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| Mephisto |
“Demon” is the localized English equivalent for the Japanese “akuma”; both words literally refer to devilish creatures but Shin Megami Tensei’s generic usage is inclusive of any kind of supernatural being, from actual denizens of Hell to sacred animals to almighty deities. And with Shin Megami Tensei being a video game and video games being a visual medium, demon design is a crucial way the series communicates its distinguishing preference for parity with mythology. Atlus’ two demon designers, the esteemed Kazuma Kaneko and the up-and-coming Masayuki Doi, generally follow the principle of “form follows function,” an idea that also perfectly applies to the symbology of religious art, where the form imitates a deity’s function in nature or its place in a mythic hierarchy; for example, traditional depictions of sun gods include solar imagery like rays or sun discs. Naturally, Kaneko’s version of the Inca sun god Inti is literally a stylized sun head atop a body; meanwhile, Doi’s crimson-clad Mephisto imitates the costuming of plays based on the Faust legend, producing a meaningful archetypal image of the beguiling devil. SMT’s correspondence to myths means a player can read relevant books or Wiki articles and gain useful insight about the demons and themes in the narrative, a practical anomaly in games despite how common mythological references crop up in them.
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| Prometheus: without and within |
Form-and-function demons help Shin Megami Tensei stand apart from the Final Fantasies and Dooms of the world, but are most conveniently contrasted with their equivalents in SMT’s own spinoff, Persona. Basically, personas function as “masks” representing their users’ personalities or roles in the story and are thus chiefly formed to reflect aspects of these individual characters. Greek fire thief Prometheus, whose rebellious enlightening of humanity earned him the torture of being bound to a rock while an eagle pecked his liver, provides an ideal example of the demon-persona contrast as Kaneko designed a version of each: the demon Prometheus is a straightforward humanoid grasping flame that directly recalls the myth, while the persona encases him in the punishing rock that primarily parallels user Baofu’s backstory and mindset. In sum, the demon is an external entity while the persona is an internal force. And though personas also have purposeful design, their tendencies, particularly in the modern era, towards proprietary, exaggerated features earn them company closer to the “anything goes” pop aesthetics of the Final Fantasies and Dooms, distancing them from demon design standards--consistent, contextualized incorporation of imagery from belief systems the world over--and the messaging that the demon is the god or spirit or hero. However, numerous demons nonetheless resemble personas and even SMT’s Slime demon is still just another riff on a Dungeons & Dragons slime, so it’s important to recognize that a flawless, comprehensive adaption of mythology has never been one of the series’ goals. In fact, after tallying SMT’s 1000+ demon designs the accuracy rate is more like 90%, which is still exceptional for video games and popular media in general.
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Occult titles from Dragon Books and Jaguar Books popular with late Showa era kids
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The relative complexity of demons as a concept evinces a bevy of inspirations. Indeed, the Megami Tensei franchise and its demons were a product of Japan’s “occult boom,” a cultural trend that began in the ‘60s and peaked in the ‘70s that popularized all manner of weird, dark, and creepy things. Like “demon” itself, Japanese’s usage of “occult” is broad and inclusive of diverse phenomena like UFOs, the “lost” Pacific civilization of Mu, cryptids like Nessie (or Japan’s own Kussie), and of course English-definition occult matters such as magic and demon summoning. The boom produced innumerable books, TV shows, anime, and manga but a few in particular constitute the primordial soup from which Megami Tensei emerged.
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A Mizuki self-portrait (sitting),
with his creations |
Perhaps most important is the late, great Shigeru Mizuki and his seminal manga creations: the famous GeGeGe no Kitaro, a frontrunner of the occult boom that single-handedly revived Japanese interest in its native fey frighteners, the yokai; and from the same period the less remembered Akuma-kun, which slanted more towards Western occult imagery like the Seal of Solomon hexagram, Christian demons, and other nasties. Mizuki was truly a cosmopolitan, erudite mind and in addition to his manga also also wrote and illustrated books profiling spritely beings worldwide, from Britain’s fairy folk (like SMT’s Pixie, Spriggan) to painfully obscure forest spirits of little-known Malaysian tribes (of these, SMT includes major headache-causer Tingkat and bee-protector Penanggal). Come the 1970s you can add Go Nagai’s Devilman to the mix of Megami Tensei influences, with its brutal demonic violence and Satan-versus-God narrative. In the ‘80s, Hiroshi Aramata’s novel Teito Monogatari would leave the biggest impression in the form of its supernatural Tokyo setting, but it also popularized use of Japanese sorcery and spirit summoning--onmyodo--that is apparent in SMT’s demon mechanics; it also transformed the fallen, beheaded rebel samurai Taira no Masakado from ghost of superstition to pop culture Tokyo metropolis guardian, an idea Atlus was quick to appropriate.
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Devilman's Satan: not all the influences
have necessarily been good |
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Megami Tensei and
devil digitalization |
These works and others paved the way for Aya Nishitani’s 1986 novel Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, which would become popular enough on its own to be adapted into an anime and, obviously, a game. Nishitani’s key establishments regarding demons (besides the term itself) include a Mizuki-style culture mishmashing with a plot that involves the defeat of Norse trickster Loki to save the reincarnation of the primordial Japanese goddess Izanami with the aid of Greek watchdog Cerberus, plus the idea of digitally adapting occult incantations and ritual texts to computer code for easy demon summoning. When adapting the novel into the 1987 game, the nascent Atlus team expanded the demon roster with the diversity of multiple Mizuki publications but also gave them greater purpose through gameplay: negotiation/recruitment and fusion, creating the basic loop of talking demons out of a brawl and into your party before sacrificing two outmoded units to beget an ascended one with better utility. But “Shin” Megami Tensei as we know it truly began with 1990’s Megami Tensei II, which brought with it more of the explicitly Western monotheistic religious narrative that Devilman popularized along with the Tokyo-based mysticism of Teito Monogatari; it is also the first game to feature Kazuma Kaneko’s design work.
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The Michaels fit to print: MT2, SMT1, SMT2 respectively. Note that the MT2 design is credited to Uriel but is used
generically for the archangels; why does it have boobs? That's MT2 for you
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The evolution of Kaneko’s art style is also the evolution of demon design. For Megami Tensei II and the Super Famicom trilogy, Kaneko first designed the sprites--most of which shared parts and templates--before creating their full, expanded line art colored with markers for promotional material like books and magazines. It’s in this demon art that one can most clearly see their evolution across MT2, SMT1, and SMT2 (SMT if… has no individual demon illustrations) and a convenient example of this progression is the archangel Michael, who has distinct representations in each of the three games. The exaggerated proportions and musculature of MT2’s raw, ‘80s OVA style (betraying Kaneko’s previous work as an animator) mostly eschew source material; here, Michael’s half nude, generic archangel design looks more inspired by Devilman’s angels than anything. The more symmetrical demons of SMT1 conform to fundamental mythic imagery but lack flair and nuance; likewise, SMT1’s luminously orange Michael with spear, cuirass, and skirt looks flat even as it is directly inspired by a sculpture on the facade of Coventry Cathedral in England. By SMT2, Kaneko’s precision exploded with increased detail and ornamentation; for Michael, this vivified his SMT1 look with better highlights, shading, and a more dynamic pose.
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Tztitzimitl, star
of the show |
In the 32-bit era, demons would be represented in-game by reductions of Kaneko’s actual finished artwork, beginning life as line art on paper before being digitally scanned and colored and shaded via Photoshop, the latter step often aided by the unfortunately overlooked Megumi Shiraishi (look for her “MEG” signature). This by far his most prolific and creative period, Kaneko’s diverse interests like French fashion produced demons such as Aztec star goddess Tzitzimitl, who is arms akimbo on a pleather dress like she’s ready to saunter down a runway--if her entire body wasn’t abstracted with stellar imagery, that is. The switch to digital was certainly the inflection point for Kaneko’s style, as art for the final period of his demon designing career between 2001 and 2009 represents mostly a refining of technique with a wider range of colors and a subtler implementation of gradients and shading. Since Kaneko’s ostensible retirement, Masayuki Doi’s demons so far also generally adhere to this latter period. But after two decades of art, Kaneko’s legacy is defining demon design as the essential forms and functions of traditional mythological imagery complemented by appropriate modern elements, bestowing SMT with an unrivaled potential to inform players about tangible beliefs and cultural motifs.
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The eternally relevant
Spawn x Zaou combo |
Prioritizing source material in demon design is one thing but Shin Megami Tensei is equally well-known for its outright cribbing of art old and new. No single work is more obvious a fount for Kaneko and Doi than the infamous 19th century French demonic tome the Dictionnaire Infernal, whose illustrations for Hell’s royalty like Beelzebub, Belphegor, Adramelech and others SMT duplicates precisely; direct adaptations like these also reinforce the authenticity of the demon roster. But SMT lifts equally, if not more, from pop culture, like MT2’s Jason Voorhees analogue “Friday” and SMT2’s maybe-not-legally-distinct-enough Betelgeuse, from Beetlejuice. One of the most unlikely cribs begins with Kaneko’s late-’90s obsession with Spawn action figures, resulting in the design of Zaou Gongen, a Japanese Buddhist deity of mountain ascetics, wearing the chains and grotesque belt of Spawn himself. For a series that’s so unquestionably Japanese it’s not the kind of crossover you’d expect, but such a breadth of influences helps keep the Kaneko demons interesting even after 20+ years of constant recycling.
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| Zeuses or: playing around with a ball and dick |
If 90% of demons harmonize coherently, that leaves the 10% that don’t play by the rules--rarely for the better, mostly for the worse. Take Zeus, who, for being such a famous god, has seen his fair share of design flubs in the series like Kaneko’s raging lightning-ball head the artist himself decried, or Masayuki Doi’s black-and-white exoskeleton…thing. Then there’s Shin Megami Tensei IV’s flawed experiment of hiring tokusatsu artists to design demons, which mercifully seems like it was a one-off; the creative high of the face-within-a-face Minotaur was entirely outflanked by form-and-function failures like the incongruously disordered archangel quartet and a cavalcade of indistinguishable, interchangeable monster designs nigh-impossible to identify by sight alone. But the worst visual communication in the series may come from two of its most popular Kaneko-designed demons. The infamous Mara’s entire phallic existence hinges on a pun (“mara'' is Japanese slang for, well, you know) and though clever and highly memorable, it’s a form that ensures many players will never see him as the Buddhist lord of temptation and death he really is. Another is death-obsessed Alice, who has the appearance of Lewis Carroll’s curious moppet but not her genuine disposition--Wonderland’s Alice never wanted to murder the March Hare or Mad Hatter. In truth, SMT’s version is an original creation referring back to the undead Alice’s scenario in SMT1; it’s created a rare case where a source-accurate form has distorted the intent.
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| Mara and Alice: SMT's top two demons as voted by internet users in 2017 |
10% may seem relatively inconsequential (it’s still over 100 demons) but SMT does not exist in a vacuum but rather it competes for hearts, minds, and sales in an industry that largely treats religious and mythological subjects as either taboo, an annoyance to creativity, or merely an endless repository of names for fantasy monsters. And most challenging of all is SMT’s forced struggle for distinction with Persona’s eponymous psychical types and shadows, opponents it may never be popular enough to overcome. Between video game conventions and internal rivalries, that 10% may offer just enough ambiguity to render SMT’s characteristic message of cultural correspondence indecipherable for many.
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| Dagda's identity crisis |
And thus demons hold a precarious position at the forefront of the battle between Atlus former and Atlus present. Though promotional tools for most of their existence, demons are now tools for appealing to the lowest common denominator rather than advertising a unique identity. Here there is no more obvious form-and-function demon design failure than SMT4A’s Dagda; in Irish myth an elder god who enjoys the simpler pleasures in life like food and sex, the game twists him into an unpleasant, nihilistic fiend. However, Masayuki Doi’s concept art shows that he did in fact initially sketch Dagda as plump and mellow--and why this was left on the cutting room floor in favor of Skeletor-with-an-apocalyptic-grudge speaks to an obvious inclination for marketable “coolness” over mythology, something presumably out of Doi’s control. Even as Atlus now chooses to depict mother goddess Demeter as a loli and invent its own deities like the baffling Mitra-Buddha, there’s good news to be found in the following impossible scenario: should SMT deliver nothing but lousy demons at its going average of 25 new designs every 5 years, it will take until 2085 before that A-grade 90% dips below 70% and into failing territory. So realistically, the enriching mythic message of SMT will never die out completely.
The structure and broad mythic significance demons provide Shin Megami Tensei transforms what would otherwise be the standard video game progression of a low-level sidekick leveling to high-level ally into a resonating revelation of growth: an initial pairing with simple beings of childhood fancy like Pixie will culminate in commanding supreme beings of life, death, and the universe such as Hindu existence-preserver Vishnu. The demons are your journey.
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Thanks to Kurt Kalata and Hardcore Gaming 101 for the chance to write for the SMT/Persona book project!
Note that Demons by Design comprises only 4 pages out of the book's 190 on every Megami Tensei game short of P5S (and includes my other contribution, a Nocturne review). HG101 has you covered on all the details right here!
-Eirikr
P.S. eat shit blogger
Once again a really nice read.
ReplyDeleteThough, you might be wrong on one point. It doesn't have to take until 2085 for things to fail. All they really have to do is just cut the Kaneko demons, something that really wouldn't surprise me at this point.