Devil Survivor 2 write-up

[radio_aspen]

My feelings on the game told chronologically in emoticons

:D

. . . . :'D

..... :|

..... :'|

..... :<

..... 8<

..... >:|

..... >8|

..... :D

And then it alternates between those last two until the end.

There will be so many spoilers in this post.

Okay, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 will feel pretty familiar for anyone who played the first. The system is the same, the controls are the same, the interface is the same, the primary gameplay mechanics are the same. For the most part there's nothing wrong with this. However it did lead me to my first criticism. One of the annoying things about the original was that there was such an emphasis on choice, but your choices were very rarely informed. Because the destinations give you little indication to what is going to happen when you click on them, or at what point in the day they are going to disappear, it was less like meaningful choice and more like pulling names out of a hat.

2 doesn't really change this, and I maintain that at the very LEAST an indicator to how long you have before an event is removed from your selection options would be a great help. However, the nice thing about 2 seems to be that most of the non-story events do last all day. So you don't need to worry (generally) that that conversation with your party member won't be there after that new battle option, or vice-versa.

Which is nice because this game introduces a much welcomed Fate System. It's very similar to Persona 3 and 4's social links, and what's really nice is that characters get bonuses to their ratings even outside of their specific conversations. If they show up in a conversation with another character, or in a story event, then chances are you can increase their rating. Each character has five levels and they're not terribly hard to max, I only missed a handful and this was a blind play. The first level unlocks some elemental resistances (sadly these are never boosted to the null/repel/drain level), the next allows that character to gloriously share Skill Cracking responsibilities with the MC (ie, if everyone in your party is rank 2, then everyone can crack the MC's targeted skill, and he can crack any of theirs), the third unlocks a special demon fusion, the fourth lets you transfer demons between parties (I never used this but I can imagine it being useful), and the fifth and final unlocks another demon fusion.

When I heard about the premise for this game, I assumed it was going to be a wake up, go to school, fight monsters, type story. But no, this continues with the very literal interpretation of the title and has you dealing with a localized apocalypse.

So everything feels very familiar from the outset, but there's something new that players will probably notice pretty quickly.

The bleeding difficulty.

1 had something of a curve, with things ramping up around day 3.

2 has an oddly consistent difficulty level. I don't think any part was actually harder than the rest, but the entire game was just really blazing hard. That day 3 boss fight from 1? 2 hits you with its equivalent at the end of day 1. Honestly I feel like this was pushed a bit too far. It's one thing to have intelligent enemies capable of exploiting your every weakness at the end of the game, when you have a wealth of skills and demons to prepare with. It's something else entirely to have this happen at the beginning, when you have no skills and you can count your demon possibilities on your fingers. Combine that with the very exploitable stunlock mechanics, and oddly high critical hit rate. I found myself having to put the game down in frustration more times than I'm comfortable revealing.

On the other side of this, the main boss fights are very satisfying. Most (if not all) of them involve a kind of puzzle mechanic. Sometimes this does force you into trial and error gameplay, but generally you're given more than enough time to complete new objectives as they're sprung on you.

Interestingly, the final boss of my route was one of the easiest boss fights in the game. The two normal battles for the final day were more challenging, really.

Oh, also there's a demon compendium now. Sweet Jesus Christ yes.

Now the writing. Devil Survivor 1 is a very underrated game, and one of it's more overlooked strengths is the writing. Not the plot, the writing. The characters often have deconstructive elements, the game very, very convincingly handles an apocalypse scenario, with your characters having to deal with not only rampant demons but standard complications of living, the characters are written in a way that feels like they're really reacting to the situation around them, and the real brilliance of the game is the way that it throws you in the middle of a group of people with different-to-conflicting viewpoints, and then it supplies them with the power to enforce them.

So yes, I have a very high opinion of the writing of the original Devil Survivor, and in that respect I was very disappointed in DeSu 2. Initially.

The difference is that DeSu 2 is more subtle in its brilliance. Where Devil Survivor hits you with all of its weight from the outset, 2 was something that I had to understand by realization (in game this was around day 3 or 4).

My problem was this: The game wasn't selling me on the calamity. The characters were acting goofy, the death of certain character's families was barely given any attention, and you don't have to worry about your survival outside of battle, because you're working with an organization, that provides you with food and shelter in its high tech facility, when it's not sending you on missions over Japan to fight evil like some kind of wish fulfillment power fantasy. There was no sense of peril that the first had. I couldn't believe that these characters were watching the world crumble around them.

Largely, this is because most of your interactions at the beginning of the game are with JPs, the organization. It was when I started seeing other people, and met Ronaldo and his faction, that I began to understand the point. There WERE people suffering, there WERE people struggling to survive, and there WERE people who had stories like the characters in Devil Survivor. You were not them. By comparison, you were living in luxury. Without spoiling too much, the final confrontation of the game comes down to two ideals, one based on perfect equality and the other on elitism. The brilliance of the game is that it gives you the benefits of the latter while gradually revealing the other side. When you are working with JPs you are so distant from the common people and their situation, and the game starts to hammer in this point repeatedly in the later days.

I don't think that either 1 or 2 is better written than the other, the point is that their approaches are very different. 1 is immediate and satisfying while 2 is gradual and subtle.

Now let's talk characters. I didn't have the issues with Yuzu that many people did in Devil Survivor, but those people should be glad to know that Io is much more grounded.

The character who impresses me the most though is Yamato. As the leader of JPs and a proponent of elitism, it seems like he should be reducible to a stock villain cliche. But he's not. He has moments of mercy and kindness, he has the betterment of mankind at heart, and most curiously, he is not interested in imposing his ideals on anyone else. He is willing to stand alone in his views if he must, and there's something admirable about it. All of this comes together to make him feel like a truly human character, not a stock cliche.

Then there's the Anguished One. Easily my favorite character, this is a type that we don't get to see very often. I'm not going to reveal anything about him, but I'll say that he defies his tropes in so many ways that it's staggering, and he creates a certain emotional hold if you follow his path (I did) that few other games have a claim to.

So my thoughts summarized would be that this is a very satisfying game, but it's one that requires more of an investment to be engaging, and it is easily one of if not the most difficult RPGs I've ever played. (I maintain that the original Devil Survivor is more difficult than commonly cited benchmark Nocturne, and 2 is easily more difficult than 1, so....)