Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei

I had to finally leave a comment on MAL to counter some disinformation. You don't need to be a fan of SMT to enjoy this, and it is actually a very unique and fun OVA. It's full of atmosphere and many of the visuals are powerful and carry a lot of weight to them. The confusing elements of the plot just leads to it feeling more abstract, which allows it to get away with any 'inconsistencies' that other viewers might locate.
Highly recommended for fans of 80s horror OVA. This certainly has an interesting feeling to it, and while I understand that fans of SMT might ... find this to be an unsuitable adaptation of a universe that they are already familiar with, I believe that a casual viewer will still find a lot to enjoy.

Far from being a good entertainment, this OVA is for MegaTen die-hard fans, mostly because it was where everything begun, not only for the SMT series, but for the whole JRPG niche. It is said that Dragon Quest V started with the whole catching monsters, befriending them, but in reality in 1987, 5 years before DQ5, the very first megaten game was released based on a trilogy of japanese books. The plot? Summoning demons through OG computers.
Can't really say its bad adapted since the first book which is the whole ground for this OVA has more than 450 pages, so if there isn't any prior ... knowledge of MegaTen it might get confusing.
What's best about is the darkness of it, megaten always had this feeling, this vibe of something obscure, but it kinda lost that throughout the years, don't get me wrong, it still is, hell yeah. but when you watch this you kinda realize how heavy the stuff in it is, i read that since it was made in the late 80s, it was aimed for the adult audience so they didn't easy any of the stuff from the books.
Will recommend DDS to someone who played the games and fell in love like I did 1 year ago, most likely through Persona, which is way lighter than this one. Won't recommend to anyone who found this randomly, is isn't a masterpiece, it isn't good, is a well-written MegaTen OVA poorly done made for fans.

I knew it! Fortran is the programming language of the Devil!

To cut to the chase: This one-shot story is just one huge pile of horse manure, with a confusing and convoluted story featuring characters you don't care about.

The 'novelty' of this OVA is that it involves summoning a demon through the use of the high school's computer, complete with cheesy bleeps and bloops and reel-to-reel tapes and all that. The way that computers are shown here may seem way quaint and silly, but keep in mind when this was made -- in an era ... when only a tiny fraction of the public had access to any sort of computer at all. Anything involving computers was, for many people, a Big Unknown. And when you have a Big Unknown, it can be kind of scary -- or, at least turned into something big and scary for the purposes of a movie. Hence, devil worship via the computer.

But don't worry, before this story is even a third of the way finished, almost all of the digital computer stuff is stripped away from the story, and it turns into just a regular human vs. demon story instead.

And stripping away the novelty, and you're left with, well, nothing worth watching. The main character is a complete douchebag for the first part of the story, then makes a sudden switch and we are supposed to be rooting for him, but by then it's already too late and the characterization of a douchebag is already set in stone. The girl in the story is a confusing element, starting out as the scared new girl in class, then for a brief moment has shining laser eyes that kill everything, then she's basically useless for most of the rest of the show. As Mr. Douchebag is left to fight the Giant Pink Slime Monster over and over.

Before long, I was tuning out from the story, as too many loose ends were left flapping around, too many unexplained events, and no clear path to follow along.

Artwork and animation were perfectly fine, I guess, if you like how well they draw and animate pulsating pink stuff. The background music was laughably bad, even by the standards of the time.