The Shin Megami Tensei series first stumbled upon PAL gamers back in mid-2005, with the release of Lucifer's Call. And boy, are we glad it did, since it still stands as one our favourites. More great news, Atlus finally realised the potential of the Shin Megami Tensei series and decided to ship it outside of Japan and drop it on a nice little plate for enthusiastic JRPG gamers. Digital Devil Saga is the second title to make its way outside of Japan, and is yet another superb JRPG that oozes with splendid old-school goodness and a bit of new-age polish.
A return of the franchise’s demon-licking good story, where all sorts of demonic elements come into play, and a blend of Final Fantasy X's skill system, places DDS ahead of Lucifer’s Call in terms of casual gamer appeal. While the game still boasts intense and frequent random encounters, DDS is a much more approachable JRPG that blends a nice and compelling story with a simple and finger-licking good gameplay structure. DDS is based around a world called The Junkyard, dominated by ravenous tribes who are fighting one another to gain the right to a brighter future. During one such battle between two of five tribes, all hell breaks loose as they discover an unknown artifact and accidentally unleash its power onto the habitants of The Junkyard, allowing all of humankind to transform into cannibal-craving demons.
The Embryons’ headquarters looks quite appealing, despite being in a junkyard.
From there, the story unravels as you assume the role of the commander of the Embryons, one of the tribes populating The Junkyard, and their saga as they continue to fight the other tribes for access to Nirvana – the land’s holy sanctuary where all of their greatest dreams are likely to be fulfilled. To add to the mix, a mysterious black-haired lady appears out of the blue who can calm the hungry they now have for one another and keeping their demon-forms at ease. So, as you’d imagine, her head is of great value too. There are plenty of exciting plot turns throughout the game and some fascinating character development that keeps you eagerly awaiting more. While it doesn’t boast a story-driven backbone like Final Fantasy X, it still has enough development and plot changes to intrigue you to the very end (well, the end of this two-part series at least). You’ll become attached to the likeable cast of characters, and the fascinating world they live in.
Combat is where DDS really shines though. Providing a similar structure to Lucifer’s Call, DDS has the fundamentals of old-school JRPGS where you’ll form a party and battle in a turn-by-turn basis, and focus on elemental strengths and weaknesses. The combat system is fairly rewarding for gamers who bother to approach each battle with strategy. Say for instance you attack an enemy with an element they’re naturally weak against, you’ll be rewarded with an extra turn. This also relays back to the enemy, meaning if you’re unprepared be ready to be stomped during battles. The great thing is that combat is a constant battle of wits and strategic planning, making each battle a lot tougher than you’d usually expect from a JRPG. You can expect to run into a lot of enemies too, since the encounter rate is extremely high, but thankfully save spots and heal stations are spread quite frequently throughout each area, making it a little less tedious than Lucifer’s Call. There are also a lot of traditional JRPG dungeon crawling elements implemented too – plenty of button pushing and platform moving puzzles to dive into, items to collect and layers upon layers worth of dungeon levels to explore.
There’s a constant freshness provided with DDS, with the elemental weaknesses providing unique challenges, as well as the ability to transform between your demon and human form during battle. There are also combos to execute, magic based attacks and a variety of others that add a nice little touch to the indulging combat system. In addition, DDS implements a similar skill structure to Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid system, enabling you to learn a chain of skills depending on the path you decide to choose. There’s a distinct variety between each set of skills ranging from healing, fire, force, lightening, and even death-based skills that allows you to distinguish each of your party members. Additionally, you’ll use the energy you consume from other demons once you devour them to learn these new skills. It’s a great little system that’s addictive as hell, and works as a nice incentive to keep entering battles.
The intense SMT combat returns. Joy!
Visually, the Shin Megami Tensei style is unlike anything witnessed before in a game, and that’s what makes it so fantastic. Kazuma Kaneko (the genius behind the Shin Megami Tensei style and styles from Devil May Cry 3) has once again showcased his artistic brilliance that highlights the atmosphere of DDS perfectly. Characters are well designed and detailed, and demons especially look stunning. Environments typically look quite stunning, with lovely draw distances and spectacular architecture designs proving to be quite lovely on the eyes. Once again though, much like Lucifer’s Call, DDS suffers from some very bland and uninspired areas that letdown some of the more visually creative areas.
Once again the music is up to standards with Lucifer’s Call, but only this time with the inclusion of some excellent English voice acting. The voice acting is a great addition that helps build tension and excitement throughout the game’s seesawing story. The soundtrack consist of a nice mix of J-Pop, rock, jazz and techno that help spice the game up a little – it helps that most of them are damn catchy too.
Digital Devil Saga unfortunately feels very familiar to the previous Lucifer’s Call, with many elements clearly recycled – the game isn’t as tough as Lucifer’s Call either, which I suppose could be seen as a positive for newcomers. Regardless though, Digital Devil Saga manages to satisfy your JRPG needs in what is probably the most distinguished RPGs for some time.
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There's just so much to learn and understand. But yeah a review would be cool. I think a lot of people would like the game if they heard of it.
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