The Detective and the Cat

After Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne — after the empty hospital, the broken world, the philosophy of destruction delivered by a man in clown makeup at the top of a tower — I was not expecting to find the SMT franchise funny. Not genuinely, warmly funny. Not the kind of funny that makes you lean back in your chair and smile at the screen rather than frown at it in concentration. And yet here was Raidou Kuzunoha, a teenage detective in a cape and hat, walking through 1920s Tokyo with a soul-trapped cat on his shoulder making dry observations about demons, clients, and the general absurdity of the situation, and I was smiling before the first chapter was finished.

The same franchise. The same demons. Completely different air to breathe.

Taisho Tokyo and the Appearance of the Past

The first thing Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army gives you is a setting unlike anything else in the SMT catalogue. The game takes place during Japan's Taisho era — approximately the 1920s — in an alternate version of Tokyo where the old and the new exist in uneasy proximity. Traditional wooden architecture alongside early Western-influenced buildings. Rickshaws and the first automobiles. Kimono and suits. A city in the process of becoming something it hasn't quite become yet, carrying its past and its future simultaneously without fully belonging to either.

When I first arrived in this Tokyo I felt something I didn't immediately recognise — a faint sense of antiquity, of stepping into something older than I was used to from the series. The aesthetic had a sepia quality to it, not visually but atmospherically. The streets felt like they belonged to a photograph rather than a game world. And I initially mistook this for the game itself being old-fashioned — a relic of an earlier era of design that hadn't aged as well as its ideas.

I was wrong. What I was reading as archaic was deliberate period texture. The game wasn't old — it was about something old, and it had chosen to feel like its subject matter. The 1920s Tokyo of Raidou is not a historical museum piece. It is a living city with a specific character that the modern world has mostly forgotten, and the game uses that character to ask questions about power and technology and the supernatural that are more contemporary now than they were when the game was first made.

Demons as Partners, Not Weapons

In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, demons are the currency of survival. You fuse them, strengthen them, deploy them tactically, and discard them when something better comes along. The relationship is transactional by design — the game's philosophy is about power and will, and demons are the medium through which that philosophy is expressed. You do not have companions. You have tools.

Raidou does something different and it matters more than it might seem. Raidou's demons are collected into tubes — physical containers he carries with him — and summoned into battle one at a time as active partners in real-time combat. You manage them during fights. You pay attention to what they need. You negotiate with new demons in the field, learning their personalities and finding the right approach to bring them over to your side.

But more than the mechanics, the game's attitude toward demons is different. Raidou is not a survivor in a world that has ended. He is a protector of a city that is still standing, and his demons are part of how he protects it. He uses them for detective work — interrogating suspects, searching locations, navigating the Dark Realm. They are not weapons deployed against chaos. They are colleagues deployed in service of order.

This reframing is the game's most quietly radical idea. In a franchise built on the premise that demons are dangerous forces to be subjugated or avoided, Raidou presents a third option — that the same creatures who destroyed Nocturne's world can, in the right hands and the right context, be something closer to allies. That what demons are depends enormously on who is asking them to be it.

Gouto

I need to talk about Gouto.

Gouto is a soul inhabiting the body of a black cat. He has been Raidou's guide and mentor for the entirety of Raidou's training, and he accompanies him through every case with the particular energy of someone who has seen everything at least twice and has developed strong opinions about most of it. He is not a comic relief character. He is something more specific and more interesting — the most experienced person in any room, expressing that experience through the limited means available to a cat.

Raidou himself is silent. He moves through the game without speaking, responding to the world through actions rather than words — a protagonist whose interiority is entirely implied. In any other game this might feel like an empty vessel. Here it works because Gouto fills the silence not with exposition but with perspective. His dry commentary on the cases, on the people they meet, on the absurdity of specific situations, provides the emotional texture that a speaking protagonist would have supplied through dialogue.

He is not warm. He is not encouraging in the way guide characters usually are. He is accurate. He observes what is actually happening, says what he actually thinks about it, and trusts Raidou to handle the implications. The relationship between them — the silent teenage detective and the sardonic ancient cat — is one of the most quietly effective partnerships in the series. Not despite the lack of conventional warmth but because of it. Real trust doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like a cat choosing to follow you into a demon-infested alley without being asked.

Rasputin and the Strangeness of History

Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army has Grigori Rasputin in it. The actual Rasputin — the historical figure, the Russian mystic who survived multiple assassination attempts in real life and whose death became one of history's most discussed mysteries. He is in this game, set in 1920s Japan, as a rival Devil Summoner. He should be dead by this point in history. He is not, and the game does not feel the need to over-explain why.

This is exactly the right choice. Raidou's Tokyo is an alternate history — close enough to ours to feel familiar, different enough that its own rules apply. Dropping Rasputin into it as a recurring antagonist is audacious in the specific way that only Atlus regularly manages — taking a real historical figure, stripping them of the academic distance that usually makes historical characters feel safe, and making them genuinely threatening in a supernatural context that the historical record never quite prepared you for.

He is a worthy rival. Not in the simple sense of being a powerful enemy, but in the structural sense — he is everything Raidou might have become in a different context. Another Devil Summoner, another person with the ability to work with demons, making completely different choices about what that ability is for. The contrast between them is the game's argument made visible: demons are not inherently destructive. It depends entirely on the person holding the tube. Persona 4 Golden made the same argument through its Shadows — that the same dark reflection destroys one person and becomes the foundation for another's strength, depending entirely on whether they can accept what they are seeing.

Old Surface, Future Thinking

The themes underneath Raidou's period aesthetic are not nostalgic. They are, if anything, more relevant now than they were when the original game appeared in 2006. The Soulless Army of the title refers to soldiers stripped of their humanity — people reduced to instruments of power by those who believe that human feeling is inefficiency. The conspiracy Raidou uncovers involves the weaponisation of the supernatural by forces that see both demons and people as resources to be deployed rather than beings to be considered.

This is not a new idea in the SMT franchise. But what Raidou does differently is locate it in a moment of historical transition — a period when Japan was negotiating between its traditional identity and a rapidly modernising world, when the old ways and the new ambitions were visibly in conflict on the same streets. The game uses that tension to ask what gets lost when efficiency becomes the primary value. What happens to the things that cannot be measured or weaponised. Where the demons go when the humans who might have understood them decide instead to use them.

It asks these questions lightly, in the way a detective story asks questions — through the accumulation of cases rather than through direct philosophical confrontation. You don't get a speech about the nature of power. You get a series of mysteries that, solved one by one, assemble into an argument about it. By the end you understand what the game thinks without ever having been lectured by it, which is the most elegant way for a story to make its point.

A Different Kind of SMT

I came to Raidou from Nocturne and I expected, on some level, more of the same darkness. More philosophical weight pressing down from above. More of the sensation of a world that has decided you are small and wants you to know it.

What I found instead was a game that is genuinely enjoyable in a way that word doesn't do justice to — not easy, not shallow, but fun in the specific sense of a story that trusts you to be curious about it. A mystery that unfolds with the satisfying rhythm of a good detective novel. A setting that rewards attention. A cat who will tell you exactly what he thinks whether you asked or not.

Nocturne showed me what SMT could be at its most uncompromising. Raidou showed me what the same franchise could be when it chose to breathe differently — when it kept the intelligence and the demons and the philosophical undercurrent and wrapped them in something that felt, for once, like an invitation rather than a challenge.

Both are true to what the series is. That might be the most interesting thing about the SMT catalogue — not that it has a consistent identity, but that it has consistent values expressed in completely different registers. The same questions about power and humanity and what demons mean, asked in a broken wasteland and in a 1920s detective agency, and both times the questions are worth sitting with.

I sat with a cat on my shoulder. He had opinions about everything. It was, unexpectedly, exactly what I needed.