Digital Devil Pod: Shin Megami Letsplei

We finally put a pin in this whole "Digital Devil Story" thing for the time being. What is protoplasm? What does it really mean for something to be "Lynchian"? How many different Lunchables have there been?  Monica Coleslaw and Ali Jaafar join us to answer these questions and more as we wax poetic about straight to VHS movies, religious children's media, and hot dogs.   The episode had to be recovered from the cloud after a computer crash in a lined-up but fairly un-mixed state so it might get a little cacophonous at times, apologies.

We wanted to really peal back the layers of the Original Video Animation accompaniment to the first round of DDS media, but unfortunately, there aren't many, and what's up in there mostly stinks.  So, in lieu of re-treading the same critiques we had of the books (listen to that episode if you haven't), we try to clue you in to some stuff we think is more deserving of your precious time.   Episode proper starts around 10:35.   I'm going to run back to the couch for some more SMTV now.

No Nike, you know we do it.  We beat the game in this episode I mean.  We also try to make sense of an American Sniper + Punisher Skull window decal.  We also learn some crucial gameplay facts quite literally on Lucifer's doorstep.  Also, we touch on the possibility of a long running midwestern weekly radio variety show dealing permanent psychic damage to the mind of a child (that child being Brent).  Also, Justin reveals his true strategic genius when the entire party finds themselves in a bind.  Actually we all get paralyzed, bind wears off relatively quickly.   There will be more content between the end of this season and the beginning of Kyuuyaku Pt II.  Inquire within for more details.

It's the penultimate episode, and after we take care of this here snake monster, we're going on the only real treasure hunt the game has to offer us.  We (mostly Brent) also deal with a brief bout of Stockholm Syndrome as we begin to feel the train pulling into the station, but that particular shine wears off quickly.  Very quickly.  Remember phone numbers being shoved haphazardly into popular songs?  Remember rentals?  We're getting very close now.  Wait, was that a hole in the floor?

Truly, we're brought to the brink on Satan's doorstep and beset by catastrophe (including a real life plague of wasps).  Just lots of pain, smiling through it all.  Wait a tick, who's this tiny comrade stuck in a bottle out here in the barren waste of the Sea of Flames?  What's your family's weird quirk that you probably don't even know is a quirk?

The shift from Mazurka to The Rotting Sea of Flames is one of the truer representations of the old turn of phrase "out of the frying pan, into the fryer" we've ever run across.  The game remains much the same, only now everything is protracted needlessly by resource drain, so we've clipped out the hours of lamenting our new situation and left you with some final thoughts on the book, a piece of Brent's truly bizarre fan-theory headcannon of Nickelodeon's live action sitcoms, and a few sojourns into some Extremely 90s videogame music marketing collabs.   Also, a named character from the broader SMT universe finally makes an appearance in-game. Boy howdy. We made it.

After weeks upon weeks of tile sweeping for items, all the while enduring increasingly caustic barbs from the denizens of the dungeons (in addition to the dungeons themselves), we finally loop back around to clear out some big baddies.  It's a double header this week as we set out to take on Loki and Hecate before taking our first real steps into the fiery basement of Mazurka that serves as the foyer to the Sea of Flames.  Oh, did you know you can learn Japanese simply by watching un-sub'd anime?  Also, don't submarines just totally freak you out?

We discover that Mazurka is, in fact, THREE separate dungeons stacked in a trench coat masquerading as one, and every tile we clear brings us one step closer to a confrontation with the *ahem* naked thief, Gaia.  Gaia does one of the worst things any video game character has ever done to us.  The sheer scope of the map situation forces us to break out the pen and paper once again, as our musical chatter devolves into questioning the very nature of sound itself.  Sometimes metalcore/post-hardcore bands write eerily similar songs so we take a moment to unpack a bit of that as well.

The never ending search for Latos's Statue continues across two more days of play, and honestly, we've forgotten why we needed it in the first place.  As the clearing of tiles rolls ever onward, we revisit childhood memories of christian youth group sports retreats, share peanut butter & jelly sandwich tips, and bring up Guyver again.  Jovana (@dirt.petal) also pops in for a spell to answer for her audio crimes and chat about the pros and cons of various methods of indigo dyeing textiles!  We get like, really close to getting out of Mazurka too.  We don't quite get there though.

Our desperation to escape Mazurka reaches a fever pitch.  We continue fleshing out floors of the map, each one a more twiztid shape than the last, searching for Latos's Statue, finding only pain.  Not to be hyperbolic, but this is where the game begins to do the absolute most disrespectful things a video game has ever done to us personally.  Yet still, we persevere, finding time along the way to discuss the dark truth behind what happened to Just Mayo, as well as the finer points of the marketing rollout for the Travis Scott X McDonald's collab.

The year may be fresh, but the hell never ended. It's been a ride, and the ride finally caught up to us here at DDP and has slowed our ongoing series detailing the "first" game in the Megaten franchise, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. Justin pops by to give you an update and assure you that the show will go on, all to the blissful music stylings of Brent and Chat Pile. Take care!

Surprise, it's the book episode!  The back half of Kyuuyaku really suffers from the lack (see: a supermassive black hole) of narrative so we dive head-first into the kiddie pool that is the Digital Devil Story light novels to try to make sense of all of it, from ritual magick and Whitesnake, to cybernetic astral tentacle attacks, and god-fights in stinky tombs.  Brent will also do their best to put forth a working theory as to why this game is so gosh darned mean to us, providing they can piece their brain back together after going down the rabbit hole of decades of worth of translated Famitsu articles and interviews with early Atlus staff.

The dungeon of Mazurka is huge, and it's brutal, and it's empty.  This week, instead of dwelling on the most frustrating aspects of an incredibly frustrating (and old) game, we're cutting all that out and leaving you with a lot of horsehockey about facebook marketplace lewd drawings, space fortresses in the Gundam universe, daytime Overwatch ranked matches, and being accused of "colorbusting" as a child in the Mississippi public school system.  We convince a Basilisk to join us also. We chatter about P4/P5 too.

We finally unlock the recreation area in the sky city via wining the battle of attrition against Medusa, and we try to soak up every last bit of the ol' razzle dazzle the game hits us with in the big mid-game info dump!  After another gear up, we head out to find Rag, the last friendly face we'll meet before the long, cold, dark back half of Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei.

The game really starts to ratchet up the tomfoolery as we set out to explore the rest of Bien, the petrified city in the sky, in search of the statue we need to seal Medusa's magic.  Later, a series of sidetracks finds us meandering the corridors of Loki's basement prison where we forge a new friendship and come to a deeply troubling realization about the literal shape of things to come.

In the back half of The Episode That Almost Wasn't, we grapple with the introduction of mini bosses into our loop as we continue to desperately try to peel back the edges of the demon fusion system.  What does recarm do?  Who was Tabasa?  Why does the currently petrified captain of the Sky City pilot said Sky City using an old-timey ship's wheel?  We look inside ourselves to find the answer.  Which in hindsight was a poor place to look.

The Episode That Almost Never Was: after realizing Brent's voiceover audio for an ENTIRE session was corrupted, we had to re-record and edit the whole thing in the space of a few days (in the middle of some particularly bogus fascist fracus).  After spinning the wheels for a little while, we're finally gaining some traction!  We have a final reckoning with the minotaur, try to make some sense of the demon fusion system, and tie up some loose ends in the Daedalus Tower before we finally stumble into dungeon 2, The Corridor of Valhalla...but not until we clear out those last couple of map squares...

It's Day 2 of play, Justin has the controller, and we're gonna do our damndest to push through the distractions and get out of this cursed ziggurat! Justin learns some upsetting truths about cockroach anatomy, and Brent does their best not to have an existential crisis over what other humans on the internet do with their collectible figurines.

In the conclusion of our first session of play, we continue to schmooze with the demonic denizens of Daedalus as we search every nook and cranny of the ziggurat for a story beat. More mysteries of the game's menus and systems are revealed to us, along with some of Justin's final wishes and the origin of the verb "bogarting".  

We're going (almost) all the way back to where it all began and tackling part one of Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei: Old Testament for the Super Famicom. Come along with us as we butt heads with a 2.5 decade old game without a manual, wade through a sea of menu screens, and attempt to conquer the fowl pink worm.

A quick gab sesh regarding subjects ranging from the hottest member of The Killers to Slipknot Funko Pops before we try to break down just what it is we're doing here.  Let's get to know each other's vibe and settle in for the long, strange journey ahead.