Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga
Jul. 30th, 2016 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroMe: You seem to have accidentally loaned me a copy of “I was a teenage demon cannibal.”
Mith: Did Puel’s fanfic sneak in there? If so, whoops.
Mith sold me on trying this with comments that it reminded her of my narration style, and that it was her favorite dungeon-crawling system. The former I can totally understand: We open basically in medias res, with two sides at war in some kind of techno-wasteland dystopia, when a mysterious object transforms them all into cannibalistic demons. We then learn that the world (“the Junkyard”) is inhabited by six factions, who are directed by a “dissemination machine” to fight until the winner can claim “Nirvana”. And also that these people don’t seem to understand emotions or other common concepts like “crying”.
The battle system is interesting, but can turn against you really fast: A random battle in the beginning of the second dungeon got lucky with first-turn weakness hits and nearly ended me. SMT games use the “press turn” system, which gives you extra actions if you hit the enemy’s weakness, and takes away actions if they nullify your hit. The problem is, that works on both sides and you have three characters with different weaknesses, so until you can learn skills to eliminate those weaknesses, any enemy that casts hit-all spells has a decent chance of getting extra turns. Learning enemy weaknesses (and strengths) is 95% of the key to getting through battles in this game; grinding levels is barely the remainder.
I find it interesting that in this and SMT: Persona 3 (which was Puel’s recommendation from the series) you don’t actually summon the demons to fight for you. In that, they’re the equivalent to equipping Materia or GFs; in this, you are the demons and equip “mantras” to learn skills and spells. And that’s about all you equip, curiously. There’s no armor and no accessories. Each character has a gun that you can equip ammo for, but you spend so little time fighting in human form that it’s hardly worth upgrading. The complete lack of equipment is weird.
So, point-by-point on dungeon design:
The Vanguard Base is basically a tutorial dungeon; the kid gloves are still on. There are a few switches that raise or lower walls. No biggie.
Manipura gets a little more interesting, with locked doors you need to find switches to open and multiple levels to pass through, but it’s still nothing particularly special. I’ll give them credit that it makes sense to have a door at the end that goes right back to the beginning—this whole thing is an intentionally set-up trial, so making you run around the whole place fighting lots of demons is logical.
Then we reach The Citadel, aka Dick-Move Dungeon the First. It introduces mimic chests, trapped chests, poison gas that spins you around, pit traps galore, and a giant middle finger that is the statue keys, which drop you in a pit if you guess the wrong way to turn them. Oh, and you have to fight a nasty random battle every dozen steps. The minibosses are actually fairly easy when compared against the normal enemies.
Manipura v2 is a time-waster of a rehash dungeon, which is also explicitly what it is in-game: The Solids are trying to distract you while they kidnap Sera.
Stupid question because my memory is bad: Did Cielo (“Medusa-dreads”) speak with the faux-Jamaican accent before Sera was kidnapped? I hadn’t noticed it before then, and given how blatant it is on a Caucasian-colored character, I feel like I would have.
Then comes Coordinate 136, aka Dick-Move Dungeon the Second. In addition to the pit traps that you can only vaguely predict, there are one-way doors (which occasionally force you into said pit traps). Coordinate 136 then gives you a floor of pleasant mirror-moving puzzles, then two floors of annoying trial-and-error platform puzzles with the same one-way doors and forced circling. (Also, according to FAQs, a set of totally innocuous conversation choices in this game determine whether you unlock a hidden character and several hidden skills in the sequel.)
This also gives us our first hint that the Junkyard may be the future / some sort of artificial world, as these are ruins of an amusement park.
The Deserted Ship is comparatively kind. You're locked in, but it makes up for that by providing multiple healing points in addition to plenty of save points; you get a brief period of learning the layout before random encounters start; and your only goal is to find the eight rooms you need to plant bombs in. (And the game tells you you're in the right place when you enter--there's no fake-out or chance to mess it up.)
The ongoing saga of “Hey, we know what this place is…why?” gets contrasted here with the Colonel, who clearly knows that he’s trapped in some sort of “locked” world and doesn’t want to have to play the game to get out. He also seems to clearly be an adult when everyone else is acting like teenagers.
The Samsara Tunnels are a good, old-fashioned sewer maze, and make no particular efforts to be anything else. I appreciate the abundance of large Karma terminals (which allow you to recover and teleport between them). The waterway between them includes a cute bit that actually incorporates the "solar cycle" meter you can safely ignore for the rest of the game: It acts as a timer before you're swept back to the start.
Adja, the Brutes' base, is controlled by strange objects at the entrance. This seems trickier than it actually is, as each of them just unlocks a segment of the dungeon that contains a miniboss. The difficulty seems to spike here (though that may be me), and there are several minibosses that, even after you figure out the strategy to effectively neuter them, are mountains of HP that take forever to wear down.
A cutscene at the beginning of the Brutes’ base seems to indicate that the main characters all knew each other in the “real world”, as there’s a video clip that seems to be them at the beach together.
Beating the Brutes' boss leads to revelations that we're all dead humans and some can remember more than others, and apparently Sera is responsible (or at least Colonel Beck thinks she is). Also, apparently we’ve been through this sequence before, as Beck thinks we’ve previously been devoured. Sera vanishes, we head to the Karma Temple to try to reach Nirvana.
(There are apparently a grand assortment of bonus bosses you can fight to unlock a few new mantra skills and special defenses. I ignored them all.)
Karma Temple: It's a straight-line dungeon in a lot of ways, but it gives "elevation" instead of a floor number, and it changes things up with some decent mazes. First there are teleporter traps (that you need to use to get past each other). Then there are fake walls / invisible walls to run you in circles. Then you need to hit switches that raise the entire segment of pillar you're on to the next height level. Then you have both the teleporters and the fake walls at the same time. All while being harried by some of the nastiest monsters the game has to offer—I actually started running from battles partway through this if I didn’t think I could end them quickly, and was running from almost everything by the end.
The final bosses has a special kind of dick move: She’s resistant to Almighty damage, and is the only enemy in the game who is—which forces you to focus on specific elements again after likely being able to reach for Almighty in every pinch before.
“Angel”, apparently Sera’s boss/controller and the person in charge of this whole mess, starts deleting the Junkyard and makes vague comments about bringing us back. After her defeat, the world is destroyed and the characters scattered into a void. But the stinger shows us Sera in some sort of cyber-cradle, and Serph in a dust-blown destroyed city. No revelations before the sequel!
…which Mith also loaned me.
Overall: The dungeons are very well designed (even with plenty of save points!) and the plot is intriguing, and if not for the part where the battles are insane and often frustrating I could see loving this. I’m going to play the sequel, but I’ll be pulling the Action Replay for that, too.
Mith: Did Puel’s fanfic sneak in there? If so, whoops.
Mith sold me on trying this with comments that it reminded her of my narration style, and that it was her favorite dungeon-crawling system. The former I can totally understand: We open basically in medias res, with two sides at war in some kind of techno-wasteland dystopia, when a mysterious object transforms them all into cannibalistic demons. We then learn that the world (“the Junkyard”) is inhabited by six factions, who are directed by a “dissemination machine” to fight until the winner can claim “Nirvana”. And also that these people don’t seem to understand emotions or other common concepts like “crying”.
The battle system is interesting, but can turn against you really fast: A random battle in the beginning of the second dungeon got lucky with first-turn weakness hits and nearly ended me. SMT games use the “press turn” system, which gives you extra actions if you hit the enemy’s weakness, and takes away actions if they nullify your hit. The problem is, that works on both sides and you have three characters with different weaknesses, so until you can learn skills to eliminate those weaknesses, any enemy that casts hit-all spells has a decent chance of getting extra turns. Learning enemy weaknesses (and strengths) is 95% of the key to getting through battles in this game; grinding levels is barely the remainder.
I find it interesting that in this and SMT: Persona 3 (which was Puel’s recommendation from the series) you don’t actually summon the demons to fight for you. In that, they’re the equivalent to equipping Materia or GFs; in this, you are the demons and equip “mantras” to learn skills and spells. And that’s about all you equip, curiously. There’s no armor and no accessories. Each character has a gun that you can equip ammo for, but you spend so little time fighting in human form that it’s hardly worth upgrading. The complete lack of equipment is weird.
So, point-by-point on dungeon design:
The Vanguard Base is basically a tutorial dungeon; the kid gloves are still on. There are a few switches that raise or lower walls. No biggie.
Manipura gets a little more interesting, with locked doors you need to find switches to open and multiple levels to pass through, but it’s still nothing particularly special. I’ll give them credit that it makes sense to have a door at the end that goes right back to the beginning—this whole thing is an intentionally set-up trial, so making you run around the whole place fighting lots of demons is logical.
Then we reach The Citadel, aka Dick-Move Dungeon the First. It introduces mimic chests, trapped chests, poison gas that spins you around, pit traps galore, and a giant middle finger that is the statue keys, which drop you in a pit if you guess the wrong way to turn them. Oh, and you have to fight a nasty random battle every dozen steps. The minibosses are actually fairly easy when compared against the normal enemies.
Manipura v2 is a time-waster of a rehash dungeon, which is also explicitly what it is in-game: The Solids are trying to distract you while they kidnap Sera.
Stupid question because my memory is bad: Did Cielo (“Medusa-dreads”) speak with the faux-Jamaican accent before Sera was kidnapped? I hadn’t noticed it before then, and given how blatant it is on a Caucasian-colored character, I feel like I would have.
Then comes Coordinate 136, aka Dick-Move Dungeon the Second. In addition to the pit traps that you can only vaguely predict, there are one-way doors (which occasionally force you into said pit traps). Coordinate 136 then gives you a floor of pleasant mirror-moving puzzles, then two floors of annoying trial-and-error platform puzzles with the same one-way doors and forced circling. (Also, according to FAQs, a set of totally innocuous conversation choices in this game determine whether you unlock a hidden character and several hidden skills in the sequel.)
This also gives us our first hint that the Junkyard may be the future / some sort of artificial world, as these are ruins of an amusement park.
The Deserted Ship is comparatively kind. You're locked in, but it makes up for that by providing multiple healing points in addition to plenty of save points; you get a brief period of learning the layout before random encounters start; and your only goal is to find the eight rooms you need to plant bombs in. (And the game tells you you're in the right place when you enter--there's no fake-out or chance to mess it up.)
The ongoing saga of “Hey, we know what this place is…why?” gets contrasted here with the Colonel, who clearly knows that he’s trapped in some sort of “locked” world and doesn’t want to have to play the game to get out. He also seems to clearly be an adult when everyone else is acting like teenagers.
The Samsara Tunnels are a good, old-fashioned sewer maze, and make no particular efforts to be anything else. I appreciate the abundance of large Karma terminals (which allow you to recover and teleport between them). The waterway between them includes a cute bit that actually incorporates the "solar cycle" meter you can safely ignore for the rest of the game: It acts as a timer before you're swept back to the start.
Adja, the Brutes' base, is controlled by strange objects at the entrance. This seems trickier than it actually is, as each of them just unlocks a segment of the dungeon that contains a miniboss. The difficulty seems to spike here (though that may be me), and there are several minibosses that, even after you figure out the strategy to effectively neuter them, are mountains of HP that take forever to wear down.
A cutscene at the beginning of the Brutes’ base seems to indicate that the main characters all knew each other in the “real world”, as there’s a video clip that seems to be them at the beach together.
Beating the Brutes' boss leads to revelations that we're all dead humans and some can remember more than others, and apparently Sera is responsible (or at least Colonel Beck thinks she is). Also, apparently we’ve been through this sequence before, as Beck thinks we’ve previously been devoured. Sera vanishes, we head to the Karma Temple to try to reach Nirvana.
(There are apparently a grand assortment of bonus bosses you can fight to unlock a few new mantra skills and special defenses. I ignored them all.)
Karma Temple: It's a straight-line dungeon in a lot of ways, but it gives "elevation" instead of a floor number, and it changes things up with some decent mazes. First there are teleporter traps (that you need to use to get past each other). Then there are fake walls / invisible walls to run you in circles. Then you need to hit switches that raise the entire segment of pillar you're on to the next height level. Then you have both the teleporters and the fake walls at the same time. All while being harried by some of the nastiest monsters the game has to offer—I actually started running from battles partway through this if I didn’t think I could end them quickly, and was running from almost everything by the end.
The final bosses has a special kind of dick move: She’s resistant to Almighty damage, and is the only enemy in the game who is—which forces you to focus on specific elements again after likely being able to reach for Almighty in every pinch before.
“Angel”, apparently Sera’s boss/controller and the person in charge of this whole mess, starts deleting the Junkyard and makes vague comments about bringing us back. After her defeat, the world is destroyed and the characters scattered into a void. But the stinger shows us Sera in some sort of cyber-cradle, and Serph in a dust-blown destroyed city. No revelations before the sequel!
…which Mith also loaned me.
Overall: The dungeons are very well designed (even with plenty of save points!) and the plot is intriguing, and if not for the part where the battles are insane and often frustrating I could see loving this. I’m going to play the sequel, but I’ll be pulling the Action Replay for that, too.
