I completed Digital Devil Saga 2 the other day with relative ease. The final dungeon really wasn't up to the standards that DDS1 and Nocturne has led me to believe was necessary. As far as the final boss gauntlet goes, I only had trouble on Meganada and Brahmin. Meganada was only because I kept forgetting that he liked to charm me and when charmed, my characters would decide to fully heal him. The last boss was tough for me only because I wasn't prepared for it all. Brahmin is essentially the ultimate user of the five elements. I didn't think to set any elemental drain skills nor did I have any elemental walls to take out it's turns. I still won the fight somehow, but I know it would have been so much easier if I had known. I'm talking so easy that at best, it could have been a midpoint boss. Anyways, with the DDS series under my belt, it's time for me to actually finish up the first game under the Shin Megami Tensei title.
Shin Megami Tensei is an incredibly interesting game. In many ways, it lays out the foundation for most of the elements that I found enticing in Nocturne like branching paths, deep fusion systems, demon recruiting, and brutal dungeons and boss fights. At the same time, it's different from what someone who discovered the series with Persona 3 would expect. The dungeons are all in first person, there's next to no customization for the main character and the plot is given to you in via conversations with NPC's rather than just handed out to you.
The three different paths you can take are Law(following order to a tee and tiered society), chaos(complete and utter anarchy for the sake of freedom) and neutral(freewill with balanced laws). There are also two religions feuding for the two major paths, the Mesian Church representing God's lawful society and the Cult of Gaia that breeds complete and pure chaos. Your moral choices affects the story in some interesting ways. Most characters will react to your alignment, some will join you in battle and some will go out of their way to destroy you. Your choice on healing houses is also cut down as the opposing healers will charge astronomical fees for their services. From what I've heard, demon recruiting is heavily impacted on your choices, but at the point I'm at, all they want is money. I'm going for the neutral path so I can fight more of the bosses.
Battles in Shin Megami Tensei don't seem to stray too far away from the Dragon Quest formula. Fast characters act first, slow act last. There are no press turns or anything like that in this game, but as someone who really likes Dragon Quest, I'm okay with it. The scale of the battles is a lot higher in this game than many others I've played. Your team can consist six characters while you can fight up to eight enemies at a time. Things get a little crazier in that enemies more often than not attack in waves. For instance, in one boss battle, I fought four waves of eight making the total number of enemies I had to deal with thirty-two. This cuts down your opportunity to heal, so if you can get a demon like an Angel with Media, you'll be able to survive without too much trouble.
Shin Megami Tensei as a series has always been more of a dungeon crawler than an RPG akin to something like Final Fantasy. The dungeons often take hours to complete and consist of nothing but enemies to fight, puzzles to solve and traps to avoid. Someone who plays the average jRPG may not get why I'm using these points to differentiate SMT from other games; I'll say this, there are no cutscenes nor is there any lengthy story dialogue. These dungeons are dungeons to the core and their length is what will be breaking you, not the hordes of demons you'll be fighting.
Like I said earlier, there is hardly any sort of customization for your characters other than assigning one stat to add to your list. There aren't any skills to juggle for your main character and your human buddies will just learn magic as they level. The Protagonist doesn't even get magic, what he does get is use of the Comp. The comp basically let's you assign demons to your ranks and lets you analyze the demons you'll eventually find yourself to. Their weaknesses won't show up like your modern SMT game, but it will show their alignment which will signal what kind of instant death spells will work. Hama and Mudo spells represent Law and Chaos and actually have a much higher success rate than in their modern incarnations. Hama will instantly kill two chaos demons and mudo will do the opposite.
I'm only about seven hours into the game, so some of these impressions may not hold true and maybe there are some other aspects of the game I'm blind to at the moment. You really can't blame me for not knowing though, there are hardly any guides available. We have Re-miel's guide which has to be one of the most unfortunately designed guides I've ever seen and Infinity Dragon's incomplete guide which is....well, incomplete. What I've been using is a Japanese guide that I used google translations to fumble my way through. I use it mostly for the maps, but it is so full of Engrish that I think everyone should try and take a look at it just for giggles.
(Please note, despite what that screenshot I grabbed from google implies, Jesus isn't a character in the game and I don't think Satan is in this one either. The player just happened to name the lawful hero Jesus and the chaos hero Satan.)
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