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You are 100% correct. Hopefully they are saving a DDS 1&2 remaster for a rainy day. Come to think of it, so far no new Megaten game is releasing this year, right? Odd. It's been a few years since that happened.

But yes, definitely take a break. DDS2 is good but it really is just "Disc 2" in that it's more of the same overall game/story (obviously). I bought both games back in 2006 and spent all of that June playing DDS1--and doing everything, including grinding incenses for the Demi-fiend fight so I could get the special ring you get in DDS2 for beating him (totally unnecessary). I jumped into DDS2 immediately after doing all that, which was a mistake. Though burnt out, I finished it--but that's it. At most I think I grinded for the drops you need for the Shiva/Vishnu fights, then didn't see 2 again until we streamed it a couple years ago.

You know they're going to be selling that trademark Atlus grinding DLC for these games when they get their remasters. Both games definitely need to rebalance the exhorbitant cost of their skill grids---especially DDS2. But I doubt that'll happen when they can just sell the rebalancing to you instead!

But now for something else, one of my oldest drafts on this blog is from Feb 23, 2014 with the following picture (that I think a friend named Russet Potato once sent me):

And the following text:

Here's one for true Avatar Tuner Maniacs. For others, get in on it

The idea was that I was going to link to a Youtube video for the DDS2 track "One-Way Stairs" and fulfill the reference/inside joke between Russet and me for all to see. Except, that track wasn't available on Youtube in 2014, if you can believe it. So that's both how things have changed in a decade and a taste of what used to pass for Megaten blog content!

of critters in clover

Yeah, you could definitely play a scenario where violence is the morally correct answer for laughs, but you don't have to.

If you wanted to play it straight, one might imagine a game about fighting a fascist state where all of the bosses are The One Good Nazi types with very sympathetic, human reasons for collaborating with the regime – there's the Sad Dad who's only committing mass murder because they're holding his kid hostage, the idealist who genuinely believes they can reform the system from the inside, the moral coward who rationalises their atrocities as harm reduction because if they quit, whoever replaced them would be even worse, etc. – and all of the talky nonviolent options for dealing with them involve compromising the player character's principles.

The final boss is naturally a totally unsympathetic Hitler 2.0 type, but before you can fight him he hits you with the old Mustapha Mond monologue, and if you've let even one of his buddies off the hook, he turns the tables on the conversation-fu trope and persuades the player character to stand down.