Epicycles in Samsara - My Strange Journey through Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga Avatar Tuner 1 & 2

Previous SMT/MegaTen Posts

I said this would be the first thing I played on my AYN Thor and it simply wasn't, but, well, look, I got there eventually, alright?

Aside: (Let's get this out of the way: DDS would be better as a single 80-hour game instead of two 45-hour games. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that The Way of Atlus is to sell you one game for the price of two if they can't simply sell you the same game again. I'm going to largely be discussing both games together as if they're a single story, which they are, and I trust you to understand the actual context. Also, spoilers for both, obviously.)

These games quietly live in the shadow of basically every other SMT game of the era. There's Nocturne, of course (and I've spoken at length about such things), but also the Raidou Kuzunoha subseries (popular enough to get a remaster which I did play but that post ended up on the cutting room floor), and that's to say nothing of Persona 3 and 4, the spinoffs that truly broke into the mainstream. When I started this endeavor, people praised Nocturne, told me to play Devil Survivor, at least talked about Raidou. Nobody ever told me directly to check out Digital Devil Saga. Which is weird, because I feel like some of the Cohost-types who follow me would have loved this shit. Maybe the mid-00s were just too early?

Digital Devil Saga is caught in this place of like, feeling strangely Normal for a MegaTen game whilst also obviously being too Weird for normies. In some ways, DDS feels more like a mainline title than Nocturne does: the latter effectively drops the "technology meets occultism" angle in favor of pure occultism. Here, we've got "digital" right in the title, even if it takes a bit of time to really kick in. In other ways it's a blatant attempt at broadening the audience. There is a regular-ass Plot with Characters who explore Themes. Demon Negotiation and Demon Fusion are gone in favor of a fixed party and a Sphere Grid / License Board style progression system. There's only the barest crumb of Law/Chaos theming and no alternate endings. On the whole I think it's to the game's benefit, but a bit of the mechanical identity of the series does feel sanded down.

In particular, the fixed 5-total-3-active party has knock-on effects due to the continued use of the Press Turn battle system. To recap Press Turn, you've got one action pip per active party member, hitting weaknesses costs half a pip, missing or hitting immunities costs two, absorption or reflection ends the turn outright, and these rules apply to both you and the enemy. An unlucky pre-emptive strike can wipe the party outright... if you're unprepared. If you're on the ball, even bosses drop like chumps.

Normally, Press Turn dovetails with the mechanical freedom offered by Demon Fusion. You're encouraged to constantly rotate and refresh your stock of demons to deal with the shifting palette of enemies. In Digital Devil Saga, despite each character having access to the full board of abilities, the small party size makes your options feel limited in the moment. Serph will always be weak to Fire, Argilla will always be weak to Wind, and Cielo will always be weak to Ailments. The game tries to remedy this by including cheap Void spells that grant the party one-turn immunity to specific elements, but that runs into the problem that few if any RPG battle systems have truly solved (even if Press Turn handles it better than most): damage mitigation is simply not as fun as attacking. You have to both take up a valuable ability slot and use a precious Press Turn pip to cast one, so it only feels worth it if you know something is about to throw a big party wipe attack. They try to patch this consequence with Combo skills, which give access to higher-tier spells at the cost of multiple turns. I found these to mostly be useful only after I'd already cracked a given area's encounters, great for speeding things up but almost never used when up against a real threat.

So, instead of the exercise of building out a rounded party with the demons you have access to at your level range, character builds can get kind of same-y as you take everyone down the paths that eventually provide passive resistance to their weakness. On a long enough time-scale (and with enough grinding) every character can learn every skill and become an invulnerable god of battle. It's still a great system overall, but you can feel it getting stretched a bit thin, especially if you're a sicko like me and wanted to max out everyone in the first game for the best possible save transfer bonus.

The opening aesthetic vibes are, if not necessarily superior, at least not inferior to Nocturne's Vortex World. We open on the Junkyard: a bombed-out landscape drenched in constant rain. Various factions, including the player party's conveniently elemental-coded Embryon Tribe, fight a never-ending battle for supremacy at the behest of the ruling Karma Temple with the promise that the final winner will ascend to Nirvana. Guns are back after being MIA in Nocturne, allowing you to once again shoot God in the head with a 9mm should you desire. The current Tribes hole up in hideouts named after the seven chakras that vary from ancient ravine tech-temples to fortresses filled with giant stone heads. The local McGuffin Girl-in-a-Box, Sera, is referred to as a "Cyber Shaman". How can you not be into the Cyber Shaman?

The deadlock is broken by a Biblically Accurate Angel (who is most definitely not just a person named Angel) hijacking the Karma Temple and granting the power of "Atma," aka the ability to transform into demons from the traditional MegaTen catalogue... at the cost of an insatiable hunger that can only be curbed by consuming human flesh. Parallels with modern society are clear, to the point where even random NPCs comment on it to make sure you Get The Idea. Bit characters start remembering how in previous lives they were in Tribes called "School" or "Business" or "Government," environments that perhaps lacked the direct bodily danger of the Junkyard but were no less oppressive, no less fixated on the fetishistic consumption of other humans for self-benefit.

The Atma also awakens emotions in the residents of the Junkyard in a way not unlike a human player suddenly taking control of a virtual avatar or a pilot getting into a mech, each suddenly imbued with an inhabiting spirit. This newfound awareness allows the characters to start considering questions such as, "Why exactly are we fighting an endless battlefield in a rainy, bombed-out landscape again? Isn't this kind of fucked up?" and, "Why do I have all these strange memories of somewhere that isn't the Junkyard?"

Aside: (If you'll forgive me pulling a reverse Boss Baby here, I found this starting plot setup weirdly similar to Xenoblade Chronicles 3; the two are, at minimum, playing in some similar spaces. Alternatively, it's basically Go Nagai's Devilman. You should read Devilman so you can understand how everything really is just Devilman all the way down.)

Pretty much the entirety of the first game's narrative is just setting more and more of these types of questions out on the table as you systematically take out the other Tribes. Want any of them answered? Too bad, buy the sequel! In fairness, pretty much all of them are answered, but that means something like 80% of the total plot is crammed into the back half. There's not much room to actually explore any given revelation before we start moving to the next, which is a pity, because there's some actual stuff to chew on here that's only gotten more relevant since 2005.

(Last call for spoilers. Based on my extremely informal polling with very small sample sizes, most people who have played Digital Devil Saga have only played the first one. I'm about to spoil major plot twists of the second game.)

It's pretty obvious after some proper playtime that the Junkyard is some kind of virtual space and the residents therein some kind of AI beings. Based on other conversations, everyone there (except Sera and Angel, who are clearly plugging in somehow) is also dead in the "real world," for a certain value of what "dead" even means in this context. The first game ends with the Junkyard being deleted whilst the Embryon Tribe manages to escape into the Real World, somehow manifesting flesh-and-blood bodies.

I'm glad I watched Ghost in the Shell before I played this, because from the proper angle this is some proper Mid-00s Cyberpunk. "Killer Guerilla Training AI escapes the simulation and possesses a body while the military tries to cover it up" could easily be a random episode of Stand Alone Complex that ends with Section 9 looking at the camera and saying, "If he did have a Ghost, it would have been real to him," not unlike how new party member Roland says to the Embryon, "Y'know, you don't seem artificial." But the characters' memories unrelated to the Junkyard remain an open question; Varin, a boss from the first game, fully recalls his identity as Colonel Terrence Beck and also remembers his death (well, his death in the real world, not his boss fight death, since, I mean, look you get it okay).

Here's how I understand the plot: Humanity discovered that the fabric of existence boiled down to just "data" - perception itself - flowing outwards from God (the sun) and returning to it when fully broken down. Scientists thus began cultivating Cyber Shamans with the power to directly commune with God, of which Sera is the latest. Her ability to manipulate data was co-opted by the government to create a military AI training simulation populated with endless random NPCs: the Junkyard. At the start of the first game, the Atma Virus introduces outside data to the simulation: demonic powers on purpose, and the memories of dead people accidentally.

I say it's unintentional because Angel seemed surprised by Beck's presence and was definitely surprised by Serph and Gale's. There's no reason the Karma Society would have put simulacra of any of them (or Lupa, for that matter) into the Junkyard, and Angel's goal in introducing the Atma Virus seemed to just be flushing out Sera. In my opinion, the characters' acquisition of plot-pertinent memories makes more sense as some kind of divine intervention (not actually out of the question all things considered), if not just outright Doylist narrative convenience.

Regardless, we're already working in some spaces here slightly different from the usual Law vs Chaos stuff, closer to something like Persona 2's reality-changing rumors. In standard SMT, it's just taken for granted that gods and demons simply exist and the Devil Summoning Program is what allows them to manifest. DDS's Atma Virus operates differently: it dissolves the distinction between dream and reality, mind and matter, putting data comprising myth/folklore on the same level as data comprising the physical world. This is particularly clear with optional bosses like the archangels, who attack you not out of hunger but because their identity has been completely overwritten by that of their demon.

A classic sci-fi question arises: when memories and perception are malleable, when you might just be in a simulation, what defines reality? If Serph were to suddenly gain all of the memories of his previous life, is he still his "original" conception of himself? Is this Serph now a continuation of Previous Serph? If you wrote all of Previous Serph's memories into a blank slate, is that being now also Serph, if consciousness was maintained from his point of view? Add the game's philosophical context and stuff gets a bit more complicated: if Example Serph gained awareness of samsara and reincarnation, is he still Serph? A version of Serph? Another person altogether? Which is more real?

DDS2's big twist is that yes, there were "real" versions of Serph, Heat, Argilla, and Cielo, but the Embryon are not them, not even in the way that Gale or Varin "are" David and Beck. They're constructs created by Sera based on people she knew. Their Atma-bestowed memories are from Sera's digital happy place of beaches, amusement parks, and blue skies she created to avoid her traumatic life being experimented on as a Cyber Shaman; this simulation was the basis of the Junkyard. They inherently want to protect her because she created them wholecloth to be her buddies. The Original Serph was a reprehensible scumbag but acted nice to Sera, so Simulation Serph is doting and heroic in accordance with her childish perception; the simulated versions of the rest are also completely different from their "Real" versions. Sera was plugged directly into God when she discovered Original Serph's deception, and her despair caused the sun to become black and start turning people to stone.

Put another way, Sera found out the guy who portrayed her favorite video game character and gave her hugs at the convention one time was actually an abuser, then felt so betrayed that God chose to destroy humanity.

I cannot help but be reminded of the internet.

You occasionally see the assertion that social media or the internet writ large isn't real life, and well, it's not, but it's not really fake, either. I assume that the people I talk to are real people behind the Bluesky or Discord avatars, even though it's something I have no guarantees of, even though the additional translation layer of cyberspace necessitates a certain amount of abstraction. I trust that the constructed representation of a human being is in fact a human being. It's when this trust is exploited or distorted that problems arise.

Sera's perception of Serph was deeply colored by what was effectively her personal game of The Sims. It's not quite a full-on parasocial relationship because they interacted regularly, but she still invented a version of him in her head and got hurt by the disconnect with reality. I've been burned a few times myself by finding out someone I knew online who I thought was my friend turned out to be an asshole. To most people reading this, the simulation of me you've built in your head is the only version you know. Some of you have interacted with me more directly, and thus have more data with which to build your simulation, and some of you have met me in person (we should hang out more), which is also a different version of me. For all any of you know, I might secretly be a terrible person. Maybe you think I'm ignoring you on purpose instead of having just forgotten whatever it is I was supposed to do.

Sometimes I wonder, if someone else somehow took control of all my online accounts, how long would it take for people to realize the deception? I've met many of my internet friends in reality, but not necessarily often enough for my physical absence to be proof something's amiss. Without some outside means of verification (and assuming they could somehow mimic my voice), I think it could probably continue indefinitely. There would be no reason for people to not simply take "me" at my word. This is not to speak ill of my friends or anyone else; it's just a function of human empathy.

Despite its capacity for harm (look, we've all doomscrolled before and RTed something heinous), I must continue to tell myself that human empathy is a beautiful thing. It allows us to support each other even if we have no blood ties. The power of empathy allows us to - as Steven Barnes put it - pass down information in the form of emotion. This is part of what makes the internet, social media, video games, fiction itself so mesmerizing: the emotions evoked feel genuine, even if all we're doing is interacting with constructed representations. Even if I know I'm just playing a video game, a collection of ideas passed through so many layers of translation it can only superficially resemble the world, it still affects me.

The Atma Virus literalizes this concept, causing the representations to spill into reality, transforming humans into the demons and gods we invented to process our own emotions. The digital Embryon can physically incarnate, no longer limited to being mere fantasy. So, again, the question: if we're not sure where the self begins, if it's all just "data," what makes something real?

Inside the terminal connected to God, Junkyard Serph meets Original Serph ("Real Varna") and Sim Serph ("Fake Varna") and must face them in a boss battle. He is able to confront that while he was both, he is neither. The only Varna that really matters is the one right here, right now. Memories can inform, but "data" is meaningless without a will to interpret it. What defines his actions is what stats he puts the level up points into, what skills he learns on the Mantra Board, the actions he takes and the intent behind them.

Your mental simulation of me, my mental simulation of you, fictional characters, the games and movies and fanfics and arguments and shitposts and drunken ramblings, they're all real because they all exist in some form, all cause ripples in the fabric of reality. The representations we build inform our actions, or else we wouldn't build them. But that doesn't make "real" the same as "important" or "true," and that's the rub, isn't it? It's so easy to get wrapped up in frivolities or falsehoods, and escaping one proverbial simulation might just lead to more problems.

When Sera and Serph fuse into the hilariously overpowered intersex superbeing Seraph for the final dungeon, achieving true enlightenment (I'm telling ya, Cohost would have loved this shit), their entreatment to God on behalf of humanity is, "I know people make mistakes, and they probably always will. But, they do their best!"

I am making mistakes. I am doing my best.

Sometimes I play video games or doomscroll or jack off or whatever to escape it all. Maybe this just sends me backwards, pulls me deeper into suffering. But I want to believe that even the mundane or stupid things I do have meaning, that there's ultimately forward momentum towards something, even if I don't know what that is yet. I want to believe that there are epicycles in samsara.

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