Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor — Macca Is Coming…

Out of all the MegaTen games that have been released, I have only seriously played three of them, and I tried out two others for a very short period of time.  I have played and beat most of the Final Fantasy games, many Dragon Quests, and yet, I don’t seem to have gotten around to Megami Tensei or very many of the spin-offs.  I don’t think there’s any other RPG series that I’ve almost completely neglected like I have MegaTen.  Sometimes I like playing a long series of games from the beginning, like I’m doing with the Dragon Quest series.  But sometimes I pick up a random game in a series and play it, as I did with this game.

In fact, I played this game during my recent epic trip, mostly in Orlando, and I admit that I missed out on two or three amazingly sunny days because of this game.  Then again, this is Florida we’re talking about.  It’s hard to visit Florida in summer and early autumn and not see the sun.

The basic gist of this game is that Tokyo is suddenly put into lock-down due to an infestation of demons, and you and your friends find yourselves armed with special tools to defeat them.  What are these tools, you may ask?  Swords?  Shields?  Proton packs?  Nope.  Your characters defend Tokyo with dual screened, multi-purpose PDA systems that look a lot like the Nintendo DS.  In fact, they are pretty much glorified DS systems.  Their design is very similar to the DS design and it’s easy to think of them as a video game system.  Except they can summon demons to fight for your side, of course.  A demon summoning video game system.  It makes me wonder if there are still some functions that were kept secret.  It slices!  It dices!  It makes Julienne fries!  It does your taxes for you!  It runs a catering business on the side!  And if you act now, we’ll throw in your first set of demons, absolutely free!  How much would you pay for something like this?  $100?  $200?  No!  You get this entire package deal at no cost to yourself!  Call now, operators are standing by!

That’s how you summon demons in this game.  You don’t have to shoot yourselves in the head or anything like that.  Apparently that’s just for games like Persona 3.  Instead, you use your Nintendo DS systems… er, I suppose they’re called COMPs in the game, to call forth your equipped demons and do battle.  Battles are typical tactical RPG fare, except that you can control up to four groups of three characters, one human and two demons, and each group can attack an enemy group of up to three demons.

Demons are gained first by winning fights to accumulate Macca (considering how close that is to another word, I couldn’t help but think of a certain video on YouTube every time I gained an amount of Macca in both this game and in DemiKids), then using the Macca to win more demons in auction, then fusing those demons to create more powerful demons.  This continues until your demons are very powerful and you can kill the enemy with extreme prejudice.  As long as you level up the demons before you fuse them, you can pass along more abilities to the next generation than you could’ve if you fused them right away.  The level of customization available to your demons is pretty high in a game like this.

It’s not just your demons who can be customized.  Your own characters don’t know magic until you fight your very first demons and then you find that you can suddenly equip it.  The question is, where can you get more?  By fighting, of course!  You can use the Skill Crack system to target a skill you want to steal from an enemy, then when you kill that enemy, you can use that skill forever.  The one weakness of this system is that you have to know which skills you want ahead of time, and you can only choose up to four, one for each character.  Also, that character is the only one who can crack the skill.  Proper planning is necessary to make sure that you aren’t sending a cream puff up against a tough enemy.

Once you have a few skills, you will find that only one character can equip each skill.  If you give, say, your main protagonist the Agi spell, then no other character other than the demons who already innately possess that skill can use it.  Theoretically, you could equip any character with any spell, but characters (and demons!) will select their own level up bonus, so you’ll find that one character will lean more towards physical power, another will lean more towards magical power, etc.  The only character you can determine bonuses for is the main character.  The level up bonus is basically just a point you can spend in one of four stats to grow your character when he gains a level.  Naturally, this makes it hard to come up with a plan for your other characters, since they choose where they spend their points.  Fortunately, they are a little intelligent with their choices.  For instance, they will make sure to invest enough of their points into Agility to make sure that they’re faster than their enemies.

As seems to be the case with many MegaTen games, magic tends to have the potential to be overpowered.  There are very few enemies that can block Drain, for instance, so you can literally ruin the difficulty curve of the game just by pumping all your points into Magic and then giving Drain to that character as soon as you crack it.  Whereas many characters late in the game can block attack skills, Drain magic is very nearly unblockable and rarely misses, so if you need to kill something in one hit….  Given that the game can be quite difficult in places, I would not blame anyone one bit if they used a cheap tactic like this to make it through the last couple days.

The story is divided into days, and each day is divided into half hour segments.  Most actions (talking to people, engaging in story-related battles, etc.) can use up one half hour to an hour of a day.  Engaging in training battles will not use up time, so players can grind levels to their heart’s content.  Each day also has an objective or two to meet, and usually, failing this objective will result in a game over.  There are certain missions where you have to rescue someone and unfortunately, her AI is pretty suicidal, so it’s easy to lose the fight one or two times before you figure out what you’re supposed to do during the fight.  In fact, many boss fights are that way.  It takes two or three tries where you die and fail before you finally hit upon a winning strategy and manage to kill the boss.

Ultimately, the game will lead you to where many other MegaTen games do.  You’ll be given a choice between law, chaos, and neutrality, and the game will gleefully express the negatives for each choice, while not really accentuating the positives.  You feel like a jerk and an idiot no matter which option you choose, and the developers know this.  Such a choice may be old hat to those who have stuck with the MegaTen series for a long time, but like I said at the beginning of this review, I’ve not had the chance to pl
ay most of the games in this long-running series.

The soundtrack successfully portrayed a modern Tokyo setting, and while I am slightly disappointed that the Heartsdales didn’t show up (this game has a similar Jpop/R&B type of music to the kind of music that they used to make), it doesn’t detract from the game any.  There may have been one or two tracks that I wasn’t fond of, but for the most part, it made me wish I could visit Tokyo sometime.  Hopefully without the demons.

The game is also easy on the eyes.  The battle system is clear in its set-up, and the rest of the game is made up entirely of a few backgrounds, with character portraits in front of them.  It’s pretty much standard fare these days in traditional-style video games.  Characters get around on the map of Tokyo by selecting a destination from a menu, another ho-hum feature of modern RPGs.  Upon completion of the game, a New Game + mode is available, where you get bumped back down to level one, but you get to keep your demons.  Also, the game makes it easier to gain levels in New Game + mode.  It may also be standard and almost cliche to include such a mode in a game these days, but the one that Devil Survivor uses is actually pretty decent.

Newly announced for a US release, the upcoming remake of Devil Survivor will be playable on the 3DS.  This seems as pointless as when Final Fantasy IV was ported to the DS just a couple years after the GBA version came out, but that’s another story entirely, especially since that game is also slated for a PSP release.  Honestly, Square-Enix.  Why release a game thrice in a little over half a decade?  Sure, Atlas has only just gotten into the practice of remaking and re-releasing their games, but still, I don’t know why Atlas has suddenly seen fit to do so.  First, they released Persona 3 FES, and then Persona 3 Portable.  You could argue that P3P was completely unnecessary, except that they added new content that wasn’t even in the FES version, and the FES version added content that wasn’t in the original.  Furthermore, the FES content is not in P3P, so people who want to play as a girl and play the bonus chapter will have to get both versions.  At least the Persona 1 port made sense, considering it’s been years since Revelations: Persona was released, and they made sure to reverse their localization mistakes this time around.  Now, here comes Devil Survivor Overclocked, which adds an eighth day to the scenario.  The eighth day doesn’t even make any sense considering the original premise was to finish everything in seven days.  There was no eighth day planned by any of the gods in the game.  However, I know that not all of us played Devil Survivor.  In fact, I know of at least one contributor to this blog who hasn’t played it yet.  For her, the Overclocked version may be a good thing, if she plans on picking up a 3DS at launch.  However, a $250 price tag on the 3DS, plus I would estimate anywhere between $35 and $45 for the game (I’m Canadian, so I don’t know what the American price would be, I’m just guessing), it is a pretty expensive proposition to buy the 3DS just to experience Overclocked.  In the end, it’s up to you whether you fork over the money to experience this game in 3-D, or if you just buy the DS version which is still available on major sites like Amazon.com.  Either way, I would recommend this game, especially to MegaTen fans who also like tactical RPGs.