Digital Devil Pod: Shin Megami Letsplei

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.

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.

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".  

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.

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...

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 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.

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 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.

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 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!

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 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.

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.

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?