Digital Devil Pod: Shin Megami Letsplei

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.