JRPG Journey 2024: Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga (August)
Summer bonus game: Soul Blazer
September’s game: Final Fantasy VI
Once again I’m behind on promptly posting these retrospectives, but this time I’ll get right into the thickness: Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga is a curious entry in the storied SMT series, a PlayStation 2 game that’s like Persona minus the all the school stuff. In fact I’d at first assumed it came out after Persona 3 as a smaller, spinoff passion-project due to how similar it is in look and feel, but no—both DDS and its direct sequel, Digital Devil Saga 2, released before Persona 3. After more thought, this does make sense since in the early 2000s Persona had achieved nowhere near the caché it enjoys now, leaving Atlus, at the time, with no reason not to put resources into new Shin Megami Tensei spinoffs to try to create more Persona-level hits. For that matter, SMT itself is a spinoff from the still mostly unknown (in the West, anyway) Digital Devil Story games, making this game’s title a sly reference to those originals.
Before I go on, shout-out to the nerds pushing their glasses up to claim this isn’t technically an SMT game or even a Megami Tensei game, since it was released in Japan as Digital Devil Saga, without the Shin Megami Tensei prefix. I hear you. I’ll even give it to ya—you’re technically right: it’s not called SMT in Japan. But I’d argue that’s because it’s obviously a Megami Tensei — slash — SMT spinoff, and since the whole “Digital Devil” moniker was much more recognizable in Japan at the time, Atlus didn’t need to specify that when releasing DDS in their home region. Digital Devil Saga is clearly part of that franchise, and I don’t find it strange to emphasize such for the Western release.
Digital Devil Saga showed me a different side of the storied Megami Tensei franchise, a side I quickly came to adore. Now I started as a Persona 3 fan, but as I’ve learned from playing the entry that started it all (Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Story) as well as the first Shin Megami Tensei, Atlus’s unique flavor of JRPG combat holds up well enough on its own that it doesn’t need fifty hours of melodrama supporting it. Heck, it doesn’t even need what I thought was the series’s core gimmick, the demon summoning system. Instead, Digital Devil Saga condenses SMT’s and Persona’s mechanics into a stripped-down, party-based JRPG—no demons to capture or train, no fusions to get more powerful, no randomly generated dungeons, nothing like that: this side story is all about teaching the kind of skills your demons would have learn in previous games, like Mabufudyne or Tentarafoo, to your party members themselves in a truly traditional JRPG setup. (Did you skip the Digital Devil Saga games not knowing that? Time to go back and play ’em!)
We’re jumping back to 2004 for this one, and while I mentioned Digital Devil Saga’s got a direct sequel, a plan that must have been in place from the start since the story here indeed feels like half of the ultimate picture it’s building toward, I’m only covering the first game in this retrospective, as I have yet to play Part 2. That will only make this writeup better, however, as DDS’s mind-bending plot gives observant players a lot to chew on despite its lack of an ultimately satisfying conclusion. I’ll reserve judgment on the latter till I’ve played both, though.
In Digital Devil Saga you play as Serph of the Embyrons, one of six tribes who inhabit an eerie, dreamlike world known simply as the Junkyard, a fitting name for a world that oozes grim, post-apocalyptic vibes. Ostensibly this “world” is nothing more than a combat simulator, but from the outset it’s apparent we’re looking at some sort of purgatory allegory, though one with a heavily Hinduism-inspired flair. While I’m the first to admit I don’t know much about Indian religions, I like how Digital Devil Saga’s not afraid to lean hard into these Hindu mythological influences that have peppered the series from the start, particularly in the demon designs and spell names. (At least, the spells sound Indian to my uneducated self; I could be wrong on that.) Digital Devil Saga extends this to its region and town names and even its core theme, jettisoning most of the overt Christian references of previous games. That’s cool stuff, but it leaves me unsure of where the story is heading or what it all even means, ’cause without having played the second part I’m unsure how to interpret the goings-on. I’ll do my best, but if you want an in-depth analysis I encourage you to seek out someone with more knowledge of Hinduism than me.
The aforementioned six tribes exist at constant war with each other, battling for control of the Junkyard under the vague direction of the Karma Temple, a seemingly all-knowing AI named “Angel” who hands down directives to each of the tribe leaders. Serph serves as the leader of the Embyrons, who get attacked early on, leaving everyone’s memory wiped. OK, amnesia may be an overused plot point, yet it works well here: some of your squad members get infected and begin to turn into vicious, uncontrollable monsters that can’t be reasoned with—only killed. Luckily, a mysterious woman named Sera, who appears just after the attacks and gets taken into the Embyrons’ care, has demonic powers that let her heal the infected tribe members, preventing them from transforming and devouring everyone. Unfortunately, she also suffers from amnesia and can’t offer much in the way of explanation as to what the heck is going on, why a virus is turning everyone into monsters, or why everyone is in this world in the first place.
If that sounds confusing and hard to follow, well, I agree. Digital Devil Saga doesn’t bother explaining the details of even its most basic story framing, leaving the player to interpret the goings-on for himself. I respect this approach, but again, it does mean I can’t comment much on the themes without playing Part 2. Despite that lack of complete context, I can confirm you’ll spend the first half or so of the game “uniting” the six tribes, which here means subjugating the enemy five to your will by traversing and conquering their headquarters, a.k.a., this game’s dungeons, all the while “devouring” enemy NPCs who have themselves been consumed by the infection. Such a straightforward approach relegates Digital Devil Saga, at least in my mind, to the ranks of gameplay-first RPGs, which admittedly aren’t as popular these days or even back in 2004. The situation might be different as viewed by Japanese players, but in the West at least (and with the benefit of keen hindsight), Digital Devil Saga was always going to end up as an overlooked, under-appreciated spinoff.
Conveniently, according to the rules of this reality-defying world, any tribe whose leader has been defeated must pledge their allegiance to the victorious tribe, a classic example of gameplay integrating into the story that I much appreciate. After conquering all the tribes, the big-daddy AI called Angel explains to Serph that the power of demons, Atma, who calls itself the god these people worship, is now accessible to all the tribe leaders. Atma further explains that they must devour the souls of the remaining infected to escape their purgatory in the Junkyard and reach nirvana. While not a gameplay mechanic, according to the story, devouring a demon raises a character’s karma as part of this process. Confusingly, a “demon” in this sense represents the essence of tribe members’ new selves (their karma), meaning everyone has a demon within them due to the… virus? That’s what I could glean from the localization, anyway. On top that, midway through the game, the party notices there’s only adults in the world and struggle to understand the what a “child” is or how reproduction works in general. Now that’s a compelling plot hook! It’s more evidence that the whole scenario is happening within a computer program, but the story takes the concept seriously, examining it in-depth, and after playing dozens upon dozens of JRPGs, any title that explores some new idea I haven’t seen before gets high marks from me. Ultimately though, without having played Part 2 the story overall is a bit confusing, so I’d better move on from the plot.
A slate of well-defined party members fills out your squad of up to three—Heat, Argilla, Gale and Cielo—each with their own elemental affinity and stat-based strengths and weaknesses. This system clearly got reused wholesale in Persona 3; I mean, it’s nearly identical, and that’s not a complaint. Again, Digital Devil Saga is like playing P3 without any demons, where your party members learn new skills instead, easily the gameplay’s strongest feature. As much as I love Persona, not having to spend dozens of hours chatting up students in favor of a focus on fun dungeon crawling and exploration makes for a nice change of pace. One odd mechanic probably could have been left on the cutting room floor, however: your party members need to transform into their demonic forms to be useful in battle, and there’s no reason not to just stay in these forms all the time. Certain enemy attacks can “de-transform” your units, serving more as an occasional annoyance rather than contributing to the difficulty. Underbaked mechanics like this rarely contribute much to the overall experience, and Digital Devil Story is no exception.
It does help that load times are quick and the dungeons themselves unique and memorable. The fourth one stands out; it’s an ancient theme park castle, with a corny story about a kidnapped princess complete with a voiceover while your party takes their “tour” through the exhibits. Puzzles feature heavily as well, an aspect totally lacking from P3, though in a stroke of genius I wish I saw more often in RPGs, rooms centered around puzzle-solving have no random encounters! What a revelation. Instead of puzzle rooms being super annoying due to constant interruptions, DDS lets you focus on what’s fun rather than wasting your time. Pay attention, devs—this is how it’s done.
Maybe it’s because I played with headphones (not typical for me), but man this game’s got great sound design. Outside of the battle themes, the music itself isn’t all that memorable from a melodic perspective—it’s not like you’ll be humming any of these tunes—but the subtlety, perfect timing, and appropriate use of background atmospheric sounds make for a chilling experience that had me intrigued, always wanting to keep playing. In fact I finished this relatively lengthy purgatorial escape in a scant few sittings, even going so far as to stream the final dungeon and boss since I was having so much fun. Definitely play this one with headphones for that reason, though the Shoji Meguro slap-bass, prog-rock inspired battle themes kick all kinds of ass, too. I especially love how when starting a battle un-transformed, the heavy guitar part of the battle theme kicks in on your first attack once you do transform—it’s killer stuff.
So, for much of this tight adventure you’ll be conquering dungeons, bringing foreign tribes over to your side, and figuring out how to escape the nightmarish prison of a wasteland, all while steadily powering up your party members with new skills. This happens through a basic skill tree system, where you pay to unlock skills for each character, after which you can use up to twelve or so at a time. The Persona-like complexity is here in full force—you’ll have to balance damage spells with buffs with status moves, all of which are viable options for the many scenarios and unique bosses you’ll face in this relatively tough, 30-hour journey. After finishing the game, I now consider this the Megami Tensei series’s defining feature: the player will never quite have enough room to equip all the skills you’d like at any given time, ensuring the you’ll never feel overpowered or get bored from tedious, unexciting battles. SMT just doesn’t do that, and its spinoffs are no exception.
That’s all for this August’s (belated) entry. As always, thanks for reading. Check back soon for September’s retrospective on none other than Final Fantasy VI!
