Since I got Persona 3 FES, I've been slowly going through some of Atlus' games. It's actually quite interesting to look and see how ignorant I was coming into the system (and still am, in some respects):
 
Persona 3 FES - I've really messed up on this. I'm somewhere in November if I recall (so far 2 or 3 people have upgraded their personas) and I'm still around level 41. XD I am notorious for being badly levelled up in games, but this is ridiculous, even for me. I think it's just that the layout of Tartarus confuses me - can't go back down floors, only up, access point, or teleport. So I run between teleporters fighting battles along the way but not exploring the full floor and only sometimes go back when not bored to fight things. The net result is the world's most ridiculously low levelled characters! Okay, so I'm exaggerating, but it's pretty bad.
 
(On the bright side, I'm doing pretty good with the social links if I do say so myself, and have my charm and courage maxed out, and my academics one from maxed out.)
 
Oh, and to make things worse, I came into this not understanding the Persona system and so haven't been fusing as well as I should have. Heck, I don't think I've even done a triangle fusion. I think it was Igor's lecturing me about fusion accidents put me off a bit. :P And I totally still have Orpheus and Asparas because I rely far too much on cadenza. I have a ton of money though, so when I get back to it I can raid my compendium and fuse crazily. Perhaps I'll also figure out how to go for a bad version of an ending (though I'd need to look it up to be sure) as I really can't see myself managing to get myself into a reasonable level to take on a final bonus boss. I really, really can't. Then I can correct my blunders in a new game+. Sounds good to me! 
 
I think my current deaths count is 12. Hehe, I'm still learning.
 
Persona 4 - (WILL CONTAIN SOME SPOILERS) I learned from Persona 3 FES here and started dungeons early to give myself time to do things in case I failed horribly and needed to train up. This time I only died 6 times in the whole game - and like I said, I'm prone to be underlevelled so that's pretty good going. At my worst I was eight or nine levels below the boss I was fighting (maybe 10 on the true ending boss) so the deaths were kind of understandable. I think it worked out like this: one random battle death (how embarrassing), one death right at the end of Yukiko's shadow (she died next hit -evil eye-), 2 deaths on Kanji's shadow, 2 deaths on Mitsuo's shadow. (Shockingly I managed to get through Rise and Teddie's shadows without ever dying. I was shocked too. And I never died again after shadow Mitsuo.) 
 
Also my fusing initially was almost exclusively triangle fusion... see, I'm learning slowly. :P I did get up and make a Yoshitsune though. Trumpeter too. Also, I used Melchizedek quite a lot, though he isn't anything more than a normal or triangle fusion I think.
 
On the other hand I'd generally spend 3 or 4 days on a dungeon so I lost S Link time, I finished around 8 of them (3 being the story S Links, then Kanji, Naoto, Yukiko, Young Mother, Nurse) and I'm pretty sure that in November in P3FES I've got more done than that! On a new game plus I plan to do a lot better (I am in Kanji's dungeon on my new game+!). 
 
I did get a bit lazy in Persona 4 with attacks I'm weak to though. Part of the reason I like Shin Megami Tensei battle system is it forces me to do what no other game ever has done - actually use magic properly. I am a total MP conserver and reserve MP only for curative spells normally. That's a death warrant in some of these games. The lack of knock doswns lasting a turn made it less of a worry in Persona 4 so sometimes I'd find myself happily physically attacking (regularly) to save MP for mediarama/mediarahan. But ah well, can't have everything. 
 
Now onto the actual reason I made this blog post (lol, I don't half go on) was to write about my current and first playthrough of Digital Devil Saga. So!
 
Digital Devil Saga - (Please don't spoil me for this! I am currently at Coordinate 136, just done the first floor.)
 
The weirdest thing for me about this game is this time your character actually has a name and is a leader... but still never speaks! Serph leads silently, apparently! I'm back to actually attempting to properly utilise the weaknesses system too, even if I find it a bit weird at times (weak to force spells? what are force spells? ...) though I'm now used to it. 
 
I'm pretty sure I'm still underlevelled. On the bright side I've only died once! And it was on a huge hoard of the... uh, green horse things that cast mazionga on you, in the Maribel's base when you open one of the gates (forced battle... if I recall, three sets of three and then a final one). I did fine for the first two waves, then they went crazy with mazionga and Gale kept giving them extra turns.
 
(After I died I ran around learning void elec and extra fire spells and that strategy worked much better.)
 
Speaking of learning things I've pretty much screwed this up too, I'm sure. I'm still learning what stats correspond best to what people/skills. Also I kept up my regular thing of making everybody have to have the capability to heal at least a little. I think I'm a bit better with it now though... got Margilla focusing on magic and Gale is becoming heal guy. I have no idea what the hell Serph is, he's learning random bits and bobs. I... could really do with putting together a plan with what to do for him. Ah well, worst comes to the worst I hang out in front of the large karma terminal and train up. 
 
In any case! The plot seems quite fun, I've been enjoying watching things unfold. Even if in doing so I have grown very, very sick of traps and may never want to see huge statue heads or portraits again. :P
 
How do other people cope when they first walk into a Shin Megami Tensei game anyway? I always find the systems a little hard to adapt to, but it's also an interesting learning curve... and obviously, it's interested me enough to try other games in the franchise. :)
 
(Eventually went for putting this in the Persona 4 forum given that that's the only one I've completed. Less spoiler chances!)

It's probably a little sad that many of my games of (mostly nostalgic!) interest won't play on my computer anymore. I knew I had some reason to keeping some rather terrible PC hardware!
 
Here are some games that won't play that really should:
 
Knights and Merchants - I'm probably never going to be able to play this game again as the issue lies in the fact it requires DOS on the machine and so isn't really XP compatible. This was an absolutely amazing game, I loved it when I was younger... even if I did always get horribly distracted and forget that, hey, supposed to be fighting a war there! (Note to self: write review for this, and possibly write something for wiki entry: something is better than nothing, even a decade or so old recollection.)
 
Stay Tooned! - I could complete this easily enough by myself when I was a kid (except Kartoon Kombat... I was terrible at that, and the addition of 3D glasses just added to the confusion), so god knows how simple I'd find it now, but it was an amazing game. Quirky fun with something a bit different in every playthrough. (I seem to recall making several playthroughs after my first purely for the chance I could run into Schleopardy again. Schleopardy was amazing.) The TV was hilarious too - how can you not like a game with a Friends parody called Frauds where people's limbs randomly fall off?! (I like how that didn't even mildly alarm me as a kid.) 
 
The depressing thing is nobody has ever heard of these games, so the conversation possibilities are... pretty much none. I'm pretty much the gamer girl who played the obscure games that only a tiny minority of people have ever played... pity, really!
 
At least several of my other "games of nostalgia" can still be played... even those that terrified me when I was a kid. (LeChuck's Revenge. ...It was the swamp, okay, the music and look of it creeped me out. :P I suppose this speaks well of the music composition, though - I was probably a bit young to be playing Monkey Island! Actually, the extra odd thing about this is the fact that while the swamp terrified me to the point of giving me nightmares, the whole voodoo doll "of the bone" thing also didn't phase me at all. What was wrong with my sense of creepyness?!) 
 
On the bright side I can still play Final Fantasy VIII, which isn't exactly my earliest gaming experience (the PS games came after the PC games in my chronicle of gaming), but I still remember playing it the first time... and constantly tripping over the fact I was lame at levelling up. On my first playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII I got near the end of disc 2 (this was the Cerberus boss fight) and got totally, totally owned. I was too weak to really do anything, I didn't really stock enough magic and didn't understand the magic junctioning system (I played it not shortly after it came out, and I reckon I'd have been about seven or eight at the time), and I ran away from battles if I couldn't be bothered fighting (this was normally when I'd got lost and ran around in circles for a bit. Embarrassing story of running around in circles: it took me 2 hours after getting off the train (I think this was to Galbadia Garden?) to actually get there. The destination was about two feet from where I was standing (triggered forest event) but even though I had instructions to find a forest, I was totally lost with the directions as I was apparently a bit rubbish at following compass points. FUN TIMES. At least I gained some levels there!). My second playthrough I died about five times right at the beginning of disc 2 in an explosion: turns out that the cutscene confused me to the degree I was moving TOWARDS the exploding building rather than away. Yeah, that was awkward. I did figure it out... eventually... though! 
 
I still love revisiting Final Fantasy VIII - though I understand the system and can complete it with ease now. I actually find it the most accessible battle system of the Final Fantasy games, probably as it's the first I played, even though I'm well aware a large part of my first playthrough problems were due to my inability to understand the magic equipping system... even with a tutorial. Funny how those things work out!
 
Heh, it's fun to reminisce. :D