Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei II
The God Who Pressed the Button: On Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei II (1990)
There is a famous line, scribbled in the heat of a nineteenth-century quarrel, to the effect that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. It was meant as a provocation. In 1990, on a beige Famicom cartridge sold to Japanese schoolchildren, Atlus quietly turned the provocation into a save file. Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei II is, among many other things, an early mass-market video game in which the final boss is named YHVH, and in which the player, if she chooses correctly, is allowed to put a sword through Him. That alone makes it one of the most theologically radical artifacts pop culture produced in its decade.
The game opens in a place that is already its own quiet thesis: an underground bomb shelter, after the war, where a teenage boy is killing time by playing a video game called Devil Busters. He is, in other words, a survivor of an apocalypse, distracting himself with a pixelated simulation of demon-hunting. Then a demon—Pazuzu—climbs out of the game and into his living room, declares him and his friend to be Messiahs, and the long climb up through the irradiated ruins of Tokyo begins. There is something almost too on-the-nose about this opening, and yet its bluntness is part of the argument. The cosmology is not hidden behind cathedrals and prophecy; it crawls out of a cartridge. The story being told is that the categories we inherit—savior, devil, lord, end-time—do not arrive from on high but are handed to us through whatever screen happens to be in the room, and that the first political act is to notice this.
What the player slowly comes to understand, as the dungeon crawl drags on, is that the war that flattened the city was not an accident of human stupidity. The bombs fell because they were ordered to fall. The trail leads, with grim eventually-comic logic, to a corporate executive named Mr. Suzuki, who turns out to be Satan in a business suit, who turns out to be acting on the explicit instructions of God. The Creator looked at His creation, found it insufficiently righteous, and outsourced the cleanup to a middle manager. There is no more concise critique of the State-Church-Capital nexus in the whole of 1980s gaming. Authority does not become benevolent because it claims a celestial mandate; the throne is a throne whether the buttocks resting on it are divine, imperial, or seated behind a desk in a Marunouchi high-rise. And the proper relation of a free person to a throne, the game argues, is to climb the tower and overturn it.
What makes this more than mere edgy theology is that the game embeds its politics in its mechanics. Megami Tensei II runs on negotiation. You do not, for the most part, conquer demons; you talk to them. You flatter them, bribe them, lose your patience, occasionally insult them. If you handle the conversation well, they join your party. Fusion, the system that combines two demons into a stronger one, has the texture of a pact rather than a chain of command. Compare this to the Christian sorcery of the era's Western RPGs, in which holy men channel divine wattage downward through hierarchies of prayer. Here, power is built sideways, by federation, out of the irreducible weirdness of others. The hero does not lead a church; he leads a strange parliament of imps and goddesses and minor folk deities, none of them subjects. It is, in the most literal videogame sense possible, a politics of free association. The mechanic is the message, and the message is older than any of the priests it offends.
The endings, however, are where the game both completes and complicates its argument. Megami Tensei II does not yet offer the famous "walk away from both sides" path that its Super Famicom successors would later make canonical. It offers a binary. You may accept Lucifer's pact, defeat YHVH, and watch demons help humanity rebuild Tokyo on terms that are at least negotiated; or you may side with the Lord, ascend to a kind of godhood, and leave humanity to whatever fate the Creator has decreed. There is no third door. The structure is uncompromising in a way that is both bracing and, on reflection, troubling.
Bracing, because it refuses the lukewarm posture of so much later "morally grey" storytelling. The game looks at a deity who would press the button on His own children and refuses to pretend that an even-handed shrug is the mature response. To play the Lucifer ending is to be reminded that some authorities, when their crimes are visible, do not deserve our impartiality. Troubling, because the absence of a neutral route also means the player's only available rebellion is enrollment in another cosmic faction. You overthrow the Lord by signing up with the Morning Star. The Devil's terms may be better than God's, but they are still terms, dictated from above by a being whose strength dwarfs your own. This is a problem the anarchist tradition knows by heart: the temptation, in the moment of revolt, to swap one master for a more attractive one, to mistake the new captain for the abolition of captaincy. The 1990 cartridge stages this problem without resolving it, and the franchise has spent thirty-five years circling the wound, sometimes proposing a third path and sometimes only pretending to.
The honest reading of Megami Tensei II, then, is not that Lucifer is good and YHVH evil. It is that any system—divine, satanic, statist, corporate—that demands you surrender your judgment in exchange for protection is the enemy in principle, and that the player who picks Lucifer because she has been told to hate God has only learned half the lesson. The categorical opponent the game keeps gesturing toward, even when its own structure cannot fully accommodate it, is the principle of hierarchy itself: the conviction, defended in heaven and in head office alike, that some persons exist to issue orders and others to receive them. That the game cannot quite imagine a way out of the dyad is itself a piece of evidence about how deep the dyad goes.
It is striking, in retrospect, that this argument was placed in the hands of teenagers via a Famicom cartridge in the bubble-era Japan of 1990. The country was at the apex of its postwar order, its institutions glowing with self-confidence, its salarymen marching in rows to towers of glass that, in the game's diegesis, are run by Satan. Into this scene Atlus dropped a story in which the ultimate authority is a fraud, the apocalypse is administered from above by a corporate angel, and the path to dignity runs through alliance with monsters. That the cartridge could not be exported to the United States—Nintendo of America's content rules then forbade exactly this kind of religious frankness—only sharpens the point. The most interesting theology of the year was locked behind a language barrier and a censor's red pen, and was being conducted in the dialect of a children's RPG.
To read Megami Tensei II now, in a century crowded with new theocracies—algorithmic, financial, platform, as well as the older kinds with incense and flags—is to be reminded that the urge to tear down idols is not adolescent at all. It is the oldest and most stubbornly adult of urges. The game's instinct, that destruction can be a creative act when what is destroyed is a structure of domination, is one of those embarrassing truths the prevailing pieties keep trying to bury. It is also, in this particular cartridge, an instinct that has not yet figured out how to refuse its own new masters; the Neutral path will have to wait a couple of years and a hardware generation. But the door has been kicked open. A pixelated sword in a teenager's hands lifted the lid on a question the official culture preferred to leave shut: what do you owe a god who would press the button? Megami Tensei II is the first game to answer, in plain Japanese, nothing.
There is a famous line, scribbled in the heat of a nineteenth-century quarrel, to the effect that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. It was meant as a provocation. In 1990, on a beige Famicom cartridge sold to Japanese schoolchildren, Atlus quietly turned the provocation into a save file. Digital Devil Monogatari: Megami Tensei II is, among many other things, an early mass-market video game in which the final boss is named YHVH, and in which the player, if she chooses correctly, is allowed to put a sword through Him. That alone makes it one of the most theologically radical artifacts pop culture produced in its decade.
The game opens in a place that is already its own quiet thesis: an underground bomb shelter, after the war, where a teenage boy is killing time by playing a video game called Devil Busters. He is, in other words, a survivor of an apocalypse, distracting himself with a pixelated simulation of demon-hunting. Then a demon—Pazuzu—climbs out of the game and into his living room, declares him and his friend to be Messiahs, and the long climb up through the irradiated ruins of Tokyo begins. There is something almost too on-the-nose about this opening, and yet its bluntness is part of the argument. The cosmology is not hidden behind cathedrals and prophecy; it crawls out of a cartridge. The story being told is that the categories we inherit—savior, devil, lord, end-time—do not arrive from on high but are handed to us through whatever screen happens to be in the room, and that the first political act is to notice this.
What the player slowly comes to understand, as the dungeon crawl drags on, is that the war that flattened the city was not an accident of human stupidity. The bombs fell because they were ordered to fall. The trail leads, with grim eventually-comic logic, to a corporate executive named Mr. Suzuki, who turns out to be Satan in a business suit, who turns out to be acting on the explicit instructions of God. The Creator looked at His creation, found it insufficiently righteous, and outsourced the cleanup to a middle manager. There is no more concise critique of the State-Church-Capital nexus in the whole of 1980s gaming. Authority does not become benevolent because it claims a celestial mandate; the throne is a throne whether the buttocks resting on it are divine, imperial, or seated behind a desk in a Marunouchi high-rise. And the proper relation of a free person to a throne, the game argues, is to climb the tower and overturn it.
What makes this more than mere edgy theology is that the game embeds its politics in its mechanics. Megami Tensei II runs on negotiation. You do not, for the most part, conquer demons; you talk to them. You flatter them, bribe them, lose your patience, occasionally insult them. If you handle the conversation well, they join your party. Fusion, the system that combines two demons into a stronger one, has the texture of a pact rather than a chain of command. Compare this to the Christian sorcery of the era's Western RPGs, in which holy men channel divine wattage downward through hierarchies of prayer. Here, power is built sideways, by federation, out of the irreducible weirdness of others. The hero does not lead a church; he leads a strange parliament of imps and goddesses and minor folk deities, none of them subjects. It is, in the most literal videogame sense possible, a politics of free association. The mechanic is the message, and the message is older than any of the priests it offends.
The endings, however, are where the game both completes and complicates its argument. Megami Tensei II does not yet offer the famous "walk away from both sides" path that its Super Famicom successors would later make canonical. It offers a binary. You may accept Lucifer's pact, defeat YHVH, and watch demons help humanity rebuild Tokyo on terms that are at least negotiated; or you may side with the Lord, ascend to a kind of godhood, and leave humanity to whatever fate the Creator has decreed. There is no third door. The structure is uncompromising in a way that is both bracing and, on reflection, troubling.
Bracing, because it refuses the lukewarm posture of so much later "morally grey" storytelling. The game looks at a deity who would press the button on His own children and refuses to pretend that an even-handed shrug is the mature response. To play the Lucifer ending is to be reminded that some authorities, when their crimes are visible, do not deserve our impartiality. Troubling, because the absence of a neutral route also means the player's only available rebellion is enrollment in another cosmic faction. You overthrow the Lord by signing up with the Morning Star. The Devil's terms may be better than God's, but they are still terms, dictated from above by a being whose strength dwarfs your own. This is a problem the anarchist tradition knows by heart: the temptation, in the moment of revolt, to swap one master for a more attractive one, to mistake the new captain for the abolition of captaincy. The 1990 cartridge stages this problem without resolving it, and the franchise has spent thirty-five years circling the wound, sometimes proposing a third path and sometimes only pretending to.
The honest reading of Megami Tensei II, then, is not that Lucifer is good and YHVH evil. It is that any system—divine, satanic, statist, corporate—that demands you surrender your judgment in exchange for protection is the enemy in principle, and that the player who picks Lucifer because she has been told to hate God has only learned half the lesson. The categorical opponent the game keeps gesturing toward, even when its own structure cannot fully accommodate it, is the principle of hierarchy itself: the conviction, defended in heaven and in head office alike, that some persons exist to issue orders and others to receive them. That the game cannot quite imagine a way out of the dyad is itself a piece of evidence about how deep the dyad goes.
It is striking, in retrospect, that this argument was placed in the hands of teenagers via a Famicom cartridge in the bubble-era Japan of 1990. The country was at the apex of its postwar order, its institutions glowing with self-confidence, its salarymen marching in rows to towers of glass that, in the game's diegesis, are run by Satan. Into this scene Atlus dropped a story in which the ultimate authority is a fraud, the apocalypse is administered from above by a corporate angel, and the path to dignity runs through alliance with monsters. That the cartridge could not be exported to the United States—Nintendo of America's content rules then forbade exactly this kind of religious frankness—only sharpens the point. The most interesting theology of the year was locked behind a language barrier and a censor's red pen, and was being conducted in the dialect of a children's RPG.
To read Megami Tensei II now, in a century crowded with new theocracies—algorithmic, financial, platform, as well as the older kinds with incense and flags—is to be reminded that the urge to tear down idols is not adolescent at all. It is the oldest and most stubbornly adult of urges. The game's instinct, that destruction can be a creative act when what is destroyed is a structure of domination, is one of those embarrassing truths the prevailing pieties keep trying to bury. It is also, in this particular cartridge, an instinct that has not yet figured out how to refuse its own new masters; the Neutral path will have to wait a couple of years and a hardware generation. But the door has been kicked open. A pixelated sword in a teenager's hands lifted the lid on a question the official culture preferred to leave shut: what do you owe a god who would press the button? Megami Tensei II is the first game to answer, in plain Japanese, nothing.
Mini Review: In 1990, Atlus released Megami Tensei II on the Famicom, smuggling a radical anarchist thesis into Bubble-era Japan. The game argues that any hierarchy—divine, statist, or corporate—that demands blind obedience is the enemy. It embeds this in its mechanics: you don't merely conquer foes; you negotiate with demons, building power horizontally through free association. Far ahead of its time, this 8-bit RPG boldly asks: what do we owe an authority that would destroy its own world? Nothing.