way, I talk to another high school kid, a friend of the main character, who isn't given a name or a face either, but who clearly knows me. I find his ghost near the same spot a few hours later.
I love the tone that this game starts out with. I know the vibe real well, it's basically how living right now is, if maybe rewound a little bit, solely because of the technological era the game was made in. The overworld song is a Jam while the player walks around, talking to faceless NPCs and getting a bit of foreshadowing from the big screen in Shibuya. There is no shortage of omens, of the sensation that something is about to happen. Vibing while we can, it's a known feeling. But no one's going to address it. Nobody but the homeless guy in one corner of Tokyo, who SWEARS the city's about to get round, but he's just a weirdo outlier who can't take the reality of things. No one's there, either, when the whole of Tokyo gets Real Round, to say that, actually, maybe people should've given a bit more of a shit about their fellow man. He just dies too. You can find him, too, after the world ends, and he'll give you another prophecy after proclaiming, accurately, just how right he was about the fate of everything.
To jump ahead a little, I kinda love the simplicity of the MC's design. Having played plenty of games with complex designs for their central figures, it's real easy to get burnt out on the sheer overboard nature of them. You're staring at their back for the entirety of a video game, which, in this case, can be upwards of 50 hours of gameplay, and that shit can get supremely grating. When dealing with main character design, I've seen two fairly common routes for games to deal with players getting bored of a character's looks: the first, which is getting more prevalent in AAA games with every passing day, is character customization. Hats, beards, anachronistic ad t-shirts for the game you're currently playing a la RE 0. Fun, but not really solving the problem; I find it tends to be the case that I inevitably get bored of whatever outfit I put together and have to keep making new ones, which is functionally offloading the issue onto the player. Some games, like Animal Crossing (which, to be fair, basically counts outfit making as a gameplay mechanic, which I deeply enjoy), even have mechanics like the Magic Wand, which allows you to store multiple outfits to use later, and to piss me off specifically due to its annoying bumps, but that's a totally separate discussion.
The second option when it comes to getting bored of a character's look is, simply, make them Just Simplistic Enough that you can never really get burned out on all their bright and clunky apparel, without being so basic that they are actually boring. Nadie and Ellis from El Cazador De La Bruja, the main cast of SLARPG, Ellie and Joel from the Last of Us Parts I and II, and my best friend Sonic the Hedgehog, all pull off being interesting enough design-wise that you can spend hours staring at them without getting bored, while being simple enough that they don't get immensely boring down the line. SMT 3: N's MC is a killer fit for that balance, while bringing a really interesting aspect to his overall interior character. Starting off after he gets his real fit, being shirtless and lanky makes him come off as weak, whereas the further I play, the cooler he seems, for being able to breathe fire while looking like a genderqueer dyke with a noun for a name that I'd be vaguely jealous of.
