/smtg/ - 真・女神転生/Shin Megami Tensei General

Look at this concept art Toki

Everyone was kind of cartoony in SMTIVA. It feels like Persona is leaking into mainline.

fuck this gay earth
definitely going massacre now

I like the Toki we got better.

I have all the demons I need to fuse Alice except the ones you need for high pixie.
Where do I get the two that are not pixie?

This almost was Inanna, until Doi slapped on multiboobs and a big belly. I think this design could've worked with the final product.

SMT isn't about deep villains though. 4A doesn't treat him any different.

Unless you wanna tell me YHVH gets any better treatment in the series.

look at the race
use search function race/new demons/use compendium

If it helps, dagda is meant to be a little insane. If you side with him, the reason is not meant to be that you care about what his specific goals are but rather that you agree that -yours- are important enough that it might override your union with others. He is merely a tool to get to them. Which is ironic, since he presents it originally in reverse like where you are the tool.

Also, he was lying in that scene. He doesn't want to rule at all. He mainly just wants revenge against yhvh. But at the same time, he decided he wants revenge against all demons, and so wants to make a world where the god with absolute power is a human, and where said human has the power to prevent demons from fucking around with humans and treating them as inferiors. At the end of the game he kills himself, and lets you take the entirety of the power of god for yourself, so that you as a human are free to make a new world where humans aren't shat on by demons.

Whether you are good or evil or what you do is left ambiguous, since dagda is insane, so he's not super reliable in terms of whether you are a good ruler. Basically, you are siding with him to get the power of god with the power to get rid of rivals that might come up. Whether this is to make a peaceful world or because you are on an ego trip is up to you. Doing this is the only way to kill yhvh forever. But whether this is good is ambiguous, since if you yourself are evil, the entire cycle starts again with you as the villain. If you are good, obviously this means yhvh can never mess around with the world again.

The ending has a lawful tone, but its not a normal law ending. You having absolute power to prevent demons from changing the peace and making a single standard is law oriented. But the world itself you make could in theory represent a neutral one more than law. Even so, the fact that it comes from one leader resembles reasons and so has an orderly tone.

YHVH gets better treated in Devil Survivor. He's a decent guy while Angels minus Remiel wanna go full Lawfag.

Yeah I guess I'm just a Nocturne autist to the core since I felt like he was at least "presented" better there

I kind of liked the change a little bit. I normally go Law because I like the side with the biggest and baddest asshole. If things were little more gray and other sides had big bad assholes and less moralizing weaklings, it might make my decision process a little harder.

>angel calls Pascal a "tarded-up clown"

Wow, rude.

Well I found where they would go in the compendium. I feel like I am missing something.

Not just Lucifer. Merkabah too, and all the angels and demons. I feel like the story shift where yhvh becomes the end boss would have been a more interesting reveal if realizing that he himself was corrupt beyond recognition didn't come til later on, and earlier he was presented as plausibly well intentioned like in the law ending of II. But merkabah straight up tells you early on that he is an asshole. The only "reveal" is that lucifer was created to be a false flag all along.

Are NG+ transfers the same as IV? Kinda want those extra demons but kinda don't want to lose all my extra app points and shit, not sure if I should grind anything or just forget about the NG+ demons

>YHVH gets better treated in Devil Survivor.

Not in Overclocked. It's strongly hinted that he manipulated Cain into killing Abel so he could have a first murderer, a first martyr, and for Abel's soul to fall into Hell so it could absorb part of Bel's power and be a contender for the Throne. After which he'd ascend to become King of Bel, then bow his head to Him and become His messiah, giving him control over angels, humans, and demons.

>strongly hinted that he manipulated Cain into killing Abel so he could have a first murderer
Aren't you forgetting who told you that information in the first place? I wouldn't exactly trust Naoya's judgement when it comes to his understanding of those events.

Yes it does. In most of the games they at least kind of come off like they have consistent semi believable ideologies rather than simply being pure evil.

How is that not being better treated? Letting a trivially few bad events play out as part of some weird way to use their message to prevent similar bad events + as part of a scheme that ultimately leads to a good ending where things are implied to be good isn't anything like in apocalypse where no matter what your moral framework is he is not someone its super reasonable to approve of.

Yes, yhvh himself is usually represented as a corrupt villain, save for in the ds games, but that is for a specific reason showing the different sides' relations to him. I.E. how law makes use of him, but will target him too once they determine that he is too bad to be part of the system anymore. And they have nuanced ideas. IVA more or less turns them all into comic book villains who openly tell humans how ridiculous their own plans are, making the entire thing just good versus not even just evil, but stupid evil.

Naoya tells you it but all the characters, even Amane, come to the same conclusion after hearing all the facts. The only reason to doubt it is because it's Naoya telling it, but Naoya has no reason to lie at that point. You've already chosen to become the Messiah, there's no way he can sway you to his side anymore in that lifetime and even he knows it. He has nothing to gain from lying or telling half-truths.

Trivially bad? He purposefully set up one of his sons to murder the other so he could gain total control over every aspect of the world. The only reason things turn out well is because Abel actually has a shred of humanity in him and prevents the angels from outright killing human beings. It's only "trivial" because his prior records contain mass genocide on a worldly scale.

...

Well, YHVH isn't the name in DeSu, it's God and the story is treated as something a bit more biblical.

I must have missed that hint.

If that method created God's messiah on earth to allow them to get humanity to abandon sin and ascend to a better stage of existence, that is worth literally every action it took to get there.

That said, that proposition weakens the narrative impact of the neutral routes. Where was this stated?

Why does the new map theme sound like it's from Donkey Kong 64 and when is that one shitty meme channel gonna make a remix of that?

How can I get Resist or Null Wind in SMT4A? I want it for my very own law friend Mastema

Overclocked, Amane's 8th Day, as you're trying to redeem Naoya.

Overclocked shat on the good story rhe original had with it's 8th day.

Made Naoya the "golden" ending depsite Haru/Gin supposed to be that, took away the meaning behind Yuzu's ending being a bad one. The cocept of angels believing in humans again was dropped entirely. The only 8th day that got a good follow up was Amane's, but that's because it took away the negative sides of it.

Is God being a force of good an alien concept to nips?

Naoya's 8th day was perfect. YHVH comes out looking almost decent because he won't involve the human world in his war against the King of Bel out of respect for Abel, humanity is freed from the imposing threat of another ordeal, demons are gone from the planet and the world returns to normalcy.

Christians believe every human that is born is still living under two permanent curses of god.

I just looked at the demon list for SMT4A in the wikia and Dagda's not there haha
It's imcomplete right
Dagda's usable right
please

>He purposefully set up one of his sons to murder the other so he could gain total control over every aspect of the world.
Set up? You can only make that argument because He knew it would happen through omniscience. Nothing in the story as told in the game suggested He took any action that would incite murder. All He did was reject Cain's offering.

If you want God to read your mind and then avoid taking any action that could cause a reaction in you that leads to murder, you want Him to remove your free will.

The 8th days were unnecessary.

The idea of God being good is alien to a lot of cultures these days. But the nips have their own take on Christianity. It is foreign to them.

>implying that Jesus didn't save us from that

Christians also believe that the devil is the prince of this world which explains the evil and all imperfections in it, but who gets all the "Bad boy with a heart of gold who truly respects humanity" portrayals. Not the Big Guy Upstairs, no sir.

Did you even play overclocked? The angels on amane's end are not pure evil. If you pay attention, they aren't killing hordes of people with plans to indefinitely. They are killing the people who won't relinquish their ability to use demons who are so dangerous they will kill again. The only change you made to their plan is asking for a chance to save some of these people who are on the edge. Note that once the people destroy their comps the angels tell them to turn themself in not to the angels, but to the human police to face -man's justice-. This wasn't something you convinced them to do. Their plan was always to let humans have some autonomy on amane's end. Note that in the very ending there are no longer angels in japan. Japan has been pacified and you moved on to new places, and the angels follow you to help you, not hang around in japan forever. Atsuro mentions that crime now barely exists anymore. So its hard to deny that that has a positive interpretation.

Killing a tiny handful of people across thousands of years as part of a plan to get world peace is not quite pure evil. You can call it questionable if you want, but this depiction of him in overclocked isn't even fractionally like his depiction in IVA where he doesn't even really want or care about world peace, and is directly behind the existence of demons. He's worse in IVA than he had been in the entire series. And the issue in IVA is not him being evil. But that pretty much every god is except for the ones who are annoyingly good.

>pain in childbirth
>work
>eternal strife through cultural and regional differences
Jesus only saves you in the next life.

They do call him yehowah or yehova once in desu. So its meant to be obvious who you are dealing with.

>implying this life matters at all aside from being a test of your morals

Who are good or benevolent in SMTIV Apocalypse aside from Danu?

Any list of new gun skills?

...

Pascal.

I missed that.

Ironically this makes a perfect counterpoint to the idea of a raging youth who wants to punch God in the face. Really, you want to punch the mastermind of the evils of this world in the face, and you ought to instead punch Satan in the face.

Unfortunately then you also have to punch yourself in the face...

Okay that didn't work let me retract that.

They dick suck japanese gods and taosim too much.

Hey /smtg/, could somebody spare me Life Stone x4?

I'll be your friend if you do

Tell me about dagda, why does he has a question mark on his face

To be fair, how do you expect polytheists to see monotheism? Japan barely even has many traditional japanese shinto and Buddhists left. So this story is being told through the combined lens of:

1: nonreligious people complaining about the strictness of monotheistic absolute doctrines.

2: the political reality of monotheism being less open to alternate beliefs than polytheism is and so trying to get rid of it.

and

3: the in-lore reality of how a god that claims to be the monotheistic god would really be seen by gods / would be in general in a polytheistic reality. In a story with many gods, one claiming to be the only relevant god really would be kind of an asshole.

So when you combine all those things together, where monotheism was never even used as the symbol of goodness in their culture, there's a lot of reasons they would hardly represent it as super positive.

>Cheat

I meant is there a list of good or benevolent demons in Apocalypse

It's kind of weird how they can go along with Taoisms "all is as it should be" stuff but then pretend that these all powerful beings fighting it out is somehow not part of this "all is as it should be"

I found it to be too fanfiction. Even Amane joins you. I feel Despot shoukd be the actual 8th day, as that does build up from Naoya's 7th day properly.

Here's your "lifestone"

It also explains why gaians are called gaians. Chaos is associated with earth and law is associated with sky. And note that when you take dante's inferno into account and the idea of hell literally being subterranean, conflating earth and hell into one side makes sense.

Satan knew YHVHs well intentionedness was bullshit. He let things get that far and the Raidou games even have Luvy point out the future is set in stone because YHVH wants it too.

So Satan killed YHVH despite knowing he would pay the price of turning on him.

Sukuna-Hikona is represented as very nuanced and sympathetic. The way he talks is meant to let you know he is a good character.

Well, I would expect him to be angry at the other gods, but not against humanity. I mean, if you repent sincerely, God will forgive you even if you are on your deathbed, and even if you are the most despicable person in the world. Jesus sit and ate with sinners and the worst types of people in his time. That doesn't seem like the kind of guy that would create a totalitarian society so that people wouldn't sin. That's just my understanding though, and I also understand why God would be portrayed in that way in SMT.

It wasn't Naoya and the characters themselves don't disagree with it.

He's always been a petty selfish God whose order exists to satiate his ego. It was his pettiness that shat on Majin Tensei and Megami Tenseis worlds because people did things he didn't like.

Even the King Abaddon system is designed around inflicting suffering because people lose faith in him and his response is to send giant despair locusts to kill people.

Taoism doesn't deny that bad things happen or that you should fix them. One of taoism's big things is that the natural flow of things is "Better" but that certain mechanations deviate too much from it, thus causing problems. Taoism sees certain huge government structures as impeding natural flowing virtue by being too artificial. And so from that angle wouldn't be for law (also why they depict law as robots. To show its too artificial). But taoism is big on natural virtue, so would see chaos as unvirtuous. Both being seen as unaccepting of the natural and proper balance. Taoism isn't some kind of nihilistic "no matter what everything is amoral" philosophy. That's a western misunderstanding of it.

>All this talk of philosophy and gods and such

The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. This is The Truth.

Loki himself pointed out Gins was just living in blissful ignorance instead of accepting the truth.

>playing Strange Journey
>fighting Zelenin in chaos route
>if Requiem doesn't kill one of my damage dealing demons then it kills me
>fight seems easy as fuck other than that
I just wanna play Apocalypse, lads.

Until YHVH's position as the "strongest" is in peril, in which case it's time to nuke some fucking worlds.

God was always absolute GODD and EVIL. Mysticism was partly made to explain the inconsistencies of how such a God could be considered Good.

IVA used that interpretation.

Calm the fuck down

>Until
Didn't contradict me at all.

The best part of IVA and YHVH was when he became more demonic-looking because he was rejected after humanity came to believe he was a horrific, monstrous deity in the same way he cast down the Old Gods.

In what context, I do not recall.

Except Satan follows Gods will till Christians try to say otherwise.

Guys, does the tied fishing hook Issachar's ghost gave me have any meaning? Will I ever get to give it to Flynn?

It is explained in the DLC notes that Demons are affected by humans when they are "Observed" by them. The reason YHVH is alwaysa floating head is because he was never witnessed or properly described by man always used a mediator of some sorts. This is so humans never affect him and he can then never be weakened, demonified or affected by humans.

Where can I find an archangel?

You ask him about lignments. He never once says God is bad in Law either. He says the angels are untrustworthy.

Divines cannot be recruited

Where can I get Demonica

>complaining about Zelenin
>when being on chaos requires you to fight Gore

Literally the biggest reason I went neutral, just so I wouldn't have to do that piece of shit fight.

Would anyone be willing to make an Apocalypse FAQ for the OP?
>How do I beat King Frost
>How do I find (demon)?
>Where do I get the Black Card
>What apps should I get?
And other questions people keep asking.

Keep in mind that the same entity has to be in both roles. If this god exists in a polytheistic world, yet is so arrogant that he claims to be the one true god, these negative personality traits may come out in his relationship with humans as well. Megaten already depicts many gods as struggling to see humans as not inferior or little more than tools. So if there was a god of gods in this world who even saw other gods that way, it follows that they may see regular humans even lower.

Keeping in mind yhvh as an imperfect being in this world, a lot of christian content would be interpreted in a negative light. For instance, the self depreciating idea that no one deserves salvatio, but they get it only be grace. This isn't present in other religions. And if it was a mere polytheistic god teaching humans this, it would be very obviously seen as coming from a place of arrogance. "You are all shit and had better be gracious that I am not punishing all of you." To someone outside of a religion that teaches that, its hard to spin it in a positive light.

Likewise, remember the old testament. YHVH isn't an abstract monotheistic good god concept. He's first and foremost all the biblical lore. And the truth is its functionally impossible to spin some of the worse old testament things as justified. They were written like he was merely a raging god who fucked over other people for the jews, but also would hurt them if he thought they weren't faithful enough since that's actually what the jews saw him as at the time. Since they weren't advanced enough to realize that that's shitty yet. If you read him as a polytheistic god, the story seems to be him being an asshole one who later got enough power to trash others directly. If you believe like some protestants do that salvation is by faith it means that his primary goal isn't even to get people to improve the world, but simply to ensure that enough people are worshiping him.

cont...

Same place as last time

I don't remember Gore coming with an insta-kill attack that said "expel resistance? lol what's that".

All of this seems super negative and like it is the actions of an evil god to people outside of the religion who aren't pre-assuming that it is all justified.

That being said, they are sympathetic. Not to yhvh, but to jesus. The good actions of Jesus in the new testament aren't read into the figure of yhvh since even the bible doesn't claim he is the one doing them. Not only that, the bible writers didn't even think Jesus and YHVH were the same entity other than john. So insisting that him being so is absolute was later christian content. So for someone trying to turn this into a fictional story, it looks like yhvh is the asshole, who simply pushed other people around to gain power due to his ego, but jesus was a nicer person who arose and tried to fix the worst parts of the system. That's what the law ending of II i sarcastically showing. Some very slight sympathy to christianity, while also saying that old judaism is simply not something you can spin as positive. And that Jesus was really a break from it that people tried to spin as a continuation. The disconnect between these figures obviously being even stronger when the story is viewed in a polytheistic lens. Note that even people at the TIME realized this. Gnosticism and other attempts to spin yhvh as the devil figure existed shortly after christianity was founded. So none of that is even new. The plot is also using gnostic lore, especially since from their own lens its not easy to see yhvh as good. Buddhas in contrast are rarely directly responsible for much that is directly bad.

Not only that, but even in the new testament, god is depicted in negative ways. In revalations, god himself is depicted as arbitrarily letting demons out to harm humanity as a weird act of judgement. And then sentencing people to an eternal hell (debatable). Read into all of these events through a non monotheistic lens. The entire thing sounds much more like an evil entity than a good one.

>tfw gay crush on hallelujah

Also, in the old testament whenever people describe him metaphorically they call it seeing the face of god. That's the closest to a physical description there is.

Who gets Resist Fire in Apocalypse? For whatever reason that's the one element I don't have a way to cover right now, and some of the best demons in the mid 30s (like Nymph) are weak to just Fire.

Are these dlc notes anywhere online?

I thought that Mem Aleph was harder than Gore or Zelenin.

>Nymph

Er, Undine, not Nymph.

So why I can't I just tell my friends to fuck off if they don't want to join my new universe of blackjack and hookers again?

>tfw want to bring him with me on massacre, but without good reason I would never betray someone I've known for years in favor of someone I've known for like two weeks and who hasn't even seriously talked to me much in that time.

The suffering is real. But if I'm god, in theory I can work to find individual souls, and try to reincarnate them similar to their original form anyways, right? Why can't dagda accept that I want more than one person? Its not like I'm not going to fuck flynn too anyways.

Update featuring a new harem route with Asahi and Hallelujah?

>No Toki
Why?

Because toki is cancer.