Review: Shin Magami Tensei: Devil Survivor
So my current thing to watch while working has been the Persona 4 Endurance Run at Giant Bomb. After 40-odd episodes of monster battling and high school shenanigans I decided to try one of out and picked up the latest DS title.
Devil Survivor plays much like an Ogre Battle or other strategy RPGs. The characters form a party, deploy, and kick some demon butt while gaining experience and Macca, which can be used to purchase new demons. A fusion system also allows you to create demons with varying stats and skill sets. It gets very deep very fast and your first few levels feel more experimental than anything else. Just the kind of thing John would love.
Again, Ogre Battle felt like this to me and I never got into it because of that. However, Survivor doesn’t seem to be overly punitive when it requires experimentation. There’s an easy way to back out of any decision after checking the results and I never felt screwed in a combat because I didn’t optimize enough.
Presentation in the game is functional if not gorgeous, with isometric sprite-based maps for the strategy sessions mixed with the standard immobile-portrait-in-front-of-you schtick that RPGs have been doing since forever. Dialogue is done with talking heads, and the art work here and on the portraits is quite nice. The sound is competent but not as well done as disc-based Atlus games, obviously. Nothing here is really pushing the DS hardware, but everything looks clean and detailed.
Storywise, Devil Survivor is the bastard child of a JRPG and a B disaster movie. Basically demons are eating dudes, the government’s locked down the area, and you and your friends are surviving by summoning your own demons with modified DSes (yes, it looks just as goofy as it sounds, but the game has a bizarre logic that makes this work) and kicking some tail. The video game console also grants you magical demon ass-kicking powers, so your guys do some fighting as well. Take that, Pokemon guy. Most of the game is played through a menu of locations, with indicators showing that you can to go a place and either fight some dudes or get some plot or both.
Time passage also becomes important in the game, as in most Atlus titles. This time you’re gauging things by the half-hour, with events happening at specific times each day. Some things cost no time at all, and early on your party gets the ability to freely grind combats (allowing you some ability to rebuild if you fuse the wrong creatures, for instance) without advancing the plot.
None of these factors really sound stellar, but somehow they tie together to make something far greater than the sum of the parts. I started this up Saturday and my DS hasn’t been off since. Making new demons and tweaking their abilities becomes addictive very quickly, and the combat is enjoyable and relatively quick. Think Pokemon-style battles, not John’s recent “hit A until they all die” experiences. I’ve also never felt the need to grind anything, but have done so just to buy more demons at the auction house and fuse them into new things.
Recommended? It depends on what you want in a DS game. Survivor is a good pick up and play game, as most individual segments of gameplay run about 5 minutes or less and everything can be paused in the middle of the action. The demon auction feature literally takes place in 5 second spurts of bidding that feel like something out of Wario Ware. But, while the fusing system seems interesting and varied, I can see it growing stale if I have to fuse 8 different creatures for one result, or plow through a half-hour tactics battle. Until then I’m loving it. If you’re an Atlus fan or just looking for a somewhat different SRPG, this is likely going to be your game. No online multiplayer, which is weird with the whole emphasis on the wireless communication powers of the DS, but whatever. You’ll definitely get your $30 worth out of this.
Toodles.
