incredible stuff. completely forgot so much of this game. dds has such a great story and it probably has my favorite music in the larger megami tensei series. atmosphere unbeatable other than maybe nocturne. some of the localization is super wack (dds1's depiction of the solids as The Black Tribe comes to mind) but i imagine it was just the era. my only real big issue with the storyline is that some of the emotional moments don't hit because the characters don't have a ton going on at the point we need to care about them, namely Jinana, but by the second game the main party feels so tightly knit that it's hard not to love all of them. even roland as a latecomer feels like such an earned arc. not to mention it does that 2000s atlus thing of characterizing the silent protagonist in a subtle but poignant way...!!! i love serph. i love the cast of this game

honestly astounding. games don't usually scare me much but it's really like everything in this game tries to get under your skin. at one point my game glitched and started playing this horrible ringing sound after i shot an enemy that looked like a child and i thought it was an intentional punishment of me as a player because it was just the right frequency to upset my lizard brain. it started going on for too long so i realized eventually, but it was still freaky as hell and it's a testament to how horrifying the game's atmosphere is that even when things go wrong, it still feels like you're under the game's 'control'

continuing my metal gear journey with my friend ben. i'm still really not sure why people seem to consider this the best one - the third act is full-stop agonizingly long. why are there three back to back fights against the same guy and only one of them is fun?! at least the final boss is the best the series has ever had, to make up for it. ben agreed - it's very good! but nowhere near as good as 1 or 2. we both sort of agreed that the reason this one is received so pitch-perfectly has something to do with the lukewarm reception to raiden and how this game is so gung-ho for being a cheesy bond-esque action film in contrast. not that it's a bad thing - it's just not what it used to be.

first finished replay in probably 3 years? this was my first dark-side run! it kinda wasn't that great. i do like that the game implements the canon star wars lore that the more evil you are the worse your chronic skin condition gets. it makes for an extremely funny scene when juhani is telling me she worries that i'm falling to the dark side and the camera cuts back to my player character and i'm just this gaunt corpse of a woman with like gray skin.

definitely still nowhere near the level of kotor2's writing as it's really just typical bioware storytelling copy/pasted back onto a unique setting with a few interesting characters (read: canderous and jolee) but if anything it's very well-executed bioware storytelling. combat is terrible. the last two 'dungeons' are horrible. but few things in star wars as a multimedia story come close to the elation you get from john cygan absolutely crushing his delivery when he's telling you a war story wherein he is absolutely, 10000% the bad guy