Customer Reviews:
 I enjoy this game. August 15, 2010
Amanda Frazzini
This game can be a bit difficult at first with its puzzles and mazes but throughout the game, you level up quickly.
There's not much of a plot to it till the very end. You go around killing other tribes and following/protecting Sara. They spent a lot of money getting these well known voice actors instead of developing their characters and story further. But overall, it is worth playing. I do recommend it.
Comes highly overrated May 6, 2010
M. A Jenkins (Manhattan, KS)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a fan of the "Persona" series, I've been trying to investigate other spinoffs of the "Shin Megami Tensai" world. My first foray was the "Devil Summoner," which were quite good (particularly the 2nd one, which was released pretty recently).
But today, we're talking about "Digital Devil Saga". I had ignored it for a while because the sequel (which, from what I hear, is actually just the 2nd part of the first game, and thus vital to the experience) had been a very rare game for some time. Thankfully, for reasons unknown to me, the sequel recently became cheaper, so I bought them both and started the journey.
And, all in all, it's a pretty mediocre journey thus far. The first game is OK, but it's nothing special. I didn't expect the depth of character found in, say, "Persona 4," but the story is pretty sparse. You play as the ruler of a tribe, whose goal is to conquer and eat other tribes... ]
...
...yeah, I said eat. The game seems to get off on this aspect a little too much. It would be one thing if you were told at the beginning that demons need to eat to live, and just leave it at that. But you are CONSTANTLY reminded that people want to eat you, and sometimes, it's just distasteful. For example, while traveling through a dungeon, occasionally you'll get text telling you what your enemies are saying, and it's totally unnecessary. The lowest point: "Wow, look at her! I'd love to eat her breasts! I'll savor her ass! Those thighs look delicious!" This is more in line with that freeware vore junk I read about on "Something Awful" than a game of this pedigree.
The writing itself is bland. The characters play out like goth teenagers who think they are numb to the world. It's pretty boring. The story is more weird than interesting. People live in a place called Junkyard and fight other people at the behest of some temple, in hopes of reaching Nirvana. I know that might not sound too weird OR interesting, but there's a lot of weird stuff that plays out in this regard. I don't want to say much more, because RPGs are about their story. But I will say that while this one isn't horrible, it's hardly stellar.
The gameplay itself makes up for some of these shortcomings, though. For most battles, you play as your demon form. You have one such form, but you can modify his skill set from some weird grid where you download other demon aspects. Kill enough enemies, and you learn more skills, and can move on along the grid. It's not nearly as entertaining as Persona's demon fusions, but it's passable. Battle itself is actually pretty fun. It's hard to explain - basically, you are given three "turns" in a three-player party. You might think that this means that each person gets one attack, but it's more complicated. Instead, certain actions might result in using half a turn, while others can use two or three turns. For example, if you hit an enemies weak point, or score a critical hit, you'll only use half a turn. If an enemy dodges an attack, you'll use two turns. There are combos that can be discovered which use multiple party members, and thus use multiple turns. It's actually pretty fun overall.
You can also begin a battle as a human if you are ambushed. I see no reason to do this unless it affects the ending of your game (I haven't played multiple times, so I can't tell you if this is the case). For the most part, you are much, much weaker overall, and so I usually transform to a demon in my first turn.
One of the negatives to battle is that it is completely random whether or not you attack first, or your enemy. In the first dungeon, I probably attacked first 90% of the time. The same held true for the 2nd dungeon...until I leveled a few times. Then, the enemies attacked first pretty much 100% of the time. I don't know if the enemies level with you or what (I doubt it, since their hit points and attack power doesn't seem to change), but it makes zero sense.
The BIGGEST negative is the encounter rate. Holy crap - you get attacked constantly. In one amusing instance, I was attacked within 2 steps for 6 consecutive encounters. The average battle is rarely difficult, but this is annoying. The boss battles, on the other hand, can be brutal at times. I often found myself grinding around a save point to prepare for a battle that was 10x as difficult as any I had faced thus far.
So, there you go. I don't really know how to rate "Good" and "Bad" in this game. Most of the time, I just thought it was weird, and often found myself losing interest in the story and the characters. I don't really know who I would recommend it to. This game doesn't feel like "Persona" in the least. Maybe it's like the "SMT" main series - I don't know, because I have never played it. If you don't like RPGs, stay away for sure. Even if you do, you need to like a particular kind of RPG to appreciate this, but all in all, it's not unplayable. It's a strange combo of weird and boring.
 mind numbing March 21, 2010
William G. Hoppes (Livermore,Calif)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you are looking for a total dungeon crawl with random battles every ten seconds though endless dungeons that require mind-numbing repetition to finally work you way through, then this is the game for you!
 Pretty good though can get a bit annoying March 8, 2010
Soriku
This is my second SMT game I've bought and it's pretty solid. The characters are pretty cool and the story is interesting and gets more interesting in the second game. The music is incredible and the game absolutely has one of my favorite game soundtracks ever. The gameplay is a bit annoying because of the frequent random battles and the LONG dungeons (probably the longest dungeons in an RPG I've played) and the battle system is pretty standard turn based overall (it's a bit different from the rest thanks to the turn icons in battle which can make battles sometimes strategic) so it's not super compelling but it gets the job done and some battles are more fun than the rest especially when you really get into them. Some battles are really tough though (mainly random battles) and require a bunch of grinding so that isn't so good either, but...
Overall though, I'd recommend the game. It has flaws but which game doesn't?
Refined, but disappointing... December 29, 2009
Paul Dougherty
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've played to completion SMT: Nocturne as well as Persona 3: FES and Persona 4, and Digital Devil Saga seems like their weird cousin. The game is very linear like the others, but has some optional sidequests if you go looking.
The story while interesting, and the characters are pretty decent with quality voice acting, kind of falls a little flat. Go to a new location, something happens, get to the end of a dungeon, kill boss, something else happens, repeat. While Nocturne mostly followed the same formula, the world was much more interesting to me. The ending of course directly sets up the sequel, but wasn't very satisfying. It also clocked in much shorter than the other SMT titles at about 40 hours to complete.
The combat carries over the Press Turn system from Nocturne (with a similar system in P3/P4), but seems much more forgiving and will allow you to mostly ignore weaknesses and just spam powerful physical attacks. The silent protagonist being killed with an instant kill spell doesn't make the game immediately end either like it does in the other SMT games. Enemies still can attack preemptively and use an all target instant kill spell which will roll the credits, so you'll probably get hit with an unlucky cheap game over at some point though.
The Mantra System has been compared to the Sphere Grid from FFX, but that's really inaccurate.
The Sphere Grid is strictly linear with boosts to stats and new spells/abilities learned one after another until very late in the game when the higher level "Locks" can be deactivated and let characters learn other character's spells/abilities. (Tidus getting Auron's Break attacks and whatnot.)
The Mantra System is linear, but multithreaded. Your "ice strong - fire weak" character who starts with ice spells (Bufu): He can immediately learn the weak fire damage spell (Agi), then the weak all target fire spell, then the medium fire damage spell, then the all target medium fire damage spell, etc, ignoring ice magic entirely for the rest of the game. Or he could go and focus on healing magic. Or Physical attacks. Or do a physical attack and then an instant kill spell. All the weakest abilities of their types are almost immediately available to learn.
The point is that you can freely jump around and learn whatever type of skill is most useful at the time. As you master one Mantra it opens up one or more stronger Mantras along the same line of spell/ability as the previous one. Mastering weak physical attacks unlocks stronger ones.
Once you master Mantras you can add and remove them from the slots a character has. More slots to a total of 8 become available as your characters gain levels. Mantras are a definite improvement over Magatama from Nocturne, but make the characters kind of interchangeable once you can cover their weaknesses with Null Element traits.
Digital Devil Saga from a gameplay standpoint is pretty well balanced and not as unfair as Nocturne could be, but just kind of lacks that special something that makes the other SMT games so enjoyable to me. Despite being half as long as the others it didn't make me want to play through it again immediately like they did.
If you're looking for a decent PS2 RPG you could do far worse than Digital Devil Saga. I wouldn't say it's the best MegaTen game on the console although it's worth picking up if you enjoyed Nocturne or the Persona titles.
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