Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga
Junkyard, a town of endless rain... With his four companions, Serf, the main character and a member of a tribe called Embryon, sets out for Nirvana, a land that can only be reached by the champions of Junkyard. They devote themselves to fighting against thenever-ending resistance mustered by other tribes. In the midst of chaos, a mysterious object, the Pod, suddenly appears. Countless spheres of light are emitted by the Pod and infect Serf and his comrades, awakening their demonic power
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga Accessories
 Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga 2
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES
Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner
Persona 2: Eternal Punishment
Eternal Poison
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3
Shadow Hearts: From the New World
Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga Reviews
This game is good fun- its an intriguing world and rather good looking even though the story is a little predictable and the battle system can get a bit tedious- but THIS GAME IS NOT WORTH $100 in fact i would not be willing to spend more than $30ish on it THESE PRICES ARE OUT OF CONTROL
GET HEAL SKILLS EARLY FOR ARGILLA, Media is really important. The game near the end makes you level up and you really need hours and hours. THIS IS ONLY THING YOU NEED TO DO EARLY IN THE GAME. I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND SPITTING OUT 100 or 150 DOLLARS FOR UNOPENED GAME, ESPECIALLY SINCE IT IS NOT as GOOD AS NOCTURNE 3. Although KT is interesting maze, you will either read FAQ and beat opponents or get beaten and set up characters after you load game.
If I put DDS 2 (Sequel or disc 2) in my PS2, it will be my own fault. YOU HAVE TO DEVELOP SERPH TO GET MEDIA SPELL. Final boss seems impossible but, thanks to friend's idea you can get strategy in this review, in previous text. YOU REALLY NEED DYNE SPELLS FOR ALLL MEMBERS, RECARM AND MEDIARAMA ON ARGILLA, ICE DRAIN ON SERPH, AGYDINE ON HEAT AND SO ON. Cielo needs Elec Amp and Elec Boost. It also has concept of demon infested world with very few humans left. Not all, but too often.
Except last boss, that is. I spent 50 hours before going to tackle main guy. Tribes are at war, just like in some parts of world, and what is bad turns to worse when people become some hybrid creatures that have special skills, something like Yuri in Shadow Hearts. If you get critical hit use the extra move to heal.
This is a game that has 60 percent of enemies copy pasted from SMT Nocturne, or is it reverse. Not too much graphic violence compared to what they could have done. After typical levels, you get to solve 3D puzzles, yeah, just like in Nocturne but I am Lara Croft/Beyond Good and Evil fan. YOU HAVE TO HAVE TERA SPELL OR TERAZI BETTER BEFORE BOSS IN SHIP IN THE DESERT. ***bad:.
Bosses are still great, non-boss battles too. You can also take out all bosses easily , if you don't run away too much and explore by yourself. AFTER BEATING HARI HARA GIANT. - FINAL IMPRESSIONS. My Serph had magic parameter about 71 and vitality around 60.
I used about 10 somas which recover party's MP and HP and about 10 revival gems. Bosses are intelligent and sometimes you have to experiment A LOT to get to know how to beat them. OR MAYBE I LIKE NOCTURNE BECAUSE IT IS LIKE PERSONA. I complained a lot about leveling up, but lot of games that are RPG are time consuming thanks to difficult bosses that you can't beat if you don't level up enough. Development of character is like in SMT Nocturne, but good thing is, you don't have to discard skills.
Although you have BIG array of skills to choose from, after half of the game or so you need to read FAQ or to go by yourself, see boss and then add mantras. All of them had Mediarama and stuff against blood curse: null nerve, null panic, null mute and whatever. POSSIBLE SMALL SPOILERS AHEAD. FIRST GAME ADVICE: GET MUTUAL KARMA FOR EVERYONE AS SOON AS YOU CAN, GRIND IT OUT FEW DAYS. Mazes are great. -impressions after 17 hrs and beating boat boss and after that lupa.
impressions after six hours. Somehow, game just gives you hints about what's really happening, and that is unfair. PRACTICE NEAR LARGE TERMINAL IN SEWERS WHERE YOU BEAT LUPA. I GAVE A LOT OF CASH THINKING THIS IS TRUE CULT GAME. get cerberus' head on right head of screen first, the one that heals. To get new magic skills, you have to use devour skill to fill progress bar for selected mantra. STOCK BEFORE COMING TO KT, NO SHOPS HERE.
It is much better later than in the beginning, unlike most of RPGs and generaly games, which are designed to get your attention and then they just become boring after 10 hours. -impressions after 12 hours and beating Mick. Sometimes I feel like I am playing solitaire just to kill time.
This level is short but it gives you shocking revelations in form of FMVs and you need lotsa luck. EQUIP IT TO CHARS WHO ARE NOT FIGHTING SO THEY WILL GET EXPERIENCE AS IF THEY DID FIGHT ALONGSIDE FIRST THREE. Characters who shot each other are now using both magic and bullets and have almost uncontrolable hunger, that is basically seen in Final Fantasy IX character who gets enemy's magic by using cook spell. Well it seems that after I stopped sulking about grayish colours and lot of enemies copy pasted from Nocturne, I started to enjoy game a little and then a lot. Characters DO develop, although story is simple so far. Logic to win against giant Hari Hara is not so obvious and yet it is. I WILL CONTINUE TO PLAY THIS GAME.
:). Central head is mean if it is last one alive so do fire absorb and bufudyne and at the end, be careful of left head's physical attack. With time, Heat will, with help of Cielo, take out lotsa cores (Zyodine works against water, fire and anything not electric) and if you have enough soma and chakra drops and pots, you can take out this boss. After ship, there is large dungeon/sewers.
IMPRESSIONS AFTER REACHING MAIN BOSS. Serph does Magic Repell (yes, expensive to get), Cielo bangs at Gold core (must be able to take it with just one zyodine) and Heat comes in: Gold core doesn't exist so nothing can reflect physical attack and two headed pacman pounds everything in sight with revelation physical magic. impressions after 22 hrs and beating VARIN OMEGA. Fights and mazes. ***good:.
I had Serph at level 67 and Cielo at 62 and Heat at 62 or was it 63. BEFORE BOSS HERE, HAVE ARGILLA HAVE MEDIA SPELL, HAVE ABOUT 10 CHAKRA DROPS, HAVE SERPH HAVE BUFUDYNE SPELL AND HEAT FIRE ABSORB SKILL. **********HOW TO DO IT (skip this if you don't wanna spoiler):. Story puts you in control of Serph , one of six tribes leader. Null poison is almost unneeded. Can't help it, I am old school 'Eye of Beholder' and Interplay fan.
Same enemies like in SMT 3 and Persona 3. Atmosphere is SOOO melancholic, just like story, which is morbid and melancholic. ***spoilers about Lupa:. MUST READ SPOILERS ARE IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Let me just beat Karma Temple level and I'll be back to you with complete impressions of first half of two sequel (two DVDs as two sequels) Saga.
First you out-strategy oponent and then you win, muscling around doesn't work all the time. This game has bosses that are as good as Xenogears. WHAT DOES IT MEAN. :).
YOU HAVE TO HAVE FORCE ABSORB OR VOID FORCE. Even Nocturne had lot of leveling up if I remember correctly.
I know it's somewhat blasphemous to say anything negative about this game amongst hardcore JRPG fans but I honestly did not enjoy it that much. The character/bad guy designs are quite boring if not outright stupid at times, also I hope you enjoy your environments completely dreary and in shades of brown and grey. Oh goodie. The story is very very interesting but the repeated deaths on first turns in random battles that can sometimes occur 1 to 2 seconds apart just made this game not worth the frustration of trying to advance the plot line in these oversized dungeons in which you will be forced to back track pretty frequently. Obviously this game is some peoples cup of tea but unfortunately it wasn't mine and I only ask you take my words into consideration if you are planning on purchasing this and have only read the reviews from people who found this game to be fantastic, especially with the price this game is now selling at.
The monsters you fight agaisnt are all familiar faces from that game though, so expect to encounter those pesky physical-immune elephants (Girimehkala), and the death spell-happy goat demons (Baphomet), as well as several new faces. Me Patra)., but to obtain the really good ones is much, MUCH harder work now, simply because they have to be paid for with money, and the top of the range spells like Debilitate, Dekunda, Megidolaon etc, cost massive amounts of cash, and you still have to buy and work through all the spells on the pathway to the top end (the skills are only for sale in a pre-set order, the weakest must be learned first before each next level becomes available). So individual character has little to do with how you deploy the skills of your team, you can make anyone into anything. Anyway, enough of the plot.
Pulpina. Now there's a very obvious reason for this brevitiy, but it's not a very encouraging one - the game is designed very specifically to be Part One of a two game series. What's different from most RPGs is that everybody in this world has a demon "alter ego" and for every battle, you will see your characters with a completely different physical appearance, usually with lots of teeth, spikes and claws. Thankfully they have improved on the drab locations that seemd to be repeated to infinity in that game, and some of the dungeons are now quite stunning - although they still repeat interiors over and over again for all the rooms and chambers in each dungeon.
So is that enough. This leads me to my other gripe - this being that with all 5 characters, the shopping list of skills is the same for everybody. And now the characters finally have spoken dialogue. So if you choose to buy it, be prepared for much of the plot to be unresolved at the end, and to have to go and get Part Two to finish the story. Actually, that in itself makes the game much harder that Lucifer's Call, as you have to do a lot of battling against enemies who cast all those mean spells like Hama and Mudo before you'll ever reach the abilities that protect you from them. Now onto the next drawbacks, but these ones will only really hit gamers who played and enjoyed Lucifers Call (that's me, then). I'll tell you one major improvement though: you no longer have to permanently delete skills to learn new ones - hooray. And it actually has a better story - all the stuff about The Conception and choosing a Reason kind of went over my head last time, I'm sorry to say.
So in summary, a shorter game and with sadly less innovations than Lucifer's Call. OK, I know thats the case in most RPGs.it just goes to show how memorable Lucifer's Call really was. Although the five characters do come pre-loaded with a definite slant (Argilla will always be the best magic caster and Heat the strongest physical attacker, etc), it's nothing like the array of abilities that the "cast of thousands" in Lucifer's Call had, giving you there the huge scope for a custom team with some real personality in it. If you haven't played Lucifer's Call.my advice is to play that first. Although the stories aren't connected in any way, I simply think LC is the better of the two.
A step up from Lucifer's Call, but still with the same anime style, except that now the graphics are even better. I'd say buy Lucifer's Call first and then get this one if you want more. Although you have to buy Part Two as well afterwards. What struck me most on playing was the surprisingly small scale of the game as a whole.
Sorry but that's not for me. All the battle skills and spells still exist, along with the same unidentifiable names (Tenterafoo. I'm going to try and aim this review at both people who have and haven't played this games predecessor, Lucifer's Call. And it will get you used to all the customs and mythology that the Shin Megami Tensei series seems to be built around. I was very proud of my final, boss-beating line up in Lucifer's Call, but in this game everyone's going to be exactly the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning, just with more HP and improved spells. (OK, sorry but I live in the UK, so please bear with me when I refer to it under this name rather than the US title of "Nocturne.). But it looks better and it's definitely still in that league. In Digital Devil Saga you are Serph, leader of a small band of rogues who live in a post-apocalyptic world of constantly warring "tribes" who exist and fight according to strict codes and rules of allegiance.
If you have played that game you are pretty much completely clued up in regards to what to expect.I'll get on to the differences later. Now I know in most RPGs this is the norm, and I don't mind some serious levelling up to unlock the best skills. Apart from that, you'll find yourself in pretty linear territory and with little room for deviation with regard to where you go after finishing each dungeon, and what you do next. There are only five tribes in this world, so I expected lots of twists in the story, but once the enemy tribe leaders are all thwarted in their efforts to seize Sera from you, the game is all but over, and you only have one other thing left to do, which is to take her with you and see what this so-called Nirvana is really about. This is great, and it makes them all seem really alive, despite a very dodgy "Jamaican" accent given to one of them.
This kind of de-personalised the battles for me as it was visually just a load of monsters against monsters, but story-wise it does have some importance. The look of the game, however is wonderful. Of course, the idea is to extend replay value.I realised this as soon as I read on the web that the "clear game" mode starts you off on a replay with all mastered skill still saved, so after two or maybe even three playthroughs, you might just have learned all the really good skills that there are.phew. Ok, you do get spells that cast shields against these attacks, but I wanted the permanent immunities. Knowing this, I kind of expected a mammoth storyline that simply went on and on, but in reality, I think DDS1 only has about half the gameplay time of some other one disc games out there anyway, so the need to sell it in two parts seemed a bit greedy to me. But here, every single top skill comes at the very end of all the other skill sets, and you will most likely reach the end of the game with several pathways nowhere near finished - unless you do nothing but grind away so that all the required experience and cash gets earned. And not even after seeing that many of my favourite basic safety support abilities like Null Death and Null Expel come way up at the top of the list.
One giant grid (a lot like the sphere grid in Final Fantasy X) shows you which paths lead to which skills. As is customary in RPGs, a world-changing event is about to happen that throws all the tribes into turnoil, and in this game it is the sudden appearance of a black haired girl called Sera (which causes a sensation because nobody in the world has ever had black hair before), who every tribe suddenly wants to kidnap after hearing that, for some mysterious reason, she alone can unlock a forbidden (or formerly unreachable) place known only as Nirvana. It was definitely over sooner than I expected. The demon recruitment system, which let you add any monster you met in battle to your own team of playable characters, is gone, which means no more fantastic variety of team members to play with. But on your side of things, Digital Devil Saga has a mere five members, which is low among RPGs anyway, and compared to Lucifer's Call, it seems very tame. It becomes clear early on that the player is in for traditional turn based battles, and I'm glad to say the superior "press turns" system from Lucifers Call (in which you gain extra battle turns by knowing which attacks best exploit your enemies weaknesses - and likewise, the enemies also do the same with your weaknesses) is still in effect.
It is one of the greatest examples of storytelling I have seen in recent games and stands as one of my favorites. This is because the battle system rewards attacking an enemies weakness and condemns playing to their strengths. Digital Devil Saga is another entry into the MegaTen franchise which has been going strong for over 20 years. To do this you just equip them and then accumulate AP in battle.
I actually found myself going to the same location before saving and quiting (as long as I wasn't in a dungeon) just to hear the music. The game plays like a top notch RPG, however it takes a bit more strategy as those used to just mashing on the attack button will be overwhelmed and find the game amazingly difficult. In fact, they are cel-shaded. All the worlds inhabitants have been divided into six tribes that are waging war to becoming the controllers of the Junkyard, thus earning the right to ascend to Nirvana. A mysterious world where it always rains, and everyone has been rendered virtually emotionless (kinda like Equilibrium for anyone familiar with that movie). If you have doubts about cel-shading just search for the trailer on a gaming site and see for yourself, it is gorgeous. Now don't get too attached to the idea that when I say top notch I mean Final Fantasy CG quality. All in all, this is one of the most overlooked RPG's from last year and in my opinion was one of the top 3 to be released.
All in all, it is a system that allows for deep customization of characters since any character can gain any spell and while it may seem daunting at first is actually quite simple. This is a member of one of the top franchises in video game history and you can finally see what it's all about. Careful though, eat to fast and you get a stomach ache, eliminating any AP that you would have gained. The amazing story though will drive you through these points and give you the drive to finish the game (and ultimately play the sequel). The Junkyard is beautiful (in a dreary sort of way) and the character and monster designs are great. Get this game, you won't be disappointed. The trick is, the fastest way to gain AP is to devour your enemy. Meaning you must keep a well balanced party that has skills in virtually every area.
Amazingly it is only the fourth or so game to be released in America (being beaten out by the Persona games and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne). The music is also very good. The graphics in the game are top notch. The game revolves around the land of the Junkyard. Many people are opposed to cel-shading, but this game shows that when it is done right it is something to behold. Inside the object is a girl named Sera who has the ability to control the transformation into demons and the hunger that coincides with it.
My only complaint is that the sound track didn't include the intro song "Danger" by Etro Anime. Because of this even a group of lower level enemies can get a sneak attack in and wipe you out if you aren't careful. Hit an immunity or fail to connect, you lose turns. To gain the spells and abilities neccesary to survive, one must master Mantras. The game however is quite difficult until you learn how to manipulate enemy weaknesses and nearly every boss will take a bit of trial and error to find their weaknesses, so expect to reload a few times.
In battle, if you hit an enemies weakness, you gain extra attacks. The final composition of every element coming together provides a very satisfying and rewarding gaming experience and I recommend this game above pretty much every other major RPG I own (including Final Fantasy's 7 and up). When it opens, flashes of light fly around piercing the hearts of every person in the Junkyard, turning them into demons. During a battle between the Embryon (your tribe) and a rival tribe, a mysterious object appears in the center of the warzone. Shortly thereafter a new order is given to the tribes from the high council in charge of the Junkyard, instead of beating the enemy tribes you must now devour your enemy and satisfy the hunger growing within.
Sounds great, until you realise the enemy can exploit this tactic as well.
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