My trip with the Persona 4 anime want pretty well and here I am again with Devil Survivor 2, another atlus game to get a adoption.

For those of you who doesn't know the concept of the Devil Survivor series is, a great disasters puts Japan on lockdown and demons are running loss. It is up the a group of summoners, who were regular people, to solve and stop this disaster from spreading. In DS2 case the things that are causing the disaster are Septentriones, a mysterious invaders and our little group of teenagers, Hibiki (Kamiya, Hiroshi), Daichi (Okamoto, Nobuhiko), and Io (Uchida, Aya) as they use their Nicaea system to summon demons to fight back. Also the Nicaea system also tells them future events where someone they know will die if they don't get to them in time. All this sounds really weird and it is.

I can't say I done a good job with summarizing the concept of the show but the 1st episode really paced things out very nicely. It was able to show us the relationships between the characters, Hibiki and Daichi doing a little friendly fight over who going to get drinks for the group and Hibiki reassuring lo about sticking together to be safe till she finds her parents, how the Nicaea system works, and how much of the disaster has mess up Japan with lack of phone signals and people looking for help. They even go as far as hinting at something is up with the 3 main character being able to survive the train crash as they are the only ones who got the message to keep living. Hibiki talks about how he feels like they are being tested and for those of you who played know, their more to it than just that. Going back to characters, they give off a Durarara feel which is expected since the design are mostly base off of Suzuhito Yasuda art from the game as well as character behavior. Hibiki, our main protag, is very talkative, when compare to how Yu of P4 anime was, and helps add in personality to his character when he was in our control in the game. Daichi is the fooly friend who's willing to look after his friends, with his attempt to crash a truck onto the invader. And lo who at this point just a shy girl but she'll be growing a pair later (Specially when she'll be throwing lighting bolts).

Visually the shows looks nice with good coloring and shading. However, there is a lack of sharpness with character models and environments when compare to Persona 4 beginning episode. Combat was well done with lots of movement from the demons and the battle with Dubhe, emulating the fight with the game, was pretty good. However, at this point our human characters have yet to do any attacks of their own so I wonder if the show will be slightly realistic by only having the character demons doing the fighting or later on character will use powers as well.

So far, it is a good start to the DS2 adoption and I hope it will continue to stay good.

Check it out on Crunchyroll: http://www.crunchyroll.com/devil-survivor-2-the-animation

Highlights