digital devil saga today

this is a replay for me. i first played dds in 2014ish, when i found a disk-only copy at gamestop in a box of a few hundred ps2 disks (it was mostly overstock rockband disks). i have a scavenger's spirit and managed to find the single good game in there. it was priced at $5 and the employee at the till was just as surprised as i was. it soon became my favorite game of all time.

i'm currently, i don't know, hours-wise probably about 1/3 of the way through? the dungeons get longer and more complex as the game goes on. if you were to look up where i am in the timeline of a walkthrough, it would look about halfway through, but since i've already played this game, i can tell you otherwise.

i've been doing coordinate 136, my favorite dungeon in the game. it's a puzzle dungeon that most people hate because you are punished for making mistakes by getting dropped through trap floors, and it takes a long time to navigate back. considering that digital devil saga has the classic smt random encounter rate of about a million enemies every step, this can be pretty frustrating. however, i like to get 100% map completion, so i intentionally trigger each trap just to see what's behind it, so it's just a more interesting form of exploration for me.

coordinate 136 is cool because it has creepy ambiance, interesting (if dead easy) new puzzles, and lots of heavy-handed eerie symbolism. the spawns are some of my favorite demons too :) sarasvati, the angel virtue and principality, jack frost and pyro jack, cu chuulain, etc. virtue makes a glass breaking sound when you kill it, and i think that's amazing. the dungeon is a stand out for sure.

i'm almost finished with it. here's a screenshot dump.

next to the karma station where i loaded in. coordinate 136 is set in an abandoned western mansion type setting... makes me think of castlevania.

the puzzles center around helping the "princess" access the "good prince" without interference by the "evil prince", such as this light and mirrors one where you rotate mirrors to connect the princess and good prince.

finishing puzzles unlocks doors for access to further parts of the dungeon.

the puzzle rooms have excellent visual design. nothing's better than a big freaky chessboard with pieces the size of people.

story is piped into the entrance of each new level via cheerful loudspeaker, like announcements at a theme park. (this is also the only screenshot i bothered to take of the rollercoaster puzzle room. it's intentionally visually overwhelming to disguise the solution, and therefore impossible to get a straightforward picture of).

on approach of the final level, the broadcast of the tale between princes and princess becomes scratchy and degraded.

i'm sure that's all good...

the scratched up recording's audio is honestly the best implementation of that trope i've heard in a long time. the clear parts are very clear, and the messed up parts do sound like they just got gouged out of the recording. sometimes, when stuff tries to pull off the [redacted] style of audio, it just sounds like they recorded the good parts separately and spliced in static between them and stuff like that, but this one was pretty good.

when you enter the final room, you hear the end of the story over a slow zoom in to something on the other side of the darkness.

.........

..... the funny part is ... none of this is explained until digital devil saga 2. you could finish this game and do all the side content and never know what this story meant for sure! and it's in the middle of the game! classic smt story pacing right there. man, i love this game.

thank you for solving the puzzle, heat. surely you physically breaking the final piece of the story and letting the light out has no symbolic meaning. let's just move on, right?

oh, sera, you poor dumb fuck.