My Strange Journey through Shin Megami Tensei - Devil Survivor Overclocked
My Strange Journey through modern Shin Megami Tensei (IV, IV: Apocalypse, V: Vengeance)
My Strange Journey through Shin Megami Tensei, Part 2 - Where I Actually Play Strange Journey (Redux)
I get why everyone was telling me to check out this one. It's good! I don't even have that many caveats!
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor: Overclocked is the 2011 3DS remake/remaster of the 2009 plain-DS game Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor. This timing puts it directly in the shadow of the infamous cash cow Persona 4, a point in time where Atlus was desperately trying to reach a broader audience with their many variations of "What If Pokemon Was Fucked Up" (and yes I know the actual release timings of the older games, let me have this). The DS also had an enormous user base.
In this context, yeah, of course Devil Survivor would be a relatively breezy, casual affair. On the other hand, this is like, what, nine months before Strange Journey? That game feels way more "hardcore", so maybe I shouldn't generalize Atlus's output in such a way. Though, if I were to simplify things into boxes labelled "casual" and "hardcore", I'd put Devil Survivor in the casual box... with the proviso that the endgame has an enormous difficulty spike.
Like modern Persona, the core cast is a bunch of super stylish and fashionable teens - this time, designed by Suzuhito Yasuda of Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and Bootsleg fame - hanging out together like it's an anime or something. I'm not sure if this was the intended effect, but the aesthetic meant I was blindsided by how genuinely serious the stakes of the plot become and how quickly they escalate. I wasn't really prepared for it to be tonally closer to mainline SMT than Persona.
The quick setup: as usual, demons have appeared in Tokyo. The government imposes a lockdown across the entire area circled by the Yamanote train line (for a broad USA equivalent, picture all of Manhattan). Our gang of goons must survive amidst the rapid breakdown of society, armed only with the Demon Summoning Program - self-explanatory - and the Laplace Mail, a morbid morning prediction of the day's events and death.
I'm glad I played this game together with a bunch of other SMT games, because it and 4 Apocalypse feel like strange mirror versions of each other. 4A is about the kids of the post-apocalypse making their way in an inherently hostile world. They have never known anything but life under the firmament with demons roaming the streets. Meanwhile, DS:O points the camera the beginning of the apocalypse. How many people, let alone teens on the town, would be prepared for the proverbial bomb to drop? The way each game approaches these ideas creates fascinating tonal contrast.
I noted in an earlier post that Apocalypse has an inconsistent tone, attempting to dual wield Persona-style anime friendship talk with the downright miserable conditions of the firmament. You get fucking whiplash going from Asahi weeping because her friends have been burned alive to grumbling about how Nanashi doesn't pay enough attention to her. Compare Yuzu, who starts freaking out early and basically never stops because the situation is indeed worth freaking out over. The handful of lighter asides play better in DS:O because they are more obviously a crumbling facade.
I don't think I'd call any of the characters "deep" or anything (as per usual with the franchise), but they work for the context. It's slightly (slightly) easier to buy characters like Keisuke immediately radicalizing to extreme ideologies because the entire world is basically collapsing in front of them. And he would come up with a bullshit explanation like "it's not me doing it, it's Yama's judgement". They're already bratty teens with heightened emotions, what's a little demon summoning and murder along the way?
(Aside: I fundamentally don't buy into the "your true character is what you do in extreme situations" concept. I tolerate it in fiction but it's a stupid idea in reality.)
There's a great scene in the back half of the game where, after having another freak out, Yuzu goes offstage to clean herself up. Obligatory Best Friend Atsuro immediately confides in the player character that he's freaking out just as hard but feels like he has to keep it cool in front of Yuzu lest she really lose it. And like, yeah, that is sure how it feels these days, doesn't it? We can all relate to things feel like they're getting too bad too fast. I'm not half a week into a demonic invasion, but it is half a year into the worst presidential administration I've experienced in my life.
There's that meme chart somewhere that's just like, all the noncommittal phrases millennials say to each other, right? If my buddy asks me how I'm doing, what else can I say other than, "oh, you know" or equivalent? Even if I want help or want to help, everything is too fucked to really get into it. Nobody trusts anybody anymore and we're all very tired. Maybe I would go nuts with the Demon Summoning Program and spend several hours grinding to fuse up my squad so I could kill guys in the street.
Speaking of, it's cool to see Press Turn (or more accurately, an offshoot of Persona's One More system which is itself an offshoot of Press Turn) adapted to the grid-based SPRG tactics style, since I love me some grid-based SRPG tactics. The format adds a bunch of minor wrinkles that intertwine and in aggregate really change how best to approach combat. Like a good battle system ought do, I suppose.
Since it's a tactics game, you're controlling way more units than any other SMT, though they're pared down to three skill slots each to reduce complexity. Each human party leader (up to four in a battle) has two demons as their wingmen and all of them can resummon from your stock if need be. Keeping eight to ten demons up to date means casting a wider net for guys you might not normally bother with lest you spend even more time grinding and fusing.
The Skill Crack system is a really cool balancing act. Demons learn and inherit skills the old fashioned way via levels and fusion, but to get a skill for your human party members, you have to make a called shot. At the start of the battle, you declare a skill you don't know currently on an enemy demon and which party member must defeat that demon. Only by fulfilling these conditions does the skill become available for use.
All party leaders have to drink from the same skill fountain; if I set Dia on Yuzu, nobody else can use it. All skills also have their own stat requirements, which really bit me in the ass because I was pumping the protagonist's magic stat at the cost of literally everything else. These limitations plus the scarce skill slots force you to keep characters to broadly defined roles, building your demons around their party leaders. It's neat!
But perhaps the most important element of the battle system is that you have information. I previously described SMT combat as basically a bunch of mini-puzzles about covering your weaknesses while discerning and exploiting your enemies'. That is still broadly true, but in DS:O you can always see exactly where the enemies are, what their move distance is, what skills they have, what their weaknesses are, and precisely how much HP and MP they have.
If I can see with my eyes that Jack Frost only has 3 HP left, then I know for sure that I can get him with one hit without wasting a spell even if it's my squishy mage punching him. But that's obvious, I don't need to explain that part. Being able to see enemy MP? Huge implications.
Think about it. If you're reading this, you've probably played RPGs before. Even in games like SMT where enemies largely have the same skillset as you, you know what they can do that you can't? Cast their biggest spells with impunity. They don't need to worry about petty things like "resource attrition", whether on the micro or macro scale. Battles are fast and numerous; I'm not sure encounters in 4 or V even have MP. But in Devil Survivor, the battles are self-contained and enemies have limited resources just like you. If MP is visible, defined, that means it can reach 0. If it bleeds, we can kill it.
So the humble Drain spell became my go-to option through probably the back 60% of the game. In other games with scarce curatives, it's more of a last resort with limited utility, but here? It's decently strong, Almighty (non-elemental), and hits both HP and MP for the same value in a system where you've usually got about twice as much health as magic. Damage, disruption, and healing all in one package. Pack the other two skill slots with whatever you want - doesn't matter how expensive they are, because Drain costs a mere 2 MP - and the Tokyo Lockdown ain't shit.
This did make combat rather same-y, which is not really what you want from a tactics game. But we've long established I am the kind of person who will optimize the fun out of the game. The objectives and setup vary enough that I didn't get bored at least, though DS:O has an extreme overreliance on escort missions. Sometimes it feels like if you don't pack a Wilder-type with Devil Speed to move extra spaces, you're just fucked on arrival. Some save-scumming occasionally became necessary to make sure I could hit some of those objectives.
I sucked my way all the way to the Neutral ending, because I just can't stop myself from being a shitty fence-sitter. I didn't want to become demon lord or the messiah, alright? Both sound like a real pain in the ass. I'd rather hang out with the hot rock singer. This seems to be closest to a scare quotes "true" ending (it's what the manga adaptation broadly uses), but one of the selling points of the 3DS Overclocked version was an extra 8th Day scenario... which only exists for certain other routes. Oops.
With the number of routes on offer and the ways in which you qualify for them, I see why people told me this is the most Obsidian-like SMT game. I did my best to rescue and be friends with as many characters as possible (as one does in this kind of game) and laughed out loud when the game presented me with a good five options that basically boiled down to, "Which faction would you like to support?" It's certainly more accessible than 4's narrow point margins for Neutral, but it does mean you don't need to commit to any decisions until that final inflection point.
What this means is that Devil Survivor got me. This is the first SMT game on the slate so far where I started up NG+ immediately after beating the game. Did I enjoy NG+? Absolutely not! But I enjoyed my first playthrough enough that it was not an immediately unpleasant proposition. None of the others I've played so far have managed that. I loaded up my overpowered squad and resumed sucking demons dry until it was time to once again choose whose ideology would drive the new world.
Yuzu's path - where you abandon everyone to save yourself and selfishly doom the rest of humanity - is considered by fans of the original to be the "Bad Ending"; my understanding is it's the only option available if you fail every side objective. Remakes and DLC for Shin Megami Tensei oft soften some rougher narrative edges, so I was curious how Overclocked's 8th Day scenario would try and rehabilitate this ending in particular. The end result is... fine, I guess?
Pick the selfish route and you get a good several hours of near every other character calling you out and telling you off. Your actions had negative consequences, and the only way to atone is to own up to it and face it head-on. This rings a smidge hollow since it's not as if these random teens had anything to do with causing the lockdown, but I suppose with great power comes great responsibility and all that. Everything turns out mostly okay by the end, and while it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth the same way Apocalypse did, it just feels kind of slight.
In the first post in this series I defended SMT's tendency towards flat characters, but it did kind of sting this time. I feel the main reason one might pick Yuzu's route in good faith is - if not necessarily empathy - then at least sympathy for her character as a normal person caught in an extreme situation. A bit more focus and specificity on her feelings would have been appreciated rather than Atsuro playing the "oohhh we can't tell her or she'll freak out" card again. At the very least give me some damn ending slides beyond "and it all eventually worked out"! Come on!!
I think this is the real frustration I've felt playing not just Shin Megami Tensei, but other noted Atlus games. All of them seem like they almost get to the mythical "there", and it stands out all the more because they're all largely built on the same bones. What if Metaphor was even half as pointed as SMTIV? What if Apocalypse had more relatable characters like Devil Survivor? What if Strange Journey was actually fun to play like SMT Vengeance? I ain't even touching Etrian Odyssey, I'm not that far gone yet.
There's an adage among critics and creatives: if you want people to love something, you make it good; if you want people to become obsessed with something, you make it almost good. If anything explains how and why the self-proclaimed Atlus Faithful persist through these games, perhaps it is this.
Next SMT in line... chances are it's Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker. See you again.
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