“Can you come over and play with my balls?” - Zak Bagans

Spirit Hunter: Death Mark is a 2017 interactive adventure game developed by Experience Inc, the guys who made the Wizardry Xth games (under Michaelsoft) and Generation Xth, a remake of Wizardry Xth, and also New Tokyo Legacy which is a remake of Generation Xth, the remake of Wizardry Xth. Now the question you might ask is, “how does Experience’s experience with DRPGs affect Death Mark?” to which the answer is a definitive “uhhhhhhhh.” If you’re going into this expecting an adventure game with really obvious DRPG stuff you’re probably going to be a little disappointed, but it has the skeleton of one!

The meat of Death Mark is walking around (haunted) mazes and shining your flashlight on things to get items which you can use to get more items which can be used in the game’s infrequent encounters. This is a true point and click game where you point and click, although on PC the game is entirely playable on keyboard which is pretty cool, just in case your mom took your mouse away because your grades are bad. Anyway a lot of Death Mark’s true fun comes from outside the game itself, as to survive these ghoulish locations you’re going to have to do a little puzzle solving, which brings us to the main type of “encounter” in Death Mark.

Oftentimes when exploring a location you will be assailed by a ghostly fright which will force you into a Live or Die choice, a timed choice mechanic in which picking the wrong answer results in instant death. This sounds draconian, but if you have an IQ above room temperature you should fare alright. You can always savescum too, but you can’t save during dialogue, so you’ll have to sit through some text again if you take this path. There’s also a bunch of non timed choices that don’t affect anything, except for one at the end of Chapter Three. Death Mark has a pretty robust record system, which takes notes for you and stores important information. You can rely on this for a good portion of the game, but once you get to Chapter Four you’re going to want to start taking your own notes. This is a good time, and like Interactive Adventure Game All-Star Zero Escape a great deal of satisfaction comes from the schizophrenic scribblings that you leave behind.

There is another type of “encounter” in Death Mark, a face to face with each chapter’s respective spirit and your last crossroads of life and death. These encounters are to their credit, visually frightening, and if you are a diagnosed Fraidy Cat you will find them suffocating at times despite how short they are. This is the closest Death Mark gets to traditional turn-based combat and unfortunately, when you break it down mechanically it’s a little shallow. You and your partner character of choice will face the spirit and you must select two items from your bag for you and your partner. Sometimes these items combine, sometimes they don’t, but you must use specific items in a specific order to make it out alive. You have two methods of success, purifying the spirit or killing it. Does it matter which route you take here? It’s the only thing that matters! If you choose to kill a spirit instead of purifying it: one, your partner character straight up dies no takebacksies, and two, you are locked out of the good ending for the rest of the playthrough. Regardless of which way you go however, the fact remains immutable that these encounters aren’t very engaging. Select items and make the occasional choice and then you’re done. There are five of these in the game and unlike the Live or Die choices, never seem to really advance in complexity. Sure they’re puzzles in their own right and you should be doing a bit of studying in order to get through them, but they never get more complicated than they are at the start. These seem to be the much less preferred type of encounter, as even Death Mark’s “final boss” is a series of Live or Die choices, rather than a spirit fight.

Let’s go chapter by chapter. Death Mark begins with you! Amnesiac Protagonist (daring today aren’t we?) as he hears about the curse of the Mark and stumbles to Maniac Luigi’s Thugz Playboy Kujou Mansion where he finds spirit healer Saya Kujou dead, and Mary, a freaky life-size doll who serves as your assistant(?) throughout most of the game. You learn that the Mark causes memory loss and death, but you can get rid of it by purifying/killing the spirit that gave it to you, and after meeting Moe Watanabe, the occult-loving high school girl, and Tsukasa Yoshida, the little boy who hates adults, you’re on your way to investigate Hanahiko at H Elementary. Chapter One: Hanahiko is a good introduction to Death Mark. The problem is that it’s extremely derivative. You know, Corpse Party did the ghost of the child rape victim thing in 1996, so what are we still doing here? Are you shocked? Appalled? Grossed out? Because at this point it’s passé. Is it heartless to say that ghosts of child rape victims are passé? Anyway, the actual story of Hanahiko isn’t very good, but there’s one thing that should pique your interest. Plant Horror isn’t something you see too often, so it’s cool to see here. Every spirit in this game has a unique motif, and while some are better than others, Hanahiko’s roses are a high point. You spend Chapter One walking around the first floor of the abandoned H Elementary, shining your flashlight on things. You run into Ex-Detective Bad Manners, Satoru Mashita, who joins your gang of freaks. Eventually you learn the truth of Hanahiko, purify or kill him and be on your way. Moe, Tsukasa and Mashita’s Marks disappear, but yours doesn’t. Get ready to see this scene play out four more times, because Death Mark loves this nonsense. By Chapter Three you’re tired of it. “Of course my mark isn’t going to disappear! There’s half a game left!” you might cry out to yourself. It’s an annoyance. Hanahiko is a decent start, but Chapter Two is probably where you’ll decide if you’re going to commit to Death Mark or not.

“NOT THE BEES” Nic Cage said that. Chapter Two: Shimi-O is about the vengeful spirit of the Pillsbury Doughboy a la Ghostbusters a big fat guy who was in a suicide cult called the Happy Bee Family and now haunts the Evil Suicide Forest. He turns his victims into human beehives which is admittedly freakish and disgusting. The crawling in this chapter is much closer to a traditional Evil Dungeon experience, with hidden side paths and identical looking cottages that you go into. This time you are joined by returning partner Mashita, as well as the motorcycle-riding delinquent Shou Nagashima. Later you are joined by former news anchor Christie Arimura. You also meet a guy named Masao Kimura and you talk him out of suicide, which is a unique use of the Live or Die choice system. Kimura dies later anyway, killed by Shimi-O so it’s really just a setup for a later scare. Similar to Chapter One, you go around getting items and notes and then face off against Shimi-O. You purify/kill him and it’s revealed that Shimi-O was like a zombie who became a spirit after failing to die in the Happy Bee Family mass suicide. It’s whatever. There’s a quiet subplot that the “traitor” within the Happy Bee Family was a friend or lover of Mashita’s, which is why he joins you again and gets another Mark, but it ends there. Mashita and Shou are freed from their Marks, but Christie and the protagonist still have theirs. This chapter is way better than the first and actually intrigues you a little bit. There’s bits and pieces of things to come that you see here like H Shrine.

How about a detour? The characters in this game blow. They are awful. A game like this doesn’t necessarily live or die on its characters but Death Mark’s contemporaries are kind of well known for their vibrant casts. If you’ve noticed the one or two adjectives accompanying each character in this review, well that’s it. Each character sticks around for one or sometimes two chapters and then disappears until the end of the game when they get a nice blurb about what they’re doing now that the Mark business is over and done with. Characters come and go and you’re not going to care about them unless you’re really into the subcultural stereotype that they represent. It does heighten the fear factor as you’re never around a friend for particularly long, but it ultimately results in a bunch of flat characters who do nothing and die.

Chapter Three: Hanayome, is maybe the strangest chapter in the game, due to its brevity and unorthodox structure. The map you explore in this chapter has a total of only six rooms, which is the smallest by far. It also has a very unorthodox way of purifying/killing the spirit, Hanayome, but we’ll get there. Your partners are Christie Arimura from the last chapter, and newcomers Suzu Morimiya, child of divorce, and Eita Nakamatsu, fatass otaku. What’s different about this chapter is that before you even get to investigating, you take Mary to H Shrine to try and uncover the origin of the Mark. You find some freaky headless Buddha statues and leave. Then once you meet Suzu and Eita you go around to some payphones, do some choices and get some items. After that things change again. Whether Hanayome is purified or not is not based on what items you use in her encounter, but where you choose to go to face her. To purify her, you must go to T Mountain. If you go anywhere else she’s killed. For some reason the encounter with Hanayome is entirely Live or Die choices instead of the pseudo-combat of the prior spirits. It’s hard to say why this is the case. It almost feels like Chapter Three was a test chapter that was retooled and jammed into the middle of the game to fill it out. Luckily because of its length it’s not too much of a hassle, and you get a neat history lesson about the division of Shinto and Buddhism during the Meiji Revolution. Buddhism is very important to the rest of this game, so hopefully you’ve memorized all 100 million Pure Lands and their respective bodhisattvas.

Chapter Four: Miss Zoo is likely Death Mark’s best chapter, which is kind of weird since it straight up recycles H Elementary as the chapter’s dungeon. All bets are off here and with the assistance of upbeat aidoru Ai Kashiwagi, fortune teller Towako Yasuoka and anxious scientist Madoka Hiroo, you delve head first into some wacky adventure game nonsense where you take a bunch of tests in H Elementary. Miss Zoo herself is an intriguing creature. While Hanahiko, Shimi-O and Hanayome were vengeful spirits who had died five-ish years prior to when the game takes place. It’s implied that Miss Zoo had turned herself into the foul creature she is within like, the last month. The recency of Miss Zoo’s creation is wonderfully novel, and for the first time you feel as if you’re truly in the midst of some frightening contemporary phenomenon. There’s a great deal of foreshadowing for Chapter Five, and for the first time the events are truly connected. There’s a big picture now, and if you’ve made it this far you’ll be invested now. Miss Zoo is always talking about “Lord Asura” and as it turns out you will meet that very Lord Asura later. Item-finding is more obtuse than ever but it doesn’t matter because Death Mark has finally committed to something. Finally this aimless game has chosen a direction and begun sprinting.

Chapter Five: Kannon Soldier. Death Mark finally has its balls out and is in a dead sprint toward the finish line. Hopefully you enjoy WWII human experiments and copious amounts of Buddhist iconography, because it looks like some guys created a real life moving Guanyin statue that likes to kill people. It’s hard to say which spirit is more interesting between the freakish chimeric experiment that is Miss Zoo or the walking bodhisattva weapon made from a living person, but they are both far more captivating than dead child (raped) Hanahiko and dead bride-to-be (raped) Hanayome. Shimi-O gets a pass his chapter is good. Anyway, this time you’re paired up with Madoka Hiroo from the last chapter, along with sickly doctor Shuuji Daimon and smelly homeless guy Banshee Itou. One again none of these characters do a whole lot. Banshee does a big info dump at the end for the plot twist but that’s not character stuff that’s just giving you story details because Death Mark wants to do the Keyser Söze reveal but without any of the fun parts. Chapter Five’s map, an underground shelter where the military had done experiments at the end of the war, is the game’s largest map, but you won’t really get lost since there’s so many sections separated by doors that it’s easy enough to get your bearings. There’s a Wabun Code puzzle here. You don’t need to decipher Wabun Code but it’s definitely something noteworthy. Just remember the dots and dashes, you’ll be alright. For the first time Death Mark becomes kind of sickening as you sit through a sequence from the perspective of the woman who would become the Kannon Soldier as she’s brutally experimented upon, and it foreshadows the way to purify her in a clever and subtle way. You have to chisel off her right ear, the same ear that the evil voice speaks into. It’s out there yet kind of intuitive. At one point you open up a box to find a western-style cushion and if that doesn’t tip you off about the real big bad then who knows what will. After you purify/kill the Kannon Soldier, Hiroo, Banshee and Daimon’s Marks disappear. Yours doesn’t, because why would it?

What follows is a ridiculous and contrived information dump from Banshee that all but tells you that Mary is the big evil here. Which of course she is, she’s the very first scare of the game and also a talking doll. Death Mark tries (and fails) to trick you by “killing” Mary at one point but it’s kind of ridiculously obvious. After a frankly dumb amount of useless text you return to Kujou mansion, do some Live or Die choices and then reseal Mary for another 50 years. Finally your Mark is gone. Hurray! Credit where credit is due, Mary’s “true form” is frightening, but she’s only portrayed in CG’s while the other spirits have unsettling moving sprites that undulate disturbingly during your encounters with them. The other plot twist is that you are Masamune Kujou, brother of Saya Kujou and former head of the Kujou Family. This nonsense isn’t as bad as Danganronpa 2’s Matrix twist but it’s pretty rough, and it’s really emblematic of the fact that Death Mark’s primary shortcoming is that it’s just ok, it’s whatever. The problem with Death Mark is that it’s a role-player on a team full of all-stars. The game’s not shit, but when you’re competing with Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, Zero Escape, The Silver Case &c. you have to stand out. Death Mark for the most part doesn’t stand out and the places where it does are so brief and fleeting that it’s hard to care at all. Death Mark is destined to be lost in a sea of middling interactive adventure games, drowning in its own mediocrity. Once more, it’s fine, but you’re probably better off playing something else unless you’re really starved for a JP horror adventure game.

“What happened to the game I love?” - Mark Jackson

What happens when we bend something until it breaks? What happens when we twist something until it no longer resembles its original shape? As children we take black and yellow play-doh and mix it together until it becomes some putrid hue of green and become saddened at the realization that we cannot undo the mistakes that we have made. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse is the 2016 sidequel to Shin Megami Tensei IV, which was released in North America three years prior. Shin Megami Tensei IV is by all accounts a fantastic game, retaining much of what has made Shin Megami Tensei so beloved while also innovating on many of its concepts, narrative elements and mechanics. As is often the case though, when one takes two steps forward, they take one step back. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse might be more than one step back, and frequently feels as though it’s sprinting in reverse. What there is to say definitively about Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, is that for better or (more often than not) worse, it is not Shin Megami Tensei IV.
There are nice things to say about Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse. Physical and Magic attack and defense have been split for buffs into Tarukaja and Makakaja respectively, although not in debuffs where Tarunda is still one size fits all. It adds just a barely noticeable amount of complexity in the early game before you can access Taunt or Luster Candy, which now have Makakaja included in them. Magaon is another new debuff that removes Smirk from enemies, which may or may not be helpful depending on how frustrated you were by the lack of it in Shin Megami Tensei IV. Smirk hasn’t exactly been reworked in Apocalypse, but its nature has become a bit more “gimmicky” in a sense. Estoma has also been completely reworked, now functioning in a more traditional way and doing away with Estoma Sword, a point of grievance with the original for many, and Skill Affinities are now relevant here, whereas they felt meaningless in Shin Megami Tensei IV.
Quality of Life changes are frequently cited as a positive for Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Suddenly in a grand swathe of QoL changes you lose access to the spirit of the hustle, your Mamba Mentality and your freedom. Default features like healing on level are suddenly locked behind App Points. Extra Skill Slots are now locked behind being a certain level, constricting the way you build your character. “No no no. You will not build your character the way you want to build him, you will build him the way I want you to build him” chides Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse. These are the QoL changes? Certainly the Quality of Life has been reduced if anything. Do not listen to those who would bullshit you and tell you that these things make the game better, because it seems that many have been swayed more by new shinies than mechanical integrity. It is simply unconscionable that we must accept these so-called “Quality of Life changes.” Should you next thank someone if they were to fashion a prosthetic for you after blowing your leg off with the mossberg? Is that not a “Quality of Life” upgrade? It is utterly ridiculous.
Guest party members were a pretty universally disliked mechanic (if you can call it that) in Shin Megami Tensei IV. Walter, Jonathan, Isabeau, Merkabah and Lucifer will join you at certain points on certain routes and hit a boss with an element they resist or nullify allowing them to shit all over you for a little bit. Truthfully this was only a huge problem only in the early game but its continued presence throughout is irksome at the very least, especially if you negotiate on your last turn, fail, and then (usually) Jonathan or Walter will kill the demon you are trying to enslave. In Apocalypse your guest your chosen guest will support you with a specific type of skill. Asahi will use heals, Navarre will use buffs/debuffs and so on. The guest also brings with them the Assist Gauge, which for all intents and purposes is a limit break that auto-activates after a certain number of turns. While the mechanic of guests has changed pretty drastically and is no longer a complete detriment, it’s not particularly fun or engaging either. Some characters have really good skills, like Toki being able to instakill enemies, which is great for grinding. It is a mechanic that ties into the narrative but as we’ll come to see, the narrative is shallow and insipid.
In Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse we take on the role of Nanashi, a citizen of Tokyo. Flynn and his samurai buddies from the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado return as supporting(-ish) characters. If you had expected a strict retread of Shin Megami Tensei IV from another perspective you’d be wrong, whether that pleases or frustrates you is up to your discretion. By this point, the armies of Heaven and Hell are already at war, and you wind up dead at the hands of the demon Adramelech. Thankfully you’re revived by Celtic deity Dagda, who wants you to aid the Divine Powers (a coalition of pagan deities including Krishna, Odin and Maitreya), but not really. He has his own hustle going on. Throughout your adventure you meet a gaggle of buddies, some returning, some new. The only one of these characters that’s really interesting in any way is Hallelujah, and even that’s being a little generous. Gone are the ideological struggles and torment of Walter and Jonathan. Why have well-written characters when we can have cardboard cutouts who could slot into any game or anime about the Powar of Friendship? If you’ve played this and maybe felt a little insulted by how trite the characters and their relationships are, you’re not alone.
Admittedly the power struggle between the Angels, Demons and pagan Divine Powers feels fresh and it is fascinating to see the pagan gods take a stand against the powers of Abrahamic monotheism, but sometimes the pacing of the story doesn’t balance this all that well, and one antagonist will disappear into the background for a bit until resurfacing when the one on stage has been dealt with, rather than carefully reminding you of this deadly power struggle being waged in the streets of Tokyo. For the most part this isn’t that bad, because there are a lot of bad guys out for your blood. In the very late game however, it becomes egregious, with Stephen materializing from the aether to tell you that you have to go kill God now, because reasons. It’s kind of ridiculous and tacked on just so you can fill out your résumé with as many dead gods as you can fit. It’s deicide stat padding.
In the same way that Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse likes to railroad your character progression, it also spends a lot of time trying to railroad you into one of its four endings. Unlike the original Shin Megami Tensei IV, which featured your usual Law, Chaos and Neutral endings as well as the White ending, Apocalypse focuses primarily on a forced neutral route with two endings that are based on whether you’re nice and embrace the Powar of Friendship (Bonds) or a big fat meanie who wants to be alone (Massacre). There are Law and Chaos endings that are dictated by a single choice offered to you by Merkabah and Lucifer respectively, and they’re obviously endings that you’re not supposed to choose, similar to the original’s White ending, but it lacks the critical agency that was present there. Bonds and Massacre unfortunately end up more like Mass Effect’s Paragon/Renegade system than Shin Megami Tensei’s traditional alignments, and because of this it’s pretty clear that the Bonds ending is the “correct” ending. Contrast this with the original, which doesn’t really have a correct ending. Sure you could say that Neutral is the best outcome but it isn’t really. Shin Megami Tensei IV is a game that centers around every choice you make being the wrong one. It doesn’t matter which route you’re on, every choice you make is wrong. In Apocalypse, the moral nuance of the original is stripped away in favor of just being inexplicably Nice or Evil, with no weight behind these options. The closest we get to this is Dagda’s desire to end the whole universe so he can go back to being an idea. Dagda is the closest we get to having a Walter or Jonathan and it’s still pretty far off.
Sometimes Apocalypse does engage in a little bit of horror, a little bit of negativity and despair, but if IV reads like a suicide note then Apocalypse reads like Sonic.exe. Shesha impersonating Flynn and then eating a bunch of guys and doing a little jump scare feels weightless because just about every story beat has as much impact as grains of sand wistfully falling from the hand of a child back to the beach. In the midst of Shesha’s massacre, Asahi dies(!) and is then later revived thanks to the Powar of Friendship and Love. Let’s just raise the stakes and then fold. Let’s go to the blackjack table and stand on an ace and a five! Low risk low reward probably is the best summary for what’s happening in Apocalypse. Every character has a neat arc where they solve their stereotypical character flaw, unlike in IV where Walter and Jonathan don’t ever deviate from their fates because they actually believe in something. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse believes in making you feel vaguely warm and fuzzy at the cost of eliminating all the things that made the original so captivating.
But so what? So what if this game eschews all of the traditional narrative elements of Shin Megami Tensei in favor of a less suffocatingly negative story about friendship? Why not have a game for an audience that doesn’t really like the crushing evil of traditional SMT? Ignoring the fact that we already have Persona 3/4/5 for that (not a diss, new Persona is good) are those people going to like Apocalypse’s dungeons? They range from boring and inoffensive to somewhat annoying to just awful. It’s not really worth it to compare it to the original here because if there’s a criticism about Shin Megami Tensei IV that’s true it’s that the dungeons are piss easy. If they had put original IV dungeons in Apocalypse it’d be a well rounded casual game but it seems that they took the criticism to heart and are now trying to balance IV and traditional SMT DRPG Evil Dungeon design and not quite getting there. If you have played Strange Journey you’ll know that that’s the modern SMT with well done Evil Dungeons. It makes you want to pull your hair out but it’s also triumphant to conquer them. Apocalypse isn’t very triumphant in any aspect, least of all its dungeons. Chalk it up to IV third person not being conducive to Evil Dungeons in the way that first person grid movement is. The final of final dungeons, God’s Universe is dumb. It’s just retarded. Some goofy teleport mazes that you get the gist of after a bit but it has one caveat that makes it the chief stinker. You can’t recruit any demons in God’s Universe. Suddenly the chief gimmick that makes you persevere through it all, the pursuit of collecting more guys, is gone. What is it all for? A lamebrained gimmick fight against The Lord himself is your reward. Almost every dungeon in Apocalypse involves a weird take on a timed switch puzzle using Navarre’s magic dagger. The only explanation that could be dreamed up for such a mechanic is to waste your time. Were the developers under the impression that the dungeons would be too short if you didn’t have to do these “puzzles?” It’s not that there’s absolutely nothing good about the dungeons, there’s at least one that sticks out, that being Naraku, an interesting take on the original’s first dungeon where instead of going down to Tokyo you’re heading up to Mikado. But when there’s only one kind of good dungeon and one kind of good character, how much weight can Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse really hold before it stumbles and falls?
Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse is a testament to the fact that you can take an excellent game, make a bunch of tiny tweaks and have the result come out far, far worse. It’s death by 1000 cuts, or maybe death by 1000 nonsensical QoL changes, death by the desire to give the world of Shin Megami Tensei IV something resembling a happy ending where Nanashi and pals live, laugh and love. It’s a losing effort in trying to turn a game into something it’s not and can’t possibly ever be because of the way the original is. If you want to play a game where you collect guys with much more dignity you should play like, Fossil Fighters or Wizardry IV or any other game with the words “Megami Tensei” on it. You can play any video game you want, maybe even the original Shin Megami Tensei IV!