When compared to Nocturne, Digital Devil Saga comes up short in nearly every way.
User Rating: 7.1 | Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga PS2
After the fantastic SMT: Nocturne, SMT: Digital Devil Saga comes as a disappointment. It suffers from far, FAR too many random battles. While Nocturne also shared this problem, DDS is missing the deep demon fusing system, and the incredible degree of challenge offered by the 'hard' mode, which kept me interested in Nocturne's numerous battles. It also employs a rather greedy marketing scheme. You see, you're actually paying fifty bucks for half a game. The storyline feels like it's been stretched over many hours of random-battle-filler, just so they can extend it enough to be sold as a separate game. Even with all the filler, the game abruptly ended at around 29 hours, which would be about the halfway mark for many RPG's. If you want to play the second half, and actually find out the end of the story, you'll have to purchase DDS2 separately. This is especially disappointing considering I got 90 hours out of Nocturne. In Nocturne each battle was interesting, because there was always a good chance you'd die, and also there was always the opportunity to recruit new demons to fight for you. The battle system is still as great as ever, but without the high difficulty level, there's no reason to explore all its intricasies, and the numerous battles really started to get on my nerves. Also, it could just be the fact that I was far less interested, but there seemed to be even more random battles this time around. Other downgrades from Nocturne include the removal of the world map, (Now you navigate by menu) party-size reduction, (3 instead of 4) and a more clichéd story line (yes the setting is far from conventional, but the characters and dialog all felt pretty standard). It's not all doom and gloom though. I really quite liked the skill system. It's very much like Final Fantasy X's sphere grid system, only a bit better. Whereas FFX's skills where kind of scattered around the board chaotically, in a twisting maze of skills, which would often require you to learn many unrelated skills before you finally reached that one type of spell you were looking for, In DDS the skills are arranged in a far more orderly fashion. Skills and spells are arranged in more of a 'tree' shape rather than a 'maze'. Healing spells will all be down one branch, fire spells another, and so on. You can purchase new skill bubbles at any savepoint. Each bubble purchased will allow you to learn several new skills once you've gained enough exp. Your character will only be able to use a limited number of skills at a time, However, (it starts at four, but eventually you'll be able to hold eight) so you'll have to decide which combinations work best. Don't worry about making a mistake and choosing the wrong skill; unlike in Nocturne, DDS allows you to re-assign at any time, so any skills previously learned will always be available to you. This skill system allows you to custom build your party into anything you want, and is really the highlight of the game. The graphics and sounds are pretty much identical to Nocturnes, although this time all the cutscenes are voice-acted. The voice-acting is decent, but nothing special. Like Nocturne, the music is pretty good, buf far too repetitive. The battle tune will really start to grate on your nerves by the end of the game. DDS isn't a bad game; it's just my expectations were a bit higher. Had I not played Nocturne, I imagine I'd have a far more positive opinion of the game. It's just when you compare the two, DDS comes up short in every way. Add in the greedy marketing scheme of splitting one game in two, and then charging full price for each part, and I can't help but feel burned. Had they toned down the random battles a bit, included a hard setting, and had they merged DDS1 and 2 together, this could have been a worthy successor to Nocturne.
