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Let me preface this by saying: DDS looks like all games should look. Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga 1: Avatar Tuner is one of the latest installments in the Shin Megami Tensei line of RPGs out of Japan. DDS is a two-part offshoot series from the main SMT line much like the Persona: Revelations trilogy a few years back. The main series is all about collecting demons, breeding them, and the like whereas DDS and Persona are more of the typical RPG genre.
The theme of the series is that the world enters a cataclysmic state when demons appear, and follows the characters as they deal with carving out a new world from the chaos. In DDS specifically, you play Serph—the head of one of the Tribes—in a world known as the Junk Yard where it always rains, where there are no children, and where everyone seems to have some degree of amnesia. A strange green egg appears on the border between your and another tribe's territories. During the ensuing conflict a bight light comes down striking the egg, everyone in the world get possessed by demons, and in the crater where the egg was a mysterious girl appears. From there you follow Serph and his tribe as they attempt to figure out what's going on / find a cure / conquer the Junk Yard / enter Nirvana.
The style of the game is a continuous dungeon much like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. You have a home base you return to occasionally (as dictated by plot) for tribe meetings, but for the most part you follow one dungeon to the next. It's a relatively new subgenre of RPGs and one I've enjoyed in all the incarnations I've seen so far; it's more action oriented than the more typical exploration-oriented "see the world" style, which has its ups and downs depending on what you're into. Most other reviews I've seen on DDS complain about the frequency of combat. It's true that random encounters happen frequently, but part of this stems from the action-oriented style, and—perhaps more importantly—all those combats are resolved quickly. I've never found the frequency of combat annoying, though if you're just looking to explore you might.
That's one of the things that's so great about DDS: while it's all about level-building, and leveling up your magics, and combat, all of those things are resolved with a remarkable lack of fuss. DDS lacks those quirks that make those things irksome in other games. You level very quickly and the difficulty is well paced so you don't need to spend hours leveling. You can buy your next "mantra" (i.e. spell book, materia,...) at any of the conveniently located save points; and while the limiting factor is their cost, that cost isn't unbalanced to how much money you're making. And since the only equipment you can upgrade is your gun (which you only use in human form[1]) you never have to worry about balancing magic against equipment. And, as I mentioned, combats resolve themselves quickly.
Visually the game is stunning. Y'know the opening movie I described with the strange green egg? Well most games these days have a gorgeous cutscene opening; But in DDS the entire game is rendered with that quality. All those gorgeous cityscapes are lifted straight from when you walk through them. All the plot and conversations are done in full cutscenes. The menus are all attractive, sleek, and organic not boring squares of text. Your life and mana bars have pulse animations. And the soundtrack is great; it's about as repetitive as any other game, but it doesn't start grating on your eardrums like you'd think it would. The one place the aesthetics of the game aren't superb is, ironically, in combat. The combat graphics aren't particularly bad, but they're not inspiring and they don't hold a candle to the out of combat graphics or to the combat graphics of games like Final Fantasy.
Final report: 4.75 of 5 stars. Not quite earth-shattering enough to earn a full five stars, but a must-have for any RPG collection.
[1] Unless ambushed you start all combats in demon form, unlike other games where you need to spend a turn powering up.
