Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Mokushiroku

This one is not scary, in fact it was a pretty sweet story, closest thing to a good boy love story I can stand to see . One of the main character Kobayashi is gay. When he was small, he was bullied for that and his friend Kojiro helped him. Now Kobayashi comes back in the same high school to show his friend Kobayashi how much awesome he turned now he knows occult and can summon demons. However, Kobayashi gets jealous of Kojiro's other friend Yosuke. I like this one more because it was emotional cause it tries to care about the characters. They got ... soul, they try to survive. The character you feel are important aren't thrown away. Many times I thought oh he gonna be slaughtered for some nice gory scene, then we can move on from him like bye. The alternative setting was just like that, more scary, incoherent story but is just a good Halloween spook on Halloween.

This may seem like a joke and I know that a lot of people don't like this anime, but this was just fantastic in my opinion. Yes, this was mainly due to the terrible voice acting in some parts, (At least in the dub) but I unironically love this OVA because of the amount of charm, weird voice acting, and the insane story. This OVA has so many memorable moments and quotes. The two things I disliked about this OVA were that we didn't get to see more Akito, and if I'm remembering correctly Ose was called Satan which was a little annoying. All in ... all this OVA is not very good, I think this OVA is best enjoyed with the dub and maybe with some friends if you have any.

There are the times when you play a game, its roots gritty, dark, imbalanced but, overall, passionate and full of life. Then you come across a later entry of the franchise which was able to channel the old spirit, being only a bit more balanced and bit tweaked for the mainstream. Then you see the fond franchise of yours being cast into the 9th circle of Hell and become something that completely undoes the nuance and fondness of the franchise and sends you down a downward spiral of hate, your own Kaz Miller arc. The reason why I am singing the tragic ballad of Fallout ... franchise is because, well, I want to emphasize that Tokyo Revelations does not fall under this specific category. But is this a sole reason to love it? Nope. Just because it didn’t fall victim to one cliché doesn’t mean that it didn’t fall for another cliché. Hence here I am doing a post mortem session on an OVA which isn’t really anything. But I have this saddistic pleasure in shitting upon something particular in verbose fashion, hence I rest my case.

Shin Megami Tensei may seem synonymous to its derivatives, Persona, Devil Summoner and Digital Devil Saga, a whole damn genre which is pretty interesting and has its own characteristic countenance, but the entries which remains my favorite are the first, the second and Strange Journey. To start from the first game, there is a characteristic plainness that really complemented the game; plainness as in the sort you feel in the soft bops, that is, it gives enough headroom for introspection. For how it is bound to the technical thresholds of its time, it really transcended its potence with a streamlined gameplay design. The premise of the characters involved, especially the protagonist (Kazuya) are simple and clean, no complicated FFVIIR nonsense. You are a teen who woke up one morning and saw a new mail on your PC. And it doesn’t resort to graphic pompadour for its exotic feel either; its artistic influences and the implementation of them in specific troupes are pretty interesting to say the least. The over-the-top troupes of having Imperial Japanese vs Gen MacArthur is an obvious correlation, this isn’t the first time Japanese media used the victim complex card; but what is more amusing is that the analogy is rather a double layered meta humor, which when introspected, gives a better comprehensive study of humans ambitions and its consequences, regardless of political inferences. I can go on about SMT1, but I have to keep it simple: It is a game which makes you to experiment (like Half Life 2) as well as give you headroom to meditate over abstracts.

Now, onto Tokyo Revelations, remember the praises I was shovelling at SMT1? Wipe it off the slate, for none of the characteristic elements persisted to the screen. On one hand, I know that the characteristic features of SMT1 shines specifically as a game for it was intended for it, but who doesn’t love to make a cliché microwave spinoff out of a franchise to shill some bucks? A lazy nothingburger which took few characteristic factors from SMT, literally apes CLAMP’s X troupe and ends it like a Pokemon movie, in short, serves as a faithful adaptation of Trout Mask Replica. For a hour of runtime, it initiated too many stuff which was ignored the second it was thrown in; like me picking nuts and raisins out of a damn muesli; and the best part here is, they are either grafted shoujo fantasy troupes or the subject-matter in the games which the screenwriters are too busy to read between the lines.

The claustrophobic existential atmosphere, unique to the original game is compensated by graphic details for the sakeof. The plot is just as silly and factitious, the same way how I felt after watching the OVA of Tokyo Babylon to see its neat thematic beauty get overridden with watered down troupes. To be honest, I feel brave enough to call this OVA a neat “attempt” of bootlegging X/1999 but this time, it is Shin Megami Tensei Ediiton; its artistic primers are pretty synonymous to the commercialized Gustav cutouts in Skinner’s office in Ratatouille. To trace the degree to which it reminded me of X, I found the main love arc oddly reminiscent of Subaru-Seishirou, the issue here being the lack of narrative consistency (being gay is fine; but to kill to get your man, well, I’ll pass). Another instance is the scene where the summoners arrive to the school; I am lying if I say I didn’t get reminded of the Seals/Minions introduction in X/1999, a feel of overarching fear and ambiguity. One could argue that adapting a specific thematic style isn’t bootlegging, which I fully agree, but it doesn’t fill the vacuum of a watchable plot. You can adapt a specific style, and construct your own style from the influence. FotNS gave life to a whole thematic troupe, whose use served as a primer to other unique styles. CLAMP is still up there in terms of artistic influence, but this is not the one. In this instance, this feels like just another commercial souvenir born out of proxy artistic notions rather than actual narrative.

One thing I really liked about the originals is how abstract and interpretative the graphic description was; let it be the more simpler and normal ones, to very eccentric and chaotic subjects. The simplicity of the sprites went along well with this style. It is not that the game extras official art isn’t a thing, but still the design doc artwork kind of enriches the descriptions. Now, drumrolls please, the OVA did something polar opposite. Few graphic details are reinforced just for the sakeof. It is not that the original game didn’t have a whole arsenal of dark jokes and crude particulars, but it was well-executed and gives a primer for introspection. Here, cliché tagged plotpoints are shoehorned onto cliché tagged characters, using cliché surface-level thematics. A similar analogy I can put forth is Fallout 3, where, in order to reinforce the “mature” tag of the game, you see the unsavory characters use the word “fuck” for a dozen per second, in order to rub the “antagonist” character troupe onto our faces. Unsurprisingly disappointing enough, something similar happens here, for few scenes are present just to make it faintly reminiscent of a complete layman’s interpretation of SMT, deficit of quality, nuance and intent.

A shoujo anime adaptation for SMT sounds both richly potent or flaccid pompadour depending upon the decree of the bureaucrats, and unsurprisingly enough, it is a cottoncandy pink day-dreaming to assume the average publisher to market something which is incredibly niche and possibly controversial on surface level. Once we had folks in church preaching against Pokemon, today you have various groups blinded with mere hate. History repeats itself, once with pitchforks, now with either twitter Curry’s paradoxes or /b/’s . That pretty much explains my disappointment in regard to this OVA, for the potentcy is very verbose, but given the mess caled reality, something of that scale of disconnection from the mainstream troupes either dampens the returns due to extreme verbosity, or arouses surface-level false dichotomies and subsequent hostility. The last thing a bureaucrat wants is their net returns to decrease, which somehow supercedes the rationale behind actions.

So, well, given the whole shitshow, one may ask why I watched this OVA; well, two reasons persist. One being that I have this sadistic pleasure while kicking down on something and calling names on it, especially when it is a spin-off or a supposed “canon”. Or, a more sober and sensible reason, the English dub. I usually don’t watch dubs, but I kinda stumbled upon this one in its dub and I am genuinely happy I watched it dubbed; for it is yet another “Ghost Stories”-esque American humor appended upon a cookie cutter Japanese anime. I know this is not unique, for there are better instances, but I should admit the comedic timings are damn good and the jokes didn’t feel out of place or overwhelming, for it wasn’t shoehorned to be the crème a la crème. I enjoyed it, and if you like westernized-dubs, you will have a neat watch.

Tl;dr – A bland uninspired spinoff whose existence doesn’t mean anything, but it was blessed with a good dub.