Retronauts - 687: Attack & Dethrone God, Book 2:1

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Nadia Oxford, Chris Sims, Benito Cereno, and Shivam Bhatt congregate once again to talk about video gaming's difficult relationship with the concept of "God." (This episode was a recorded a couple of months ago, so the opening quip is unrelated to/uninspired by recent world news!) Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, holy smoke, someone blew up the Pope. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. Welcome to Retronaut's episode. Actually, I don't know if I put a number on this one yet. It's transient. It's whatever number you want it to be. It's just an active thing. I know. We're polytheistic here. Okay. So if we're doing that, it's either seven. What is it? We got seven? Three, seven, seven, twelve, forty. Yeah, one of those.

All right, you jokers, introduce yourselves. Actually, let's start. with a newcomer on this episode. We've pulled in a ringer to help us talk about the actual video games. Yes, this is the sequel to attacking and dethroning God. Now we're going to do it in the scope of a video game and not just a study of real world history. A fast-forwarded history of the entirety of Christianity. Yeah, no, that was great. We did that and now we have an entire two-hour episode of context for talking about Christianity and video games, and it's probably not going to be as long an episode. It's more backstory.

You know, it's like, you know, the Hobbit versus the Lord of the Rings, the movies, where there's like 20 hours of the Hobbit versus 12 of the Lord of the Rings and it's, you know, wildly disproportionate. This is the Lord of the Rings. This episode is going to end with all of us jumping up and down on a bed in slow motion.

So here in this episode, the Canadian Gandalf, please take us to the Westlands introduce yourself where are these necks these necks I am supposed to ring I keep hearing that I am the ringer I am naughty Oxford and when you say transient

I think of whales because I think of the orcas there are certain populations of orca that I don't know if there are ones that hunt mammals but they are known as transient populations and the populations that stay in the Pacific Northwest hunt salmon they are not transient hi thanks for having me

I don't actually know why I said hi. I don't know why I said transient. I actually just panicked. And no, I don't know why I said transient. It just, I panicked. And that was the word that popped into my head. It means nothing whatsoever. So out there from the land of California, who's joining us once again to talk about religion and video games mostly religion. You can't throw out transients and nothingness at the same time. And like then just tell me not to talk about, you know, the transcendental nature of like Buddhism and like the. The Heart Sutra and thing like that. Hi, folks, it's Shiva and Putt. I'm a podcaster. I talk about Magic the Gathering usually on my other two podcasts or Dragon Alliance on my third podcast or whatever. But also, I talk about God a lot, a lot, and it's one of my favorite topics. You might remember me from the literal last episode we did of this where I talked about God a lot.

And then, like, I don't know, half a dozen other retronauts in the history of mankind. Yeah, I like talking about old games and Parrish likes, I guess, not talking about. about games I like so that you can just sit there and I will rant about civilization for an hour. This is not a civilization episode. Sorry. Christianity is into. Oh, you know what? Christianity and civilization do have a relationship, though. Did you know that when Civ 4 came out, there was a religion had been introduced to the game and you would unlock it by praying, like use, research of technology like polytheism, meditation, whatever, and you would unlock a religion. and for a long time these religions were tied to these technologies

like divine right of kings gave you Islam et cetera et cetera and the problem was the games would devolve into giant empires of Buddhists and Hindus fighting each other for supremacy maybe the Jews because they were the third one you could discover in the tech tree and a bunch of Christian players complained that they were only getting to play

as Buddhists and Hindus all the time and they couldn't express their own religion my gosh buddy that must be hard but because of that the developers of the game went and changed it in a later patch of SIF 4 to disconnect the religions from the text that they were associated with. So you could do things like research polytheism and then you pick which religion you want to be. So you could technically have had polytheistic Islam or polytheistic

Christianity. And I used to love just the emergent storytelling of what does it mean to have like a meditation driven orthodoxy? Like what is this? And yeah, sorry. That's okay. We're not going to talk about Civilization 4 on this episode because this is really specific focused on Japanese games, and there was no Civilization 4 in Japan because that symbolically means civilization died. Because 4 is death in Japan. Yeah, actually, buildings in Toronto don't have a 4 anymore or as well as a 13, no 13 as well for the same reason. Just a hauler. Buildings. There are just, there's just shrinkage. Yeah. Anyway, I didn't mean transient. I meant intransigence. Anyway, so Chris Sims, can you introduce yourself? Hi, everybody.

It's me, Chris Sims. There you go, Chris Sims. Hi. Co-host of the Apocrypal's podcast, where we are two non-believers who read through the Bible and we try not to be jerks about it. And we very frequently talk about video games and comic books and the other things that we take extremely seriously. So when you say we in the context of this other podcast, who are you referring to? I'm referring to my good friend and the person who, did not compliment me on my crossword streak today, Benito Serino.

Hey, everybody. I was waiting until a moment when I could in front of everyone congratulate Chris on his 111 day streak, which he not only completed, but actually did two minutes and six seconds faster than his average for this day's puzzle. So congratulations to Chris. But it's me, Benito. The other son of thumb. the other set of footprints. Also, most importantly, the writer of the new ongoing comic book series, Blood and Thunder, starting May 7th from Skybound Entertainment. Nice. Please pre-order at your local comic book shop. But yeah, I'm also co-host of Pocket Balls with Chris. That's cool.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. So in the last volume, the last book, Book 1-1 of Attack and Dithrown God, We talked about Christianity and its actual history, and it's spread into a fun little place we like to call Japan. Or if you are the Blackthorn, the Anjin, you call it the Japan's. I don't know why. I guess because it's multiple islands in an archipelago. I don't know.

But the Japan's, we must get away from the Japan's. You know, there's something about that era. They just liked calling everything the, like the panjjjjj. job, the Ukraine, the Japan. But it's not the Japan, it's the Japan's. There's multiple Japan's. Like, they're looking into the multiverse, I don't know.

Yeah. There's Canton. Japan 616. So you know what? Kento, Joto, Sino Hoan. There you go. Okay, I can accept that. Because... Sir, we have a report of Pokemon off the

part bow. Because Japan is what all the melee sailors used to call it. Like, they used to call it Japan or Japun, depending. And that was because of the bulk of the sailors of the Portuguese ships that were going to Japan were from Portuguese colonies in Malaysia and Indonesia. What those guys would call this place is what the Portuguese ended up calling it. And that's why we call it Japan instead of Nihon.

Because it's from like the on-reading of like the Chinese version of reading the name. And linguistics, there you go. We need a little like macro that causes a rainbow to appear above your head that says the more you know. You know what, dude? Every time you bust out with one of these. I was talking to our mutual friend Karen Chu the other day. And she was like, I'm glad you found podcasts because otherwise you would just be the interesting but quiet dude who sits in the cube next to me telling me all these stories. At least now you have an audience to listen to all these stupid useless facts that are in your head all the time.

I haven't heard Karen Chu, how she doing? Great. Yeah. Good for her. Do you two actually work together like adjacent cubicles? I just had her on my show because I listened to her show. Good job brain. If you guys don't know, it's one of the best trivia podcasters.

is. But I was like, oh. With friend of retronauts, Chris Kohler. Yeah. Oh, cool. And so I love listening to them. What a small, incestuous world we live in. You know what, man? One Up was a very small place, and we all became very good friends for like 20 years. Yeah, we did. I mean. Oh, my God, it's been 20 years. Oh, my God, it's been like actual 20 years. 22. Well, since I got there. My back. Oh, that's what it started for real. Yeah. I understand. Parish was one of my my first boss out of college. I wasn't your boss, though. No, you weren't. But you were the one who got me the job. I wasn't. I had nothing to do with the hiring. Okay, well, let me live my dreams, damn it. No, you got there on merit. Take the phrase. What am I, what, don't tell you all

short. And then I worked in an intern for a while, and it was awesome. You know what? I mean, I tell all people about a lot of things. Christianity and interns. Lots of those. There was not a lot of Christianity at one up, and that's fine. No, it's fine. It actually, my, my, my, my, my, you know, parochial up, up, upbringing gave me a different perspective on things. I could write weird features and articles and, you know, kind of take things in different directions than people would instinctually do otherwise. Yeah. Good memories. Yeah, so we're here, though, talking about video games in Christianity,

which is a thing that I actually care a lot about for some reason, because when I was growing up and you would have, one of the first games I ever played Dragon Warrior, you know, and in Dragon Warrior, when, like, especially in like the later game, when you had a party and they would die, they would be just coffins dragging behind you. And you would have to go to a church to get somebody to raise the dead to bring him back.

And I didn't necessarily understand it at the time, but I'm like, as I grew older, I'm like, wow, that's a turbo Christian thing to do, isn't it to have, like, and also just D&D based, like, we're having a story, bring the, the dead back to life. And they did they have to pray to the God. Well, what do they call him a Dragon Warrior? They didn't call them a goddess, did they? That was the name of the goddess in Dragon Warrior, the good goddess, I suppose he could call her. Yeah, like, I don't think, there's like other gods as well, but she's like the main one.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Nintendo, the NES originally had like an injunction against mentioning religion at all, right? It did, yeah. So in fact, it's sort of. And by the time Dragon Warrior 2 came out, they changed the crosses to like the weird little stars. Yeah. Pentagons, yeah. Yeah. It was it was kind of a weird perspective for me being a Jew because I'm like, is that like a star of David? What is that?

It's not a five-pointed star. Yeah, it's a shed a point. Yeah, it just shut a point. It's a star of Satan is what that is. It wasn't upside down. Well, if it's up down, that doesn't matter, but yes. So Nintendo didn't have an injunction against religion, per se. It was more like imagery from actual religions.

That was what they tried to avoid. But even that was imperfect. I think I mentioned last time the title screen to Schoon, the submarine shooter by IREM, where there is a topless mermaid holding a crucifix on the title screen. She's out there with her girls on. on display holding across. Admittedly, she's like a tiny eight-pixel sprite. But nevertheless, it's frontal nudity and a crucifix. Okay, I mentioned it on some show recently. But yes, that is, that was, you know, when I was putting together NES works in 1987, I'd never played

Schoon before. So I was like, okay, it's an I rim shooter. It's going to be pretty good. But then I turn up the title screen and I was like, wait a minute, she's holding a cross. Okay, but Like, that's a proper rosary. But also, am I mistaken? Is that, like, an actual, like, mermaid in the buff? Huh. Back then, that was... You kind of got that a lot with the NES, like with Kid Icarus, had the sirens who had boobies.

And my brothers and I... Those were only in the manual, though. Yeah, but we found the instruction book, like, we thought it was the greatest thing we'd ever see in our lives. Yeah, there was a tiny bit of content that slipped through Nintendo's Netflix. in localization in the early NES days, and they really tightened that up. Again, I've said this before, but I really think it was Golgo 13 top secret episode where the, that's the point where they said, you know, we should probably be more careful because here's Golgo 13, having a smoke, shooting guys in the skull bloodily,

killing Hitler, and also meeting up with ladies to have sex in hotels and get his health back. this is probably not what we're trying to sell to the PTA. So let's watch out from this point on. On paper, that's pretty bad. So September 1988 was the last time the NES was a true Wild West, thanks to the wild gunman from the east, Golgo 13, aka Duke, Tok. But we also didn't get what was the name of the game with the Bible and the dragon and the... That was Devil World. Devil World, yeah.

That one they just kind of skipped. right over for many years. Like, just nope. Yeah, you have a devil at the top of the screen who's like this blue dude with a cape and he's just kind of doing this little dance. It's like the YMCA, like his own version of it. It's kind of like the fusion dance from Dragon Ball. That one's for you, Chris.

But yeah, he's just kind of like doing this jig at the top of the screen and his little minions are taking that as directions to move a frame around a maze and the frame boxes you into spaces in the maze. Meanwhile, you have to run around and collect pellets, but also you have to get like crosses, which you can use to power up. And you have to like put Bibles into slots in the center of the maze so that Satan will go, ah, and whatever Satan does, and run to the next screen. Meanwhile, you're like this little fat Godzilla-looking guy. Yeah. It's not exactly hardcore religious imagery there. It's not like someone was going to play that. say, well, it's time for me to convert to Satanism now because I've seen baby Godzilla

shove Bibles into a slot to scare away the devil. You know, it's just... It's not like SMT where you summon Jesus on the cross to do Jesus things. Yeah, Shedemagamagame Tensei, too. You open it up. You walk through a maze and there's a crucifix and Jesus is just hanging out there and he talks to you. That's like, okay, I could see what that didn't make it to the U.S. I can see your house from here. I'm so sorry. No, that's a camel album, actually. I can see your house from here? Yeah, there's a crucified astronaut hovering in space above Earth,

and the album is called I Can See Your House from here. That's amazing. I love that. You made an accidental Prague rock reference, Nadia, and I'm proud of you tonight. I have finally achieved greatness. I feel like making an accidental prog rock reference on a parish podcast is definitely like achievement unlocked right there. Well, we originally became friends because I had a Mega Man site with Jethro Taller.

on it. Yeah, you did. There you go. Yeah, you did. I remember, Red. I remember. Curse names. No.

I'm so happy that you're my friend for this long. Yeah, I know, right? Isn't that crazy? But yeah, anyway, Parrish, talk. Lead us back to the Promised Land of the podcast. Are you directing this podcast? No, okay. Sorry to let you down, Sheevam.

No, I'm just like... No, I don't really have a firm outline for this episode. I just want to talk about... Uh, video games and Jesus. No, so what I do want to talk about is, you know, we last episode explored the movement of Christianity into Japan and how it's very strange and very specific entrance into Japan gave that entire country, that culture, a very different perspective on Christianity as a religion than I think exists anywhere else in the world. And that has, you know, resonated through Japanese culture through the ages. You know, there's a very small amount of people in Japan who identify as Christian, like one or two percent of the population. But Christian imagery permeates Japanese media.

Oh, they love it so much. Yeah. How many J-Rockers have you seen who've basically got like giant full-on crucifixes on their uniforms like all the time? I don't really watch or listen to it. If you did, you would see that they're all basically glammed out and have like ginormo like crosses and crucifixes and things all over

the place. So is Arcan seal like a or Arcancia? Is that like a reference to Jesus, the circle in the sky? Arkincile might not be, but La Criamacristi definitely was you know, the blood of Christ one of my all-time favorite. Yeah, that's

there. Sorry, sorry as a Latin guy I have to break in, that's the tears of Christ. Yeah, I'm sorry, you're right. Beautiful. Now, that's Prague, rock. Like Lecrime and Chrissy, one of my all-time favorite J-Rockers, they definitely had a lot of Christ in their life. And even ex-Japan, deer and gray,

there was something in the water in 1980s, Japan, where Christianity was just the thing to do and talk about. I mean, if I can divert for one second, last week we were, or last issue episode, we were talking about, we mentioned in brief passing, Dragon Ball. Because Dragon Ball, of course, one of the most influential shown in anime's of all time.

There you go, Chris. Chris has a t-shirt, of course. You know, we love as a Dragon Ball, but Dragon Ball had a huge outside influence on a lot of video games. One of the things it had in that series, if we all remember, is a lot of people dying and coming back and dying and coming back. And when they die, they go to either hell, if you were in the rest of the world or in America, Heffil,

home for infinite leases. And they all have their little halos. And they go to the home of King Yama, the Hindu god of the dead, or the Buddhist god of the dead, or the ox king. you know, riding his yak to bring people to hell. And the thing is, is that in Dragon Bowl, Toriyama takes this very eastern notion of the monkey king of Hindu and Buddhist mythology and then layers it very heavily with Jesus' imagery

and interpretation. Goku going super-Syajian, becoming the Ubermensch, becoming the greatest being there is, dying and coming back to be resurrected to save everybody, is very much like. Like, the resurrection motif is such a deeply Christian story that we even call it. Like, you know, the, there's that word. I cannot remember what the word is for that kind of motif that shows up all the time in stories, Christ figure. Yeah. Like, but yeah.

And so that kind of idea permeates video games because they all watched Dragon Ball. They all watched the same shonen ideas. And in video games, you have to have the ability to come back. like if you're playing an arcade you can put it in another quarter to get another life if you're playing a home game you can't necessarily do that they have to give you some mechanism and in d and d which like wizardry took a lot of influence from dragon warrior took a lot of influence from and stuff like that you had clerics who were very guy jacksian clerics who were basically jewish and christian clerics from the bible turned into d and d rules because like one of the old

dndd spells sticks to snakes which is what moses does right with his staff um the ability to bring people back from the dead is a very Christian miracle that you see in the Bible over and over again and in the later stories of saints and stuff. And so they're like, okay, we need to have some mechanism to bring people back from the dead in these RPGs that we're playing. We need to have clerics who do that because obviously these games say you've got to pray to the gods to bring these people back. But that is such, like in Hindu stories, they don't bring people back to life. And Buddhist stories, dying is kind of like the next time you come around, you're reborn as something else. They're not necessarily plucking you from space and putting you back in your

body, it's reincarnation versus rebirth. So that idea of rebirth and of like coming back from the dead and a phoenix down, bringing you back, that is so turbo-Christian and just permeates a notion to the point that you don't even think about it as being religious, except in the notion of like, oh, it's a cleric bringing me back from the dead. It's actually interesting. What we see with Dragon Ball Heifal is extremely similar to what I learned about the after-life as a Jew.

It's true, though. I mean, there's no ogre. It's like, you know. yeah pumping you up but uh in judaism there is no like set belief and what the afterlife is and one of them you know core one of the beliefs that some people have is that you have basically the badness taken out of you so you can be resurrected and you're right because the the um it's not that we necessarily believe in resurrection it's just an option the whole idea is well life is more important than what happens afterwards so live your life and don't worry about it but uh you

Yeah, I have to say that I didn't really grow up very much with the Christ's figure. I did have some insight into it because my mother, she converted to Orthodox Judaism from Irish Catholicism. So we still had that. Yeah, she, it was a, it was a slubble dipping in the guilt. I ask her, oh, yeah, twice the guilt, absolutely. So I have all the hang-ups about sex and the guilt. Good stuff. But yeah, it's an interesting perspective.

So I do know about resurrection through the Christianity. lens, because I was a huge fan of C.S. Lewis, even though I didn't know what the hell was going on the first time around, my mother explained it to me. So, yeah. So I think it's wonderful that Shevim was chastising me for to get the podcast back on track and then immediately talked over me and blew through an entire half hour of talking points in about two minutes. So. Hell yeah. Look, man.

Good times ahead. I still have more to say about Goku. Okay. We'll get to Goku. Don't worry. As I was saying, there is not a lot of the Japanese population that identifies as Christian. But nevertheless, Christianity, like the imagery and themes of Christianity permeate the culture. And some of that is from the historical migration of Christianity into Japan.

But a lot of it is just that once, you know, the Black Fleet rolled in, Admiral Halsey was like, open up, we're here. Hi. You know, there was some indigestion about that. But eventually, collectively, Japanese society was like, you know, this Western stuff, kind of cool. Let's adopt parts of it. Some of this stuff, let's just leave behind. Let's also maintain our own traditions and heritage and culture. but let's bring some of this Western stuff in here.

It's kind of neat. So there's a almost like a buffet approach to import culture, Western society in Japan, where they just kind of cherry-picked the interesting things or the things that they like the imagery of. So for formal occasions, you'll still see people dressed in traditional Japanese garb, but also for business, they tend to wear Western-style suits. And that's just something that was kind of brought into Japanese society in the 19th century, 20th century, and eventually just kind of became its own thing. Like, I remember a few years back in the summer, I was over there

for Tokyo Game Show, and it was boilingly hot and humid as always. So, you know, know, I have to give it up for businessmen over there who just wear their three-piece suits, neckties, you know, just fully dressed. How? In miserable, sweltering weather, you know, stuffed into trains. They've got air conditioning. But once you get enough people in there, you don't feel the effects of it. I do that.

But there was one guy who did his own thing with Western garb, with Western suits. He had a searsucker suit that the pants were shorts, but it was like a full, like, formal suit just with shorts. And he was wearing like loafers and no socks. And I've never seen that. I've never seen someone do that in America. And I just had to stop. It was horrifying and wrong, but I admired it because I was like, this is a man who understands that this is not good weather to be dressed up in a full suit in. So not only did he go seersucker, like in the American South, he was like, I'm also going to go the next step and take it to the beach.

And I don't know, I don't know if, like, that's acceptable or if he was just like a rebel at the office. But I have a lot of admiration for that brave man doing the business thing and a pair of business shorts. That dude is about to drop the sickest closing argument. Yeah, right. Exactly. Now, I'm, I'm just a simple country lawyer. I was going to say the suit look with shorts and loafers. That's the uniform of all of V-Lon's Doge kids now, right?

Oh, Christ. They all just like that. This was like 15 years ago. So it was happier times where we had never heard of that man. So, yeah, anyway, I'm just saying, like, Japan takes elements and concepts from the West and just kind of puts their own spin on it and makes it. a new, a new thing that integrates into that society and is still recognizable as something from overseas.

Like meat eating. Sure. Yeah, because they were all vegetarian society until the ships came. And then the emperor was like, huh, we're all smaller than these guys. And they're all bigger than us and taller and blonder. Maybe if we did what they ate, then we would also get taller and blonder. And so they can really eat fish. Yeah, but not like the amount of beef in the way that like, you know, the Westerners did.

Well, no, we're an unhealthy society. There's something horribly wrong with what we do to animals. But nevertheless, I had a wagu steak last night, so who am I to speak? Japanese apparently. That's from Japan, yeah, right there. Like taking the idea of a steak and saying, how can we make this better? Because it's pretty awesome on its own. But what if we massage the cows until their meat was amazing?

And they did it. The bastards. They did that in Dragon Quest. Jeremy? Hell yeah. Massaging the cows. I think it's called a puff puff. Oh, Jesus Christ.

I'm going to get a hook and pull you both off the stage with the same hook. But no, as I was saying, like, Western-style weddings are very popular in Japan and really throughout the world in places,

but like disproportionately I would say popular in Japan. I don't know what the actual percentage is. Where you're born a Shinto, you marry a Christian, and you die a. Buddhist because the Shintos have the ceremonies that care about life and living.

Wasn't that a riddle? Yeah, right? Like the Japanese Sphinx once told it. They borrowed that from Christianity, too. I think I heard Bilbo asked that one. The Tagalog. Yeah, because the Shinto and Buddhist cultures didn't really have good wedding traditions,

but the Christians did. And so they're like, oh, we've seen all these white bride-dress things. So they took the Christian wedding ceremonies wholesale and used them in Japan. I mean, sometimes we'll still see traditional Shinto-style weddings. but not as often because they really like the bride culture and the whole thing. But when you die, you have a Buddhist ceremony because the Buddhists are the ones who care about the afterlife.

So it's just, it's very much a culture of like the salad bar approach to theology, right? Like, there's just like, look, dude, whatever, I don't care about any of them. So I'm going to use the one that looks the coolest. It's called Viking in Japan, by the way. It's called what? The buffet style. It's called Viking. Oh, yeah, because it's a smorgasbord, right?

And they just can't say that. That's amazing. I didn't know that. Yeah, I kept seeing signs when I was over there. I would say, like, is that biking? And so I said, no, it's Viking. Viking. It's like, why, why does it say Viking everywhere? That's a buffet.

Oh, okay. What would I know about how Christianity came to Japan is that, well, there's a whole bunch of crucified missionaries for a start. And I feel like Christianity is very much a religion that's out to scare you. Love Jesus are going to go into an eternal fire. Who wants to burn to death forever? And it's like, I feel like maybe if that didn't really get into Japan and scare the crap out of them about blasphemy and all of that, maybe taking the buffet approach just seems like a little more sensible, a little more easier, because there aren't many cultures in the world where you kind of have that Viking buffet style of taking this and this and this from, you know, different cultures. There's actually a funny instance I had in Final Fantasy 14 where there was a New Year's event.

and there's always a little story that goes along for these New Year's events and it was the Year of the Dragon so there's a story about this child whose father was going to go out to sea to fish or whatever

and the child was like you know oh I'm so worried because our God isn't really this isn't his year he's on the Pantheon this year and I'm kind of worried that like the sea god won't protect him

and so this woman from the from DOMA yeah that DOMA she says well we have this dragon god that we're promoting why don't you pray to him and he's like what a great idea

I'm like holy shit you can't do that And here's the thing, like, as someone who is, I'm not a religious Jew. I don't really believe in, I'm very secular. So I don't sit there saying, oh, God, Old Testament God's going to kill me. But at the same time, it's just like, worshipping another God, just borrowing another God like that. You can do that. So this is one of the things that irritates me about the way Japan and America treat religion in terms of video games and stuff.

Because that's how a polytheism works. Polytheism is not about like, oh, I worship this guy. can I pray to that God? It's, you're going to pray to whoever is useful at the time. It is not, we are not series of related monotheism sitting next to each other. If I worship the sea god and right now the farm god is here, it's not going to be like, oh crap, I can't go to the farm god sample. No, that's, it's, I personally, when I go traveling around the world,

I've gone to Singapore a billion times, one of my favorite cities. Singapore's got a lot of Tamilian Hindus and they've got temples to deities I've never heard of, seen and don't even know the name of because they're written in Tamil and I don't read Tamil. and I will still go in there and pray because I'm a Hindu and that's a Hindu temple this god will figure it out and send it to the person who needs to see it like that is not like one of

this is like one of my big pep thieves I had a long discussion with Brandon Sanderson about this once too because like it's always like oh no I pray to the god of plagues I can't go to the god of peppers how is that going to work it's like no it really doesn't that's not how it works unless the god is the god of a city

that is currently at war with you that is not the god that you're going to be ignoring. It doesn't matter. It's just like, but, but because like the, the monotheistic mind virus has infected so many people that they cannot conceive of God except as this slot in like the cattle in the, in the big farm of like, oh, look, this cow is Jesus cow, this cow is Muslim cow, this cow is Jewish cow. We can only pray to Jesus cow. If we go to Muslim cow, then we'll die. Like, no, dude, the milk is all going to come into the same bucket. It doesn't matter. Sorry, this is just one of those things

It just irks the crap out of me Especially in D&D And D&D being the earth source Of all of this religious malaise In all the video games It's all Gary Guy Jax's fault Because he was an evangelical Christian And could not conceive of life

Except in that Lent Yeah, I kind of get that impression Yeah, I kind of get that impression So anyway, as I was saying, there's a lot of, a lot of, you know, just kind of mix-and-match imagery and, and even practices in Japanese society. but the primary source, I think, the primary vehicle for a lot of this has been, one, you know, like traveling abroad, Americans going to Japan and that sort of thing, but also America's number one cultural export up until the past few years, which was films, Hollywood, so much of what people, and not just in Japan, but throughout the world, they see, like I, they see things in TV shows and movies, and movies, And to them, you know, to people who don't live here, I'm not trying to other everyone else. I'm just saying, like, people who don't live here who don't live in North America experience things like yellow school buses. Like to them, that just seems like a sort of fanciful thing.

You know, it's like for us and, you know, British police boxes and double-decker buses. We don't have those here. And it seems almost like this whimsical fun fantasy thing. But then you go over to the UK and you see the double-decker buses. decker buses going around and you're like, oh, okay, yeah, that's, that's like, wow, that's fun, that's cool. Kind of like me living in the annex and like Scott Pilgrim being like the location. So I'm just like, I'm just going by sneaky dees because I got to get to this place.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of, a lot of the Christian imagery and concepts that permeate Japanese media and entertainment, those come from America. And, you know, they're borrowing images that they see so much of, you know, like manga and anime were influenced by Walt Disney. So much of Japanese film was influenced by Hollywood. And that trickles down into video games. You know, it's really kind of speaks to the soft power that America used to have in the world, which we have thoroughly squandered at this point.

But that's a different topic for a different time. But as she even keeps coming back to, a lot of this does come from Dungeons and Dragons. You know, this is probably a different podcast altogether, but the role-playing game, the video role-playing game kind of emerged from the same stew of ingredients that was brewing in the 1970s, Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons. and just a general sort of mysticism in science fiction writing. You see so many 1970s novels, sci-fi novels or works that involve espers. And these are things that really, you know, people with the idea that humanity still had more evolution to undergo, that we could achieve a higher state of being and move into, you know, something that is effectively mind magic.

You know, those are something that kind of went away in the 1980s, but all of these kind of fed into the stew of role-playing games. And at the same time, you had platforms like the Apple 2, and before that the Plato shared computing system emerge. And people, the same sort of people who were playing around at universities on computers were the same kind of people who were listening to, you know, Rush seeing about Baitour and the Snow Dog and reading The Lord of the Rings and, you know, watching all these fantasy movies. And all of this just kind of bled into the other, you know, just kind of combined. So there is this very sort of common pool of influences and thoughts and inspirations that just happened during the formative days of video games in the 1970s when this whole thing about computers and computer games was brand new and shiny and exciting, very, very heavily influenced by just the kind of past times and interests that the people who were into computers and

actually making this stuff happen were excited by. And on top of that, you had stuff in the world world like man walking on the moon for the first time. That's crazy. Did we actually do that? Yes, we actually did. It's just, you know, all these, all these things kind of co-lo into the computer role-playing game. And those early computer role-playing games from America, the Ultimus and the wizardries and the bard tales and so on and so forth, those trickled over to Japan and the people who were really into that kind of stuff generally could read or comprehend enough English that they could import these computer games,

you know, go to a little shop in a back alley in Akihabara and see it running on a VIC-20 import and be like, Oh, my God, that's amazing. And so they played those and cut their teeth on those games and said, I'm going to do one of these myself. And for the most part, you know, those early Japanese RPGs were just people in Japan making exactly the same games that they had played as imports, but in their own language or, you know, with their own kind of little twists on it,

but still very much influenced by the Western games that were being imported and really working in that shape. makes sense that the influences, the cultural influences and the shared religious heritage that kind of shaped those games through, as she even mentioned, Gary Gygax, Gaijacks, Gygax. You know what? I've even met the guy, and I still don't know how to say his name. Hard Gigi. Hard Giacs?

Gary. Guy Gygax. Jerry Gygax. You got? Okay, all right. And I just messing me up. Sorry. Can we just call him Viking?

That's where a lot of those things come from. I mean, if you look at the early, some of those early American Canadian RPGs, wizardry, not quite so much, but Altima, you know, you have like the priest class. And they, they walk around with onks on their staves rather than crucifixes. Altima was definitely trying to be a little bit hippie-dippy, though. Like, they were delving into pseudo-Hindu cultures in there. But that Lord British is a weirdo. Well, he's been to space. maybe he could stay there

next time but like oh dear okay it's okay don't worry about it I played a lot of all two games

I enjoyed them quite a bit but you're right though because there's a it's this interesting feedback loop that we get where like Japan took a lot of influence

from early 80s and 70s fantasy and like the influence of what Western fantasy was doing at the time and then those kids in America grew up

playing Japanese games and started taking their influences from anime and from, uh, you know, the JRPs and stuff that we played. And so you've got this weird kind of like narrowing feedback loop of like there's a whole generation of theology is drawn from persona, you know, or from like, like, the idea of like the hero in the village coming up and saving the world type of thing. It's just kind of, it's always amusing to me to kind

of check out. Um, but religion and games in Japan, you'll notice that for a long time. Like, I noticed this because it's stuck out so uniquely. playing the Sukhadan games in the 90s, you know, they would have their technical, like, their item to raise you back from the dead. And instead of being like, you know, a feather or a cross or some Christian ideal, it was a Jizo doll, which is a small Buddha doll that they, the small Buddha statues that you see that are like the protector spirits that are for like, you know, the dead children or whatever. And I was like, I had to look it up because I was like, what's the Jizo? And then it just was so. It's Mario. It's a nuky Mario. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And

That was nothing. Like, I didn't realize that until decades later either. But I thought it was really neat because it was the first time I'd seen them using and drawing upon an indigenous source as opposed to the Western idea of bringing something back from the dead. And, like, they also see a lot of, like, the Arthurian tales and stuff like that show up in, like, big, like, in big chunks in Japanese culture. Like, you see the night to the round from Final Fantasy, for instance, or any of these kind of, like, tales of, like, just. British religious fantasy shows up and like then when they they need monsters for their things so they go and they get Beowulf and Enkidu and like various spirits and things from like the West and going back down and I don't know I just that's really fun that part is at least

cool until they turned Chiva into a lesbian bicycle which is I will never not be mad about that that was a choice they made and in her defense she's really hot um so you know As much as we've been talking about all the religious influences and so on and so forth, something that is worth mentioning is that, you know, like I said, the Japanese RPGs took a lot of influence, like direct influence, from Western RPGs. And, you know, those were influenced by Dungeons and Dragons and all those things. But, you know, in terms of scenery and visual imagery,

the setting of these RPGs that, you know, were being produced for communication. computers generally reflected a medieval European style. Yeah. And so when you look to medieval Europe, Christianity is inextricable from that. You cannot separate medieval Europe and that society from the influence of the church because the church had such profound control over the entire society. And it was such a massive part of everyone. lives and of just the basic functioning day-to-day of society. So much of, you know, a community

relied on the local monastery and so much of a resource, the resources of a community went into building its church or its cathedral. And I mean, you go to Europe now and the buildings that are still standing eight, nine hundred years later generally are religious in nature. And they're amazing. They're astounding works of architecture to think, people did this, nearly a millennium ago, you know, they didn't have a computer. They didn't have a crane. They certainly didn't have a cell phone. It was a better life in some ways. But they did this. And these things are still standing and they are going to continue standing after all the, you know, the shitty McMansions that we're building today are long gone. And, you know, it's kind of

funny, because when I've talked to Europeans about this, they're like, oh, God, these things are such an eyesore. It's just like, here's this thing that's stuck in our town, and it can never be changed, and it's always going to be there. And it's so old. It's just this, you know, it just seems like a relic of the past. It can't tear down the cathedral. It anchors us to history. And, you know, to my surprise, like, I've had people tell me that's why Europeans often find America so appealing and so exciting because we don't have anything like that. We just tear it all down. I don't think there's anything, yeah, like that in Toronto.

We're only a few hundred years old anyway. Yeah, so they're like everything's new and exciting. It feels like a place of change, a place where the future is possible, where new things can happen. So, you know, there's this really interesting difference in perspective. But nevertheless, like so much of what we think of as, you know, Western history is tied to the established religions of those eras. And not only the imagery, but also the architecture and the structures and the, just the, the lasting impressions that they made, you know, monasteries that are still, you know, have monks practicing and making liquor in them.

These, these things are, you know, just. I mean, if that's a story you want to tell, that's the story you have to tell, right? Like, pretty much. So, you know, you do get to things like fantasy star. where they're like, actually, you know what's cool? Star Wars. And you can have a sword that's not made out of a laser, but it's still Star Wars. And actually, when you resurrect someone in Fantasy Star, never mind. I guess it is kind of like a cathedral dragon quest.

Actually, no, I want to point out here, in Fantasy Star 2, at least, you go into a clone lab. And I think that's creepy as hell because he talked to a guy who looks like Kefka, number one. And he's like, welcome to the clone lab. And you look at like his background. You see like a fetus in a jar. And that's incredible. never seen another RPG do that. I can't remember the first one, to be honest, but second was great. In Fantasy Star 4, you just go to an inn and sleep. Oh, that's boring.

Bring back Kefka's Clone Lab. To get people back later, you have to give them like a specific medicine like Star do or whatever. Okay, no, actually, I'm looking at the original Fantasy Star, and I do have to correct myself. The little Dragon Ball circular building dome that you go to to resurrect people has a little cross on it. Of course it does. So it's a Christian clone lab. So even in Star Wars. It's a horrifying thought.

Even in the Star Wars inflected JRP fantasy star, you've still got Space Jesus or the Space Pope. And you don't get to fight and kill the Space Pope until Final Fantasy 13. It took that long to finally let us go after Space Pope. I don't know. I think Final Fantasy 10, like you were fighting against a Catholic Church. church of Waka was definitely Catholic and he was definitely having problems with sin the bad guy, sin

the bad guy, literal well, kind of, but he's he's Sheen in Japan, so it's Yeah, well, you know, that's a localization choice. Theodore in Japan is also Feodor for, so. Oh God, don't even get me started on Seedore, please. Yeah, whatever. For Seedore. I mean, sheen

could be written as sin, but it's also like the emperor's pronoun, so who can say, Neil? There's something I want to point out That's always very interesting Being a big fan of Cain Hywin From Final Fantasy 4 If you look at the Japanese version of the spelling

It's Kain, which is also how it's pronounced in Hebrew It has an extra syllable That's totally left out of the English translation So Rainbow, the more you know Oh, I thought that was a I thought it was like the pepper Like cayenne Yeah

I thought he was supposed to, okay No, that's Final Fantasy 6 You're thinking of cyan, cayenne I'm talking about Cain Highwin from 2 slash 4. Kane. The dragoon who's pissed off as they want. Kane? The dragoon. Yeah, Kane Highwin.

No, that's just how you get that sound in Japanese. You put those two vowels together. Kayen, but it's also how it has the same kind of sound in Hebrew as Japanese. It's kind of interesting compared to the English. I did not know that. You're going to be able to be. Anyway, so that's a lot of really all over the place discourse. But it's getting to the point where we're going to talk about some video games.

And I do want to mention some Dragon Ball was mentioned earlier. I do want to call out the fact that of all companies, Sega really loved to depict dead characters as angels ascending with a halo to heaven. A friend of the podcast, Danny Cowan's website, Dream and Friends, has a little feature that shows, what is it called? SIGA master system angels that shows off the many, many angels that appear and ascend to the heavens when something, sometimes the protagonist, sometimes a bad guy, sometimes even just a random monster dies. it ascends to the heavens as an angel, and that includes Alf. When Gordon Shumway, when Gordon Shumway dies, he ascends to heaven with a pair of angel wings. That implies that Alph's been baptized. Possibly.

Or let me pitch you this idea. What if Alf really stands for angelic life form? Oh, my God. What if Alph is a 13th angel? What if Alph is a biblically accurate angel this whole time? Everyone's like, oh, put more eyes on it. And I'm like, no, longer nose, more cat eating. Yeah, where does cats, where does eating cats factor into theology?

Well, they ain't kosher. Probably not halal either. Are they not? Dear God, no, they're the opposite of kosher. Yeah. I did not know that. The only, the only mention of cats in the Bible is not in a text that is considered canonical by all churches and not by Judaism. but it is it is uh from a jewish text the uh the letter of jeremiah which is uh it's an addition to

uh the book of baruch um but uh the only mention of cats is like cats are no good because you'll see them sleeping on top of idols and so that's that's the only time uh cats get mentioned at all and that's in a book that's only canon for like orthodox is it like midrash uh no it's just it's Halacha or something. It's from the Greek material that in, it's not even the stuff. Gentile nonsense. It's not even, well, no, I mean, it is a Jewish text, but in Greek. So it's a Hellenistic Jewish text, but it is from later than any of the material that would end up in the Maseretic text.

And so it's, but it's not even among the, actually, it might be among the material that's in the Catholic Dutero canon. So it might be Catholic, but it's definitely canon and Greek Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox. Oh, interesting. Yeah. This is actually something that I wanted to talk about because we've mentioned Dragon Ball and we've mentioned the halos. And that is something that I find genuinely very interesting because when you think about the ways that cultures influence each other, particularly with regards to religion, text is difficult. even in just the English language, there is debate over what things mean in religious texts, like, let alone like going back and translating and different things. So the actual substance of a religious text or religious art of any kind or cultural art of any kind, the substance of it is hard to translate in a literal sense.

visuals are not. Visuals are very easy. The problem is those two facts together mean that visuals are often divorced from context. So you have halos, which Benito correct me if I'm wrong or anyone else. Like that's kind of gets its real start in Byzantine art, right? Like, yeah, these guys are much earlier than that, much, much earlier. Like you see that in a lot of old like Hindu and Buddhist stuff. stuff from the earliest statues that the Greeks...

So in the Indo-Helenistic era, post-Alexander, that's when a lot of the statuary for like early Hindu and early Buddhist art was showing up. And a lot of those guys had the big halos around their head because they were drawing from the ancient Greeks because Homer used to say that like, you know, angel, sacred, like, heroes and gods and stuff had a more than natural light appearing around their heads

that would show up in the artwork, which is itself drawing from Mesopotamia. And, like, Persia, you see this a lot in, like, the early Zoroastrian art in, like, the deserts of Persia, where you see, like, the images of the Zoroastrian or the big phoenix that they use to bring people back, and it's got kind of this weird glow around it. So this is, like, the Byzantine definitely used it a lot in their artwork, in the orthodoxy artwork, but that came significantly earlier. Because I was thinking about this, because you were written in the note, and the transmission process of bringing halos from the east to the west. and from the west to the east, definitely tracked along the Silk Road and through, like, the Hindu cultures that went from, yeah, the ultimate source was definitely Byzantine and Sumer and stuff like that. But the Hellenistic culture that did that predates Byzantium by a significant margin. It predates Christianity by significant margin.

Certainly in the early church, a lot of early artistic depictions of Jesus are drawing intentionally drawing from images of Apollo. Jesus is often And if you look at really early Christian art A lot of times he's a beardless youth in his intent But the idea of like the sheep and then the sun disk Behind his head

And so yeah There's definitely like Yeah because I mean you've got There's a line to be drawn Soul Invictus had it and like There's some like I ra is not quite like Ryan Akenaten don't

They don't really count because there's sun god So obviously they're gonna have the sun on their head but like Greek artwork had a lot of like this person is important we need to make them look more important but it is cool though because like when you see that kind of notion this glowiness kind of transcend and go through it

when you see like Buddhist art in China you'd start to see a lot of these glows and stuff around them and when it made it to Japan the thing that's interesting is the Dragon Ball halo is not the same as the Buddhist halo the Buddhist halo is flat and around you It's sort of like when Goku goes super saijian and he's got the big glow around him of the fire, that is the Hindu Buddhist halo. But when they die, they have a Christian halo.

They have the little frisbee on their head. I mean, I think that goes to what Chris was saying where like this kind of this bit of visual iconography becomes divorced from the meaning. Yeah. And so eventually, and it happens in Western culture too. It's not just in the transmission from one to another. But the idea of, I mean about halo specifically, the idea of the halo being an aura of light radiating from. from off of the person does eventually get abstracted down to the golden ring floating over the head. And it gets divorced from its origins of divine light.

We start associating it with saints. And then we start associating it with angels. And then we start associating it with dead people. And then we start associating it with Wiley Coyote. Tom and Jerry. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a real saint. Do you think Homer?

Homer could possibly have envisioned Tom getting detonated by dynamite and turning into a pale version of himself ascending to the heavens with a halo above his head. I don't think he had that in his – I don't think he had that on his bingo card. No, I think he did. Homer was so far ahead of his time. Yeah, I would bet. Homer are a real person who actually existed. But then because you get it in that form of Wiley Cote, blows himself up and then you see him with a halo and wings in a heart. then pop culturally, it becomes, right, this guy's dead. Yeah.

And so you get stuff like in Dragon Ball Super when they go down to literal, explicit hell to get Friza so they can bring him back to life to fight. He's got a halo. And you look at it and you're like, well, that's not right, though, because only some dead people. Only good dead people get that. So it made sense when it was Goku. But now it's just, and I love that. Like, I, I love the idea that, like, there is this visual shorthand that we have all agreed on means this one thing. And then it means an adjacent but different thing now.

It's interesting because, like, when you think about how the Halo got divorced from being the glow to being this ring around your head, it's because of, like, realism in painting. It's because when these guys in, like, the 15th, 100 or the 14th, 15th century, when they started drawing more real. realistic looking depictions of scenes and stuff, they were like, well, how do I make this glow behind his head look like a thing? Because the glow is already kind of a flat disc around him. So like, okay, well, what if we yank it back and give it three-dimensionality? And suddenly it's this ring around your head. And then it's just this, like you see it a lot in like very early Italian attempts to do like the big triptics that used to be on the Catholic altars where they would have things. You would start to see them kind of yanking the, it feels

a lot like when you're playing Pokemon Go and you see Pokemon that were in, you know, black in red and blue that were obviously never meant to be seen in three dimensions, get yanked out and stretch into the three dimensionality. When you take like this notion

of this flat circle behind your head and they're like, well, what would it look like if he turns? If Jesus turns, is that flat circle just staying there or does it move with him? How do you do that? Is it just kind of glowing behind him? And they're like, okay, fine, it's a thing behind him that's a flat Turkle. Okay, well, let's yank it upwards

a bit. Let's angle it a bit. Okay, now it's just a ring around his head. And then that's just like, oh, dead people, ring around your head. Happy birthday. I'm almost positive that that happened because there was like a church play in the 12th century

or something and it flopped over. And everyone was like, actually, that looks cool. The early Catholic V-tubers needed their ring lights and well, the rest is history. Chris, I do actually think that's dead serious. Like, yeah, I mean, like mystery plays and that kind of stuff.

very important in the Middle Ages for conveying religious ideas to people who couldn't read. Right. Because text is difficult. Yeah. And so a lot of a lot of visual iconography in Christianity. They have to pin it to the back of the hair, so it looks like...

Yeah, it's dependent on what they were able to physically craft for these kind of plays, hell mouths and that kind of stuff. And that is why the Metatron is a Super Sentai robot in persona 5. Oh, really? Yeah, we did a special video episode of Apocrypal's where I made Benito guess what biblical figures were being represented via the designs from persona 5. That sounds like a lot of fun, actually. We had a discussion on the Acts of the Blood God forums because we saw the design. I can't remember which persona game it was or which SMT game it was, but Maria or Mary, she had like a bunch of bronze.

things around her and there was she had like my Catholic friend explained it to me but she was really just we didn't understand why there's a T-Rex at her feet we couldn't understand T-Rex. We got everything else but there's a T-Rex at Mary's feet and we don't know why. Well

T-Rex has really tiny arms and it's impossible to crucify. Well I don't know. It could be an evolution of the visual motif of Mary trampling the devil which can often be depicted as a drag And so you'll definitely find art of Mary trampling a dragon.

And so transferring that to a T-Rex. Because she was also, like, surrounded by, I can't remember who wrote the apostles or whatever, Matt, Marker. You know, just like the lion, the eagle, the Matthew, whatever. Matt, Jason, Tyler, Aiden, Aiden, Jaden, and Brayden, the less. Hunter. I should have thrown this one in. Because look, I also really love the persona designs. They're incredible.

I think they're great. Like, specifically for Christian biblical figures. Yes. Messiah is like one of the, like, I think maybe we should replace the Jesus on the cross with the persona version of Messiah with the... Oh, that would go over a gangbusters. That would be great. The chain of coffins. I actually adore, and I've said this many times in our own podcast about the Messiah on a Christian podcast.

You can't do that on a Christian podcast But the depictions they have Of some of like Jewish myths and legends and whatnot Like the way they designed the dybic was incredible Like you only I haven't seen that one since SMT strange journey So one of the things that like people Like what do you think about like the way persona treats Hindu deities

And I'm like well I've got a statue of Shiva from persona In my personal mandir at home So that's what I think about I'm like they got it right And it looks holy and I'm like I actually love the depiction they have for Lilith, who is like a demon who still shows up in Judaism. She's considered very bad luck around babies for obvious reasons. But the way she's designed is incredible because, first of all, she has a very androgynous look, very David Bowie.

But she's with Samayle, her consort, and just this kind of detail. You don't really see that often. And if you look at her too carefully, you notice she has the wrong number of fingers. So it's just like one of those designs you look at it first. think you know what you're looking at it first, but then you pull it back and you're like, that's actually very clever and really cool in a respectful way from a game series that's actually famous for a dick on a chariot. Yeah, but that dick on a chariot is a Buddhist deity from Bhutan, right?

Like the fertility deity, Mara slash the deity that tempts the Buddha when he goes into his three days, which seems to be a thing that, like, you know, religious folks likes to do, which is go to hell for three days and come back. It just... Why not? It seems to write a passage. Dealy. But the mega 10 games... It's a good weekend vacation, yeah.

It's like, it's funny because when you look at Western Eastern RPGs, they will generally treat Christianity and friends with super respect and be like, oh, we don't want to depict, you know, Yahweh or Jesus or anything like that. But we'll take all of these other religions like Egypt and Greece and Hindus. Why not? You've got a lot of God. We'll borrow a few.

And it's always just very demeaning and demoralizing, except for the Mega 10 games, because the Mega 10 games take the viewpoint of everybody is equal and there all bad. And because of that, they've got the deity pantheons of Japan, of Egypt, of their own culture is not protected, Christian culture is not protected. Nearly every single monot, like, every single active religion that has something that can be depicted is. And I think that's

amazing because they go through a lot of work to make sure that it's both respectful and also like dispassionate. Like they're not making a judgment. They're just saying this is, and we're just saying these alien figures and stuff are just here to deal with this. Like, those, that series of games might be the most nuanced, religious series of games I've ever seen. Especially, like, when you think of the ones that have the really long names. That's what most of them? Not the. The digital devil saga?

Yeah, digital devil saga. Those ones go into depth about, like, reincarnation and, like, it's like reliving debates in, like, the fore. the 400s between Trunkeracharya and the Buddhists and stuff and it's like who goes into like who but me cares that much about this nerdy stuff but the guys who do the writing for those stories

are some of the best theological thinkers in video games yeah I think I mentioned this on the last episode but like a thing that I appreciate about the

presence of like Christian iconography and the stuff that I grew up with, uh, in Japanese video games is that in my head, I'm like, yeah, they got that about as right as we do. Like it's, and I feel like that is exemplified in persona and Shin Megami Tensei where it's, you can't be mad at it because it's everybody. Like they really, they really got everybody in there. And I actually, I actually, um, would disagree with, with Shevim's assessment that Magamay Tensei treats all religions, all gods as bad, I say it treats them all as valid. And at the same time, they're like, they're like a weapon in a sense. Like they are

inherently neutral. It's how you use them. Yeah. You can basically team up with any God of any pantheon, aside from like the prime figures, the movers and shakers who are the final bosses. But everyone else is like they're out there. They have their. own motives and desires and ambitions, and you can team up with them. If you know, if you talk to them and offer them enough money or, you know, just smooth talk to them, they'll be like, yeah, I'm cool with this guy. I'll tag along with him and fight with him in his little wrist computer. That's okay. That's, it's, it suits my needs. And, you know, it doesn't matter if they're like a Mesopotamian god or, you know, someone from Aztec lore or someone more adjacent to Christianity or just like

a Japanese yokei. They're out there. They're doing their thing. They're going to call you an asshole if you don't give enough money. But, you know, if you do give them enough money, they're going to be like, all right, pal, you confuse me with, you know, an angel. That's fine. Whatever. It's what I was born for. Listen, have I read any actual Kabbalistic texts? No. Do I feel like I have an understanding of Yelda Beath based on playing Persona Five twice all the way through. Absolutely. I have been educated.

The demiurge, got it. It's because it stands in contrast with something like smite, which from the West takes a bunch of pantheons of gods and stuff and treats them like toys. And then you're like, why don't you have any of the Jewish Christian Islamic tree of pantheons? Like, well, we want to be respectful. I'm like, yeah, but there's a billion Hindus and you're okay with just

having half-naked collie run around as a toy. I'm like, yeah, but my Hindu friend sends it's okay. That's literally what the designer told me on Twitter. Whoops. And I was like, I have black friends. Yeah. It's okay for me to use the hard bar. They're probably okay with playing hindus.

It's fine. I was recently reading on the War Rocket Ajax podcast. We've been reading through a long run of Marvel's Thor comics, the run that Dan Juergens wrote. And they're in the middle of this extremely long story that is very convoluted, but it's about, like, people starting to worship Thor, like, from the Avengers, who is also Thor, like, from mythology. Right. But no one ever mentions the fact that, like, that Norse Pagans do actually exist.

Like, there are people. They're around. Like, this is, this would not be an entirely new idea for, for many people. In India, in the 80s, there was a serial based on the holy text of Rama and the story about Rama and fighting and everything. And it was the most popular TV show, literally, historically worldwide. I think you meant breakfast cereal for a minute, and I was fascinated by where this is going. Breakfast cereal?

You said something about a cereal. You said cereal. Oh, right, right, right, right, right. No, no. My brain sparked in the wrong direction for a second. Yeah, I was cereal. What, you know, what you actually were talking about makes much more sense. Yes.

But the point is, this cereal was watched every week, and it got to the point in small villages, is they would have like Buja's before, like religious ceremonies before the show airs. They would sit and treat it like they're going to church for a week and watch the cereal until the next episode of Rama. And then they would end and they would distribute food to everybody. It was like a whole religious thing to the point that like when the finale aired, the literal country stopped for like two hours and just stopped. It was watched by almost 600 million people or something like that. But the point is, is that the guys who play. played the gods in that series were unable to work afterwards because people would be like,

Rahm wouldn't act in this movie. How dare you? And because they were not able to separate the fact that this is just a guy who played God on this mystery play that went over on TV. But it was so impactful and important to the theology of literally my generation of people that these folks were unable to just get acting jobs ever again because the fact that they're just like, you can't be a gangster. You're the personified essence of purity. Ultimate typecasting.

You can't be a gangster or anything ever. Like, you show up at ROM or you don't? And they're like, well, I guess. Yeah, that's why no one ever plays Doctor Who for more than three seasons. Yeah, basically. But yeah, so what else has gods in it, Jeremy? Well, actually, you know what? It's time for me to take back control of this podcast things.

And as I was saying earlier, So many of the Japanese RPG elements that we are familiar with come from Western RPGs. To the point where, you know, sort of famously, Nihon Falcom wanted to localize some of the Ultima games and do some work with Richard Garriott. And he came over to talk to them. And it came to light that in some of the Dragon Slayer manuals, they had literally just traced screenshots of like the Ultima shop screens, like the characters you talk to. And that kind of blew up that conversation. But as a result, you did just get this, it was kind of just accepted that Western religious ideas, Western European history, the Catholic Church, etc., were just

a fixture of role-playing games. And RPGs that are not based in that kind of setting, are almost, you know, like taking a deliberate stand to do something different. And like I said, even, even Fantasy Star, you know, you've got the Dragon Ball Dome churches. So when you have RPGs that veer in another direction and try to do something different, it really stands out because every, every RPG has their own kind of version of like, here are the fantasy precepts of Christianity. Final Fantasy not quite so much. Like, you know, in the early Final Fantasy, fantasy games, you had to go and pay a priest to resurrect your party. But eventually, you just learned, like, you know, resurrection magic, which is just called

Rays. It's called White in FF1. That is because of localization, censorship by Nintendo. We were just talking about that. Natty and I yesterday with Alexander O. Smith. You sure were. About vagrant story and the history of Final Fantasy localizations. There's like, I know that guy.

I cannot wait to hear that. five different ways that they localized the Holy spell in Final Fantasy games before it finally went to PlayStation and Sony was like, yeah, whatever, just call it holy. White, fade, pearl, et cetera. Like, it's, you know, it was all over the place. Yeah, and I was saying how basically at the time I had no idea that, okay, this is a holy spell. I just thought, oh, wow, pearl looks pretty because it is a very pretty looking spell, of course. But I had no idea, okay, use this against the 10 million undead things.

you're going to come across in the world of frickin' ruin. It's right there in the name, ruin. But, you know, the holy spell is not explicitly Christian in Final Fantasy. You use it against the undead. It's like purifying magic. So it's almost got that kind of Shinto, like Japanese tradition to it. Very similar spell in, it actually is an instill for the undead in Breath of Fire called Kiri. Kyrgyz.

Kyrich turning undead is such a Christian thing. though, because it's straight out of D&D, and it's from D&D because of the Christian mythology of people, like, if I hold the true cross in front of, like, you know, people who are possessed by evil or the walking dead or whatever, you will, you know, die or be rebuked or whatever it is. That is, that is very much in that same lineage of Jesus times. Sure, but you also have, you know, like, shinto ceremonies to purify. Yeah, like, I hold a thing and you go away. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, it's, it's not just drawing on Christianity there. It's a kind of a universal concept across religions. And there's nothing about the

holy spell that makes me say, ah, there's Jesus. Yeah, it's just the name. Holy. Holy, is that a specifically, like explicitly Christian term? Not really, no, but they decided it was. Yeah, I didn't think so. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't read that one as Christian. And Phoenix Down, that's, you know, what does the Phoenix represent? Yeah. So it's down, like the feathery down. of a phoenix. So they kind of divested themselves from

Christian symbolism for a long time in Final Fantasy until like Nadia said, I think you got back to Final Fantasy 10 and you start getting toward, was that you Sheave him or was it Nadia? Okay, sheave him. Of course. Who's talked the most this episode? I even

presaged this episode by saying, sorry I talk so much. That's true. It was like a pre-apology. It's better to ask forgiveness than permission. Christian tradition. So Final Fantasy 10, you do get back to more of that, like, hey, there is an organization here that is pretty Catholic-looking.

Final Fantasy 12 is very much in a, well, it's based in Evilis, which is its own thing. So, yeah, there is a lot of Christianity in Final Fantasy 12. But then Final Fantasy 13 is weird because it's like this artificial constructed society that exists inside a sphere. And at the end, you fight your way past, you know, all the linear paths and everything, and you go out into the veld and fight dinosaurs and whatever. But then at the end, there's like robot space pope. And you have to use, you know, like he's got insta kill spells and so forth. But that's like the one weird kind of, I would say most explicitly Catholic looking thing in the entire mainline Final Fantasy series outside of Evalys.

And it's so, it's so bizarrely out of place in 13. That's very strange. Yeah, like, where did this guy come from? Because everything else, you know, you've got everything from the lesbian Shiva motorcycle to, I don't even know. Like, Final Fantasy 13, I guess it just speaks to what a mess that game is. It's all over the place, like thematically and visually. It's just anything that they could put together, they did because they were desperate for content for that one.

Look, it's pretty. God damn it. Look. I hated that. Yeah, man. So I haven't played the MMOs. I haven't played 16. But 15, I feel, kind of has like cathedral imagery. But it's really just to kind of, not so much about religion, but it's really just about. A fallen society. A fallen society. But it's to create. create like the, you know, the image of a very European-style center of civilization. So it draws very heavily on, you know, like Parisian imagery and like Roman imagery. You know, like I go to these

cities and I'm like, oh, wow, this is, this is heck of Final Fantasy 15. Love this. So it's, yeah, it's specifically trying to create like a faux Europe. So that's really kind of the extent of the the religious imagery there. But if you want to talk about Final Fantasy and religion, you look to Evalise, because Evilise is like basically Holy Roman Empire

the franchise. And you know, starting with Final Fantasy tactics, that is the game. It's not the first JRP to have excessive Christian, Catholic religious imagery in it. But, I mean, it starts out.

Yeah, the entire game starts with a battle outside a cathedral. And someone is like, yeah, it's your fault or God's fault, whatever, it's not our fault. And, you know, through the entire thing, you're fighting the gods of the zodiac. But also at the end, the final boss is a half-naked Jesus lady who then turns into a demon as like the false prophet of Jora. So it's got a lot going on there. I mean, your sister, Romsa's, the main character's sister, is training to be a nun, priests, and just, you know, medieval religious imagery permeate that game. It is so heavily steeped in, again, European history.

It's very heavily based on the War of the Roses. And it just draws on the culture of that period of European history because Yasimi Matsuno, the director and writer, is a, giant history nerd and loves the history of war especially and great, you know, great and notable conflicts in history. But again, it's a case where religion is inextricable from that society, from the sort of heritage and the period of history that is explicitly being referenced by the story and the imagery in this game. I just want to take a very quick step back to 14 for a second because Heaven's Word, the second expansion, is the Catholic Church versus you.

And we're talking about Catholic Church elves, run by elves, basically. And it's a whole thing. I won't get into it, except basically the church is angry because I'm a fucked a dragon. It's the whole thing. Happens of the best of us. Wait, is that what that meme is about? The church is angry because they won't let us fuck dragons. I don't know if that's the true.

That's the true origin, but people have reverenced it many times for that reason. but I want to specifically bring up that there is a you can become a botanist and just like you know play with plants for as a job if you want to

and I was doing this and in the Heavens Ward expansion there is a side quest and I adore this where you are growing what do they feed the chokobot was gristle greens I think are called

Gislegrins and there is a plot where there is one bishop is beating with another bishop so the bishop that is that owns or knows the botanist who is growing these gisle greens is trying to bring out an accusation that these are not

orthodox these are unorthodox gisle greens or heretic gisle greens it's a whole it's fantastic I adore it heaven's word great stuff yeah that sounds so that's so catholic though it is it it is it it is ff 14 is a game that I don't want to play because I would have to play and pay money for it and do it monthly and I'm god of child but that being notwithstanding the thing about tactics that I really appreciated more than other fantasies the other ff fantasies is that it has all of the same trappings the classes, the priests, the everything, but it acts like a world where

religion is a thing that matters and it has weight and actually exists as a unit and not just like, oh, we have to go kill the God. No, it's like, literally there are people who are praying, they're people who go to church. There are churches that have functions. Like, when you look at your white mage, they look straight up like a tonsured monk, right?

Like, they've got the little bowl haircut and everything that would be very medieval European. Even though, like, tactics also has like, you know, Chinese geomancy and the Taoist oracles and all the, like the whole panoply, but these are things that feel natural in the world. Like, this is a world where religion is a going matter, it's a going concern, and they care about it. And I think that's a really fascinating change from so much in terms of like the way video games normally treat religion, which is just the place you go to raise your dude from the dead. Like when you're dragging

the coffins in Dragon Ball, like in Dragon Warrior, when you're dragging the often around. You're not particularly worried about the theology of the goddess. Later on, in the later later games, yeah, there were some priests and stuff, but generally it's like, oh, look, the priest is abusing the people. They're bad. We should kill them. You don't, like, Romza's sister goes to church. Like, devout cares. That's not a thing we see in other games. One of the most important NPCs in the game is the priest Simon, who's basically providing her sanctuary. Right. You know, helping out. It's just, it's so refreshing.

I have Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,

Oh, Oh, Oh, uh, And, you know, that is an image that you do see in some games, even before Final Fantasy Tactics, like Zelda, A Link to the Past. You know, you escape from the castle at the beginning and take Zelda to the sanctuary, which is very, very clearly a Catholic cathedral. It doesn't explicitly say that.

But, I mean, before that, Zelda 2, you have to get a cross, a crucifix, so you can see the ghosts in the graveyard. Yeah, the graveyard is also, like, bigger than the entirety of Zelda 1? I kind of, how many people died? I mean, Gannon's a bad guy. Gannon is resurrected with a blood of like. people to get their blood to bring himself back. Yeah. He's, Gannon is resurrected by sprinkling Ling's blood on his ashes. That is so very Christian. So is Gannon? Is it? Jesus? Of course.

Because Link doesn't get resurrected unless a fairy brings him back. Anytime, okay, parish. Anytime I hear anything to do with blood being sprinkled on something, I immediately think Christian. Because you have to understand, I was, one of my introduction to Christianity was somebody seated my grandfather's synagogue with chick tracks on Passover, specifically about the story of Passover, which I knew is like a five-year-old, however old I was. So I'm reading the story, like, yay, plagues. And then it's like, they get to this whole thing about some guy got across and his blood washing you clean somehow.

I'm like, what is that? That's grisly. What is this? So that was very, very confusing. I don't want to blow your mind here. But Jack Chick might have gotten a few things wrong. Oh, yeah. I know that for now.

I know that now. Jack Shakespeare's a... He had ideas. He was a great fan fiction writer. He had a lot of opinions. Maybe it's just that I don't come from a Catholic tradition, but I, like, sprinkling blood was never anything to do with anything that we ever talked about. Just blood and resurrection together.

Sure, sure. Okay. Yeah, but... Made that connection for me. Is this the part we get to talk about Breath of Fire, too, yet? Yeah, go for it. Okay, cool. Because that's also a pre-Final fantasy tactics.

That was kind of the big one before FF tactics. I want to shout it out because that is another instance of a game, despite a horrible, horrible translation of where there is a story going on about an indigenous religion that worships a dragon god versus St. Eva, quote unquote, who might be Catholic representation, I don't know, coming in and kind of taking over the old church. But it's not an explicit matter of this is. the evil church, even though it is. In fact, when you start the game, your father is a priest for this church, for St. Eva, and his wife is half dragon,

and she, no, she is dragon, actually. Riyu is half dragon because they have the baby. She worships her God, and he worships St. Eva. And he's a very, you know, nice, kind priest who just happens to be preaching for a super religious, super evil religious organization.

But you get to that point eventually, And in the meantime, you know, not only are you kind of looking at what this religion is doing to this indigenous dragon god, but also to the indigenous, there's a, the tribe people, the shell clan, worships the earth and the goddess of the earth. And you have St. Eva trying to buy the hero Rand, trying to buy his mother's property so they can put up a church. And there's this whole plot going on where they're trying to get her killed and just trying to sell her off. And she comes to a really bad end. it was a great game, and it's really a shame that we didn't get a better translation for it, because it actually, it was my first encounter with a game that had anything to do with, like, serious religion in it, because this is when Nintendo finally said, you know what, we don't care. Put it everywhere the hell you want in your games. We're working on the NCC4 over here. And yeah, so that was just a game where I started up, and there's this demon talking to me about, you must give up your power to God, you must become God's strength. I'm like, what the fuck am I playing right now? But when I look at it in retrospect and kind of like, you know, with the re-translations and whatnot that have been done by fans as Capcom hasn't, I can really appreciate what a really actually in-depth story it is and very

complicated for its time. Yeah, earlier I was talking specifically about 1980s JRP's like Dragon Quest and, you know, Dragon Slayer and things like that. But the approach that JRPGs took to religion, you know, importing Western religion and Christianity specifically in the 1990s, really. changed. And, you know, in the mid-90s, I think a lot of that has to do with something that's not a video game at all, but rather Neon Genesis Evangelion, the famous anime series, which we've had an entire episode on. Please look that up in the archives. You can hear all about it.

But that was a very, very interesting cartoon whose creator was not a religious person by any means. he did love Ultraman, and Ultraman, as we've mentioned, last episode, was created by someone who was actually very devoutly Christian. But basically, there's a ton of, you know, religious and Kabbalistic imagery in, like, a Christian and Kabbalistic imagery in Evangelion. And none of it has any real meaning. It's all just like, well, I thought this sounded pretty cool. So we went with angels that are, you know, existing in opposition to the Lillum, the children of Lillith, which is humanity, and want to create a cataclysmic event. And to prevent that from happening, we've got Lillith's body, which is a giant crucified in the basement of our giant geological egg that exists beneath Tokyo. and now there's

there's robots that aren't actually robots it's your mom inside by the way and you're in her womb yeah there's there's a lot happening in Evangelion isn't there like the spear that stabbed Jesus or something

Oh yeah longinus's spear Men will do anything to avoid therapy man Is he just cat If you look at pictures of his cat The cat just looks like is having existential crisis In every picture in a Pearson Who?

Ono's cat Hideaki I fully believe that anybody related to Anno is having existential crises all the time. His animates are high. His, uh, the impression I've gotten, what's that? This cartoon sounds wild, but I bet if Goku was there, things would have gone down there. I would, okay, I'd finally watch Eva had go of a Goku get in it.

I don't know if, if Goku could break through the, uh, the ego barrier, though, the, the, um, yeah, he's, what do you call him the, uh, the, the, AT field? As he feels, yes, absolute terror. Sounds like one for a death battle. That's how you break down the ego barrier. He definitely could. I put him money on Goku. He's kind of too empty-minded to really have that bother him. He's the living heart sutra is what he is.

Let me tell you about ultra instinct. You know, the thing is like, Ava is responsible for more people around the world learning about weird Christianity in Judaism than like anything else. Like, there's so many people who think they know anything at all about, Judaism and Christianity because of Ava and it's just like, bro, you saw like once Heffarat once, that doesn't tell you anything at all. But yeah, Ava's weird. Ava's got some weird, weird imagery. But that's because none of it has any like actual meaning or coherence. It's just like, here's some really cool stuff we can throw in here to tell basically a story

about trauma and depression. And all of that, like, robot and Jesus stuff is kind of incidental. It's really, you know, like about deconstructing the, the super robot and Gundam-style anime concept and dealing, you know, like you said, you know, doing that instead of therapy. You know, it's fun, actually, is imagine having a father who was raised Orthodox Jewish and has, like, a lot of the knowledge behind him and doesn't really know they come a lot, but he knows. like, you know, of it and a lot about it. And explain to him who Sephiroth is. And just like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, he's got long white hair.

It's like, what? Jeremy, I know that you've already picked a title for this episode and it is a good one. But I do think all that robot and Jesus stuff would be an accurate description of what we have been talking about. I mean, that's a, that's a, that's kind of, persona five right there, based on your statements. But Evangelion was hugely influential because it was extremely popular. And it had all that cool, imported religious imagery that meant nothing. And it made a lot of people say, we should do some of that too. And so you do have a main villain in Final Fantasy 7 whose name is Sephiroth. And that has no meaning whatsoever.

Did she have something really come out after Ava? Yeah. Yeah. Avah was like 94, 95. Oh, I guess we just got it in America. Final Fantasy 7 was 97. Yeah, we got it. We got it pretty late. America got it pretty late. It was wild. No, I was watching Ava videotapes before Final Fantasy 7, actually.

Oh, pardon. Oh, did I just say actually, sorry. But, yeah, no, like I did see Ava before Final Fantasy 7 came over here. And so, you know, it all felt like it's just part of the same last. It was all kind of compressed to like two or three years. Eva coming on Cartoon Network, too. Like, it showed up on Tsunami, and that was the big breakout. I was the weirdo who paid money for the videotapes, yeah.

But, you know, at the same time, you had a trigon where there's Nicholas Wolfwood, the guy who carries around across the full of machine guns, which I think is also kind of a reference to that, God, what was the movie El Mariachi? Is that what it was? The Robert Rodriguez movie? I'm talking about, well, there's a series, but the big one in America was Desperado. Desperado? No. Is that what it was? Yeah. With Antonio Benderos? Yeah. It was a sequel slash reboot of earlier Marriacci-themed action movies that Robert Rodriguez directed. All right. Well, there you go. So, you know, not the most original idea, but, I mean, there were a lot of anime. But like the cool, the cool cigarette priest walking around with machine guns and his cross. It's a cross-finisher, baby.

Yeah, it's got some moxie to it. I'll give it that much. But then, you know, all of that kind of culminated at the point where after Final Fantasy 7 and tactics and so forth, Square sat down and said, let's do the most Jesus thing ever. Let's make Xenogiers. Oh, God. And actually, that's not really that Jesus. There's what would Jesus do?

He would make Zeno Gears. He would turn you into Soylent and eat you. There's a lot of references to a lot of things in Xenogiers. But I feel like the religious element of it is less Christian, despite the fact that you do spend the entire second disc sitting in a folding chair sad as a crucifix ticks behind you, a giant crucifix swings, like a pendulum. But it's much more like Gnosticism. But then you get into the Zeno Saga sequels.

ish. And, uh, you do team up with Mary Magdalene. And, um, I, I, I can't remember exactly what happens. Jesus. Geno Gears came out. Zenogears was 98. Zeno Saga was 2002. Okay. So they're both before Dragon Quest 7. No. Um, Dragon Quest 7. It came out in 2000 in Japan. Uh, I think that was 99 in Japan, wasn't it? August 2000. Okay. Fair enough. I mean, I don't want to distract from the fact that, you know, Zeno Gears literally has a crucified stuffy or whatever the hell was. Muppet. Stuffy, Choochoo is a real living, thinking, young lady, and I trust you will respect her. She died for your sins.

I played that game for like 10 minutes and got, I was like, no, this is not for me. But it was so evocatively bizarre. It felt like just a weird fever dream of Christian imagery. And just like everything I remember from that game was just so, so weird. It definitely felt like somebody was drinking the Ava juice when they were playing that game though Oh absolutely

100%. But the reason I bring it up is because in DQ7 Do you remember DQ7 Jeremy? I haven't played all the way through DQ7 I've played it but it's been a while Because I don't have 5,000 hours, I'm afraid How dare?

Because the premise of Dragon Quest 7 is that the protagonist is sitting there There's an island and you find maps and you rebuild this world as you're going out. And it turns out that basically God, aka in America, the Almighty, has sat and made all the continents disappear,

but you pray to him and you worship him, you're like celebrating him. And then you go and you discover that God is actually Ogordemer, the evil, you know, who has come here to destroy and trick humanity into worshiping him. And then you have to fight against him and go to the dark place to kill God.

Literal in America, they called it God in the first version. And it was just like, I remember some of my very Catholic friends who later on went on to actually become priests, were sitting there very upset by this game. They're like, this game is making me go and kill the Almighty. Just like the most dumpiest

Toriyama-looking God in existence. He was a stupid-looking demon, too. It was great. It was definitely the idea of the demiur, the false divine deity who would come here and is like leading the humanity astray and you have to kill it to get to actual God.

But it was like the most explicitly anti-like, Christian anti-religion game in the Dragon Quest series and it was super weird because that game was so mid in like the grand scheme of things and it's like what in the hell is like

the Dragon Quest series has always had this weird relationship with religion especially once jobs came in then you have the all trade to Abby that you go to to pray to get new careers given to you because it's like a cast system I guess or something like that it is I love Dragon Quest games but boy

how do you do they have a challenging relationship with the divine. So, Nadia, I do want to say that Star Trek has some weird things about Christian gods, but I will say Satan is a guy who's actually pretty cool. He's from Megastu, or that is his name, Megastu. Yeah, in the animated series. He's just like a pretty nice guy who's misunderstood, and Captain Kirk stands up for him. Well, Jeremy, around here, we pay homage to Fechlar.

Okay, so. Fair enough. I was thinking of, I couldn't even remember which Star Trek it was, was the movie where What Does God Need the Spaceship? Oh, yeah. What does God need with a spaceship? What does God need the spaceship? Shut up and give me your starship.

So, so Shevam, I thought the actual, like, you know, friendly old man version of the Christian God in Dragon Quest 7 was in fact like a, you know, a benign deity who is kind of separate from all of this, and you can fight him, but it's just like, hey, kid. you want some practice, come fight me. Come fight me. Let's see what happens. I thought that was, yeah, I thought he was just kind of like up there, like hanging out, you know, to, yeah, totally be like the Goku fight, you know, to train. Am I mistaken? Because Anethean dragon wasn't here today.

You fight God. I think it's in the apocrypha where Jesus trains in 100 times Earth's gravity. There was a fighting room that came out a few years ago where you got Jesus with broken, the cross is broken that you're punching people with. I have purchased that, and I have played it. It's not great. No. But it does, it does let you fight as Jesus. It sure does.

Which is pretty fun. I specifically bought it to discuss on a Pocker Palace, and I don't think we ever did. It sure is a thing that happened. Um, yeah, I don't know, attacking and dethring God in JRP's is just, there, like, there's got to be the underlying kind of notion here is definitely, we've imported this religion, we're treating it from arm's length. It is not a thing that we're particularly invested in, but we like the costuming and the decoration and the kind of trapes that go because like real talk Catholicism is a very flashy and cool looking religion and a very

and flashy cool looking organization and if you need a big evil body that I mean have you seen those cathedrals? Yeah exactly awesome right like and if you need a big body that's got its fingers in everything that is a big evil controlling system fine choice of words a big well look dude

I'm talking from the perspective of the young hero in the village you have to go and kill them all but like if you need a big organization that is world spanning, you can do worse than a Christian-esque church, because that has already got the example there of what you need to do, right?

But it's just weird when you come from a culture where these symbols and stuff have meaning, and then you see them just all over the place. It's like when you see like the coexist bumper stickers or like that last scene of Lost or whatever, and you're like, I'm not sure about this one.

Well, let's not drag this down by talking about the last season of Lost. I feel like it's a, like, a function of, I mean, for lack of a better term, and I generally don't like to use this term in discussions of like, fandom stuff, but like power scaling, right? It's like, what's the, you know, you fight a monster and that's a supernatural creature. And then you fight a more powerful supernatural creature. And then what's the most powerful supernatural creature? Well, it's God. I mean, that's the D&D, like ladder, right?

Like, yeah. There was the, in the, in 1980 or so, Gary Gajax wrote a book called Deities and Demigods, which was literally just like, here are all the pantheons in the world, uh, with stats. And like, that sounds so. It was, it was, uh, it was, uh, it was not great. God was the most powerful, I bet. Do you know why the first version of it was controversial? Yeah, because it's got Cthulhu. It's not for the reason you think.

It's got Cthoo in it. And it had the pantheon from Crawford and then Graham. Mouser, and they were like, those are copyright, but Hindus are okay. And it was, uh, I, I love that book, but it's also just like, you guys just randomly picked it alignments out of a hat for this. Like, it doesn't, and they were like, look, we don't want you to kill gods, but some of your players might want to. So here we go.

And it was wild. Hang on, let me pull it up, because I've actually got it right here on my computer, um, because I care a lot about D&D. Uh, yeah, it was by James Ward and Robert. and basically by a guy jacks who he approved of it but he was a little tentative because he's still a Christian so there's no Christian

mythos in there but you definitely see like you know the Indian and the Japanese and you know the Norse and Sumerians and Arthur not even Hindu just Indian and like Greeks and Finnish all of these different Native American pantheons if you really wanted to kill like Raven you know like

they were like look dude we know people want to kill gods so here's a way to do that and in D&D second edition there were all these like modules and series you could go in Forgotten Realms all the way up to the Pantheons and kill and become your own god So yeah, it is definitely exactly that It's like, look, I've beat everything else

It's like a sketch comedy sketch That they keep going back and forth until they're both in space And they've got nowhere else to go now You know, it's like But you know and I've talked about this a lot on Apocryphal's How like that same impulse that exists in me where I can tell you anything about Batman or I can explain what

Goku going ultra instinct is to Jeremy Parrish. Like, that has always existed within our human brains. Fact. But just for several hundred years, it was applied to, like... My God can be your God. Yeah. Yeah. Like, saints and gods and, you know, pantheons.

Oh, man, can I tell you a story of... Yeah, and let's keep it on topic. Okay, fine, fine. I think the power scaling is a great point. Lots of JRPs pitch you against gods or godlike entities at the end that are not explicitly Christian. You're fighting like the goddess or maybe the goddess has been subverted by a demon. And she's a benign goddess, but there's some force out there that's doing something bad. You know, even when you have something like that, there still tends to be like a tendency to draw upon elements of Christianity,

narrative elements, like in the lunar games. You know, there is the goddess Althina, and you have to rescue her at the end of the first game. And then she becomes a human. She, like, comes down to Earth, and she's like, now I'm mortal. I'm going to marry Alex, because I like his hat and his little flying kitty.

And that's kind of Christian-ish. But then she doesn't, like, have a resurrection where she, you know, repatriates with God. and there's no, like, there's no rest of the Trinity up there. So once the goddess comes to Earth and lives and dies and I guess has little Alex babies, I don't know what happens to that universe. I mean, there's a, there's a lady on the moon who's watching and she's got a cool robe, but they don't really explain, like, what happens to this world now that the goddess is like,

she pieced out and said, I'm going to be mortal now. It's very interesting. Like it's soulblazer. Same thing. Yeah, kind of. You're fighting the demon. the demon death toll and Dr. Greed or Magreed or whatever his name was. Yeah. But that, like that whole game, that's super animistic. Like the, the idea that everything has a

spirit in it, whether it's, you know, like a dog or a squirrel or a table. Hell yeah. It's all got a spirit. I mean, you can't save the world until you rest, unlock the soul of that table from Death Toll's machine and put it back in the town where it belongs. great game. What a great series. But I think my favorite, like, early example of a GRP saying, like, what is the most powerful thing you can destroy? It's the dude or the being that created this world is not technically a Final Fantasy game, even though it wore the name, Saga, Final Fantasy Legend One. The Little Men in the Ombuds Hat.

You're inside this tower. It's like this bizarre, like, spatially impotible. possible tower that recurses into itself through these multiple floors and you keep climbing and traveling, weaving in and out of it. And eventually you get to the top and you meet the creator who's like, yeah, I made this place. And, uh, you know, I'm up here and everyone's lives are miserable because of me, but I'm the one who made this and, you know, tough shit basically. So what do you do? You get out your chainsaw and you kill them. Oh, right. Use the chainsaw. Isn't it? Wasn't the chain house the only thing that could beat him, like Excalibur, except as a chainsaw? I can't remember what the mechanic was. No, no, I mean, he's, he's an RPG boss, so you can kill him with all kinds

of stuff. There is, um, in, in Final Fantasy Legend 2, when you fight that game's equivalent of the creator, there is the glass sword that will only strike once before shattering, but it's really, really powerful. So that's, that's what you're saving your potions for. You're saving your precious inventory space with this one glass sword that you will never use until you fight the final boss. Yeah, it's like throwing a spoon at Zeramus. And, you know, Breath of Fire

3, I think, is a really interesting example, because you end up like traveling and fighting the goddess of the world, who is ultimately, like, trying to do good. She's not evil. She, that's a very, yeah. But, you know, the things that, like, her control

over the world, the universe, like the realm that she's created is not good. Like, you end up fighting her because, you know, dragons, what can you do? Basically, yeah, her whole thing is that dragons cannot exist in the scene universe because they can go berserk and kill everything, which is true, but the dragons in this particular game try to stay hidden as much as possible, Ryu being one of them. That is the goddess Maria, I think her name was, or Maria. I can't remember how to pronounce her name, but she's been across all three of the, or all of the, most of the, the Breath of Fire games.

I think in Breath of Fire 2 Death of In who was literally the leader of the Catholic Church was her son but anyway her deal in three was that you start the game off on this one continent that's kind of rustic and medieval and as you get closer and closer

to the shore of the ocean you notice there's more machinery kind of like flooding the area and you're like what is this, why is this here and you finally get to the shores where you see all this broken machinery and everyone's like we don't know where this come from it just comes from over the sea that's all we know

and you eventually go to the ruined world, as it were, which is the other half of the game. And basically, I don't remember if it had anything to do with the Dragon War, but I do know that there was the instance of, like, the instance of, like, humanity killing itself with its own technology and the goddess saying, okay, you know what, whatever's left of humanity, I'm going to protect it by not letting humanity learn anything. So it's almost like an Eden story where they have this innocence that the goddess wants to protect. but you are like, well, hey, you can't do that because the world's got to change, blah, blah, blah, very Japanese RPG reasons. And, yeah, it's a talk about a long-ass fight, though. Geez, I did that once.

I'll never do it again. See, that's why you save up all your good stuff. That was the RPG where you have a, like an hourglass that will freeze everything. And I never used those. And I got to the final battle. And I basically just would use those, transform Ryu into a dragon. hit her with my most powerful attacks for as long as I could. And then once the hourglass ran out, I'd use another one. I used like three hourglasses. And I was pretty much the only character that moved.

I didn't either. It was just like a, I was like, oh, God, this, this, like, I'm not prepared for this battle. What am I doing here? I didn't realize I was going to fight the final boss right now. So I tossed one of those out just to see what would happen. And yeah, I, uh, I killed God with, with hour glasses. You actually had to cross the desert with the wrong instructions. Yeah, well, that was, that's what strategy guides. That's what that's a game I think he was. No, that was Secret of Sega Sages back then. We went through this yesterday, remember?

That's right, yeah, yeah. I had a big, thick printout of the Desert of Death. Wow. I get through that stupid thing. Anyway, so there's a lot of religions of religion, concepts of religion, gods, etc., in JRP's. And, like has kind of been touched on, a lot of them incorporate Christian imagery just because it's easy, it's accessible, it's universal.

it's like, you know, the Tom and Jerry Angel. Like, it's just shorthand. And people instantly recognize, oh, here are the trappings of organized religion. Organized religion, not necessarily Catholicism, is the bad guy here. So there is a Catholic kind of resonance about this, even though it's not specifically about that. And so that's just kind of baked into the entire genre. It's really just kind of like a visual shorthand. You know, coming from heavy manga influences, manga is all about visual shorthand and about, like, iconography and just using, like, instantly recognizable images.

So it's a quick, accessible, digestible. I mean, in black and white, a halo on Goku looks a lot easier than how do I depict a dead guy. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, that's all interesting. But I do want to end this by letting Chris and Benito have the floor. to talk about the most Jesus game ever, maybe? That is El Shadai.

Ascension of the Metatron. Actually, is that the most Jesus game ever? I never played it. I just know that there's like some fancy, fancy jeans. It's the most geniuses game. Yeah, the most genes us, yeah. Oh, boy. How do you even talk about this game?

Yeah, like, so like, you've got five minutes. Shout out to friend of the show, Shane Benton hasn't. Right. So explain who he and. is. Yeah. So not only it's about Enoch, who is the great, great-grandfather of Noah from Bible, who in the canonical book of Genesis, what it says about him is that he walked with God and he didn't die and God took him. And from that one verse, a whole tradition of Inokic literature spread during the, well, during the Second Temple period of Judaism. in which it developed vast angelologies, cosmologies, and that kind of stuff.

It's a very interesting literature. I do recommend if you don't listen to any other episodes of Apocca Pals, go listen to anyone that's got Enoch in the title. I think we've done like six different ones. And again, the first book of Enoch is canon to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. But it is also notably one of the books that is actually quote. quoted in the New Testament. So the New Testament book of Jude, excuse me, quotes Enoch. And so it was definitely in circulation at the time of the New Testament and was very influential in a lot of

ways, even though it's not canon in most churches. But so nominally, it's about that also one of the things that happens by the third book of Enoch is that he becomes a figure called the Metatron, who is kind of like the biggest, baddest angel, who is literally called God Jr., the little Yahweh, they call him. And so this is theoretically that as a video game, except, yeah, you're a dude and no shirt and then, like, fancy jeans. Yeah, he's got some real diesels. They take this concept and make it Bayonetta, but somehow less influenced by the Book of Enick than Bayonetta is. Yeah, yeah.

Panetta being the most accurate to the books of Enac video game and another one where it ends with you riding a motorcycle on top of a rocket ship to go out to space and punch God. Yeah, I

played through all of Elshadai. The weirdest thing about it is that the devil's also there talking to God on a cell phone the whole time. That's true. Yeah. I feel like it's confusing. for people of all religions. It can really bring us together to wonder what, what and why.

Yeah, it's, it's really a very, yeah, it's a, we'll all be unified and going, why did they make this? I'm glad you mentioned Bayonetta. I forgot about that one. That one's got a lot of demons and stuff in it too, but I don't feel like it. Sorry, angels. I mean, in the end, isn't that just a spectrum? I will give you an hour on that. I was going to say you did not intend to just double the length of this podcast by asking that question.

I'm going to call tonight. You guys go ahead. Thanks, everyone. This has been retronauts. I'm sleeping now. Okay. So Baynetta has angels. Are they biblically accurate?

They are definitely like, they're definitely inspired. by, like, what would become in current, like, 20-25 pop culture, like, the biblically accurate angels. Like, there's a lot of, like, multi-headed, multi-winged figures, and they are all arranged in the hierarchy of angels. So you have your powers, thrones, et cetera, et cetera. And when you beat them up, they bleed halos, which are more like Sonic the Hedgehog rings. Well, it is a Sega game. The jangly sound. They definitely make a sonic noise.

But, yeah, but Bayonetta being a witch, what's a witch's enemy? The church. So we're going to go fight this heavily Inukian Christian allegory church where the guy in charge is named Father Balder, which is a different religion. That's okay. I mean, monks do have that shaved head thing, so technically all the fathers are balder. There you go. No. I guess no, they're brothers.

Never mind. Sorry. Sorry. Jeremy. Yeah. Um, anyway, okay, so we've gotten to the dad jokes portion of this podcast. So I guess that's got to the dad jokes portion of this podcast. So I guess that's, Time to go. There's only one father in this episode, and it's not any of us, because it's with a capital F. It's with a capital F, Shevim. Sorry, you're a lowercase F father. It's probably better that way. Probably. So, even though we've been talking about the Holy Trinity, there will not be a Holy Trinity of these episodes. We have attacked and dethroned God. Although I will say that there will be a special episode coming up on.

video games that are actually just about the Bible and like just straight up religious video games. But that's a long way from the much more entertaining and wildly interesting world of JRP's adopting Catholic and Christian imagery willy-nilly and just going for it. I mean, we didn't even really talk about the Shin-Magame Tensei series. There was some talk about persona. Forever. Like, that's its own thing.

And actually, we have, as you may know, if you've heard the Magame Tensei 1 and 2 episode, Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2 coming up sometime this year. You can look forward to that. And boy, there will be some talk about religion and stuff. Because, again, one of those games begins with you walking through a maze to find the crucified body of Jesus, just hanging out in the maze. Let me tell you about Christianity. It doesn't really go like that. Can I tell you about your Lord's savior of me?

You also talk to Stephen Hawking and Lucifer's in there. He's got a nice suit. It's all over the place, but that is a whole other topic for another time. But anyway, this has been the dynamic duo of attacking and dethroning God, JRP's and Western Religion. So thanks everyone for listening. Retronauts. You know when you do the JRPGs and Eastern religions, because I got a lot on that one, too. That is a thing we could do at some point.

I need a nap before then, though. So this has been retronauts, as I mentioned. You can find retronauts on all the cool podcatchers and download services. Notice I said, cool, that means you can't find us on Spotify. But everywhere else, yes. You can also support us directly. That is actually how this podcast continues happening, because if I can't eat, I can't make podcasts.

So check us out on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. We have a cool setup for less than the price of a dozen eggs. You can subscribe to the show and get exclusive content, $5 a month. That's biweekly exclusive episodes, weekly exclusive columns, Discord access, et cetera. If you have spent all your budget on eggs, I understand, there's also a $3 level where you just get all the episodes that go out on Mondays a week early in a high. higher bit rate quality with no advertisements. And if you have your own chickens in the backyard,

you can subscribe to one of our higher tiers where you get to choose topics and even possibly, well, not possibly, even get to appear on a podcast to talk with us about a topic of your choosing. So check us out, patreon.com slash retronauts. That's the spiel. And that is the price of eggs in America. Let's see.

Shivam, where can we find you talking about religion and eastern things and RPGs and things? And whatever is on my head at the moment. Generally speaking, you can find me these days that blue sky primarily, shevimputt. I've basically divested from Twitter entirely. Sad to my 40,000 followers there. Man, it sucks having a rebuild. But that said, you can also hear me on Catch Your Old Magic with Shevon Put every Tuesday. and Shivamu Wheeler Love Magic every other Monday

and the Chronicles of Dragonlance podcast every first of the month and I don't know, whatever else, like either half a dozen or something retronaut. I'm sure if you want to hear about the Tao of Street Fighter, go back to any of those. I've spent four or five hours talking about the Street Fighter games on here. I love those episodes so much.

But, yeah, Parrish, thank you so much for having me. I love talking about this topic especially. But, yeah, that's where you can find me. I appreciate it. All right. Thanks, Sheefam. Benito. Yeah, you can also find me on Blue Sky, Benito Serino.combeSky.combe. You go to my profile there. You can find a link to all my other presences online. You can find me also on my podcast with Chris, Apocca Pals, and another podcast I do called Friends Till the End, a horror movie podcast that used to be about the Chucky franchise, but is currently about the perch.

And also, like I was saying before, please pre-order my new series, Blood and Thunder, coming from Skybound Entertainment and Image Comics, starting in May. It is a action-heavy sci-fi satire that's kind of like if it's Blade Runner, but if it were set in the world of Futurama and the main character could fight like the guy from the raid, maybe if that helps. And also there's a talking gun. So check that out, maybe. all right when you say the world of Futurama

is it funny is there an angry dome it's it's funny in the sense that it has jokes in it

it's not ultimately a comedy but you know there are satirical elements

about my ideas about things like guns in the police because it's a book about guns in the police

so you know all right Christopher Sims you can find me also on blue sky

the isb dot peace guy dot social because I didn't bother linking it to my website which is t-h-e-isb.com if you go to Beeskyy depending on how long from now this goes up you will see me

reacting in real time to watching every episode of Pennyworth the three-season surreal dream scape about Batman's butler that I just finished

and will likely be writing something about on the aforementioned website T-H-E-I-S-B.com. That's also where you can go to find other podcasts that I do, including Apocry Pals, and also the Weekly War Rocket Ajax podcast, which is about comic books.

And you can also hire me if you, like the producers of Pennyworth, colon the origin of Batman's butler, need someone to tell you what... What is Batman Canon? What is Batman Canon?

and what Batman things you should use or to explain Goku's ultra-instinct form. I will do that for a very reasonable price. I bet you would be more than happy to write a comic where Batman faces off against

Goku's ultra-instinct. I don't want to see my guy lose like that. Which one does he mean? We'll never know. Oh. In the end, they become friends. Ladia, what about you? That is what happens.

to go. Yeah, I am also on blue sky at Nadia Oxford. I was on Twitter. I'm not really on there anymore. I think I got put on a list called Jews. So I just said, you know what, I'm gone. I mean, that's good if it's like, you know, a rabbi trying to put together a list of people that he should reach out to. But I feel like it probably wasn't. No, he wouldn't have used that kind of, he wouldn't have said it that hard, I don't know how to describe it. But anyway, yeah, just other than that, I am also the co-host of the Axe of the Blood God RPG podcast. We talk about RPG's old and new Eastern and Western. We are streaming every Saturday now at 9 a.m.

P.T. 12 p.m. E.T. and you can find my writing here, there, everywhere. I'm on Rotronauts. I'm around. You'll find me. Hire me. I'd write almost anything these days. And I am Jeremy Parrish. If you listen to this show, you know the routine. I don't need to belabor it. It's fine. I'm just an old man talking about video games. So thanks for listening to this old man and all these other people talk about video games and about religion, maybe more religion than video games, but that's okay. Sometimes

it's good to mix it up a little bit. I really want to go play Final Fantasy Tactics now, and I strongly encourage everyone else to give it a go. Thanks, everyone. Bye. You know, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Mm-hmm

And Mm-hmm I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm I'm

I'm I'm the I'm and I'm I'm I'm

and I'm and I'm going to and I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm Oh I'm and I'm

I'm going to be able to be.