Gripping stuff, that's what Shin Megami Tensei: DIgital Devil Saga is all about.
The game sets off in a world known as the junkyard. When the junkyard is divided into tribes and each fighting against one another to gain entry to a heavenly place known as Nirvana, you know you are in for a story. A war between the embryons and the vanguards broke out after they've identified a strange object near their bases. That object exploded and everyone fell into coma. By the time they regain themselves, everyone has found out that they are plagued with some nice cool tattos. They have now been granted the power to fuse into monsters.This however, comes at a heavy price. In order to reach Nirvana, tribes now have to quite simply and literally gobbled up each other. The last one standing shall reign supreme. In this game, you follow the adventure of Serph, the leader of tribe embryons.
The good: Story wise, it really can't get any better, can it? The first game, norturne was well known for its brushes with taboo subjects, ie world destruction. Thankfully, this game stems not too far off, as it involves occult themes like canibalism. It's not something made for kids, so you won't find such games lying around the shelves too often, and that itself makes Shin Megami Tensei Digital devil Saga worth buying. The graphics in this game can't really be describe as being breath taking, but if you are looking for a pretty game with no substance, you aint looking at this game. I like the graphics a lot, as it complements much on the dark theme covering the whole story. Colour selection was deliberate, with lots of dull colours such as grey and black being used, with the occasional orange. Special credits has to be given for character design. Again, there's nothing too spectacular here, but it fits the tone of the game like a glove. The eyes on each characters are masterpieces. They seem to tell a thousand words, and sadness, if not, chilling, roams the entire environment.
The layout of battles, at first glance, looks to be what we expect it to be. However, a few ingenious twitch to the system turns battles into a whole new ball game. You control 3 characters, and battle sequences are turn-based. Each round, you are given 3 turns to execute. This does not mean that each character would necessary have 1 turn and that's it. The number of turns is shared among all 3 characters. If 1 character decides to defend, which wastes 1/2 a turn, the next character would get to act on the next 1/2 turn. Sounds confusing? Here's more. By dealing critical hits or by striking enemies where it hurts most(their weakness), you will get an extra 1 turn to top it off your 3 turns. On the flip side, enemies would also enjoy the same 'benefits' and its not rare to see your party decimated, especially after a few powerful elemental spells has been cast in a row. Success in battles is thus based on your ability to spot enemies weakness and hide your own. In conclusion, this is an extremely difficult game.
The bad: In case you find battle sequences to easy, the developers decide to up the difficulty scale by offering us an unreasonable and outrageous number of random battles. It's hair pulling stuff, and makes an otherwise enjoyable game unpleasant.
Character customisation is also far from perfection. Although I have to agree that it has improved from norturne's, whose limitation on the number of skills learnt made me give up half-way, there are still some problems which gets in the way. For one, only Serph gets to customise his stats points upon leveling up. All other characters get random improvements based on the AI's preference. It's a good thing to see them improving the stats that mattered( magic users get more magic boost etc etc), not so when you see a particularly quick character investing all the points in his agility, not exactly the most useful of attributes. Talk about putting all eggs in one basket. This makes some characters very unbalanced, unplayable even.The mantra system doesn't make real sense to me. We have to pay money to learn skills? Some of the mantras are priced extremely high and that means more random battles. Boo.
Next, boss fights are often mission impossible. Yes, they can be defeated, but only at the expense of a 'Game Over' and 'Play again'. What I mean is, some of the bosses are extremely powerful and it needs at least one encounter to study their behaviour and to derive a tactic to beat them. At times, the only way to defeat these bosses is to exploit their weaknesses. The customisation system allows you to equip a fixed number of skills out of the many skills learnt. Thing is, you can only equip them OUTSIDE battles. So what makes of you if you are facing a boss which is weak against fire without having equipped any fire skills beforehand? Dead meat. The next time Serph senses that ' theres' an behind those doors', find a place to save, as you will find yourself dead very soon. Having said all these, I would like to commend the game on its boss fights, which could be fun, challenging and interesting once you got that right arsenal.
Lastly, SMT DDS is only one half of the whole game. By the time you finished the game, there are still some unanswered questions hanging off the cliff, which can be rather frustrating to players. Moreover, a 30-40 hour gaming time isn't all that value for money, especially when there's a part 2.
Albeit its minor flaws(I wrote a lot on that, I know), this is a game that fans of the genre should not miss. Make no mistakes about it, I would not want a 10 years old child to play this as the dark theme may not be suitable for them. But for mature gamers, this game offers a highly scintillating gaming adventure, and adds up for a nice collection. Oh yeah, and ultra cool characters doesn't hurt. Gale, anyone?