Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

With the amount of death going around lately, it’s probably gotten more than a few people pondering their own mortality. But what would you do if you could see how long you have left before you die? Though it’s a question seemingly ripped from a press release, the ways you can choose to answer it make Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor deliver on its premise, while mostly living up and sometimes exceeding franchise expectations.

Devil Survivor's plot, with its focus on a week-long countdown to certain doom, at first glance seems ripped straight out of The World Ends With You. Instead, it ends up borrowing from its own series, specifically Shin Megami Tensei 1's plotline of demons running amuck in Tokyo, the military quarantining the area off, and heroes with demon-summoning devices named COMPs. These excusable similarities really end there and the game's storyline is at its best when it sticks to its title and deals with the means and consequences of surviving in a hellish environment where you can literally see how many days you have left to live.

The story moves at good pace thanks to how the game manages time in 30-minute increments. Moving forward what little time you have mostly comes by conversing with characters or enacting the story events, which can give you the moral choices that can affect the game’s ultimate outcome, which seem more meaningful than ever and will make the game more interesting for subsequent playthroughs. Another of the game's strengths related to choice is with the limited time available per day you can't possibly spend it with everyone, so you have to choose your company carefully. The game's cast is mostly likable and varied, despite having some of the least inspired designs in the series. As the game progresses, you’ll see your choices affect who you have in your party as well as other more minor subquests. It’s pretty refreshing to influence more than just dialogue, say, from Persona 3 or 4’s S-Links.

Of course, the other way to pass time is by beating dudes and demons into a pulp. Half tactical, half traditional turn-based, Devil Survivor's battles are fun and satisfying. The tactical movement phase works like any other strategy RPG you can think of, with a variation in the demons' class support skills, which can increase your movement or heal your party and can really make a difference in do-or-die situations. Once locked in combat, however, it switches over to the 3-on-3 turn-based phase, which would be pretty basic if it weren't for the Extra Turn system, which is essentially yet another deviation of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne's Press Turns. Extra Turns are granted both seemingly at random at the beginning of encounters and by exploiting enemy weaknesses, giving the battles some needed tension. Taken apart, neither phase of battle seems all that interesting but together they make a very addictive little monster.

The game is also quite difficult in places, especially in the many instances of “escort” missions, where you will have to protect some innocent civilians from being demon food. Some of the boss battles can also be overwhelming at the cost of feeling cheap, which adds more than its share of unfortunate frustration. However, the game is lenient in a sense by giving you free battles that don’t consume time, but with the number of tactical options the game gives you, success is probably only a particular demon skill away -- as esoteric as it might be. If you did have the needed skill at some point, it's a shame there's no compendium so you can just buy the needed demon back immediately.

Speaking of skills, added skill flexibility is given with the Skill Crack system, which allows human party members the chance to target a specific enemy and take one of its skills upon defeat. Cracked skills are then put into a common pool the party can switch and swap out from. While this is the only way the human members can learn new moves, it's still amazingly flexible and a welcome change from past games where removed skills were forever lost.

The Cathedral of Shadows returns for more demon fusing and is complemented by a new Devil Auction system. The Cathedral works nearly the same as always, only you can choose every skill you want a new demon to inherit instead of rerolling for hours, which is a huge improvement. A search functionality lets you see the exact formulas to fuse specific demons, which also saves you the trouble of needing a FAQ. The big, disappointing tradeoff is that there is no compendium, so once you fuse away one of your demons, they are gone until you fuse them again.

However, this is where the Devil Auction comes in, and it works exactly how it sounds. The demons you'll bid on put themselves on the auction block, with the topical reason being that work seems to be hard to come by. Also bidding on these unemployed goat-worshippers are three "opponents" that only exist to ensure you don't win them for pocket change. Though all demons have a "buy it now" price, it's very easy to raise an instantaneously winning bid above what the other bidders will pay and below the buy it now price, which makes this evil spin on eBay seem more like a store than an auction house – as long as you have the cash. As you buy and successfully pay for more demons, you'll get access to higher level ones, so there is a reward for being a good customer. One thing to look out for is that demon selection is finite but also refreshes every 30 minutes in-game, which is good encouragement to move the story along.

Devil Survivor’s 2D graphics are about what you’d expect from a strategy RPG, with enough detail that you’d probably recognize the Tokyo locales if you knew them. While the aforementioned character designs are rather bland, the real highlight on the art front again is Kazuma Kaneko's demon designs, many of which have never been seen before in a game released outside of Japan. Disappointingly, the game's music is poorly  implemented. While a lot of it is either inoffensive or actually pretty good, an irritatingly cheesy rock track plays for most of the battles, so it may be in your best interests to mute your DS until you get to cutscenes or a boss.

Despite it being on a portable, Devil Survivor is anything but a watered-down Shin Megami Tensei experience. The strength of its plot choices and the addictiveness of its gameplay are reason enough to endure through some uneven difficulty spikes and other blemishes that keep the game from a universal recommendation. Nonetheless, for the Megaten initiates, Devil Survivor is another addictive romp through the oft-smoldering cityscape of Tokyo.