A little more than six months ago Atlus released Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga to anxious players of their award winning role-playing games. The unique visual style and story immediately garnered a loyal following of fans. But within days of the release a howl went up (no doubt from people with way too much time to just sit and play the whole game through immediately) that there was a major cliffhanger and no closure to the story. Well unlike the Halo 2 fans, Digital Devil Saga fans did not have to wait long to see the continuation of their cliffhanger story. Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 has been released and the quality of play and story is everything fans of the series could want.

Digital Devil Saga 2 picks up right where the events of Digital Devil Saga left off. Serph and the rest of his Embryon tribe, heroes of DDS1 and the player’s personal posse, have escaped the Junkyard (their dilapidated and rusting home) in what they thought was a one-way trip to Nirvana and unending happiness. But it turns out that things are not so good in Nirvana for the Embryons. What the Embryons thought was Nirvana ends up being the real world. And it is a world on the brink. It was discovered that particles smaller than atoms existed. These particles, known simply as "data", are what determine what everything will be. Through a manmade catastrophe, the sun turned black and started sending corrupted data to Earth. Life caught in the open was turned to stone by the black sun. The survivors went underground organized by the Karma Society. It was the Karma Society that constructed the combat simulator of the Junkyard to test combat AI programs. The Embryons were nothing more than programs in the Junkyard, and now, through means they do not immediately understand, they have been brought into the real world as what the Karma Society calls "ghosts." Our story takes off on a wild tale from there as the Embryon join the resistance in fighting the demon-enhanced Karma Society.

If you played and completed the original Digital Devil Saga you can start the game with your old save that will award some advantages. If you didn’t complete the first game or deleted your save (Are you nuts?) then you start off the game at a default setting that really is not a significant disadvantage. The game thoughtfully uses flashbacks to bring players new to the series up to the present time on events important to the game story.

It has only been six months since the first DDS, so – as you’d expect – there have not been any fundamental changes to the gameplay. The greatest improvement has been to the mantra system that allows characters to learn new skills for combat. It is now a bit more complex than the first game, but the ability to build-up and customize your characters with any mantra skill in the game is a big plus. The biggest weakness to the new system is the cost of higher-level mantras. Gathering the money to buy new mantras can mean a lot of hunting about the world for funds.

Combat has remained the same, retaining the twist on the traditional turn-based, role-playing game of lengthening or shortening the player’s turn depending on how well the player uses his character’s strengths and exploits his enemies' weaknesses. Using an attack that exploits an enemy’s weakness earns the player extra points to use in that turn before his foe ever gets to attack. Of course the same holds true if you use the wrong attack: your turn will be shortened. Your enemy can and will also exploit your weaknesses to prolong his own turn. This system rewards a smart offense and severely punishes a careless defense. Figuring out that smart offense and defense can be a bit of a trial-and-error proposition as you learn the properties of the demons you run into. But there is no shortage of combat to test your skills. The demon-enhanced Karma Society has troops out everywhere hunting for regular people for food and the Embryons, and you’ll randomly run into them almost constantly. These guys are no pushovers. The difficulty level of the first game has in no way been diminished for the second.

Visually, Digital Devil Saga 2 is the equal to its predecessor. The unique art of Kazuma Kaneko is every bit as compelling and at the same time disturbing as it was before. (I still get mental flashes of that demon chick with the teeth in her breasts. Kind of shrinks me like a spider on a hot stove.) The real world has a little more environmental detail than the world of the Junkyard, so you get a clear delineation between the two settings for the games. All the colors have a full, saturated feel to them.

The sound in the game also measures up to the high standards set by the first game. The music has moved a little away from the techno that was more prevalent in the original, but still offers a pretty eclectic mix. The voice acting is also of very good quality – even with the convoluted story line the actors were expected to make believable.

For fans of the original, Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 is going to be a must buy. For other RPG fans – not so much. If you got wrapped up in the original game’s story, you’ll almost surely want to see how it comes out, but there is nothing so unique about the game as an RPG that you’ll want to pick it up in the middle. It still shares the annoying random battles that plague most Japanese RPGs and make them a bit hard for many gamers to swallow. If you want an RPG with more logic to the fighting, pick up Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the GameCube.