>>532568683
You cannot divorce politics from the alignments or that it doesn’t impact the ultimate outcome for a game. It combines both politics with real metaphysical concepts to make the world as it envisions, but with your logic it should also be criticized when the only way it knows how to make that work is to ignore the fundamental beliefs and actions that guide those values. It’s why you can’t say the US are the world police and ignore the underlying fascist politics that guide its role of destroying democracies and socialist states to replace them with chaotic dictatorships or fascism, because that would mean creating fascist states is Law, or outright erasing socialist and progressive parties of its allies to assert its control over them economically. If you have to do all that to make US being World Police = Law work, then it has zero meaning.

I would argue that a lot of SMT doesn’t have Left vs Right but is more traditionally different flavors of conservatism. The “nice” conservatism of Neoliberalism as Law, and the openly hostile and violent conservatism of Fascism with Chaos.

Only recent games have been a lot more willing to differ with IVA pointing out how both sides are a sham that will work together in the end, because Liberalism/Neoliberalism prefers Fascism as its enemy over elevating socialism. With its Light-Neutral ending leaning towards genuine progressive ideals and it’s Dark-Neutral one to a now dead God’s atheist utopia ubermensch fantasy.

SJ Redux is where a fully socialist utopia is brought about because it doesn’t betray its values to murder as many people it can and instead tempers aggression so people can communicate their way through conflicts. (Also Ronaldo in DeSu2 but it’s a spin-off and I side eye the idea “Progress” stops)

V fully follows this by being based on THE World Order built upon colonialism, imperialism, and US Hegemony with God’s Order being what represents it that they brought in Africa!