#Shin Megami Tensei 4

[shindynegarden]

Day 12 - Companion

[yarrayora]

hire a trustworthy local to ensure you won't get fucked over by ashura-kai when selling relics and also teach you gun maintenance

[navarresimp]

Save me Agi

[smugcomputer]

persona 2 and mainline shin megami tensei charms are now available for preorder ^^ limited characters at this time but if they do well i may add more characters & games (i want to draw aleph!!). purchase HERE or HERE - at the time of writing (dec 2024) this batch of preorders will be sent out in jan-feb 2025.

[strangersyndrome]

rkgk

[house-of-muses-gallery]

Longinus

D&D NPC - Shin Megami Tensei: Eclipse

[seealandraw]

i was gonna try to redraw some of the keyframes from smt iv last year but i only got this one done... i still like it!

[yeenthebin]

forgot i had this drawing of isabeau

[clawsou]

It’s Agi time.

[vgtrackbracket]

Video Game Track Bracket Round 2

Snake Eater from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

vs.

Kiccigiorgi Forest from Shin Megami Tensei IV

Propaganda under the cut. If you want your propaganda reblogged and added to future polls, please tag it as propaganda or otherwise indicate this!

Snake Eater:

Gotta be one of the most iconic (and best) songs in the mgs franchise. Vocals and instrumental are both so powerful and tell the general plot of mgs3 through Snake's perspective. Also pretty touching because the lyrics are about the strong feelings he has towards his boss and you don't get to see such a tender side from Snake too much. Incredible song from an incredible game

What a thrill…

Kiccigiorgi Forest:

The unsettling nature as your first dungeon is your home, corrupted and destroyed by your old friends turning into demons. Howls of pain accent this track

[cake-apostate]

An idea I think would be fun is that centuries after the events of SMT4, Blasted and Infernal Tokyo both become evil empires. They idolized their version of King Akira, and took their stated ideologies to the limits with neither nuance nor restraint.

That's not to say that either Akira did a bad job; they did what was necessary at the time to save their people from disaster. It's just that if you took their actions without knowing that context, they would look incredibly evil.

So I think that their kingdoms would become evil empires if their future rulers continued their policies well beyond the states of emergency that spawned them.

Infernal Tokyo

Infernal Akira would seem like a cartoonishly evil overlord if you didn't know where he was coming from. Under his rule, humans are cattle to be eaten and bred, demons run a kind of protection racket, and he calls this equality. He even killed the previous king! And given that he's a coward and a weakling at the top of a society that values strength above all else, he'd seem a massive hypocrite.

Except most of the problems with Infernal Tokyo aren't his fault. Kenji was the one to start the demonoid/neurisher system; the worst you can say about Akira is that he didn't abolish it. And he couldn't. The obviously good step of freeing the neurishers would be disastrous; either the demonoids comply and starve, or they'd rebel openly, which would leave Akira powerless and the neurishers right where they started.

Akira found and enforced the minimum level of cruelty required for his current society to function. To many outsiders, that level is shockingly evil, but he's loved in his time because it's so much lighter than before.

Future generations would idolize King Akira, not unjustly, but it's easy for them to miss the point. He didn't draft a blueprint for some ideal society; he wrote laws and regulations to deal with the current disasters plaguing his city. Let's look at the specific orders he gave, and how future generations can screw them up.

Every district takes a census, and if they need Neurishers, more are sent there. That is how he ended both famine and war; districts fought over and hoarded Neurishers until he distributed them equally. It also sets up precedent for future kings to arbitrarily separate families or rip people from their homes.

Neurishers are mandated to be drank from every other day. In his time, that's a huge load off because they were drained every day, all day. But in the future, there might be so many Neurishers that forcing all of them to work half the time is seen as gluttonous, or maybe there's a future where Neurishers are required to work on top of providing Magnetite ever other day.

Some Neurishers are assigned to breed and make as many babies as possible. It's to ensure the survival of humanity, but even Akira's sorry about it. If the population stabilizes within his lifetime, I can see him easing back on this, but if he doesn't...

This isn't necessarily an order, but Akira's subordinates from Kasumigaseki wound up killing Demonoids who refused to follow him. That can easily turn into death squads killing those suspected to be disloyal.

Blasted Tokyo

Blasted Akira doesn't do anything evil. It wouldn't help his situation. But he does give Flynn and co. a speech about how he's going to use the demons from the Expanse to rebuild the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado; judging by the DLC, he did a good job building cities before the Ancient of Days blasted it back into desert.

Enslaving demons to build your city isn't any more morally objectionable than what your average SMT protagonist gets up to. What might get spicy is if future generations start seeing that anyone who comes through the portal is a 'demon' to be enslaved, even if they're human.

So this hypothetical evil empire would be, well, an empire. It rules over vassal states that are forced to give tribute, regards noncitizens as nonhuman, and the central state contributes nothing of value.

In King Akira's time, there was nothing they could produce. They lived in a desert and burned Pluto corpses for fuel. If they didn't steal, they'd have nothing. By the time the land is arable once more, agriculture might not be as easy or profitable as piracy, so the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado continues as an interdimensional demon summoning pirate state well beyond its need to be one.

On a semirelated note, Blasted Akira only gets a speech about his ideals and how he's going to reform the city, while Infernal Akira gets a whole bunch of NPCs saying what he already did and how. I think it's because we need a lot more assurance that Infernal Akira is doing the right thing, considering both his personality and the whole 'demonoid and neurisher' thing.

King Aquila of Mikado

Now let's reverse it with King Aquila. We know how Mikado turned out after 1500 years after he created the country, and we see his orders, but why did he make them? What context was lost to time?

Let's start with the part of the Samurai Code that forbids them from entering Tokyo, and how Aquila assigned the Minotaur as gatekeeper. From Nanashi's flashbacks, we know Aquila always intended for Mikado to unite with Tokyo, so why stop them?

Look at the plaque in front of the Hall of the Minotaur. It says, "Those who serve God Almighty: Thou shalt not proceed beyond this door." It sounds like Aquila isn't necessarily trying to stop the Samurai, but those who would follow the Monastery's orders. My guess is that he suspected that some fanatics would try to purge Naraku of the Unclean Ones, and the sign is for them.

I've heard a theory that the stark Luxuror/Casualry split was deliberately created to foster dissatisfaction, so that the Casualries would eventually rebel.

I also think that Aquila tried to amp up Mikado's food production to be much greater than their current population, to feed the future Tokyo emigres.

On a semirelated note, for fanfic purposes, I like the idea that Aquila was basically so terrifying that nobody wanted to speak ill of him after his death. He's honored as the ideal king because everyone's scared to write down his less than savory moments.

[shindynegarden]

Happy Pride month

[yarrayora]

flynn as king aquila's bedwarmer and his good friend jonathan figuring out flynn's lover is not a lady luxuror everyone assumes to be

commissioned by @gothamcityneedsme

[navarresimp]

another low quality shitpost

[calling-all-comas]

Flynn 🤠🤠🤠

[goatwithaplan]