Spoilers: Rambling thoughts on Shin Megami Tensei IV

[sundin13]

Well written good sir. That was a brilliant read and it sums up my feelings quite well (although with a little less severity on my side). I really liked that the game gave you three choices, with both the extremes being "bad end" and the neutral path being "good", despite the immediate assumption that order=good.

However, this becomes a problem if you are someone like me who power games everything to a fault. For a large part of my playthrough, whenever a decision came up I would think "okay, I probably need x amount of points in chaos/order to become neutral again" and make my choice accordingly, sometimes against what I personally would do. Additionally, if I recall correctly, there were times when I wished there was a neutral option as both options seemed like they sucked.

This whole things was too transparent and it makes me wish that I was a spectator in the world instead of a key player. However, that sentiment goes against the strength of video games and leaves me at a loss for how to solve this problem. They already did right by making the morality bar invisible, but I suppose the problem was that even though the bar was invisible, the choices were still transparent. Better writing would likely get you past that (although I can't guarantee that I wouldn't just cheat my way through it anyways).

Even still, your opinions on the neutral path are interesting. I went in knowing that it would add 10 hours of fluff to my playthrough and because of that, I wanted to get neutral even more. While some of the quests were frustrating, I still found that my time spent in the world was quite fun and the payoff of the good ending was worth it to me.

Overall, I think that the problems with the game are present in a lot of games, and morality in games is something we really need to talk about as an industry. Systems like in Mass Effect are quite frankly terrible, and while I think SMTIV takes one step towards the right path, it still stumbles and falls into the same pitfalls. Additionally, SMTIV brings up a lot of problems I have with my own playstyle, which constantly limits my immersion in games. I'm not sure if that is my fault as a player for making decisions based on what would benefit me most in game, or the game's fault for not pulling me in enough to make a choice based on who I want the character to be, but I would love for a game to rip me away from my habits and give "different endings" instead of "good/bad" endings.

Paper's Please is one game that did that and I love it for it. It was able to get me invested enough in the game to not know how I should react with every choice, and it made each choice feel real and organic instead of phony and binary.

And finally..."Comething"....great typo