Shin Megami Tensei IV is a fascinating piece of work. It's this hungry revival of a series that had since been eclipsed by one of its spinoffs, going full force at the game-playing public with a fresh art direction and musical score as well as story focus on one of the fastest-growing platforms at the market at that point. Hilariously, it's a game that's also just brutally antagonistic for the beginning stretch, only giving you a single town to explore (only through menus) and a brutal first dungeon that you'll have to dive into several times, to the point of planning out "runs" of it to grind a little bit before you get killed and lose progress or too many items.

In 2013, I was one of those fresh-faced players looking to get into a new JRPG with a different aesthetic sensibility than most out there, and was greeted with just an absolutely discouraging dick-smashing in those first hours. It's hilarious, honestly, but it's something that made me drop the game and not look back for a very long time. Now I've played the entire mainline series up to this point and gained a most valuable thing... Context. And within that context... this game's really fuckin weird! and cool!

This thing is so blatantly different than the other games in the series while also paying loving tribute that I feel like even if I ended up hating it, I'd have a really hard time NOT respecting it. The cast of characters in this one are super colorful and fun by SMT standards, and probably still "bland" for Most Other JRPG standards, which is an interesting balance to strike. The story in turn is also a lot more lively and twisty than its predecessors with much more defined Moments and Setpieces than really sparse stuff like Nocturne or Strange Journey. Apparently the scenario was originally drafted by Kazuma Kaneko himself, so maybe the series was always going to go in this direction.

Speaking of Kaneko, while we get a good handful of his classic demon designs, the character design is by Masayuki Doi here. I know Doi is real divisive around these parts but honestly I really like his stuff and think it fits the game beautifully, and if some of the new work in SMTV is anything to go off of, it seems like he's truly coming into his own as of late as a successor to Kaneko. There's also outrageously good demon and angel designs by tokusatsu designers, which you KNOW is my fucking shit. They even got the GOAT Keita Amemiya on this joint. Another changing of hands here is series music composer Shoji Meguro to Ryota Kozuka, and uh... this might be a hot fuckin take but I think Kozuka is a straight up upgrade here. The music in SMTIV is by far and away one of its strongest assets, and will probably go down as one of my favorite video game scores in general. The more classic nods to visual-kei style glam metal from the early entries work really well here too. Kozuka's gonna be a legend going forward.

Going into this game with much needed context for not just SMT but JRPGs in general, I thought I'd be prepared for that beginning difficulty cliff, but honestly it's still pretty damn hard! More manageable, but still hard. Once you hit Tokyo the difficulty definitely levels out a lot more and I'd even say by the end the game starts pouring so much EXP on you that it's kind of impossible to not feel powerful. Really interesting difficulty curve but honestly one that I don't think is bad... I think it kinda fits? Maybe I should chew on that one a bit more. Quite possibly the biggest contributor to this game's early Fuck You difficulty is the smirk system, which is probably the thing I feel the most negative about. I honestly don't think it adds much! It's a Fuck You on top of a Fuck You in the extra/lost turns in the excellent Press Turn system, just adding to this weird dynamic of "Cool When I Do It, Cheap When They Do" that I'm not a big fan of. Feels like slathering a piece of wagyu beef in ketchup. Like sure it tastes, good but who needs that shit!! I don't feel like I'm exactly being a purist here, I think there are definitely things you could add to Press Turn to enrich it and make it even better than Nocturne, it's just Atlus hasn't found that extra spice yet.

Shin Megami Tensei IV feels like at the same time an advancement of the sheer horror and isolation of Nocturne and Strange Journey while also being the bustling cyberpunk apocalypse of the original two games on Super Famicom. In another sense, it kind of feels like a sendoff to that style. Here we have the starkest, most interesting permutation to date of those original ideas of conflict between orders of law and chaos, and the refutation of both flavors of fascism, to make way for an era of unity, an era of care. At it's best, Shin Megami Tensei IV is a beautiful, horrific game (I will remember the debut of those Amemiya angels forever), and at its worst just a little too video gamey for my personal taste when it comes to this series with its final Neutral questline. While I'd love to see another Swords, Guns, and Computer Gloves SMT, I think this game (and uh, I guess its sequel? I'll get to that some other time) is a fine enough place to leave that for the time being as Atlus barks up that sacred Nocturne tree once more, with feeling. Shin Megami Tensei's New Class is here, and this game is a mission statement. They're gonna give it all they got. And they're gonna make you give it your best too.