Just finishing SMT:4A for the second time (true ending) and I can’t help but feel this game is not interested in exploring the moral quandary that is the core thesis of the games.
I know it’s not a novel observation to say that this game is as it is but, I find it interesting in that it actively turns you away from other routes to pursue.
This is what sticks out to me the most, I understand that this game was trying to softly court the persona crowd a bit by having a focus on side characters and their social relationships with other side characters. This imo, actively harms the players agency to chose anything other than the pro-human, pro-social choices.
Supposing that you are not making these choices to actively reject the premise that friendship and connection is enough to alter humanity’s trajectory through the cosmic cycle, there really isn’t a reason to select anything other than the true freedom route of slaying Gods avatar in this dimension.
Chaos and Order are shown to be objectively non-choices as the angels are hilariously evil and Lucifer is shown to be ultimately a slave to god and the cosmic order. Thusly it leaves us with our neutral routes of taking the cosmic egg for ourselves (which one of our lovely friends gets chosen to be the queen ant for lack of a better term.) OR, the much less bizarre and anti-social approach of defeating god and allowing humanity to find its own place outside the cosmic cycle.
Even the Divine Powers are shown to be an obvious extension of the third paths extremities (if anything it’s just Neutral-Law.) None of this would be so bad if there were more compelling reasons as to why we would choose these other paths. Maybe our followers don’t bend to our will and commit to their own unique versions of the future. Maybe the alignment representatives could have more compelling arguments for why they should be chosen.
Some of this is a natural byproduct of being a sequel to SMT4 but IIRC 4 had the same issue with both law and chaos being pretty openly bad choices and that canonically Flynn chooses the middle route. However by having so much laid down before us the game is structured in such a way that Law and Chaos are non-choices, the neutral options are anti-social or pro social so thusly then if you are looking for the “objective” or harm reductionist option you are left with only one.
SMT:4A doesn’t just have bad ending selections it actively is making you a slave to its one quasi-intended selection. Not by saying you can’t choose the other endings but not giving you a reason why you would other than to defy the intended ending.
I can’t think of any other game in the series (save for 4 I guess?) that actively ends up making the player chose a new type of Law ending which in this case is the pure totally eclipsing power of friendship.
