Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey

Boasting the series tried and true formula of demon hunting and an engaging combat system, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is an excellent dungeon-crawling RPG that successfully builds an oppressive, pessimistic atmosphere while telling a story about humanity’s suicidal greed.

The story is set at the end of the 21st century. Humanity amounts to 7 billion souls and social conflict has been escalating while the planet suffers. There’s war in Eastern Europe, an economic crisis in South America (rampant inflation has led people to raid malls), and the most powerful nations just stand by, accumulating wealth. To make matters worse, a space anomaly appears suddenly at the South Pole one day, releasing demons onto the world: called Schwarzwelt, this anomaly seems to be growing by the day and so a military excursion is sent there to investigate.

The Schwarzwelt is described as a natural phenomenon that is bound to destroy human civilization, as it’s absorbing its surroundings while it grows. Characters refer to it not as a natural disaster, however, but as Earth’s defense system: it’s not a random phenomenon, but a corrective measure.

The origin of the Schwarzwelt, the reason why it came to being, is at the heart of Strange Journey’s narrative. Characters constantly debate over how it’s supposedly a response to humanity’s greed, a way for the planet to defend itself from a civilization that’s laying waste to its surroundings. The game opens with war, social inequality, and the complacency of the rich to get specific about the type of behavior that is being punished. Humans are painted as destructive beings and their will to live is treated as more of an annoying obstacle – much like the resilience of a cockroach – than a virtue.

The protagonist – a silent one – is a man that you can only change the name. He’s part of the expedition sent to the anomaly in the South Pole and his mission is to investigate the place and discover a way to make it disappear. Of course, their plans go awry pretty quickly and they get stranded inside it: they discover that the Schwarzwelt is a demon-infested land, formed by several planes of existence that mirror humanity’s errors.

One of these realms is a war-torn battlefield, reflecting humanity’s propensity to solve their problems with violence: it’s a ravaged place, with burning buildings and rubble everywhere. Another realm is a shopping mall – members of the expedition are quick to mention their consumerism habits – and there’s one that is littered with garbage.

The demons that populate these places are all responding to humanity’s doings in some way or another. This is a Shin Megami Tensei game, which means that the protagonist’s party is composed of the demons he is able to befriend in the field of battle: before offering money and items, or making a display of power, the player must convince them that they share the same ideology. This part is crucial to these negotiations, as the demons often mention the damage humans have done to Earth, condemning it and asking the protagonist – us – how one can proceed from then on. Some seek to punish, others to rebuild, and some offer only resignation.

These demons are fascinated with humans. If their actions seem condemnable, it’s because they are meant to reflect humanity’s mistakes. A genocidal demon, for example, says to the protagonist, “We need only mimic you to slaughter humans on a grand scale.” In other words, if they kill, imprison and murder humans, it’s only because we already do this to ourselves. In Strange Journey, the demons function as a dark mirror that reflects humanity’s worse traits, exposing to the members of the expedition that what motivates the Schwarzwelt is not evil, but natural retribution: the planet is defending itself. As an angel explains, “The actions of the demons mirror the actions of humans.”

It’s a staple in the Shin Megami Tensei series to offer three paths – Law, Neutral, and Chaos – to reach an ending. Law, represented by God and his angels, is usually related to order and oppression – a tyrannical government. Chaos, supported by Lucifer and his demons, is related to the law of the jungle – a meritocratic society where the strong eat the weak. The neutral path stands in the middle ground, trying to offer a compromise that gives power to humanity.

Strange Journey differs from the other Shin Megami Tensei games in the sense that the ideologies behind these paths don’t matter too much. What matters is that, here, they are all solutions to the same problem: humanity turned into a suicidal society that’s consuming the planet just so that a selected few can live like monarchs. Even the neutral path is pessimistic, deeming that even if the protagonist is successful at destroying this Schwarzwelt another one will not take long to appear. The problem that the protagonist faces, then, is that his mission is just a palliative solution, missing the cause of the destruction.

As this is a horror story, the incursion into the Schwarzwelt doesn’t go as planned and quickly derails. They become stranded in this foreign land that rightfully deems them monsters, being attacked by unknown assailants from all sides. Rescue missions go awry, leadership becomes scattered. Soldiers start to panic and think only about their own lives. The narrative is structured around these rising problems, giving a sense of urgency to the proceedings: there’s always something going wrong somewhere, there’s always a tragedy about to happen.

In the protagonist’s crew, Jimenez is the first character to stand out. He wants to escape that hellish place, but then return later with more resources. He believes that they are on a suicide mission, with no means to succeed or survive. His polar opposite is Zelenin, a woman who got captured by demons when she arrived at the Schwarzwelt – she had to watch her colleagues being slaughtered – and so resents using them in battle. She’s more cool-headed, always trying to maintain everyone’s spirits under control and offer a more honorable course of action.

Jimenez befriends a demon called Bugaboo, whose faithful and innocent personality gives off dog-like vibes that are supposed to make us root and care for him. But Jimenez is also constantly quarreling with the rest of the crew, displaying an alarming lack of tact and sometimes even empathy toward others: he cares about his interests first and foremost. Zelenin, meanwhile, detests demons because of her traumatic experience in the Schwarzwelt. This makes her a ripe candidate for being indoctrinated by the angels, whose binary discourse of good against evil favors and justifies the hatred she feels. And it’s just fitting that the character that represents the “Neutral path” mirrors its themes of death and rebirth of humanity.

Strange Journey is a first-person dungeon-crawling RPG. This means that each realm of the Schwarzwelt is a complicated labyrinth full of traps, dead ends, and monsters – that appear in random encounters. On the bottom screen of the DS/3DS, the map of these dungeons fills in automatically as we explore their many corridors and halls. Usually, each realm has a specific gimmick, such as tiles on the floor that deal damage to whoever passes through them, pitfalls that send the protagonist to the bottom floor, and even teleports that send him to specific places on the map. To make exploration a key factor in the game, important upgrades are scattered throughout the dungeons, allowing the protagonist to spot hidden doors or be able to see in dark corridors.

The game uses a turn-based battle system where the protagonist is always the leader of the party, which is composed of three demons fighting beside him. The protagonist is more of a supporting character in battle, as he doesn’t learn many skills – they are tied to his equipment – and is usually the only one that can summon new demons if one falls in battle or use items to assist the others.

The main gimmick here is how alignment impacts the battles: when a demon hits an elemental weakness of the other demon, they inflict more damage, and everyone that is of the same alignment – Law, Chaos, or Neutral – attacks together immediately, dealing unblockable damage. Since it’s advised for the demons to be of the same alignment as the protagonist – to maximize damage – the path the player wants to take in the story directly impacts the team of demons they must build: a player following the Law path will have a party mostly composed of angels, for example, which is fitting.

Strange Journey is not an easy game by any means – Dungeon Crawlers seldom are –, which leads us to carefully consider what demons to use and what skills they possess. Status effects such as paralyze, sleep, and poison are a bit one-sided – bosses are mostly immune to them, but our party is not – but buffs and debuffs are essential for both sides in battle: it’s imperative to use them against bosses, for example, whose enormous power, if left unchecked, can devastate our party with just one attack.

Redux Edition:

On the 3DS, Strange Journey comes in the Redux Edition, which adds a lot of quality-of-life features, such as the ability to save anywhere and equip more apps (which serve as additional skills), besides two optional dungeons – the first one being enormous – and a new ending for each path, if we complete those dungeons.

Unlike Radiant Historia, where the additional content only served to pad the game’s runtime and destroy its melancholic atmosphere – it ensured that everyone would have a happy ending – Redux’s additions are a bit more balanced and rarely deviate from the original experience.

The big optional dungeon is called Womb of Grief. Just like the Schwarzwelt, it has many layers and floors, and their difficulty increases as the player ventures deep down, so to encourage them to complete it in parts as they progress in the main story. On the one hand, the Womb of Grief offers the same kind of challenges as the main dungeons, being built around the same traps and devices, which means it can be seen as a filler. On the other hand, the items we can get by exploring it make the traversal of the original dungeons less of a pain: one of them can reveal in the map where the teleports are going to send the protagonist, for example, which makes the layout of the later labyrinths less disorienting. In other words, the time we spend in the Womb of Grief, we gain back in the main story.

By the same token, if the protagonist can get a bit overleveled after the many battles of the Womb of Grief, making the random encounters in the main game a breeze, we can also acquire an app that makes random encounters with underleveled demons disappear, so we do not waste time battling them again. Also, there’s no more griding to defeat the final bosses, which here pose less of a roadblock since the protagonist can manage to get stronger by organically exploring the Womb of Grief.

Story-wise, the ending – at least on the Neutral path – doesn’t negate the themes and tone of the original story, but builds upon them. In the Neutral path, for instance, the ending leans more heavily on Christian symbolism than the original, but its take on humankind’s nature stays the same.

Shing Megami Tensei: Strange Journey offers a memorable and thought-provoking horror story about humanity’s more destructive tendencies and a competent – if not revolutionary – dungeon crawling experience.

September 10, 2022.