YMMV / Digital Devil Saga

• Accidental Innuendo: Angel's Pre-Asskicking One-Liner can easily be read in all the wrong ways. Even more so when you find out she's a fully functional Hermaphrodite.
  Angel: At last, we shall finally see the maturation of the seed I have SOWN in you!
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Varin Omega somehow manages to be this and the Climax Boss. While his first form is somewhat difficult, those who fought Ongyo-ki in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne will be familiar with how it works, and the only thing that makes his second form a challenge is Hunger Wave. Other than that, it's a rather simple fight.
  • The Final Boss of the first game, Harihara, has 3 forms, spread out over 2 battles. None of them are particularly menacing, though the final form is dragged out far longer than necessary due to its incredibly long attack animations.
  • After the tough fight with Vritra, you would expect Serph Sheffield (or rather Real Varna and Fake Varna) to put up more of a fight due to his role as the overarching villain of the Digital Devil Saga duology. However, he's a joke. True Heat's skillset is enough to get you of a bind and both Varnas have very simplistic movesets that barely put up a fight. Then again, in a display of irony, the character who caused the plot of both games is a Breather Boss who believes himself to be a god so it may've been intentional.
  • The Final Boss of the second game, Brahman, is very impressive looking and has five forms. All of these forms go down very easily, and while they do get harder, it's easy to counter most of his attacks. You don't even have to engage with his gimmick, because unlike Harihara he's not at all resistant to Almighty attacks, making him even easier than the first game's final boss. This is likely to balance out the sheer pain provided by the preceding boss, Meganada.
• Awesome Music: Shoji Meguro's score for the duology is typically considered some of his best and most memorable work. Muladhara, Manipura, Sahasrara, Hunting,Battle For Survival and Divine Identity are just a few examples.
  • The "Normal Battle" theme is awesome in its own game, but it's even better here. That's right, you're nothing but a forgettable random encounter to the Demi-Fiend.
• Broken Base: The party's journey to the Sun at the last part of the second game is either the most iconic segment of the duology due to previously-departed party members coming Back for the Finale to fight Brahman, the game's equivalent to God (also they manage to reach the Sun despite the fact that they had just died), or where character development and impactful plot movement came to a screeching halt in favor of themes too Anvilicious for detractors. Or that the party's motley of deaths over the course of the second game were cheapened out by their re-joinings as soon as you reach the Sun.
• Character Perception Evolution: From a pure gameplay standpoint, Cielo. In the early days of the fandom he was considered a Low-Tier Letdown due to his weakness to ailments in a franchise notorious for them being very nasty. As time went on, fans realized that lacking an elemental weakness is a big deal, and ailment-nulling passives are available far earlier than elemental-nulling ones. Combined with his high starting level, and availability in the sequel, Cielo is one of the most frequently-used party members by hardcore fans across both games.
• Complete Monster:
  • Serph Sheffield, when placed in charge of the Karma Society's God Project, began using everyone and anything around him in his quest to attain the power of God for himself. Serph used Sera's growing love for him to push her Psychic Powers into further maturation, only to express disgust at Sera's creation of a virtual paradise consisting of AIs she uses to escape the pain of his experiments. When Colonel Beck proposed to change Sera's paradise into a training simulation for creating stronger AIs, Serph overrides Heat O'Brien's warning against destroying Sera's mental condition and tells Beck to proceed. After a desperate Heat pulls a gun and demands the project to stop, Serph tells Heat that a human's mind is no different than a machine, and that his subjects, including Sera, were expendable and could be replaced, before manipulating Argilla into killing Heat. After being turned into a demon by a heartbroken Sera, sending a massive data surge into the now black Sun, Serph goes on a killing spree starting with Beck and Argilla before being killed offscreen. Refusing to accept that he is dead, Serph reappears at the EGG facility as Solar Data and tries to kill the AI Serph and Heat while proclaiming to have the power of God. A cruel and manipulative young man, his actions are largely responsible for the disasters plaguing the series.
  • In the war-torn Junkyard, the traitorous Bat stands out as one of the most despicable inhabitants. Serving as a recurring antagonist, Bat starts off as the right-hand man of Jinana, leader of the Maribel. After suffering defeat by the main characters to secure an alliance with Jinana, Bat became a traitorous schemer. Bat betrayed The Maribel and Embryon alliance by informing Mick of their incoming invasions and arranged the ambush against Serph's team and the annihilation of Jinana's forces, resulting in the death of most of Jinana's group and Jinana going berserk and having to be put down. Bat then diverts Serph's group so that Mick's forces can invade the Embryon main base to kill its members and kidnap Sera after learning of her powers. When Serph's group came to rescue Sera, Bat tried to force Heat to kill Serph by taking Sera hostage. When this failed, Bat left Mick for dead in the hands of Serph's group and defected to the Brutes, leading the invasion to get Sera from the Embryon, not realizing it was a trap to finish him off. Ambushed by Argilla, Bat managed to overpower her and bragged that he ate Jinana's body and that she was no different from him, before trying to eat her. Even after his death, Bat still left a dark scar on Argilla, making her believe she is a monster just like Bat.
• Cult Classic: Even within the Shin Megami Tensei fandom Digital Devil Saga is somewhat obscure. However, when it is discussed, it is often praised to be on the level of other fan favorite games such as Nocturne or Persona 3.
• Damsel Scrappy: Sera serves as this in the first game, with her only useful contribution being her song which cancels out the effects of Hunger Wave. Averted in the sequel where she gains Atma powers.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Laksmi from the first game is geared to constantly attempt to put you to sleep with Dormina and then kill anyone sleeping with Calm Death (Nocturne players may know this spell under the name of Eternal Rest). The problems come when they appear in groups of three, where if you are not immune to Nerve, it is likely that a party member (or more!) will be killed before you even get a turn. Also, they have Rage in order to give them as many turns as they feel like (generally to launch yet another Dormina + Calm Death attempt).
  • Pairs of Samael have an irritating chance to appear as reinforcements in Anahata's Samsara Tunnels. They get two turns each, which is horrible news in itself (especially due to always appearing in pairs). All their attacks are That One Attack alone: Bloodbath (a really strong randomly-targeting physical attack), Stone Gaze (where an unlucky victim is Taken for Granite and will definitely be killed immediately after if the enemies get another turn), Vanity (random status ailments), and Marevert, which attempts to revert up to all three party members to human form (which mutes their demon form spells!). To make matters worse, their weaknesses (mute and poison) do little to no damage to them, unlike most weaknesses in the game.
• Epileptic Trees: Satan in the second game states that a "heretic is trying to destroy the world." Fans theorize that he's referring to either Aleph from Shin Megami Tensei II or the Demi-Fiend from Nocturne.
  • The Four Archangels appearing in the second game really don't help any. Expecially since Raphael -encountered in a factory- says "This is not the factory I knew..." Guess what one of the areas was in Shin Megami Tensei II.
  • Before fighting Seth in the second game, he says that "you are not the one who is to judge." He's most likely referring to Zayin, who Seth fused with to become Satan.
  • Brahman has something akin to the Amala Drums on the heads of his various forms. Let that sink in for a minute. Though it is confirmed inseries he is not connected to God/Great Will by Schrodinger himself.
  • Some theorize that the Demi-fiend's dying message is a response to the game over screen of Nocturne.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Margot Cuvier's outfit wouldn't look out of place in Lady Gaga's wardrobe.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Serph Sheffield and Heat O'Brien are often paired together by fans despite O'Brien being distrustful of Sheffield and being disgusted at his treatment of Sera and thoughts on the God Project in general.
• Friendly Fandoms: This is the other Shin Megami Tensei spinoff you'll often see Persona fans playing, due to it being more of a traditional story and character-driven JRPG lacking the usual Order vs. Chaos elements, while still retaining the classic SMT Press Turn system and difficulty. It's commonly suggested as a Gateway Series for Persona fans looking to get into other SMT games. Persona is the franchises' More Popular Spin-Off while Digital Devil Saga is considered excellent yet under-appreciated, so many Persona fans use their sub-series' influence to help promote DDS.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Putting all of Serph's stat points into a single stat can lead to some hilarious results, especially Magic. He'll be a Glass Cannon, but his spell damage output will quickly become much higher than enemies and bosses of his level are designed to handle, enabling him to blast through them in a few turns. The Magic stat also raises MP, giving Serph way more than he ever needs and allowing him to top up the party's health with basic Dia after every battle at next to no cost, meaning you won't need to rely on Heal Terminals or the Level-Up Fill-Up for most of the game.
  • Cocytus in the first game. True, it's obtained from a Superboss, but it's one that can be defeated fairly early on. It hits all enemies multiple times for decently-high Ice damage and has a very high chance of Freeze. And frozen enemies always get criticaled by physical attacks. The freezing can even affect some enemies that are immune to ailments, too. Combine this with a Magic-optimised Serph and Mind Charge...
  • Zig-Zagged with Debilitate. It's practically required for any of the superbosses (and they'll use it on you as well), but if you know the Mantra grid you can go for it pretty early on, and it makes a lot of storyline bosses a complete joke. Especially since bosses don't start using Dekunda until the endgame.
  • Null Attack from the first game. It nulls everything except Almighty attacks (just like Masakados), leaving anyone not named the Demi-Fiend, including the Final Boss, flailing in the wind. In the second game, the Master Ring provides the same effect. Both cases require an enormous amount of grinding (and in the second game, catching Permanently Missable Content) to acquire, however.
• Goddamned Boss: Varin Omega isn't that hard, but both his forms have annoying luck-based gimmicks. For his first he's invisible, so you need to target one of 6 empty spots and hope you hit him. Sera gives you hints on where he is, but she can only narrow it down to two spots at most, meaning you still have to go through at least a coin flip before you can damage him. Thought you could cheese it by using spread moves? Nope, they automatically miss. This effectively renders this form immune to debuffs too, as all of them are spread moves in this game. His second form has Hunger Wave, detailed under That One Attack below.
  • Bat's third and final boss fight, largely due to Zotzilaha Bane, which is detailed below. Coupled with his other moves, and his very long casting animations, you have a very long and tough fight ahead of you.
• Ho Yay:
  • Pretty blatant in the case of Argilla and Jinana, who both take a liking to each other in spite of the Junkyard's emotionless conditioning. Heat even Lampshades it after the group is forced to kill Jinana, complaining that she's upset about her "girlfriend" getting killed.
    • It says something when the otherwise stoic character up to this point immediately breaks the Tribe's orders about Sera's identity, and immediately begs for Jinana to come with them. Talking to Argilla in the field shows she still thinks about Jinana often, especially during the first game as a source of strength. In the novels, where her death happens much later, the two form quite the close pair in the Embryon.
    • Given another lampshade in the sequel, when one of Jack's quizzes asks how the party distracted Bat, one of the answers is to claim Argilla was busy kissing her.
  • Like Argilla and Jinana, Gale clearly cares for Lupa. It says something when the memory of his former lover can't unlock his emotions, but Lupa's death does.
• It Was His Sled: The Optional Boss fight with the Demi-Fiend in the first game is so infamous that few fans call it a spoiler anymore.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Averted. When you first see Roland and Argilla's Heroic Sacrifices in the second game you'll almost certainly dismiss them as just hiding because the game still has a long way to go and, given the way you're encouraged to optimise your characters for specific roles, killing 2 of them off for real would SERIOUSLY handicap your party's effectiveness over the long term. By the time Gale and then Cielo have been far more conclusively killed off on screen it finally sinks in that, no, Anyone Can Die- as you immediately see when Serph and Sera, the last 2 characters left, die after them and the final stage of the game effectively takes place in the afterlife.
• Memetic Badass: The Demi-Fiend has acquired this sort of status due to him serving as the first game's ever-notorious Ultimate Boss, enough so that he was allowed to reprise the role in Shin Megami Tensei V. His successor Satan also has this status, but to a lesser extent that the Demi-Fiend.
• Memetic Molester: Khumbanda in the second game due his pelvic thrusting animation, him being a creepy prison warden and one of his attacks binding the player to prevent them attacking.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I do not comprehend." Gale's Catchphrase, often used humorously to ridiculous and/or incomprehensible events.
  • Nue sounding like a seagull made it a fan-favorite among speedrunners.
• Moe: Sera is noticeably more youthful and innocent than anyone else in the Junkyard despite being a fully-grown adult due to her suffering from Rapid Aging. She's actually still seven years old. In the second game, her Atma transforms her into a pink Cute Monster Girl covered in bone plating that makes it look like she's wearing a skirt, and is shorter than the rest of the Embryon's demon forms.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The sound of the karma meter going up after battles, especially after getting a ton of Atma Points.
  • The Demi-fiend's death scream in the first game (which, given Nocturne, is the only time it's a good sound) and all the sounds Satan makes while dying in the second game, including his scream and the solar data leaking out before he explodes.
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• Narm: Cielo's Jamaican accent. It was intended to emphasize the friendly, outgoing disposition of the character but most people just found it a little too ridiculous.
• Older Than They Think: Due to this duology trading demon negotiations for demon transformation and customization, this is the first game in the meta-series to allow the player to freely select skills for each character, whereas the norm for games at this point (and for a few games after, including the original version of Persona 4 and every version of Persona 3) was skills being randomly selected in the fusion preview screen; for the player to get the desired set of skills they wanted usually entailed constant re-rolling. Both games actually upped customization by allowing for the storage of unequipped skills at Karma Points, which later games mostly lack.
• One True Threesome: Heat/Serph/Sera is pretty popular with fans, mostly for the obvious reasons of resolving any sort of shipping conflict and the canonical one-sided rivalry between Heat and Serph for Sera's affections. This gets taken to its logical extreme when Serph and Sera fuse into Seraph at the end of the second game, and as a result Heat/Seraph tends to be popular amongst fans of the ship as well.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Sera and Cielo get this in the second game. The former due to gaining an Atma form of her own (and carrying Serph's skills over after he's temporarily absorbed by Heat in the EGG Facility). Cielo in the first game was a gimmicky character weak to status effects, though his weaknesses were reduced in the second game and he's often used as a replacement for Argilla for healing due to her death at Meganada's hands midway through the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Berserk Mode in 2, which happens during higher numbered Solar Noise phases. You can't use magic or items and everyone becomes a Glass Cannon. The only thing you can do is use physical attacks (or Hunt skills) or wait a turn, resulting in Critical Or Death battles. Fleeing is also an option but Karma points get more than doubled if you win.
  • Thank god fleeing isn't just an option, but has a 100% guaranteed success rate in Berserk Mode. Also, the developers applied Developer's Foresight to the idea of only being allowed to use physical attacks, so your characters ignore enemies' physical resistances and immunities, allowing them to slaughter enemies they wouldn't even be able to TOUCH with physical attacks normally.
  • In both games, there is a random chance that a character will suffer from the Ache status after devouring a demon, and won't gain any AP points if the status is active. This can be especially annoying if you get the status at the very end of a battle. The skill Iron Stomach mitigates this, but takes up one of your characters' limited move slots.
• Signature Scene: Despite being a sidequest that has nothing to do with the main story and requires slogging through a large part of a New Game Plus to get to,Demi-Fiend's notoriously difficult boss battle in the first game is one of the most well-known parts of the series due to its sheer unrelenting difficulty compared to the rest of the game.
• Surprise Difficulty: These games are among the easier games in the wider franchise due having constant party members, no Mons and complex fusion mechanics, and the ability to shuffle between learned skills whenever, among other reasons. If you go out of your way to fight the optional bosses, the difficulty spikes; if you dare to take on the Demi-fiend in the first game or Satan in the second, prepare to be slaughtered unless you grind for hours to get the ideal stats and skills; only then will you have a slim chance at beating either of them.
• Tear Jerker: As mentioned in Heroic Sacrifice, there will be lots of tears in this game.
  • In a more realistic example, Fred waving goodbye to the Embryon as they leave on their literally suicidal mission.
• That One Attack:
  • As mentioned above, Varin Omega's Hunger Wave is the only reason his second form isn't a total joke in the first game. It's also not a particularly threatening attack, just very, very annoying. It inflicts Hunger status on a random number of party members. Hungry characters will spend their turn either doing nothing or attacking an ally. (And if you just Power Charged or used Tarukaja...) The only cure for Hunger status is Sera's song, and she can only sing for one ally per turn. And even then, who she sings for is random. So you can be critically low on health and Sera decides not to cure your healer. And if all three allies get hit with Hunger, you're not doing anything productive for a while. Harihara also uses it in the second phase of the battle against her.
  • Bat's Zotzilaha Bane. Similar to Bael's Bane from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, it transforms one of your party members into a lesser creature and cripples their stats. Unlike Bael's Bane, however, there is no way to block or avoid Zotzilaha Bane. This can lead to the boss fight becoming very long and arduous.
  • Demi-Fiend in the first game has Gaea Rage, which just kills your entire party on the spot with four-digit damage. At the least. Since it's an Almighty damage-numbers attack, it can't be resisted against. There are a few ways to trigger it, the most common being to throw up any immunities other than Null Sleep or Null Critical in mid-battle or to go into battle with any immunities on, in which case he'll end the battle with Gaea Rage before it even starts.
  • Got Satan in the second game to extremely low HP? He uses Diarahan. Gate of Hell in both games counts as well since it hits everyone and has a chance to turn you to stone.
• That One Boss: Cerberus in the first game has three heads, which increases the chances of attacks they can throw at you. If all three of them are active, your party will be the receiving end of Pyriphlegethon, a powerful Fire attack that will severely burn your party members.
  • Vasuki is where the game makes it clear that the gloves come off. It uses both Maziodyne, an electric spell that can shock your characters, and a unique Ice spell called Hima Alaya that has a good chance to freeze your characters and, barring crazy preparation, you can only guard against one element and Vasuki is smart enough to attack with whatever isn't blocked. It can also toss in two unblockable Megidolas using the two actions that it gets per turn. Oh yeah, and it's encountered earlier than Ananta. Your only saving grace is that Vasuki is weak to fire, but it has a lot of health and has ailment attacks ready if you brought Cielo along.
  • Let's not forget Ananta. It gets 7 actions per turn, hits you with Dekaja, boosts itself through the roof with Tarukaja and Power Charge, and is smart enough to attack the same person constantly rather than spreading out the damage. Not to mention that it likes starting every turn by casting Sonic Wave, Stun Wave, and Dream Haze in succession. And if you even try to use a Void Physical ability, it rips of Mudo and Mudoon for every attack. No elemental weakness either. Its only weakness is that it lacks Almighty attacks; slap either Null Ailment or Null Attack on your characters and it cannot damage them at all. Magic Repel works fine too.
  • The second game has a few:
  • Abaddon is one of the harder fights in the game and will likely catch a player off guard during a Normal Mode playthrough. Abaddon's claim to fame is that he can fill the roles of all three Tribhvana members by switching between physical, magical and support skills with Bellow. He can also temporarily remove your party members with Gate to Abyss and several turns later free them with only 1 HP with Regurgitate. In other words, you're up against an opponent whose strengths and weaknesses change every so often, can hit multiple weaknesses and reduce your ability to fight back by removing party members and leaving them weaker while you barely have the means to heal reliably and hit hard with your own abilities.
  • As expected from a fusion of Heat and Serph, Vritra is a challenger of it's own. For starters, it no longer has it's former weakness to ice and will insult you if you make that mistake. Your party options are limited due to Argilla being dead and Serph out of commission, meaning that you'll likely have Cielo as your healer which makes him a prime target for Vritra's Silent Howl and Sonic Wave, both of which inflict Mute and Panic respectively. That's when he's not using various debuff spells to weaken your offensive or putting the deep freeze on you with either Gelid Torrent or Inferno Roar, the latter of which is Almighty type.
  • Meganada, who serves as the penultimate boss. If you beat Meganada, even just barely, the final boss will be cake. For starters, Meganada can switch between magical and physical modes, requiring you to switch up your attacks every so often. It'll use Black Bhakti, ensuring that it will bring the pain with either Viraj Blade or Meru Thunder. It's Magical Mode is where most of your troubles will come from. It can use all -dyne spells to exploit any potential weaknesses you may have, status effects to waste your time or inflict a One-Hit Kill and can bolster it's physical or magical power with Makakaja or Tarukaja when it isn't actively crippling your party with Debilitate or using Rage to add more Press Turns to prolong the pain train you'll be forced to endure.
• That One Level:
  • The first floor of Co-ordinate 136, less for difficulty and more for it being just plain frustrating. You have to navigate a maze of portraits to find the portrait of the "good prince", but walking in front of a portrait of the "evil prince" (read: every portrait that isn't the good prince) drops you in a pitfall to the dungeon, forcing you to slowly make your way back to the beginning. The problem is that each room has three exits, which are one-way, and often two out of three exits will drop you right in front of an "evil prince" portrait with no way to avoid it. Making it even more tedious: each individual "evil prince" drops you into a different room of the dungeon, rooms that can only be accessed by intentionally falling... and some of these rooms have treasure chests in them. Yes, you have to fall for every trap, slogging your way back each time, if you're a completionist. Oh, and the Encounter Repellant isn't available at this point unless you've been selling a whole bunch of cells to the Vendors, and Co-ordinate 136 doesn't have a Vendor. The good news is the puzzles on every other floor aren't anywhere near as bad, and are actually quite well-designed and fun.
  • The Karma Temple. Not only does pretty much every part of it look the same, but it goes on and on and on... Additionally it houses some of the hardest random encounters in the entire game, some of which such as say Catoblepas can wipe you out in one turn if they get the advantage. Once again, there's no Vendor in this place, and this means you have to climb back up if you choose to leave to sell off any cells. Worse still, if you reach the very top and you decide to go fight any of the superbosses, you will have to backtrack all the way from the last Terminal through a maze-like area with invisible walls that require memorization to get through.
  • The Internment Facility in the second game is not really hard when it comes to the enemies, but rather with the dungeon's main gimmick, the Jailer Kumbhanda. He turns the dungeon into an intense chase scene as you desperately try to locate the information and items needed to trick him, progressively getting harder as the dungeon goes on. What makes this even trickier is that Talking Is a Free Action is completely averted, and he'll charge at you even if you're trying to listen to hints or obtain the items needed.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Being human in combat. Outside rather specific strategies (i.e for grinding Atma points by killing Omoikanes or fighting Seth in the second game), there's never any real reason to become human. You can't use any of your abilities and guns are generally underwhelming outside of specific enemies that are weak to them. The game even generally knows this as you start combat in demon form by default, you need a specific passive ability equipped to start battle in human form. It feels like there could have been a lot more done with swapping between human and demon forms.
• Ugly Cute: Nidhoggr is definitely ugly, but when you fight a horde of tiny ones as a miniboss in the Brutes' Base, combined with the high-pitched squeaking noises they make when casting spells or calling for reinforcements, they're strangely adorable. Until one of them starts devouring the others to get bigger, that is.
• Woolseyism: Mostly kept to name changes: the Assignments became the Vanguards, the Merrybell became the Maribel, "Mick The Nick" became "Mick The Slug", and so forth. Strangely enough, they didn't change the names during cutscenes: Gale's map of the Junkyard displays all the original names of the Tribes and Tribe leaders.
  • They named one of the Mantra (skill-teaching equipment) "Wikipedia" as a joke.