The Shin Megami Tensei Franchise and Tabletop RPG

Something I've been wondering now that I've gone on a serious Shin Megami Tensei binge is: why don't we see people in the tabletop RPG circles talk of that franchise? Especially around the OSR this is a bit puzzling as there is a lot in the Shin Megami Tensei that can be ported wholesale or used as inspiration. However it hit me that its very likely a sizable chunk of the OSR blogosphere is a bit too old to have gotten into that franchise. While it is an old JRPG franchise it has only (officially) made its way in the western world in the past decade or so which would explain why grognards who haven't touched a console since the SNES era wouldn't know of it. Which is unfortunate.

The cover to the original game for the
Famicom (NES)

Shin Mega-what?

Now maybe I'm wrong and short-sighted to assume people don't know about it. But my gut tells me that, with its niche status in an already increasingly niche market (classic-styled JRPG aren't really found among AAA productions who tend to favor action-RPG or games-with-RPG-elements) and its rather underground status until relatively recently.

The Shin Megami Tensei franchise is a series of vaguely-connected Japanese RPG produced by Atlus, with the first game in the series, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, being released in 1987. That game was based off a Japanese Cyberpunk/Fantasy novel called Digital Devil Story by Aya Nishitani. There was a direct sequel, a spinoff and a remake/re imagining and these games formed the core of the franchise's identity as a whole. Where (most) JRPG of the time focused on fantasy worlds, Megami Tensei focused on the then-present and near-future, blending science fiction and urban fantasy.

One look at the plot and setting and you can immediately tell why these games never made it to the United States in the 1980: focused on demon summoning, the occult and post apocalyptic themes it was just way too saucy and controversial for the Western World. The fact that God is a recurring antagonist in those games and Satan is sometimes on your side didn't help. With its strong occult themes, darker and more mature themes and tackling of religious and philosophical matters this was just a game that was never going to get  chance outside of Japan. No one wanted to touch and with good reasons.

This is God/YHVH and HE is (usually)
not your friend.

The SMT franchise is also a bit of a predecessor and ancestor to the Pokémon games, as a central game concept is the summoning of Demons to serve you. These demons have a variety of trait, skills, elemental weaknesses and resistances. They can be recruited to your cause by talking to them in combat and negotiating. Demons don't level up as fast your human character(s) and as such must be fused together, sacrificing both of them but creating a new and more powerful demon who can inherit the skills of the demons sacrificed in the fusion. The exact details and mechanics of this has changed a lot over the years.

This is a sprawling franchise and talking about each individual game is impossible but I'll try to give quick descriptions of (some of) those legally available in English for those interested:

• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne: The first mainline SMT available outside of Japan and forever made infamous for featuring Dante from Devil May Cry! The world end, creating a nightmarish post apocalyptic world full of demons. Your character is transformed into a half-Demon and left to puzzle out wtf is going on. The game is fairly low on dialogue and very harsh, creating this foreboding sense of utter loneliness and isolation.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: A game which should have been the fourth game in the franchise but was eventually called a spinoff. SMT:SJ draws inspiration from American action and horror movies with the classic SMT formula. You play a marine sent to Antarctica  as part of a team hoping to reverse an anomaly which will end the world.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: After years of spinoffs, SMT IV is released for the Nintendo 3DS. Unlike the other games it take place in a (mostly) peaceful, pastoral medieval-ish world and....yeah obviously ten minutes in you'll notice a suspiciously high amount of technology around indicating things are not what they seem.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse: A spinoff/side-story/alternate telling of SMT IV.
• Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner 1 and 2: These games are a duology meant to be two games played back to back. More post apocalyptic weirdness which is hard to explain without spoiling quite a bit. This one has no recruitable demons and focus on your party members more like a classical JRPG.
• Devil Summoners: Soul Hackers: You play as a hacker in a near-future (for the '90, anyway) city. This is by far one of the oldest and most 'retro' of the legally-available SMT titles as it is a remake of a 1997 Sega Saturn game for the 3DS.

Those who are already aware of this franchise history know I'm leaving out a very, very famous and popular spinoff series. One which has become so popular it has eclipsed the mainline series all around the world. A series which needs no introduction to anyone vaguely into JRPG and/or anime: Persona. The Persona series is an SMT spinoff but it has become so different in style, tone and concepts that it isn't covered by this basic guide.

Gameable Material

There is a lot to take from the SMT franchise, so here's a few key points I would definitely take note of and make sure to include if I was to run an SMT-inspired game:

• Law vs Chaos (and Neutral) Alignment: With so many cues from tabletop RPG, it is no surprise that SMT features an alignment system in most games which can vary from an actual game mechanic to simply which side you choose which affect your ending and maybe final boss encounter. Law is usually associated with YHVH while Chaos is associated with Satan. The Neutral routes range from anything between balance-of-both-sides to the main character giving the middle finger to both sides and siding with humanity. If one like their Moorcockian-ish cosmic struggle, then the SMT alignment should be appealing.
• Its a monster mash: In SMT, just about every creature from myth and pop culture exist, implied to possibly be made manifest and born from the human psyche. Its the kind of world where Oni, ghosts, angels, Cthulhu and Thor can meet. And most likely fight, too.
• The Setting(s): From modern day Tokyo with demons to the future to the past to post-apocalyptic cybernetic hellscapes the SMT settings are always interesting, especially the post-apoc ones. Good for sandboxing and exploration.
• Reaction Tables and Talking: An SMT-inspired game would definitely benefit from a reaction table, as some demons are more likely to want to have a chat with you while others will want to rip your face off. Sometimes it is a matter of alignment (yours and the demon) and sometimes it depend on other factors. Demon negotiation make for a valid random encounter, as not every encounter is combat-related: some demons will want or give info as well as items. Of course, if something goes poorly then the fight is one.
• Its Hard: The older the SMT the harder it gets. These games have punishing combat and, infamously, quite a bit of Save-or-Die type spells.

Terrible weaboo ideas to combine with (some) older RPG elements

Here is something that would rattle some people the wrong way. Fortunately almost nobody read this accursed blog. In any case, here are some flat out terrible (or hilarious/great, depending how you see it) 'weaboo' ideas to combine with one more more play styles or ideas found in older RPG and moder retroclones. The freak flag is flying high and the shameless weaboo reveal his power level!

This is a post sure to catch shit but consider it a synthesis of the things my players like and my attempt to learn from all the various retroclones and the play style of older games. A marriage between the grognard's ways and the crappy taste of the millennial generation, perhaps?

Probably what people who don't know anime think
it look like, or something...

Idea 1: Isekai

Oh Isekai. The most overused and mocked genre in anime nowadays, perhaps with some valid reasons. Now for the non-initiated, isekai is weeb-speech for 'transported to another world' type of stores, meaning technically Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz and John Carter are all isekai. Once upon a time this genre was just one among many, producing many good shows such as 'Now and Then, Here and There' or the first season of Digimon.  It's hard to deny there is a simplistic appeal to these kind of show.

And then Light Novel and Sword Art Online happened.

Sword Art Online pretty much set the standard for what Isekai would be seen as in the 2010: cheap, poorly written, terribly thought out power fantasy self-insert with bland characters and crappy harem meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Gone are the unique fantastical worlds of old replaced with cheap ass MMORPG....written by a man who never played a video game in his life. No, really, the creator of Sword Art Online does not play video games let alone MMORPG. Yet somehow this vacuous trash is seen as one of the big anime sensations of the decade.

How to use Isekai for a game:

There are a few ways one could use Isekai: after all the core premise is extremely simple but lend itself well to a tabletop campaign. One funny trick with isekai is that you could very hide the game is an isekai. If you play with people with people who are pretty weaboo-ish themselves (I doubt people in the OSR blogosphere do since most are over thirty or forty, I bet and so don't play with people in the 20 to 25 year old range) you could very much pretend you're running a very different kind of game and then BAM! Trapped in another world.  That said, a few more considerations:

• Of course, does Isekai itself need to be stuck with the trappings of anime? The answer is obviously no: the core concept itself predate anime and, in fact, one could argue modern anime are very much a case study on how NOT to run a trapped-in-another-world type of game.
• One could very much use a pre-existing setting of their choice, preferably a suitably exotic and fantastical one and bring in character from the modern world. Depending on the level of difficulty you'd want to throw at the players, it could be very well possible that these characters are dropped into a fantasy world with no money, no readily available weapons, unable to speak the local languages and possibly even not looking like the local inhabitants. This could make for a very harsh survival-centered game.
• That said the MMORPG idea has a few interesting concepts grossly underused in these kind of shows. Namely the realities of how MMORPG even works, even assuming the one the players are trapped into allow enough outside-the-box thinking to not make the game crappy. Basically, trapping a bunch of teen, young adults or even lifeless older neckbeards inside a virtual world is a sure recipe for the darkest kind of setting you can imagine once the PVP is turned on and the swear filter is turned off. Like Lord of the Flies but inside an MMO.
• Trapped in/transported to another world stories don't need to be fantasy. Again, John Carter and the stories set on Barsoom are a good example which predate anime by several decades.
• Alternatively, for more politically-driven game one could do the cliche of revealing the transported characters are actually royalty from the fantasy world. Now granted this one is less suited to games with high risk of death. Of course this could open an interesting angle: what happen when the Chosen Ones just....die? Can their once-sidekicks now step in to save the say and defy the odds?

Ultimately, I'd say isekai is prime sandbox material and the concept itself is quite divorced from anime. It just so happen that anime is the medium where these type of stories are more likely to be told nowadays. The concept is flexible to any level of serious one wish to have for their game, from having teenagers running around in a fantasy world with anime shenanigans to a much more serious survival story where average adults are thrown into another world with possibly no change of returning.

Hell yeah.

Idea 2: Mecha

Giant fucking robots. What else is there to say? Sadly, when it come to tabletop RPG I've found the genre to be criminally underused and I have written a previous post about my ongoing mecha exploration/pointcrawl/survival game here so this section will have much less explanations. This game is how I introduced my players to some new concepts like XP-for-gold. Except it's not gold, it's the resources they need to manage to keep their spaceship and mechs running. Pretty much most of what I had to say on the matter and the core ideas are in that previous post.

How to use Mecha for a game:

Much like fantasy, mecha shows and movies are a pretty varied lot, ranging from the harder scifi and military drama to kids in giant colorful toys whacking giant monsters with a pretty wide spectrum in between those extremes and some sub-genres some of which aren't even clear cut. Hell there's even fantasy mecha series. While mecha is often associated with giant laser sword, drills and two dozen robot combining as a genre it can be played with a rather straight face as long as the mechs are treated more as military machines with arms and legs. The actual plausibility of the mech's abilities is less important than how the setting and characters treat it: is a war machine or basically a giant superhero suit?

• Perhaps the players play a bunch of mercenaries in a war-torn planet or solar system: this very much allow to play things more like exploration mixed with combat and, at higher levels they build/conquer their own domain and it move more toward management.
• Alternatively as outlined in my earlier post, it's an exploration game except it is centered on mechs and giants monsters rather than armored faux-medieval adventurers and monsters. Surprisingly little of what they do in the game change but what tools they use and the overall setting is greatly affected.

Lessons from Hirohiko Araki and Akira Toriyama's work

This is more a post about 'style' and I suppose won't be of use to anyone. Oh well, whatever.

Growing up, the first manga (nay, comic even) I ever read was Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama. There's not really any need to introduce this one given how famous it is, both for good and for ill? Who can forget all the jokes and ridicule thrown at it, after all? Still, I do think the manga itself hold up way better today than it's critics say it does however this isn't as important as the key lessons in creating a world and, yes, a story (I know the 's-word' is taboo on those kind of blogs!). The thing to keep in mind here is that Akira Toriyama is a very unpretentious and simple man and Dragon Ball reflect this: it combine high action, comedy and a lot of weird things which when even loosely analyzed reveal a world and story that both know it is completely silly but also, at the very same time, does not treat itself as a complete joke. The things inside that universe, be it the coexistence of magic and science fiction elements or even talking shape shifting pigs are treated as completely normal and in no way unusual. There is very little of this hipstery 'self aware' mindset of stopping and pointing out "Isn't this silly? Look at how ridiculous this is!".

Son Goku goes from being a super strong monkey boy who does martial arts collecting mystical artifacts to fighting an army to a demon lord (who is revealed later to be an alien slug-man) to the alien emperor of the known universe to a biomechanical monster partially made from his DNA and that of his former foes/rivals to a pink man child blob monster. That's gonzo as all hell but it (mostly) accept it. The disturbing thing, in all this, is that at no point do any of these elements really feel tacked on...but neither do they really seem all that explained by complex and serious world building.

Our heroes. Well, initially anyway.

However, as crazy as Dragon Ball could get at times it remained (and still is) a very predictable and stable manga. It has certain patterns you learn to expect. Even the author, at times, felt almost like a slave to the serie's own pattern and popularity of the main character. On the opposite end of the spectrum yet very similar Jojo's Bizarre Adventure by Hirohiko Araki. Up until the popularity boom via the 2012 anime, it was one of those highly influential works which had never really managed to catch on outside of Japan for the most part and had remained stuck as a cult classic in spite of being one of the most unique manga out there.

Both Dragon Ball and Jojo are very similar but also complete opposites in many regards. These two works are primarily known for a certain focus on over the top action, both are in the same manga demographic (shonen), both are highly influential and important to the overall history of the medium and both are really freaking weird to the point where even trying to explain or recap Jojo as a whole would make it sound like I've just had a really bad fever dream. So instead, Jojo will only get expanded upon when needed.

JJBA: One of the greatest manga of all time. Also known as
'internet cancer' nowadays.

Lesson One: Let Yourself Be Inspired By Passions

Both these series would hardly be as unique as they are (or were, anyway) without their respective authors allowing themselves to be shaped by their own passions and personal tastes often in complete and utter defiance of trends. What's important here is that these men both allowed their personal tastes and passions color their works and paint a rich tapestry of crazy ideas with a near-endless font of inspiration, especially for Araki. His love of American movies, classic rock, greek art and travel. Akira Toriyama's dislike of land sharks (and maybe his then-current editor) combined with all his childhood fears manifested and coalesced into Freeza, the most enduring and famous villain of Dragon Ball.

Lesson Two: Keep Shaking Things Up

Dragon Ball can be pretty repetitive (more on that in a bit) but each chunk of the story is defined by it's villain (hence why we tend to call arcs after the villain of said arc) and each villain bring a new personality to the table to some extent, not to mention in setting. King Piccolo is a monster out of the myths of the Dragon Ball Earth and also, in retrospect, bring with him the end of Goku's childhood in more ways than one as he sets up the reveal of the existence of aliens, we just don't know it yet. The Saiyans and Freeza expand the setting and world while the Androids and Cell return the action to Earth while also bringing in science fiction concepts like cyborgs and time travel. Buu (and later Beerus) return the serie to a mixture of humour and mysticism. No villain and his arc is ever quite the same, either building on a previous arc or radically shifting things.

When Araki killed his protagonist, Johnathan Joestar, people were apparently shocked. Shonen heroes aren't supposed to die. However, in killing his protagonist and moving the story further in time, switching the focus to the now-dead protagonist's grandson he created one of the key elements of the Jojo serie and what makes it so unique. Every new 'part' has it's own main character, it's own cast (with some returning characters, sometimes) and it's own style. In doing so Araki keep trying out new styles, new ideas, new genres all the while refining what works in his style while learning what does not.

Lesson Three: Power Escalation Is Bad

Dragon Ball and Jojo are radically different, however, in how they handle power and scaling the scope of the story. With Dragon Ball, things are ALWAYS bigger: the villain is always stronger, always a bigger threat and the heroes simply need to power up more than him, either through training or plot contrivance. In a way it is no different than a bad game of D&D where everyone munchkin and min max to no end and the DM always has to compensate by bloating the numbers even more. There isn't much variety, only bigger numbers.

On the other hand, Jojo's strongest villain appears in Part 2. Out of a staggering EIGHT PARTS! Early on, Araki realized that he had already peaked (and peak way too early!) when it come to the physical power of his villain, not to mention how much the villain was a threat. The final villain of Part 2, the big final boss at the end, is simply put the most powerful one of the entire aerie barring maybe some situations or exceptions and this is where the genius of Araki come in and how he designed the power set which would dominate from Part 3 onward: Stands. While I'm not going to go too much into the form and function of Stands the important thing here is that each Stand has a certain level of strength/speed/durability/range as well as a single and unique power. Thus, it become less about who can power-grind to get a stronger Stand and rather about the creativity in using one's Stand and the interactions between their powers. In doing so, raw power remain dangerous but its hardly the be all end all of action sequences. Yes, obviously in an RPG you'd want players to become stronger (and that is fun) but raw overall power should not be the pure benchmark of utility compared to creativity and the ability to use the tools at one's disposal.