OKAY. So, I guess it's time for that ol' DDS rant.
So, first the good: the game has a nice sense of aesthetics, dungeon exploration is theoretically good (it sorta pans out in practice on Karma Temple, a few issues aside), Karma Temple is an awesome dungeon for the style sense alone (and it's pretty fun, too!). Oh, and the soundtrack is pretty solid! That's nice. Problem is, the good ends just about here. And there's a lot of bad to plow through.
For starters? The gameplay design is infuriating. It's carefully designed and had a fair amount of thought into it, sure, like most of the entire battle flow, I feel. Problem? It's meticulously, unceremoniously designed to annoy the hell out of the player.
Sounds vague? I'll try to exemplify this through a random battle I fought while remapping Coordinate 136 in the lategame. I got into a random battle with two Panic-spamming whores and a Rage spammer, levels on the low 50s for myself. They got the initiative and began spamming MT Panic. Which hit my entire party off the bat. Due to Panic, my commands wouldn't go through at all, and they kept doing that -forever-, while my attempts to heal it or flee were walled by Panic. They couldn't kill me at all, the damage was in the single digits against me. But this prolonged a pointless battle far longer than it should have, was not fun and I had -no proper way to control it at all-. Essentially, you're in a dark room. You're likely to be gnawed to death by a RNG.
This is the entire gameplay in a nutshell. This -is- DDS.
The hax varies, the pointless varies, but the underlying point doesn't change: the game makes consciously bad gameplay design decisions by the gallons just for the sake of making them. Which is, really, the crux of SMT gameplay from what I know. The entire game is balanced and designed with the intent to annoy the player slowly but surely with hax that is entirely beyond the player's control: from the turn system, which is just about the worst thing you could ever do in a TB RPG (phase-based in a non-SRPG is sub-SMRPG TB. Absolutely random initiative system, with your stats having no say at all? This alone is conceptually dumb, and the fact initiative goes against you so often is even worse. You do not pull that kind of thing if you're concerned about making a game fun) to the purposeful excessive hampering of the player's options with the skill equipment system, you end up with a gameplay that, in spite of having a couple fun concepts (press turns are conceptually haxy, but not too bad a way to encourage weakness hitting), is very one-dimensional, partly because of how the skill equipment system hamstrings your versatility. I mean, eight skill slots TOTAL? On a skillset of that size? That's not encouraging you to think about the skills you'll use very carefully, that'll encourage you to just find the one setup that will last you through the game, which the game is very clear about. Since you want battles done as fast as possible, the best approach is simply picking the MT damage off boosts and an elemental resistance to avoid giving press turns, add healing and maybe an uber debuff if you have it. Because anything else is counter-productive. It's annoying, there's plenty of effective stuff to use that would matter a lot more if the game's nature wasn't so hax-based, but it entirely wastes the possibilities by that.
Also, the stat balance blows: Magic is god, Vitality is good, everything else is useless. Status is also very underpowered in your hands even when hitting weakness: this is bad considering the system wants you to hit varied weaknesses. But then, it limitates that by hamstringing your versatility anyway, so what's the point? And then, there's the fact that DDS Analyze FAILS. When you make a system that reliant on hitting weakness, you DO NOT hamstring the player of his only way to check weaknesses without getting his ass bitten - because, if you hit immunities, you're getting bitten by it HARD. Not having a place that stores enemy data and not letting you see any info on boss specs is idiotic in a system like this, and defeats the purpose of intelligently playing it. It's like the game wants you to stumble your way with the system, and doing that gets you killed by hax. Annoying design, and it's so carefully crafted that I still suspect the designers get off on the player's annoyance.
The mantra system was also poorly implemented: not being able to see what the skills on a mantra actually do (not even a description!) until you buy and -master- it is downright dumb, no ifs or buts. Once again, it's the type of design decision that hampers intelligent planning and strategical growth. A design decision that doesn't let the player's intelligence play a decisive role on the effects of the game, rewarding stumbling blind luck instead, is a bad decision. DDS revels in those, and the worst part is that it's so far better about it than just about every SMT game I know that it's disgusting. It's the least annoying SMT I know about those things and it's still retarded.
Then, there's the writing that accompanies the setting. The setting is sorta neat, if dangerously bordering on Dork Age crap (in that "The Grim '90s" sense. The game tries really hard to be dark and edgy, and, while the aesthetics work out, it can wear thin fast). But it hits DDS writing failure. DDS's general dialogue and story flow is like an old 2x4: wooden, stiff, ugly and can't reliably hold together a structure. There is no buildup and real explanation of a setting that decidedly needs them, and the reliance on MYSTARY and FORESHADOWINGU just makes things worse. It's clearly a game that tries to be both a plot and gameplay game, and it fails up on both fronts.
THAT said, it could be worse. As Sage noted, it's better than Lufia 2! Although I can hardly call that a merit.
But, in the end, DDS is just very underwhelming. It's a game that could've been pretty neat, but isn't. The developers clearly understand the tenets of good design, but they decide to build games using fundamentally bad design as a cornerstone and prancing around that flawed fundamental. It's incomprehensible and obnoxious, and I certainly can't respect a game for that. In the end, it just feels like a slight waste of time.
And now, to better things!
KH2 - Sora just came back! Too bad Roxas never remembered what did he tell Axel in bed that night.
