My Strange Journey through Shin Megami Tensei - Devil Survivor 2 Record Breaker

Previous SMT Posts

Should I have gone directly into the sequel of one of the better SMTs I've played yet rather than let myself breathe? Probably not, but here we are.

On the previous post about the first Devil Survivor, Artix commented that DeSu2 was a "better game, worse experience", and I think that pretty much sums it up in a way more succinctly than I could. But I suppose (I hope) you look at this website because you care about the random tangents and shit I'll inevitably go on while explaining myself. Seeing as I write these posts in an attempt to improve at the skill of explaining myself, I appreciate you. Thank you for reading.

Devil Survivor 2 feels like a classic iterative sequel. There are more characters, more demons, more abilities, et cetera. It's bigger and better baby! It even does the good sequel thing of following a completely different core cast; not a single character from DeSu1 appears throughout the entire story. There's a lot here to appreciate and in many ways this might be a better intro to the Shin Megami Tensei metaseries than the first game.

Like any follow-up, it's caught in the unenviable position where it must balance familiarity and novelty. Iterative sequels are hard to pull off. They often aren't evaluated positively without the benefit of hindsight. Like, mechanically, Tears of the Kingdom is a "better" game than Breath of the Wild in every way... but it just can't capture that same mindspace. The particular weirdness of Dark Souls 2 inspires arguments to this day.

The main exception, I think, is when something manages to break containment and become the go-to gateway entry. My brain immediately flicks not just to massive breakout hit Persona 5, but the Persona subseries in general. It's like an order of magnitude more popular than mainline SMT, let alone any other given SMT spinoff. Hell, I started with Persona 4 myself, and that perspective has certainly colored how I view all these games.

The first Devil Survivor feels like Atlus were trying to make a more accessible Shin Megami Tensei spinoff; Devil Survivor 2 feels like they were trying to make a portable Persona spinoff. That feeling, more than anything else, informs much of why I find Devil Survivor 2 to be kind of disappointing. It feels like looking back at a harbinger of the current age, an age where Atlus kinda feels like they've given up on trying anything new. I can't necessarily blame them for that - like FromSoftware, they found their golden formula and are simply sticking to it - but I don't have to approve of it either.

2 takes the basic setup of the first Devil Survivor and cranks it past the proverbial 11 to something like 13 or 14 while still attempting to make use of the same base elements, losing focus on what was compelling about the premise as a result. DeSu1's Tokyo Lockdown and its sense of being the proverbial final levee holding back the flood is tossed out in favor of an immediate cataclysm that casts the entire world - other than Japan, natch - into the Void. The ominous future-telling Laplace Mail and ambiguous Death Clock are replaced by the "Nicaea" app that sends gratuitous videos of party members meeting their gruesome ends. Rather than literal angels or demons, you're fighting alien space monsters.

By the time you join a mysterious organization with unlimited money dedicated to stopping the metaphysical apocalypse via sortieing teenagers, Jack Frost's dopey grin is the only thing preventing the copyright office from scratching "Shin Megami Tensei" off the cover and writing in "Neon Genesis Evangelion". That's not necessarily a bad thing - Evangelion is one of the most influential anime ever - but something about it didn't click for me.

Evangelion's whole thing is that it takes standard tokusatsu/mecha tropes and wraps them up in some amazing visual design, interesting character studies, and enigmatic Gnostic terms, the last of which in particular helped it gain a fervent foothold westward where Christian symbols are deeper in the cultural DNA. Shin Megami Tensei is already concerned with the cross-section of militarism, myth, and mysticism as part of its basic premise. As early as 1992's SMT 1, the United States was fighting demons with guns and missiles. It's old hat for the series.

So DeSu2 gets caught in this weird position where by cribbing the plot structure and some visual design elements from Evangelion, it can no longer feature - for example - capital-a Angels as part of the plot, lest it get a bit too close. Angels and the forces of the Judeo-Christian God are a hugely important faction in almost every single other SMT game I've played including the first Devil Survivor. Replacing them with extradimensional space aliens feels off.

By using symbolism from existing myth and religion, SMT apocalypses tend to have a sense of grim inevitability about them. The conflict was going to happen sooner or later; it's just that the characters are unlucky enough to be the ones stuck in interesting times. There was tension around the Tokyo Lockdown, a creeping dread. The attack of the Septentriones instead tries to balance imminent obliteration with making sure you can hang out with your buddies between missions. It feels like a tack better suited for a different subseries.

Instead of Angels and Devils, our obligatory Law and Chaos routes are represented by Sanctimonious Cop and Social Darwinist Twink, both so dickish in their comically extreme yet paper-thin ideologies that making nice with either seems absurd. Which I suppose is par for the franchise, but the tone and context changes a lot. I'm presumably meant to actually like these characters rather than treat them as ideas. Otherwise they wouldn't have relationship events, right?

Eternal fence-sitter that I am, I ended up choosing neither and went with one of the Neutral routes. Specifically, the one where you team up with Mysterious Space Twink (definitely not Kaworu from Eva) to tear down the system perpetuating the endless cycle, et cetera et cetera. I only had to personally kill the two faction reps (which to be fair is still fewer former party members dead than my first playthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses). Everyone else was willing to immediately toss out their ideologies in the wake of my overwhelming protagonist charisma and my willingness to punch them in the face until they agree friendship overcomes all.

I called the first Devil Survivor a mirror to 4A, but this one might as well be its twin. The tonal contrast between the two is almost exactly the same as between SMT4 and 4: Apocalypse. The core cast is larger and more boisterously characterized as a cavalcade of recognizable anime stereotypes dolloped with a heavy helping of hang-out-itude. There are like two or three times as many adult women who join your party. It's great! Sometimes! Other times, the whiplash somehow hits harder and faster than ever.

In an attempt to capture a bit of Persona's popularity, DeSu2 has "Fate" events, which are pretty much identical to Social Links: clearly delineated steps of character development punctuated with mechanical bonuses. Understandable enough; it gives more opportunity to flesh out the cast and their broader dynamic with each other. But because certain characters can permanently die and the player can choose when and whose Fate event they're seeing, they don't mesh properly.

Persona largely gets around this issue by taking place over a full year or so, where there's leeway to allow characters to be unavailable for decent stretches of time. Devil Survivor 2 takes place over about a week, like the first game, and crams in way too much. We shoot straight past melodrama and into unintentional parody.

For example: quite early on, I got one of Io's Fate events where she comes across her mortally wounded mother, who says with her dying breath that Io's father is also dead. It ends with Io on her knees wailing in sorrow. Less than 24 hours later, when the party must sneak into a building to prevent fellow party member Jungo from being murdered by rioters, Io suggests "Operation Cardboard Box". She gets a whole series of unique sprites during the next battle where she is sneaking around under a cardboard box, popping her head up to talk to people and everything. Whether or not Jungo was just beaten to death.

It's funnyI I enjoyed it! But also, who the fuck decided this was a good idea?

Is this our only alternative to Yuzu freaking out about the impending apocalypse every 6-8 in-game hours (which, again, I did not mind)? Simply ignoring any of the narrative stakes until it's convenient? Deployed correctly in the right context, I love tonal dissonance and bathos, but damn. Devil Survivor 2 feels unhappy being stuck not just as a Devil Survivor game but as a Shin Megami Tensei game.

Well, fine. I recalibrated my brain right then and there to no longer take anything in the game too seriously. I put it on the same level as that point in any given (modern) Persona game where you're hitting mid-to-late summer and everyone's in vacation mode because the real plot has stalled out. Might as well slap bikinis on everybody all the time; it's not like Hinako's design would change much.

I recognize that "wah wah it isn't SMT enough" is a complaint I can only make because I'm playing this immediately after playing five-to-six other SMT games in 2025 and forming weird opinions about them. If I played Devil Survivor 2 at the same time in my life I had played Persona 4 (a chronological impossibility), I would have absolutely latched onto it. I get the appeal.

And you know what, Devil Survivor 2 beats out Persona in some places. I can ogle and stack the party with competent adult women instead of horny teens. I can meticulously tweak everyone's builds instead of just my own. There's no wacky little mascot in the party. Practically paradise!

As with the first game's Overclocked version, I played the 3DS remake ("Record Breaker") of the DS original. Unlike the first, I don't think I would have finished this one if I didn't have access to the obligatory Atlus DLC grinding maps (which I have made ample use of across this entire blog series). I spoke to at least three of my friends who all dropped DeSu2 in its back third, and I'm acutely aware why they might have done so. Hell, I would have dropped DeSu1 if I hadn't been working on this series.

Let me be clear: pretty much every aspect of the moment-to-moment gameplay in 2 is an improvement on 1 in ways that only an iterative follow-up can manage. There are more varied tactical objectives, way fewer escort missions, and some neat additions to the skill system like evolving passives. What isn't improved is the absurd difficulty spike toward the endgame, which is a consistent problem across the whole series.

I made use of the DLC grinding maps early and often and spent most of the game overlevelled, easily stomping through most encounters. So when I reached the endgame and suddenly ran into enemies at or above my level, I took pause. If you were playing the original NDS version or simply didn't purchase the DLC, your only grinding recourse would be the normal free battles and their ever-diminishing return of experience points. Staying on level curve would be incredibly tedious. And I'd know, because I did it the old-fashioned way in Overclocked.

Last time I spoke on the idea that games of this stripe give you access to a lot of information about the enemy team, which is notable in a Press-Turn-Derived context where much of the tension revolves around ferreting out elemental weaknesses. They can do the same things you can at the same levels of power, so your tactics (and your level grinding) are the deciding factor. This is also part of the mechanical appeal behind any "monster collecting" game, and SMT is one of - if not the - progenitor of that genre.

Obviously any game with battles in it can be boiled down to "how am I using my tools to solve this problem", but how common is it for the game to use the exact same tools against you? If you can think of an example that isn't a tactics game or a monster game, let me know. Combining the two is an inspired decision that I'm sure has other examples I'm blanking on, but at this moment and second Devil Survivor is the only one I can think of. It fills an unfilled niche.

The cool intricacies of such a system did not prevent me from abusing not only NG+ privileges but also straight up cheat codes when it came time for the extra 3DS Record Breaker content. I expected something fairly short, since Yuzu's epilogue in Overclocked was maybe 3-5 hours of gameplay. I had no idea I was walking into a whole 20-hour sequel game when I started up the new Triangulum arc.

I should have known, seeing as I'm coming off the triple threat of V: Vengeance, 4: Apocalypse, and Strange Journey Redux. It's a running joke at this point that modern Atlus cannot commit to sad or even bittersweet endings. Every re-release, add-on, or follow-up is going to have the Obligatory DLC Girl who always brings along a new happy ending in her lunchbox, contingent on reaching the bottom of the new gauntlet. I've seen it happen before and it will happen again.

The form this takes in Record Breaker is picking up after the base game's other Neutral ending, where you push the reset button and return to the "normal" world without the threat of imminent apocalypse. Except, oh no, in this world there are even meaner aliens here to kill everyone! It's time to put the band back together... minus Social Darwinist Twink, who's been mysteriously replaced by Trolley Problem Domme. I'd consider that an improvement already.

To get the most out of the Triangulum arc, it's best to think of it as a sort of postscript victory lap. We can treat the cast as friends even though it's literally impossible in the Septentrium arc to get a situation where everyone agrees. The characters exist in their final forms and can bounce off each other without spending half the game establishing them one by one. The NG+ style premise is an opportunity to dig just a bit deeper into how everyone feels about giving it another go.

There actually is some solid stuff once we get past the "now the girls are pop idols!" business. In the base game, Otome acts as the adoptive mother to her orphaned niece Koharu and we get some standard "busy parent with an important job" tropes. Koharu's parents are still alive in the new world, which everyone acknowledges as obviously a good thing, but Otome admits that she feels lonely and bereft of purpose without a daughter waiting for her at home. It's the kind of plot point that only works because of the time and distance across both arcs.

By the end, when every character ends up happy and content with no true sacrifice being made other than my own pain of slogging through another 20 hours, I'd reached a kind of peace. This game simply wasn't what I wanted it to be, whatever that even was. Because, well, what is Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker, conceptually? I'd been playing the remake of a sequel of a spinoff, probably made because marketing said Growlanser would sell fewer copies than Shin Megami Tensei. What's it supposed to be?

I noted last time that every one of these games has felt like an exercise in measuring how close they get to some kind of platonic ideal of what Shin Megami Tensei ought be, but that's still operating on the premise that Shin Megami Tensei needs to be a certain way. Perhaps Devil Survivor 2 is just trying to be the perfect form of itself, and I ought be celebrating that. If the dice had fallen differently, maybe it would have been the spinoff that made it big.

On the other hand, I got so fed up with Record Breaker's shit that I started (and finished!) a completely different game right in the middle of my playthrough. So.

Yeah, maybe DeSu2 is a good game and I'm just being mean because being mean is fun and easy. Maybe there are good reasons the metaseries has ended up where it is in the past 20 years or so. And maybe we'd all be better off if we got out of Persona's shadow and Atlus made some real swings for the fences, throwing out some weird shit that breaks old trends in ways people don't know that they want. It's worked out for them at least once or twice. I'd know, considering what I played.

Next on the Strange Journey: Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne.

HD Remaster.

...Starring Dante from the Devil May Cry series.

#games #rpg #SMT

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