NFOpocalypse

Another Atlus game in the Shin Megami Tensei series (and spinoffs), Digital Devil Saga is bizarre. I don’t mean the regular kind of bizarre, which is what Persona 3 or Final Fantasy X might fall under. Digital Devil Saga is downright creepy in its employment of the surreal, creepy, and extraordinary elements of its plot. Perhaps the biggest element of this insane aesthetic is in the fact that you consume your defeated enemies. Not only that, but the enemies you defeat used to be human. So, in essence, Digital Devil Saga is about cannibalism.

There’s an actual story in the game, something about clan warfare and territories and survival of the fittest and blah blah blah , but the real meat of the game lies with the characters. They are strange, rational, insane, cannibalistic freaks, and their interactions with how their body is changing and how they deal with the fact that everyone in their little world is turning into a monster is the primary focus of the story.

If you’ve played Persona 3 at all, you have a general idea of how the combat works, although in Digital Devil Saga you always start first. You control your 3 people, and it goes down the line. After they have finished, the enemies take their turn. If you use an attack with an element that the enemy is weak to, you get an extra turn. The thing I like in Digital Devil Saga that Persona 3 doesn’t include is that if you or an enemy use an attack that is absorbed, then you lose your next turn (which translates to giving the enemy or yourself an extra turn). It’s a nice system that makes the battles more a mixture of offense and defense, rather than the almost pure offense seen in Persona 3.

While I find the characters interesting, the story is just random Japanese techno-fantasy-cyberpunk-apocalypse jibberish to me. It’s hard to get attached to the story because it’s so convoluted and confusing, and even at the end of the game, nothing is really explained (although I suppose it is explained in Digital Devil Saga 2). It’s rife with religious allusions and cheap foreshadowing and poor characterization. Then again, I suppose that sort of bullshit is what your average JRPG fanatic wants.

For me, it’s all about the gameplay. There’s a system in the game where you explore dungeons, much like in the other Shin Megami Tensei games. The locations are always so compelling that they draw me in and I end up out-leveling the boss of the area because I fought so many random enemies. In actual battles, you can switch between demon or human form, each with advantages and drawbacks. It does feel weird using a gun in human form, though.

I guess the cannibalism is just another shock tactic. It does fit the theme of the game (social darwinism, or survival of the fittest) and it does actually give you bonuses in the game itself in the form of restored stats after a battle. It just feels like a way to draw in the edgy crowd, though. The people who want to be cool because they like gore and mutilation. The kind of people that see the SAW or Hostel movies for sexual pleasure.

Oh, and I really hate RPGs that don’t let me control the stat growth of my team. Why does this have to be the trend with JRPG companies? The world may never know.

Tags: company-atlus, crpg, dragonmaw, jrpg, ps2, rpg, single player

This entry was posted by dragonmaw on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Adventure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.