A New Kind of Power: A Review of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga

One feels a strange sort of emotional detachment when playing Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga. It can be likened to the feeling we get when a distant relative dies; we might feel a little numb, but we??e not sure that we can bring ourselves to feel sad.

When DDS opens, we find ourselves in the Junkyard, a war-torn wasteland dominated by six perpetually fighting tribes. Naturally, we play the role of the smallest and weakest tribe. It?? easier for the plot to evolve that way, to go from smaller to larger. It?? cleaner, more efficient.

Digital Devil Saga uses cell shading, a graphical style that normally lends itself to wild experimentation or to making things look bright and cartoony. DDS uses it for other reasons. I??l address the graphics a bit more later.

The Shin Megami Tense series has always allowed us a choice as to what role we want our characters to play in battle. In Digital Devil Saga, we have the ability to turn into demons, and almost all of the combat takes place in demon form. We gain new abilities depending on what Mantra we have equipped; Mantra are templates that contain a number of new abilities, and are downloaded (for a price, of course) via a "sphere grid" that can be accessed at any save point. However, to actually use the abilities of a given Mantra, we have to collect Atma Points, or AP. Each time we kill an enemy, we get AP, which are then used to fill a special meter that once filled completely, grants us the power of our equipped Mantra. This system allows us to buy a wide array of abilities at virtually any time, however it rewards us with powerful abilities for staying along a certain path (such as learning all of the physical attack skills or magic skills) on the "sphere grid".

Combat, being our main source of income, and thus, our main source of Mantra, plays a very important role in the game, and is mostly inoffensive. We can do all of the things that we??e been able to do in an RPG since??forever. We can cast magic, we can physically attack, we can use items. Our magical spells come in fire, earth, ice, electricity, and force (in the place of wind) varieties. Nothing that we haven?? seen before; nothing that requires us to waste time learning. We still get into random encounters, but the pace of said encounters is often so quick that we barely notice them. The battles go by so fast because we know how the systems works, we??e known since the day we played our very first RPG.

Digital Devil Saga contains nine dungeons??yes, nine dungeons, and eleven total locations on the world map. We get to these locations by simply highlighting one of them, and pressing the X button, no dealing with bothersome random encounters along the way.

Effective, clean, efficient. Battles happen with such frequency that we start to lose track, yet they??e over before we can even remember them. We buy a Mantra, and get its abilities, yet we barely get a chance to use those abilities because we??e busy leveling up a newer, more powerful Mantra. There are eleven locations on the world map, and nine of them remind us, every seven seconds, that the faster we defeat our enemies, the more AP we get.

We start to settle into this world, and we start to become part of it. Efficient, emotionless.

The graphics mirror this cold, indifferent world. Colors are solid and muted; details are forsaken for simplicity. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, yet everything is??clean. It looks fake, and yet it seems so strangely real. It?? as if all our surroundings and objects lost meaning. If real life looked like this, we could never say "these are the initials I carved on a tree by the lake"; "This is the mural I painted the brick wall". All of this is gone now. Instead, all we can do is think to ourselves: "this is where the neutron bomb exploded; this is where all organic life died."

The sense of poise and style that Digital Devil Saga exhibits in its cut-scenes is ridiculous. What class! What confidence! With so much going for it, you?? think that it would show off. It doesn??. The action in the cut-scenes is just good, effective, exciting stuff. The camera angles are bold, and sharp; the approach is very direct, but low-key in a way. It?? a style of depicting action that I haven?? seen for a while.

The cut scenes aren?? quite as perfect as those in Nocturne, because of the voice acting. It?? not bad??in fact, it?? great. However, the way Nocturne plays out like the most surreal of silent movies is nearly unmatched in style.

Kazuma Kaneko?? character designs have become more detached and reserved as well. Now that the Shin Megami Tensei games are on hardware powerful enough to preserve Kaneko?? artistic vision, (and even enhance it) it seems his designs have become less risky, especially compared to his previous work on the Persona series. Of course, that the character design is detached and reserved makes perfect sense. That all the tribes wear a simple uniform also makes perfect sense. For the characters in the game, things like "emotions", and "individuality" are new concepts. As they develop, they come to grips with their newfound personas. As they grow, they all start to physically change in subtle ways??all of them, as they discover "this??new power".

One has to wonder if Kazuma Kaneko, a man who likes to wear a black suit, black shoes, black sunglasses, and a black leather fedora during interviews, likes to keep things simple. We have to wonder whether he likes to design high school students that assholes might describe as "chic, sexy, and very very hip!" or if he likes to design simple characters, characters who wear solid colors.

The change in character design, and the focus of the story, are in almost direct contrast to Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (my game of the year for 2004, and one of my ten favorite games of all time). Nocturne, being a study in existentialist philosophy, focuses on the desire of an individual to tell their story, to create their own world. The Reason of being defines the shape the world will take. The difference between good and evil is meaningless; all sides are simultaneously right and wrong. It?? up to the player to decide what suits his or her personal taste.

Digital Devil Saga uses the idea of a group to tell its story. It uses the idea of having someone else help us to become an individual. The warring tribes are the main focus of the story; there is a shadowy group that can easily be defined as evil. Although the characters we control develop their own ideas and personalities, the group is what matters in the end.

And yet??before this review can end, we must speak of the electric guitar.

The overdriven electric guitar is quite possibly the perfect instrument for this game. It?? hyper-real, it?? sharp, it?? simple. It adds a touch of energy to the game, but it never feels out of place in this scrap-metal metropolis.

During some of the levels in the game, levels where everything looks antiseptic, the music is our only indication that we??e making progress. We might find ourselves climbing higher and higher in a giant tower. On the first floor, the only sound we hear might be a nervous little guitar riff, a clean, palm-muted little thing. We climb floor after floor, and eventually we start to hear violins in the background, the little guitar riff staying as steady as ever. We keep climbing, even though we swear we??e already seen this place before. The beat of a bass drum starts to mix in with the guitar riff and the violins. We know we??e making progress. After a short while, more sounds are added. We climb for what seems like forever, and then we hear the sounds of an overdriven guitar layering another riff on top of the other sounds. We??e reached the apex. The simple notes that joined us in our climb to the top have melted into each other and formed a complex wall of sound.

Digital Devil Saga probably has the best post-battle music I??e ever heard in my life. Four palm-muted power chords, a sparse bass kick, and a cymbal tap.

Music always plays an important role in every epic saga.

Of course, this game wouldn?? be much of a saga if it didn?? have a sequel. I mean, we haven?? even really killed god yet.

-Evan Kaigle