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The Shin Megami Tensei franchise has been around since the 1980s starting with the Famicom title Megami Tensei, allowing gamers to collect and amass an army of monsters before Pokemon was released for the GameBoy. Unlike Pokemon’s origin, which was based on creator Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood hobby of collecting insects, Megami Tensei and the rest of the franchise was inspired by Aya Nishitani’s Digital Devil Story. Most of the games in the franchise had a fantastic, dark story with deep game mechanics, and a difficulty curve that goes up as the story progresses.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor was the first game in the franchise to be release on the Nintendo DS and was well acclaimed by critics and fans alike. It started its own small franchise with the sequel Devil Survivor 2 (with an anime based on the sequel), and a 3DS remake titled Devil Survivor: OverClocked. Let’s take a look at the game where surviving a Monday was especially essential.

The story revolves around three high school students who become demon tamers, thanks to the protagonist’s all-around computer genius cousin, before the start of the Tokyo Lockdown, the government’s method of containing all demon activity until seven days have passed. During the seven days the party must recruit demons and tamers alike to eventually decide on everyone’s fate inside the lockdown. With multiple choices and endings the world can be saved or brought to Hell. The main story arc slowly reveals itself to the player and will require several playthroughs on different paths to see more of the plot, but if you know a bit of mythology then you may come to a conclusion after a few days in-game.

 

The game’s story is told through dialogue in a visual novel style. This allows players to choose from given dialogue lines when the main character is speaking which will unlock certain paths as the game progress, ranging from the final outcome of the story to the lives of selected characters you’ll meet during the seven days. This portion of the game also gives character development and back stories when certain choices are made. Like all other Shin Megami Tensei games there are more than just one ending. While most other MegaTen games had Law, Neutral, and Chaos endings Devil Survivor has six endings, some requiring conditions to be met.

 

The battle aspect of the game is similar to a number of strategy RPGs but with a few differences. During a turn a unit, consisting of a tamer and two demons, can conduct multiple actions aside from moving and attacking; they can also take individual actions from their skill list as well as swap out demons outside of the combat stage. The combat stage itself plays as a first person RPG battle segment, allowing the player to choose from the standard attack and defend commands as well as the skills taught to the demon and equipped to the tamer. During the combat stage both player and enemy parties can earn extra turns by either utilizing a weakness or performing a critical hit, which can add or subtract from the macca bonus at the end of combat depending on how the player makes their move. At the end of the combat stage the unit’s tamer will gain a magnetite bonus to teach moves from the skill pool, accumulated by cracking skills when defeating the selected enemy with the skill. The accumulated magnetite, however, has no gauge or indicator that shows how much was earned; only leaving the player to estimate by adding the percentage of magnetite, which is equal to the bonus percentage of the macca, earned at the end of every battle. Using the magnetite or just leave the demons as is will reset the amount to 0%.

 

Outside of battle there are other features aside from party/unit setup and character bios. Unlike most games in the series where demons are recruited by negotiating a contract in during battle they can be acquired though the Demon Auction Site, a demonic eBay that sells only contracts for a variety of demons the player has battle through the story. There the player can bid or buy a demon, some of which can better or worst than some of their normal counterparts. Players can also get more than one of the same species of demon. The other feature available at the beginning is Fusion. This feature gives the option of Fusion and Search, with Fusion just jumping into fusing demons (just standard binary fusion) and search to find exactly what demon you can create with a list of possible demons requirements. Like the auction site you can fuse multiples of one demon species except for unique ones that can only be gained via fusion.

 

While the demon designs were done by Kazuma Kaneko the art design of the main cast and human characters were done by artist Suzuhito Yasuda, illustrator of Durarara!! and Kamisama Kazoku. It is strange to see two different art styles in a game but it seems to work well without causing much of an artistic clash. While the humans have different poses and expressions the demons are static as the monsters from the first generation Pokemon games. The backgrounds in the visual novel portions and maps for the battles were nicely done with a progressive change from peaceful sites to streets filled with havoc and decay. The music is nice but since there isn’t much of a variety like it’s sequel it can get very repetitive.

 

This game is a fantastic title and it’s no wonder as to why it started the “Devil Survivor franchise”. The gameplay is fun, the story is well written, and the art direction, while static at time, is well done while giving a bit of a manga feel. The music, while having nice tunes, doesn’t have enough tracks to keep it from being purely repetitive. While it is fun to replay the game after completing an ending there isn’t much of a challenge since you carry all of your high level demons to the next playthrough. Otherwise a fun game and great addition for a MegaTen game for the DS line. Now there is only one thing left to do…