Digital Devil Stories: Megami Tensei is where it all began if you don’t consider the books. It is roughly based on the third book of the series (which hasn’t been fan-translated into English but given the quality of the first two I don’t mind not having read it). Apparently the big bad in that one was Lucifer and Akemi and Yukimo had to fight him. In the game, Lucifer has created some dungeons that the two have to best to confront him in the end and get a happy end (they do unlike in the book where Akemi gets killed).
It has a lot of the aspects that the Megami Tensei series is known for, especially demon collecting, and merging them into stronger forms. Though, unlike later parts, you can only merge them in one location in the game which means if you convinced some new demons to join you, you have to trek all the way back to the beginning to try merging them to see whether you can create something stronger. Also unlike later games in the series active demons in your party use up a consumable resource and if you run out, they start losing HP until they are dead. So you rely far more on Akemi as your tank and DPS dealer and Yumiko as magic support, healer, and so on than in later games where the humans usually are much weaker than the summoned demons.
The game is pretty impressive in some ways, there’s a huge variety of enemies, with a lot of animated parts, and the game itself is quite big with lots of mazes. It is hard to recommend though, as it has some issues that make it less enjoyable. First and foremost, the game is one of the worst grind-based RPGs I ever played. It has a ridiculous encounter rate made worse as encounters can happen in a row (you beat one group of enemies only to then have the next one pop up right afterward) and later in the game 2 or 3 in a row is quite normal. You only encounter one type of enemy at once, so while there’s a lot of variety of enemies, the encounter design is pretty boring. You only need to remember which enemies can stone or paralyze your party members (especially Yumiko, as she is the only one with a competent healing spell that can get around these things if she is out of the picture you’re dead except if you have a demon with the same healing spell).
But enemies can deal quite a lot of damage so usually you get around that by leveling up, but while your defense scales with your levels (up to a point, and in some new areas you need to level quite a lot just to survive) your attack potential is rather pitiful even with fully maxed out strength and attack stats, so most enemies become hit sponges as you level up. That’s why you need a lot of heavy-hitting demons just to survive normal encounters regularly. Bosses on the other hand can take a lot to beat, they are hit sponges to the max.
So for the most part what you do in the game is fighting, more fighting, and even more fighting. And unlike Wizardry, which at the time this game came out was already 6 years old, combat is slow as hell. All those nice-looking animations during combat, and the flashing screen when either you or the enemy got hit make combat feel very slow compared to the snappy combat in Wizardry. A 6-year-old game that had better encounter design, snappier combat, and better character progression. Playing DDS:MT made me appreciate just how well-designed Wizardry had been.
Dungeon crawlers need two things to succeed, good combat and good dungeons, and DDS:MT has neither. The dungeon design is really the second big issue holding the game back. It’s large with lots of mazes but honestly many of them feel rather empty and blown up to keep you busy. There are very few, very simple puzzles. A couple of fetch-like quests where you have to meet NPCs in the right order to unlock stuff. NPCs usually only have one thing to say here, though keep talking to all of them and making notes as some of the stuff is rather relevant.
There’s the occasional situation where you have to meet an NPC again to progress and where it’s not obvious that you should (so sometimes you have to check all of them again, so maps with their locations are pretty useful). You can get stuck for no apparent reason, though it doesn’t happen too often. Overall it’s pretty linear and the puzzles, if you can even call them that, are rather simplistic.
There are also no different alignment-based paths with different endings like in later games.
Many of the dungeons are towers with 8×8 slices stacked upon each other connected by ladders (and sometimes the 8×8 mazes are stacked together on a plane to create larger areas). There are also elevators that allow you to traverse multiple levels at once but usually only work once you have beaten the local boss encounter. Sometimes there are moments of clever design: teleporter mazes, lots of mazes with one-way doors, and very few secret walls (you need to use the mappa spell to reveal them and mappa can fail on fool moon).
There are also vast swathes of maps with empty corridors or large rooms with nothing in them. Encounters strangely are based on going through doors. They can also happen if you just walk down a hallway but it is very infrequent. Going through doors raises your encounter potential by 90% (an estimate not a hard number), so if you want to avoid them avoid going through doors as much as you can. Escaping from fights is actually useful and works most of the time, but when it doesn’t and it’s an enemy with paralyzing, sleep-inducing or changing to stone then you’re fucked.
Overall Digital Devil Stories: Megami Tensei is a game easier to admire for what it did at the time than to actually enjoy playing. People sometimes talk about how hard the original NES grind of Final Fantasy 1 is compared to later releases of Final Fantasy. This is the same, only that the NES Final Fantasy is actually pretty easy on the grind compared to DDS:MT.
Historically it’s an important and even impressive game. It introduced the concept of monsters collecting (to my knowledge) and merging them into stronger forms, it had nice visuals for its time, and thematically its a bit different than the usual fantasy fare (though in the dungeons it feels more like the usual fantasy than later entries in the series). But it’s a game better admired from afar than actually played.
The Entropy Pump 