positive emo (SMTIV)

the below introduction contains spoilers for SMTIV and references to suicide and depression also I am no longer depressed so I decided to post it incomplete

I've been struggling through depression lately over the last few months more than I usually do, which has been tough. For a life insert: I've been working night-shift for the last year and change, which has contributed a lot to the depression I've been feeling.  You miss out on a lot of things, the sun among them. Even while I'm writing this, the glimpse of the sun I got was while it was disappearing over a mountain.

The denizens of Tokyo in Shin Megami Tensei IV have lives a lot worse than mine could ever possibly be. Not only do they have to constantly be mindful of the fact that a brutal death is waiting around likely every corner (if they don't starve) they've never seen the sun before.

That's not really what drew me to start playing SMTIV though! It was actually complete happenstance that I even ended up here. More real life insert: Usually when I am depressed there is a shortlist of games I play. Almost all of which focus entirely on positive emotions; imagine lots of teenagers with their hands on their hips trying to solve some mystery.

My shortlist is mostly games I have an emotional connection to for one reason or another. I am a sentimental goofball and up until just a few years ago, I didn't have an interest in things that were based out of negative emotions or despair.

Look at it this way: I didn't even really start reading books until after highschool, so imagine the worst motherfucker upset at 'art games' as me from the years of 13-18. Even still after not being that person, I tended to avoid things that weren't, I dunno, build for entirely positive purposes unless I was already happy.

Instead of crawling back to the sunlit vistas and friendship-togetherness of Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy VIII's morality play of learning how to be a better person, I sort of accidentally fell into Shin Megami Tensei IV's fucked up world where every plot development seems to directly deal with fucking up the life of someone else.

One of the first plot twists in SMTIV comes as a revelation to the player about the nature of the world where the game takes place. A character called "The Black Samurai" has been giving people illegal literature that contains references to worlds where people don't live by a strict caste system or have alternative political or religious systems to the ones they live in.

This, in most cases, causes people to either go insane and die, or turn into violent and bloodthirsty demons, in the literal sense of the word.

I didn't even realize I was helping propagate a ruthless caste system until a little while ago, at a little less than halfway through the game. This ruined Tokyo and the world sitting ontop of it is built out of alternatives though, It's not like the game has so far railroaded me into one path over the other.

Every turn in the story brings with it more decisions to be made, and uniquely SMTIV's offerings of moral choices have made me actually stop and put down my 3DS on more than one occasion just to think.

When the decisions are this weighted and larger parts of the narratives and whole characters weigh on your actions and responses, it lends more credence to how oppressive the game feels. Maybe it would be purely enough if like some of the games in the same series that came before it, the game was mainly about how it was constructed around the plot, but SMTIV's whole existence as a game from start to finish is opressive.

 Alternatives that I'm given aren't much better: going a more chaotic path quickly turns you into the kind of person who affects a ruthless, might-makes-right kind of approach to the world. You can become the fascist god-emperor of the post apocalypse world!