. . . at a certain point, you are obliged to navigate a post-nuke Tokyo, that's all rubbled and obstructed, so you're obliged to take a mazelike, circuitous route, and your player characters are also outsiders to this place, so, y'know, it makes sense that you kinda just follow what breadcrumbs the game drops before you.
Meanwhile, outside of the game . . . I have this travel guide to Tokyo. I picked it up on discount, I don't recall where. I just remember that I paid five bucks or so for it. It's a listing of bars and nightclubs and museums. It's catering to "creatives," I guess, people with money. Architects, you know. Not for poets, that's for sure.
The book-a small paperback-has a dust jacket that unfolds into a cute, colorful not-to-scale map of Tokyo. Not a proper map, but an artistic map. It could conceivably be something you find in some part of the game world, a poignant reminder of the pre-apocalyptic world. I ended up using this map to help me navigate the post-nuke Tokyo of Shin Megami Tensei IV. It sorta worked. The book had no connection to the game, so you can't call it a proper pack-in feelie.
I came to think of it as an emergent feelie.
Sometimes, you get a return on an imaginative investment. It's sorta neat.
