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| “ | Understand that there is no point in living! Cry, that there is no answer! Where there is darkness, there are shadows! I, myself, am all of you humans!! | „ |
| ~ Nyarlathotep |
Nyarlathotep is a major antagonist in the Megami Tensei franchise. While being a minor recurring antagonist in the Shin Megami Tensei and Devil Survivor games, he takes on a much larger role in the Persona subseries, serving as the overarching antagonist of Persona: Be Your True Mind, the main antagonist of the Persona 2 duology, and the overarching antagonist of the series as a whole. He is based on the deity of the same name in the Lovecraft mythos.
He is voiced by Jin Yamanoi, who also voiced Ghostface in Scream movies in Japanese and in English by Tom Wyner in Eternal Punishment and Patrick Seitz in the PSP remake of Innocent Sin.
Biography[]
Pre-Game[]
Nyarlathotep is the personification of all of humanity's evil taken form, able to take any form he wanted. He is the evil counterpart of Philemon, who represents the good of all humanity. At one point, the two of them made a bet about the fate of humanity: Philemon believed that humanity would reach enlightenment and transcended themselves, but Nyarlathotep believed that humanity would destroy themselves. However, Philemon is only limited to guiding humanity to find their goodness, while Nyarlathotep actively intervenes humanity in order to ensure that he is the winner of the bet.
Persona: Be Your True Mind[]
Nyarlathotep makes his presence known at first by becoming the Persona of Takahisa Kandori, the CEO of SEBEC company, manipulating him to fulfill his delusions of Godhood and utilizes the DVA System using the subconscious of Maki Sonomura in order to start the first step of the destruction of reality through the destruction of Mikage-cho with the alternate reality provided by DVA System. Kandori is defeated and Maki is restored to normal. However, no one knew that it was Nyarlathotep pulling the strings from behind.
The first English localization of the game changed his name into Massacre. It is possible to obtain Nyarlathotep himself as a Persona in this game by fusing a Tower Arcana Persona using the item obtained from defeating Kandori the last time. However, not only he has the worst affinity to every party member except for Kandori's brother Reiji, his form is considered massively weaker than the form he used as Kandori's Persona.
Persona 2: Innocent Sin[]
Nyarlathotep takes the next step of his game by granting the people in Sumaru City the power to make rumors turn into reality, throwing the whole town in chaos. In addition, he manipulated Jun Kurosu into becoming Joker with the basis of making his friends pay for a sin they chose to forget, acting as his Persona. His friends; Tatsuya Suou, Eikichi Mishina, Lisa Silverman and Maya Amano; snapped him out of it and Nyarlathotep took another guise, this being Jun's idolized father Akinari Kashihara.
Nyarlathotep seemingly took the form of Akinari's Persona. However, around this time, one nasty rumor about Adolf Hitler surviving and is hiding, waiting for the time to restart his reign, comes to fruition when the Nazis come back, assaulting Sumaru City. When Tatsuya and his friends confronted Hitler, Hitler claimed that he's using Nyarlathotep's power. It turns out, however, that Hitler was in fact yet another guise of Nyarlathotep.
Nyarlathotep reveals his bet with Philemon to the team and attacked them afterwards. While defeated, Nyarlathotep had the last laugh, previously he manipulated a deranged teacher Maya Okamura to be his follower, based on his appearance as Akinari. As a result, Okamura appears and gored Maya Amano with the Spear of Longinus, with the rumors surrounding the spear that any wounds caused by it would not heal. As Maya died, another plan of Nyarlathotep came to fruition: All the chaos he's causing is eventually part of the prophecy written in the book In Lak'ech, the creation of the book itself influenced by him. The prophecy spoke of the destruction of all realities. Maya's death triggered the part where the destruction commences and Tatsuya could only witness as all realities crumble, leaving only Sumaru City and Nyarlathotep laughing triumphantly over his victory.
However, his victory was undone when Philemon gave the remaining heroes a way to undo his victory: By sacrificing their memories of their meeting, so all these would not happen. As the heroes did so, the realities were restored. However.
Persona 2: Eternal Punishment[]
Despite his victory undone, Nyarlathotep stayed calm, as he had prepared another way to restart his plan and once again come out victorious. He took advantage of the fact that Tatsuya turns out to be extremely insecure, and in the last minute, refuses to sacrifice his memory. As a result, Tatsuya of the old world took over the Tatsuya of the new world. Around this time, a new phenomenon is appearing in Sumaru City in form of the Joker Curse about a paper-bagged serial killer called Joker. This too, is a plan of Nyarlathotep, to recreate similar events to lead to the end of the world.
His other plan involves restoring the memories of the old world to the new world's Eikichi, Lisa and Jun, that they were Persona users. By doing so, it would once again trigger the destruction of the world. He succeeded in capturing them, but were eventually confronted by a new group of heroes, aside of Tatsuya and this world's Maya Amano, there's also Tatsuya's brother Katsuya Suou, Maya's friend Ulala Serizawa and information-broker Kaoru Saga/Baofu. After confronting and torturing their psyche, Nyarlathotep once again launched his assault. However, at this time, Tatsuya has found enough resolve to not run away from his sins of the previous world. Philemon eventually confronted Nyarlathotep and declares victory, that the humans would not lead themselves to their destruction. Nyarlathotep accepts defeat, but warns the heroes that he would never truly vanish, as long as humanity exists and continue to do evil as he is a part of humanity that could never be removed.
Trivia[]
- Shadow Aigis' intro for Persona 4 Arena Ultimax shows her with a black butterfly, Nyarlathotep's symbol. Despite this, he has no role in the story.
- The broken Buddha statue on Kandori's Persona-Nyarlathotep in Eternal Punishment is identical to the intact Buddha face that appears as the body of God Kandori in Megami Ibunroku Persona.
- The fact that Nyarlathotep is the only known character to disguise as a Persona deliberately to manipulate a main antagonist (Kandori in the first Persona and Jun Kurosu/Joker in Innocent Sin) references his roles in the Cthulhu Mythos universe; while the other Lovecraft gods are often described as mindless or unfathomable, rather than truly malevolent, Nyarlathotep delights in cruelty, is deceptive and manipulative - deceiving the antagonists into believing he could grant them power (which he did at the cost of nearly losing their humanity) and manipulating them into becoming his pawns - and even cultivates followers and uses propaganda to achieve his goals - using rumors, Wang Long fortune-telling, Sumaru TV (broadcasting Wang Long), and the Masked Circle (Innocent Sin) / Tenchu Army (Eternal Punishment) to ultimately destroy the world around Sumaru City.
- Additionally, the vile Outer God's nature to offer deals with humans for power in exchange for their bodies reflects one of his forms in the Cthulhu Mythos, namely either the Black Demon of the Black Man. It would appear to distraught cultists and offer them unimaginable power for the permission to enter their body, but would never follow up on his end of the deal.
- The Malevolent Entity in the Persona 4 Arena games is easily mistaken with Nyarlathotep before his true identity was revealed due to both sharing a tendency to manipulate others' emotions into achieving their goals (although Kagutsuchi was only able to manipulate someone by personally contacting them), their lack of regard to their surrogates/subjects such as Minazuki or Labrys, their ability to manifest Shadow Selves out of nowhere and their goal of complete and utter world destruction. Therefore, prior to the release of Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, fans speculated that the Malevolent Entity was in fact Nyarlathotep.
- Nyarlathotep disguising as the Time Count is similar to Yaldabaoth impersonating as Igor in Persona 5, as both are final bosses that appear as vital service providers in the game, and provide the services as a part of their plan.
- As of Royal, Yaldabaoth is no longer the final boss, however, the new dungeon contains many Shadows related to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, with Maruki's ultimate Persona, Adam Kadmon, assuming full control over Maruki after he willingly surrenders himself to his own Persona in desperation, also sharing many similarities to Nyarlathotep.
- Nyarlathotep's form of summoning in games of the series, most notably Eternal Punishment's additional "Tatsuya's Scenario" is a direct reference to the Cthulhu Mythos. In the mythos, the Shining Trapezohedron is an ornate stone used to contain Nyarlathotep's Haunter of the Dark avatar, usually driving those who have it mad.
- The Great Father's skill Master of 18 might be a reference to the Neo-Nazi group Combat 18. The number 18 is also used extensively in some J-Pop fandoms to mean AH (as in "Adolf Hitler"), a reference to the Persona character named The Fuhrer.
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 Villains
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SEBEC Route Takahisa Kandori | Nyarlathotep | Pandora Snow Queen Quest Victims of the Snow Queen Mask | Tomomi Fujimori | Night Queen
Innoncent Sin Masked Circle | Master Joker | Tatsuya Sudou | Junko Kurosu | Anna Yoshizaka | Ginji Sasaki | Akari Hoshi | Nyarlathotep Eternal Punishment New World Order | Tatsuzou Sudou | Kiyotada Sumaru | Takahisa Kandori | Chizuru Ishigami | Nyarlathotep
Strega (Takaya Sakaki | Jin Shirato | Chidori Yoshino) | Kouetsu Kirijo | Shuji Ikutsuki | Nyx Avatar Persona 3 FES
The Killer | Mitsuo Kubo | Izanami Persona 4: Arena & Persona 4: Arena Ultimax Sho Minazuki | Shadow Labrys | Malevolent Entity
Suguru Kamoshida | Sphinx | Sae Niijima | Antisocial Force (Ichiryusai Madarame | Junya Kaneshiro | Kunikazu Okumura | The Traitor | SIU Director | Sugimura | Kobayakawa | Masayoshi Shido | Yaldabaoth) Persona 5 Royal Persona 5 Strikers Alice Hiiragi | Ango Natsume | Mariko Hyodo | Shuzo Ubukata | Akira Konoe | Jyun Owada | Kuon Ichinose | EMMA | Lock Keepers
Teru Gojuin | Dark Yashiro | Yatsufusa Hatanaka
Persona Q Clockwork God Persona Q2 Kamoshidaman | Enlil
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