(This write-up originally served as the basis for a thread on the ResetEra forums; since I put a lot of thought into it, I feel inclined to also post it here to essentially preserve it and make it more visible)

Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse released in the West about a year ago to positive critical and fan reception. Despite strong sales and good reviews, its direct predecessor, SMT IV, proved to be a divisive game among veteran MegaTen players, and this sequel ostensibly fixed a lot of its more glaring shortcomings; some might even argue that it rivals Nocturne as one of the best entries in the series.

Personally though? It’s probably the most disappointed I’ve ever been with a game, in fact I INTENSELY dislike it. A lot of my reasoning in this regard is unintuitive and deeply rooted in all the amazing qualities that I saw in SMT IV, which to me aren’t present or outright diminished in this sequel. This is why I haven’t seen a lot of my complicated feelings about Apocalypse echoed in the SMT community and why it’s been hard for me to explain exactly WHY it rubs me the wrong way so much.

With this essay, I want to examine Apocalypse from the perspective of someone who loves SMT IV to death and find out if anyone else shares those same sentiments. Before I go on this huge and probably way too heated rant, here are some things the game did really well in my opinion:

Skill affinity is a fantastic way to balance out the freedom and flexibility of SMT IV’s fusion system. The game doesn’t arbitrarily restrict you from putting whatever random skill on any random demon, you still have an incredible amount of options in how to build your party, which is what’s fun to me about SMT. At the same time, skills that don’t make logical sense for a particular demon are nerfed severely and vice versa (putting Agi on a Jack Frost vs giving him Bufu instead). This ensures that demons don’t become mere palette swaps of each other without, again, limiting your options: everyone can theoretically do everything, but is that really smart? You get to make that choice.

Apocalypse has the best implementation of demon negotiation that I’ve seen in an SMT game. The way a type of demon reacts to the same response is always consistent, but the dialogue is so smartly written and there’s, crucially, SO MUCH of it now that it never becomes formulaic or predictable. To me this strikes a perfect balance between fairness and gamey-ness (which was a problem with SMT IV’s almost random negotiations) and having to use your own intuition and trial & error (I’d say Nocturne is on the opposite end of that spectrum where the correct answer is always completely logical and obvious). Persona 5’s system was pretty good in its own right, but I would’ve much rather seen Apocalypse’s version in that game, and I hope SMT V will expand on it.

You can change your skill order now. This drove me nuts in the original. Not much else to say.

Masayuki Doi is responsible for all of the original art this time and it makes for a much more consistent experience. New demons like the Mermaid or Sukuna-Hikona are stunning, and he managed to make previously hideous designs like Medusa and Lucifer actually look really cool this time. The “pencil sketch” look that was present in some of SMT IV’s designs is completely gone now, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Doi REALLY knows what he’s doing with this series if you ask me.

The revamped partner system ensures that stuff like “Walter uses Agi on Minotaur!” can be entirely avoided by the player now, and the partner AI just feels a bit smarter and less trigger-happy than before either way.

I’m a bit mixed on how Hama/Mudo were changed from insta-kill spells to normal damage dealing spells which have a *chance* to insta-kill when smirking; in my mind, it makes the combat feel a bit safer and more predictable. That said, it’s hard to deny that I used these skills wayyyyyyy more often in my playthrough than I ever did in SMT IV, and they’re a really good complement to a Strength or Dex build.

Despite all of the negative things I’m about to say, the immensely fun and polished mechanical core of SMT IV is still intact: demon whisper is still an insanely addictive system and the game just looks and feels great on 3DS.

All of these changes are superficial but important, and in hindsight I would’ve really loved a Maniax-style Director’s Cut for SMT IV that includes all of the improvements mentioned above.

Sadly though, none of these pluses are strong enough to mitigate my disappointment with Apocalypse. It’s a well-made game, but one that feels soulless, cold and calculated, and I’ll finally get into why now.

What makes SMT IV special?

Things immediately get off on the wrong foot in Apocalypse with a heavy-handed introduction that basically explains away the entire backstory of SMT IV’s world, all of which was left completely and deliberately vague in the original game. The reason I’m opening with this is because it’s indicative of a larger shift in soul between the two games: from an exploratory game that asked you to figure things out yourself, to a much more overt and guided experience. If there’s one quality that will always stick out to me about the original SMT IV, it’s the incredibly strong link between how you interact with the game world and the overarching themes of the narrative.

From the outset, Tokyo is established as hostile, unholy territory, and the game does a great job at bringing the player on the same page with the main party by making you enter it as a complete stranger. You get to experience the clash of cultures firsthand, with vast differences in speech and clothing between you and the residents of Tokyo. I find it interesting that this aspect of the game can work in different ways depending on who the player is: the game obviously acknowledges people who are very familiar with Tokyo’s culture and layout, and I would imagine that casting players with that kind of background as *invaders* of Tokyo makes for a strange feeling of disconnect. Conversely, if the player *isn’t* from Tokyo, they will most likely feel more connected to the protagonist and experience Tokyo as something completely unfamiliar and new.

Despite the initial hostility, there is an exotic quality to Tokyo that slowly creeps into you the more you play. This is the thematic “link” I alluded to earlier: in the story, it becomes quickly apparent that, despite all the destruction and decay, Tokyo provides a level of freedom and access to knowledge and opportunities that our party had never truly experienced before. Walter and the other Casualries slowly succumb to this temptation, while Jonathan and Mikado’s government take a fierce stance against it, viewing Tokyo as “unclean” and fearing a loss of control over the larger populace. Not only is this a fresh take on the Law/Chaos concept of older SMT games (using Tokyo and Mikado as physical manifestations of these ideas and holding up their unique characteristics against each other), it’s also brilliantly reinforced in the gameplay.

SMT IV essentially tasks you with slowly conquering Tokyo. The world map is immediately very open, and the game doesn’t hold your hand at any point. It’s easy to stumble into demon domains way out of your league early on, and a lot of the NPCs you meet in the opening section of the map will brush you aside until you’ve become stronger or fulfilled tasks in other parts of the world. SMT IV does not feature objective markers, instead asking you to pay attention to detailed NPC directions and figuring out the intricate connections between different locations. I understand a lot of the criticism leveled against the clarity of the world map, but it’s generally very apparent that the team went to great lengths to adapt the layout and architecture of the *real* Tokyo into video game form.

This doesn’t just pay off for people actually *from* Tokyo, it also gives the setting an authenticity and grounds it in a way you’re not really used to from other titles. The game will often simply send you on lengthy treks from A to B, and ask you to take routes tucked away in back alleys and abandoned buildings. Even though SMT IV’s rendition of the city comes in mostly miniature, top-down form, the relationships between the individual locations feel believable. You have entire networks of tunnels running underneath Tokyo, and how and where you emerge from them can often be surprising; as you become more familiar with the world’s layout, shortcuts between key locations will reveal themselves to you, NPCs will provide you with travel opportunities, and previously dangerous territory becomes more and more manageable. Having to negotiate poison swamps and demon-infested parks along the way only adds to the feeling of a plodding journey riddled with hardship, and makes the distances between central locations even more palpable.

Upon entering an area from the top-down world map into an over-the-shoulder perspective, what will stand out to you immediately is the incredible amount of detail packed into the environment. The general aesthetic is very urban and gritty, but despite that, the screen will often burst with color, and the architecture is lush and intricately detailed. The way you explore the environment is grungy and intimate: you crawl through shafts, kick down ladders, and jump through holes in the ground frequently, discovering countless nooks and crannies, and slowly charting all the unique ways the different places are connected with each other and loop in on themselves.

As you venture deeper into Tokyo, you keep discovering Terminals and small communities nestled into the different subway stations all over the city. These will serve as hubs along your journey, slowly turning Tokyo into a giant honeycomb of warp points, rest areas and dungeons. Returning to your home of Mikado will become less and less necessary as time goes on, until you eventually realize that, this entire time, you’ve been carving out a new home for yourself in the Japanese capital bit by bit. I mentioned earlier how the game is very openly inviting to players actually *from* Tokyo, and this feeling just described is in effect probably even stronger for them.

Through this, seemingly insignificant RPG conventions like NPC side quests or equipment gain a new dimension. The denizens of Tokyo are, ostensibly, your enemy, and going in you only help them with their troubles to earn money and experience out of pure necessity; this later shifts to you discovering all the tragic individual stories the city is dripping with, culminating in a huge endgame mission tasking you with solving all of Tokyo’s problems to inspire hope in her people. Another example: the majority of the available equipment in SMT IV consists of makeshift armor and weapons, like sports equipment or Winter jackets. Whatever Mikado can offer you becomes quickly obsolete, and as you deck yourself out in these new threads, you simply *look* less and less like a Samurai and more like another survivor of the Tokyo apocalypse.

What it all comes down to is that, through all of Tokyo’s corruption and ugliness, beauty and warmth can still shine through. The people can be coarse, but also welcoming, the landscape might seem rough, but hides a deeper splendor underneath. You eventually even start to sympathize with the demons: a lot of them see themselves as guardians of the land, and they pride themselves in their traditional values and sense of honor. My favorite example of this (and also a display of impeccable environmental storytelling) is Minami-Sumachi, a small town you can only access toward the end of the game. Despite that fact, the local demons are strangely low-level, and while the game’s dialogue doesn’t actually acknowledge this circumstance, you quickly discover (through self-initiated negotiations with the demons) why: the demons have been driven here by the angels of Mikado, out of their home of Naraku — the game’s tutorial dungeon. This just goes to show what great lengths the designers went through in establishing a consistent world and lore.

SMT IV does all of this with a kind of subtlety that is uncommon for JRPGs. Every line hits as intended, as the game upholds the series tradition of only sparse dialogue and cutscenes, while still giving everything enough context and specificity to make you care. Early on especially you will find numerous examples of incredibly strong writing: the first descent into Tokyo through Naraku and the Medusa battle are particular highlights. SMT IV effortlessly manages to build suspense and make you question the world around you, with slow yet pitch-perfect pacing that doles out new puzzle pieces for you to think about frequently, creating images in your mind that can range from disturbing, shocking and mesmerizing all at once.

I’d be remiss not to talk about SMT IV’s phenomenal soundtrack, which ties everything together and gives every location its own unique identity. It manages to bounce seamlessly between haunting, upbeat, exciting and somber, and it will linger with you long after turning off the console, drawing you to this new home you made for yourself time and time again.

When I say I see things in SMT IV that nobody else does, this is what I mean. I understand if the game to you is still just a standard JRPG with a lot of flaws, but I hope I’ve managed to outline why it’s so special to me. All of that is to say that, in my eyes, Apocalypse had a lot to live up to, and it unfortunately couldn’t have missed the mark harder where it actually counts.

How Apocalypse gets everything wrong

So, about a million paragraphs ago, I said that there was a shift in soul between the two games; a major change in direction for a sequel doesn’t have to be bad, but what makes Apocalypse so disappointing is how it outright tramples over everything the original stood for, and how it retains so much of SMT IV’s basic framework even though it doesn’t make sense for the kind of game it’s trying to be, seemingly oblivious of what the individual elements of SMT IV were there in service of.

Apocalypse’s game world is almost identical to SMT IV’s, but it tells a new story parallel to the events of its predecessor, using the same basic gameplay and making you explore most of the same areas with only a handful of new locations. A lot of players found it frustrating to get lost and not know where to go in the original, and the ways the team addressed these concerns for the sequel are immediately apparent. NPCs now only give you the bare minimum in terms of directions (generally just the name of the location you need to visit and nothing else), with the game now instead relying on objective markers like you’re used to from every other video game ever made. The overworld map has been streamlined to such a degree that you now simply look at the point the game wants you to head toward and then move your cursor there in a straight line — there are bridges everywhere now connecting the individual areas, meaning you never actually have to think about *how* you’re going places. The roads are so wide and the map is so free of clutter now that out of ten different routes, it literally won’t matter which one you pick, since all of them will take you to your goal anyway.

Not like the game will even let you get lost or choose where to go in the first place:

I doubt I even have to explain why this is a problem but let’s talk about it anyway: I’m not gonna act like SMT IV was the Breath of the Wild of JRPGs (or the Dark Souls of Persona perhaps?) or something, but letting the player check out a bunch of different locations immediately, even if it’s not to their full extent, serves to spark their curiosity in the world and engenders a desire to poke at everything they can find; it makes them more engaged. Letting the player go somewhere they’re not supposed to early on so they can then make the *conscious choice* to turn back and return later when they feel up for it is ONLY a good thing. The part about “returning to a place you’ve been before” especially can be powerful, making the world feel connected, alive and rewarding.

Not only is that kind of non-linearity that’s missing from Apocalypse valuable in itself, the way the game *frames* its hand-holding is terrible — having a little sister character stop me from going *where I want to go* is patronizing to the point that I felt like I was playing an SMT parody or something. It’s Skyward Sword-levels of condescending.

All of this is a problem considering SMT IV’s main joy was exploration and indulging in its amazing world, but there is a deeper issue: if the whole point of the first game *was* the world, does a barebones sequel set on the exact same map like Apocalypse even make sense? Players of the first game already know all of these locations by heart, shouldn’t you be showing them something new instead of retreading old ground? Is it even possible to capture the same sense of wonder again?

In fact, it becomes quickly apparent that a lot of the design changes in Apocalypse were done so as not to exhaust experienced players: the world map unlocks lightning fast, every location becomes easily accessible and traversable immediately, new paths open up conveniently when the story demands it, and you find new warp Terminals by the minute. The last point in particular just baffled me on my playthrough: in SMT IV, finding all of the Terminals was a huge quest spanning the entirety of the game, and every single one you found felt like a significant milestone on your journey. Apocalypse just hands them out haphazardly like free candy, and the excitement and elation I felt every time I found one in the first game turned into complete ignorance here.

I understand that you don’t want experienced players to go through the whole process of slowly uncovering Tokyo again just to get to the new stuff, but… shouldn’t the answer have been to make a fucking new game? Instead of just taking the original and completely sucking away the methodical, deliberately constructed pacing, disregarding all of the feelings that game was trying to illicit in the player.

The “new stuff” also makes it abundantly clear that Apocalypse just wasn’t constructed with the same care and attention to detail as its predecessor. One of the coolest things about SMT IV was how almost all of the dungeons and explorable areas consisted of settings you would find in the real world: office buildings, police stations, parks, museums. This element of realism isn’t exactly uncommon for the series, but SMT IV made a clear effort to elevate the urban grit of previous titles and keep a consistent tone, with a much higher level of detail to everything and by greatly increasing the intimacy with which you explore, as I described earlier. The “unreal” demonic corruption running through every fiber of the city is made much more palpable by how clearly the original “real” beauty of Tokyo shines through it, and the environments only start to get truly outlandish once you begin exploring different parallel universes and decide to face the powerful rulers of the Expanse in their personal domains toward the endgame.

The new locations in Apocalypse, which there are only very few of anyway, don’t follow any discernible rules. The Fairy Forest, “hidden from the eyes of the general population,” (because the designers needed some kind of excuse to put it in the middle of the city, despite it not EXISTING in the first game) is covered in pink fog and completely clashes with the surrounding skyscrapers and city streets. Where did it come from, what even is it? Is it a park that was always there that the fairies just took over? Is it some kind of parallel universe? Who knows! Then there is Kanda-no-yashiro, a huge cave located at the bottom of a well. Who designed the interior with all its stairs, elevators and traps? Who is it that sealed Krishna here, and for what purpose? This isn’t even about “plot holes” or anything like that — again, SMT IV’s biggest draw *was* the world, and if you just insert these completely outlandish areas into a familiar map, they’re not going to have any kind of emotional effect on me whatsoever. Instead of being engrossed in this rich setting, I’m just gonna be like “oh it’s a video game.”

There is an underground prison/war shelter that’s pretty cool and fits SMT IV’s setting and aesthetic to a T; I would’ve liked to see more of that sort of thing. Aside from the two endgame dungeons though (the Cosmic Egg and YHVH’s Universe, which are obviously justified in their supernatural aesthetic), that’s basically it for *new* explorable areas.. which makes the whole idea of Apocalypse as a sequel even more absurd to me. Apocalypse took me eighty hours to complete, with the old content being much less compelling than it was within the context of the first game, and the little new stuff that was added stretched laughably thin and being poorly thought-out anyway.

The carelessness with which these new environments were constructed is also evident in other aspects of the world-building. Later in the game, the party ventures to Mikado, and all the different parts of the capital that were accessible in the first game are present and accounted for here — including the Blacksmith and Item Shop. Disappointingly though, both of them serve the exact same wares you’d get in the stores of Tokyo (sports equipment, streetwear, guns, you name it). This might sound like a nitpick, but having it set up this way doesn’t make logical sense — how did these items wind up here? In any other game it wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but considering the great lengths SMT IV went to establish a coherent world, this can’t help but come off as lazy. Apocalypse never pulls any well-considered surprises like Minami-sumachi, either; there isn’t any effort made to further deepen the setting.

It’s worth stressing again that so far what I’ve been talking about aren’t *plot holes* or anything. All of the attempts to develop or expand the setting only clash with what’s been already established; the ways exploration has been streamlined and how much old ground is retread serves to suck all of the joy out of engaging with the world; the game has no sense of pacing and never tries to spark your curiosity or challenge your ideas about the existing world. At least for me, this is is what made me go through the *play* of Apocalypse like a mindless zombie — I walk from A to B as the story demands it, I level up, I get loot, I do a lot of the same things that I did in the first game, but this time there’s just no joy or wonder to it. Considering the world and the exploration of it was the whole point of SMT IV, all of these elements only compound to make the whole experience deeply, deeply disappointing.

If you were to ask me about Apocalypse’s *plot* though? Boy, I would never STOP ranting about it. In fact, ranting is exactly what I’m going to do now.

Going into this, I said that Apocalypse represented a move to a more overt and guided SMT experience compared to the first game. While I think the crux of why this is problematic lies in the way the approach to world-building and exploration has changed, it’s actually much more obvious and pronounced with the game’s plot. Much has been made of Apocalypse’s more jovial and therefore jarring tone, so while most of what I’m about to say won’t be entirely new to most of you reading this, I believe it’s still worth discussing. Because, while I think some of the criticism leveled against SMT IV’s plot is valid (I recommend checking out this huge piece by Eirikr J.S.), I’ve seen a lot of dissenters of the original treat Apocalypse as an improvement, which frankly I find hard to wrap my head around.

The thing that will immediately stick out to players of the original is the way speech has changed. Seeing how this game focuses on a party mostly from Tokyo, it obviously makes sense to shift to a more casual and informal tone. While I think the dryer and more serious mannerisms of the Mikado party in SMT IV inherently lent that game a greater sense of maturity that is uncommon for the genre (which was then subverted in interesting ways once the crass, crude demons and citizens of Tokyo were engaged), it’s important for the sequel to continue to accurately represent the different cultural identities put forth by its predecessor. It does this, but not without taking some strange turns and shortcuts. The characters will say things like “Totes!” or “Wow, your demon is really cute,” and I find it off-putting that so much of the party is comprised of characters who barely pass as teenagers. Generally, all the Tokyo hunters you end up joining forces with somehow happen to be the nicest and coolest people in this brutal nuclear wasteland of a city, and the only two characters initially hostile toward you (Toki and Gaston) later become friendly because power of friendship or whatever.

Despite being comparatively young, SMT IV’s party interacted almost exclusively with adults and saw eye-to-eye with them, behaving consistently and staying in-line with the tone of any given situation. The only teenager you meet in that game is Hikaru, who later turns out to be Lucifer in disguise, which to me was an overt stab at genre conventions: the only cute high school JRPG girl in the entire game happens to be God’s greatest enemy and self-proclaimed liberator of mankind. The fact that Apocalypse now chooses to *follow* these conventions with its teenage party, almost always upbeat despite having grown up in toxic, perpetual darkness, is not just disappointing, but a weird tonal shift that cheapens the game world.

There are so many baffling moments in this game that could be straight out of a harem/comedy anime that it borders on parody. You creep on your female party members as they’re getting changed in the locker room (the game even *asks* you if you want to do it and completely ignores your choice if you say no). When Toki comes into the picture, a “love triangle” of sorts ensues between you, her and Asahi, with the latter spouting tropey lines expressing her jealousy at frequent intervals. Characters blush and get flustered and crack jokes whenever something remotely sexual is brought up. There is literal BEACH DLC — BEACH DLC!!!!

What confounds me is how the tiny handful of lighthearted moments in SMT IV (a few scenes involving Isabeau and her manga, and one bit where the party is put under a charm spell by a demon) were scrutinized and turned into memes by the larger MegaTen community to an extreme degree, but then Apocalypse is seen as an improvement? I can understand the many ways fans of earlier entries take issue with SMT IV, but even its seemingly innocuous plot elements like Isabeau reading manga have a clear, distinct purpose: the entire hook of the story is the balancing act between the comfortable status quo and the freedom that comes with seeking out what lies beyond your limited horizons. Again, what sets SMT IV apart is how it gives these established ideas physical form, and Isabeau’s interest in manga is just another example of that. It makes natural sense for her character to latch onto this sort of thing, and it’s something every player can understand.

With Apocalypse on the other hand, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that all of the changes I’ve been talking about compared to its predecessor were made *not* out of a creative motivation, but instead to address all of the criticism leveled against SMT IV and expand the game’s potential audience. The world map was confusing and easy to get lost in, so let’s completely streamline it and hold the player’s hand all the way through it. Players thought the characters were dry and the story non-existent, so let’s give them this huge party of tropey anime archetypes and put them into a super-overt linear story with “epic” twists and “badass” moments.

Your character is referred to as the GODSLAYER because of course he is. The NPCs, which in the first game all went about their own business, now only talk about you and what’s going on with you and how cool you are. Apocalypse doesn’t trust you to come up with your own reason to explore Tokyo or ask questions about it, instead you set out on this quest out of a childish motivation to “become a badass” and be recognized as an adult or whatever; it’s a game that finds it necessary to flat-out tell you *why* you should want to do things and *what* you should care about. It ends with you fighting Satan to prove your worth, so you can then *team up* with Satan to kill God because that’s “sick” and “cool.” That’s why we like SMT, right, because it’s a video game where you punch God in the face?

So much of the storytelling in Apocalypse just feels misguided. Lucifer now speaks in a growly evil voice, because generic evil dude is totally what he was in the last game. I thought the angels had a strong, incredibly intimidating presence in SMT IV, whereas here it’s just filth this, scum that. They give your protagonist this ridiculously elaborate and twisty backstory and make Flynn into an actual character because they think *that’s* what the player cares about — not subtle theming, not learning about different ideas and philosophies, not figuring things out for yourself, but this fucking anime nonsense. I’ll go on a bit of a tangent here and say that this sort of thing is why Persona 3 didn’t click with me — that game just keeps throwing outlandish plot twists and concepts like robot waifus at you to the point where it just made me zone out the more I played. Persona 4 shows that a story can often be so much more compelling when it’s kept simple, and the same is true for SMT IV: the *specifics* of what happens or has happened aren’t as important as making you *think* about what happened.

The backstory of SMT IV’s Tokyo — a demon apocalypse ensues, nuclear weapons are launched in an attempt to fend it off, Tokyo is encased in a gigantic dome by Masakado — it’s not mind-blowing when you hear it, because that isn’t the *point*. It’s not this twist that you’re supposed to anticipate, instead it’s the foundation the entire world is built upon, which then facilitates the drama and the suspense. Apocalypse makes a big deal out of you being the reincarnation of some dude or whatever, it keeps showing you these dumb flashbacks assuming you give a shit, Hallelujah’s DAD is a DEMON, did I mention that the final boss is God, who just becomes our final antagonist out of nowhere, just because that’d be a cool thing to happen in this JRPG I guess?

Everything in this game exists or happens not for a thematic or creative reason, but instead to make the player happy and give them what the writers and designers *thought* they wanted. The final dungeon sees you teaming up with Flynn, and he has a move called the MESSIAH BLAST — that’s badass, right? Walter and Jonathan show up for the final battle too and they’re besties again somehow, despite literally having been locked away in the bodies of two eldritch abominations respectively BY THEIR OWN CHOICE mere days prior — because that’s what the player wants to happen, isn’t it? We can’t have characters making choices with actual consequences, choices that might make them unpopular or straight-up disliked, can we?

It’s always confounded me that people made such a big deal about Walter and Jonathan as characters — the *characters* of a mainline SMT game, at least in my mind, shouldn’t be the point. Instead, they should serve as ciphers for their respective ideologies, and as such, I think Walter and Jonathan got the job done. You could totally see where each of them was coming from and they made strong cases for their respective outlooks. SMT IV also did a great job of showing interesting and surprising sides to these characters without beating you over the head with it — my favorite examples of this are how strongly Walter takes offense with Tayama using children to keep the demons docile (as a low-class citizen, he sees himself in them) and Jonathan’s sudden and extreme outbursts of violence when his beliefs are infringed upon (which, respectively, mirrors the behavior pattern of the Mikado government and the angels).

Apocalypse just gets this wrong on so many levels. Every single character aligned with the player has to be cool and strong and dependable — the game goes out of its way to endear you to everyone you encounter, terrified of the idea that you *might* not 100% warm up to a character immediately (or ever). It’s especially evident with Isabeau, who was nice, but quiet and indecisive in the first game (which, again, was the whole point), and has now turned into this capable “badass” leader figure. I think giving you a super high level party member for a while can actually be a clever way to tie story and gameplay together (the intro to the first .hack game is a good example of this), but here, it feels cheap and unearned since her personality shift is never really established — again, it just feels like this was done because that’s what the player would enjoy. The only character who is (initially) an absolute asshole to you is Gaston, and guess what… I ended up liking him the most out of the entire cast.

I inherently take issue with Apocalypse’s approach to story. It’s a poor fit for the established lore and tone of SMT IV, and the fact that it’s so transparent *why* this huge shift was made frankly just makes me angry. It feels condescending, it feels calculated, and most importantly, it’s simply not compelling. What makes it even worse, though, is that the writing itself on many levels is just awful and riddled with baffling moments.

Initially, you and your childhood friend Asahi are merely tagging along with Manabu and Nikkari, two veteran hunters trying to show you the ropes. Their deaths at the hands of Adramelch, a powerful demon, serves as the game’s inciting incident: it sparks a desire within Asahi to become a “real” hunter and be recognized as an adult. Obviously, you don’t get a say in the matter, and you have to go along with whatever stupid idea she’ll come up with, even if you disagree with it as a player. This eventually leads to you *unsealing Krishna (basically the game’s main antagonist) from his prison*, throwing Tokyo into chaos.

I can’t even begin to put into words how dumbfounded this entire sequence of events left me. Forcing the player to do this, even if they’re *aware* how bad of an idea it would be, is an incredibly contrived way to get the plot going. Like many things in Apocalypse, it feels condescending; like the writers don’t expect the player to question it or see through the fact that it’s all a trap. You could argue that, even if the player chose not to go along with Asahi’s idea, Dagda could’ve just exercised his mind control over you from the very beginning (instead of only doing so once you’re right in front of the seal), which would render the player’s choice null and void anyway.

However, later events in the game put into question just how strong Dagda’s control over the player is. Before the final Krishna battle inside the Cosmic Egg, you have to either side with Dagda and kill your friends, or stand up against them. If Dagda really had total mind control over you, there wouldn’t be a choice to be made, just like when you’re asked to go along with Asahi’s insane plan toward the beginning of the game: he would simply force you to kill your friends regardless of whether or not you agree with it. Ultimately, you really can’t explain away this plot point, and the way Dagda’s control over you changes conveniently as the plot demands it is just horrible writing.

On that note, the scene I just described basically destroys Dagda as a character — literally. His mother, Danu, creates *another version of him*, except without all of his nihilistic tendencies (because of course), which can then sustain your life force in place of the original (whose death would normally spell your demise since he’s the one who resurrected you after having been killed by Adramelch along with Nikkari and Manabu at the start of the game). This, again, just feels like an overly complicated contrivance for the sake of the plot, and this new version of Dagda is completely irrelevant and contributes nothing of importance for the rest of the game — he’s no more than a mere decoration.

There’s another scene where you, again, go along with Asahi in an attempt to “save Flynn,” even though you as the player are most likely very aware that that’s an awful idea — and you’d be right! You show up at the scene and Asahi ends up being taken hostage by Krishna, which prompts Flynn to let himself be taken captive. He clearly could’ve handled himself just fine, and the Divine Powers would’ve never become much of a threat if not for Asahi making these repeated mistakes. So much of the plot hinges on her making asinine choices that you are FORCED TO GO ALONG WITH BY THE GAME, even though it would be clear to anyone that nothing good is gonna come of it. At worst, SMT IV could introduce some concepts that aren’t fully explained (how the Reds are used to keep the demons in check, for example), but it was never like *this*. SMT IV never just chose to overwrite or blatantly disregard your choices, and the party’s characterization was so simple that it was pretty much guaranteed to always be in alignment with the player’s wishes and goals.

(Before anyone brings it up, the way people always complain about the “forced clash” between Jonathan and Walter later in SMT IV’s story has never made sense to me. It’s the party’s mission to kill Lilith — Jonathan doesn’t question it, whereas Walter thinks just complying with it would be too hasty. Jonathan attempts a killing blow, which, as I established earlier, is consistent with his character, and Walter naturally stops him; Lilith escapes. This whole event creates tension in the group like it should, but it doesn’t serve to fully dismantle it. I don’t see what’s supposed to be forced about this sequence of events.)

There’s other stuff, too. Asahi is killed right before the Cosmic Egg dungeon (if the game was trying to get me attached to her then it failed miserably), only to be revived after you kill Krishna — Deus Ex Machina nonsense at its finest, and another example of the game being too afraid of having the player deal with difficult choices and lasting consequences (note how in SMT IV, most if not all of your party ends up either dead or horribly disfigured toward the game’s finale). I talked about YHVH’s inclusion and how it borders on fan service earlier, but seriously — he becomes Apocalypse’s primary antagonist out of nowhere when, really, he didn’t even have a hand in any of the game’s events. It feels like an unnecessary ass-pull for the sake of an “epic” finale, and it stands in stark contrast to SMT IV’s somber, very low-key endings (the beautiful Neutral ending in particular).

Ultimately, that’s where the crux of the issue lies with Apocalypse. SMT IV felt indifferent toward the player, fully content to do its own thing and let its creativity run wild — the sequel, by contrast, is a product designed to give you what you want (or at least what its makers *think* you want). The game never managed to shake off that smell for me, it made me feel condescended to, pandered to, like my intelligence wasn’t respected. I’ve played a bunch of disappointing games over the years, but it didn’t just stop there with Apocalypse — I’ve developed an outright distaste for it. SMT IV is one of my favorite games, and I’m confused, sad and angry that the same people involved with that game chose to follow it up with *this*.