A fusion of Shin Megami Tensei’s (SMT) Press Turn battle system and classic strategy RPG gameplay, Devil Survivor plays out on smaller more tactically oriented maps. Choosing to focus more on the things that make SMT great, team building an strategic turn based combat, rather than deep and complex strategic scenarios.

This is a winning combination, the smaller maps allow for precise gameplay with most missions taking about 15 minutes to complete. Like SMT battles it’s often clear from the outset if you were prepared or not.

The story plays out in a visual novel fashion, again highlighting SMT gameplay staples: time systems and branching paths. In any given day you can pick where you spend your time, at the expense of other opportunities, ultimately the decisions you make change your characters paths, who joins your part, and what endings are available to you. It’s all over the top and a little silly, but I enjoyed the high stakes and slowly building tension.

Overall, while the game starts off a little slow, this has become one of my favorites in the Shin Megami series.

I got maybe 3/4 through this one but didn’t have the stamina to finish.

There’s a lot to like here. The game is charming, cute, and well voice acted. There’s monster hunting and monster evolution for team building and all the designs are unique and interesting.

But the combat is a complete mess. You have a team of three (main character, two monsters). Everyone has a couple of skills. Battles play out in real time and involve switching between each character using skills to hit enemy weaknesses and keep everyone healed up. The problem is that it’s hard to see what’s happening, switching characters all the time makes it harder, and it’s just not very much fun.

Other big problems are that the map is a mess and navigating it can be a chore (I recall getting stuck on a quest where I couldn’t find the right tiny land bridge to cross a valey and explored that valley over and over looking).

And lastly leveling up for team is a GRIND. Which if the battle system was fun could be fine but it’s not so it’s bad.

I have deeply mixed options of this game. The writing is very clever and the story has many twists and turns. But I found the gameplay dreadfully dull. I think this comes from a couple of issues:

First, there is no player agency in the story. The story is non-linear but it isn’t branching. Your actions have no impact on the outcomes in either the visual novel section nor the strategy game component. This makes a lot of the game feel like reading a book with some hidden picture elements.

Second, the strategy portion has only shallow ties to the story. It feels tacked on to give some gameplay into the game, not integral to the game. You could remove all the strategy game parts and I don’t think the overall game would feel any different.

I don’t know. I think radiant historia did the time line stuff better and the ninology trilogy did the visual novel stuff better. This feels like they didn’t quiet stick the landing.