Devil Survivor’s number one goal is to make the player feel like they’re playing something cool. It has this aesthetic I haven’t seen in many other games which I continually referred to as “trashy anime” while playing - it’s so over the top, so stupid, so edgy, that it actually tips the scale back to being kind of amazing. I love the main character’s stupid fucking cat headphones, I love Naoya’s weird-ass cloak. I sincerely regret not recruiting the playable Black Frost, and I love that there’s even an option to use a demon as a main party member. There's only so far this charm can go before it dissipates, though. I found the heavy sexualization of the women in the game who are overwhelmingly minors to be disgusting, though. Devil Survivor’s writing reeks of misogyny - the most present woman in the game, Yuzu (a character who I’m sure capital g Gamers were very Normal about in 2009) spends most of the game either whining about wanting to go home, or fawning over the protagonist. At first, I enjoyed Yuzu’s trepidation towards the whole act of demon summoning. I found it to be somewhat realistic to how someone might react in a similar situation in real life, but it became clear over the course of the narrative that Yuzu was not going to get any big character moments throughout the story to grow. Her ending is pretty insultingly bad, in my opinion. A complete waste of a potentially interesting character.

Generally, I found the writing in Devil Survivor to be kinda hit or miss. They do a good job framing the narrative with interesting plot devices like the Death Clocks and Laplace Mail, but the game’s pacing removes all the interesting tension that those devices could create. This game’s midsection, especially days three four and five, are dreadfully boring, with little of note happening aside from the boss fights. The player just kind of aimlessly wanders around Tokyo, talking to random NPCs to pass the time and lock in their alignment. Devil Survivor’s pace in general is just far too slow - I hate being that guy who needs a speed up button to play RPGs, but without the handy-dandy space bar I seriously don’t think I would’ve been able to finish this game. Though, when the writing hits, it hits. I love how they handled routes in this game - there are no routes that felt objectively bad (aside from Yuzu’s), and I appreciate that the game lets you select which route you want instead of just thrusting you into whichever one your alignment score matches up with. Unfortunately, this doesn’t salvage any of the game’s pacing problems, but at least after slogging through painfully slow and unfun battles you’re rewarded with something cool sometimes.

Before I get into the gameplay, I should note that I played through Devil Survivor using a strength build. According to the few fourteen-year-old GameFAQs threads I read about this game, this is the shittier build compared to magic. It definitely tainted some of my experience. I did the Naoya route as my first (and probably only) playthrough, and two out of three of my party members going into the endgame were using physical skills, those being Atsuro and Kaido. With my MC taking all the good physical skills and Naoya gorging himself on literally all of my magic based skills, I was left with Kaido taking all the non-preferred physical skills and poor Atsuro being forced to use support magic, something he’s not very good at. I ended up kind of loving this team aesthetically, but it was miserable to slog through the seventh day with just the main character, Naoya, and what essentially amounted to dead weight.

Most SMT games require little to no grinding thanks to demon fusion - all you really need are three demons that are around the player character’s level. Swapping out demons for boss fights is easy because you only need to create three demons at most. This entire approach is lost in Devil Survivor because the player is deploying eight individual demons in every battle. Deceptively, this causes the game’s most frustrating problem: in order to create stronger demons, you’ll usually be fusing demons from your rotation of eight. When you create a new demon, odds are you will then need to fill a vacant slot on a character’s team. Mind you, there’s no Compendium in the DS version of this game, which drastically changes the way the player interacts with fusion. Any demon that you’ve leveled is essentially lost forever if you fuse it away. You can fuse the demon again, but you’ll have to re-level it to relearn all of its skills. So, you must use the Demon Auction system to bolster your roster for fusion. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if demons weren’t so expensive, but in the late game, demons become absurdly expensive and thus necessitate grinding Free Battles to be able to afford them. Not only that, but Free Battle grinding is further necessitated for cracking skills and leveling your team for the many absurd late-game spikes in difficulty.

Speaking of difficulty spikes, the spikes in Devil Survivor are pretty egregious. Having to run a boss rush of all the previous Bel demons into the final boss was stupid. It didn’t feel like my tactics were being challenged in any way, it was just abusing the game’s imbalance (Drain + Holy Dance) until I finally won. In general, I strongly disliked that Devil Survivor was an SPRG, but my only experience in the genre is from Fire Emblem so I don’t really feel qualified to critique Devil Survivor’s implementation of the genre. The SMT-styled battles were pretty good, but nothing special.

Devil Survivor is like mainline SMT’s less cool younger brother who can do Tech Deck tricks - it's neat, but ultimately nothing of real value.

Un juego que realmente pone a prueba tus habilidades estratégicas con sus jefes duros de vencer. Un sistema de habilidades que te obliga a aprenderte las rutas de crecimiento de los personajes para poder aprovechar tus mejores habilidades, todo para que al final del juego acabes con builds rotisimas como Holy Dance + Extra One.
La historia también muestra el lado más oscuro de la humanidad, mostrando como la desesperación se apodera de todos en una situación de encierro. El uso de los trasfondos de los demonios para contar la historia de los personajes y el uso de historias biblicas poco exploradas como La Torre De Babel o Cain Y Abel hace que los eventos te tomen por sorpresa en cada revelación que ocurre en los distintos finales del juego.
Mi única queja es qur en el New Game Plus tu personaje regresa al nivel 1 a diferencia de otros juegos, obligandote a farmear nuevamente para usar tus mejores ataques, aunque esta vez al menos podrás fusionar libremente a los demobios de tu partida anterior, volviendo a los personajes humanos en algo extremadamente débil en comparación a tus aliados.

I love this game, it's great in every way. Overclocked is even better, but this version is special to me because it's how i discovered SMT when i was like 12.

I found out about it in a Club Nintendo magazine, the reviewers compared it to Death Note and TWEWY. At that time i didn't play RPGs (now one of my favorite genres), i found them boring except for Pokemon. I imagined cliche plots about medieval fantasy with magic crystals and prohpecies and shit, i was not into it at all (kinda funny considering Dark Souls has a medieval fantasy setting and it's currently my favorite game of all time).

But Desu 1 taking place in modern times and fighting using demons caught my attention and decided to play it.

I still remeber the first time i booted it up. It was night, i was playing it with headphones and hidden under my sheets. The fucking intro theme and text SCARED me enough to turn it off, i had to start playing it the next day in the morning.

A bit of context:

1) I used to be a MASSIVE pussy, like, i was not able to beat 1-1 in Re4 because i was too scared to progress. I couldn't handle scary shit AT ALL. I would eventually get over it years later by exposing myself to that stuff until it didn't scare me anymore. Now i love horror games and can play them without any issue but the side effect is that nothing scares me wich also kinda sucks :/

2) I grew up in a VERY religious family, one that ate up all the satanic panic garbage up. For example i couldn't play Doom because they tought it would LITERALLY SUMMON DEMONS to our house. And of course i believed it.

So yeah, not only the intro scared me to death, i also felt like i was doing something wrong.

Anyways, i loved it and i sucked really really REALLY bad at it, this was my first non-pokemon RPG, and it's not an easy one regarldless of your experience. Horrible teams, terrible stat spread for the MC, fucked up every event, getting stuck for months in a few bosses, getting the bad ending, getting the not-good ending, etc.

But i couldn't stop playing it because i was having too much fun and i eventually mastered it and beat it like a billion times.

It also shaped my taste in media, it improved my english a little bit (just a bit, what i know is self taught and this game and the AVGN were one of my main learning tools), and Naoya's edgyness was my first step to questioning religion.

It's probably the most important game i played in my life for all the effects it had later, it literally made my life better. It also helped me discover the Persona series, and Kanji's Social Link was ANOTHER thing that had massive influence in my early teens and made me a happier person.

Thank you for everything edgy japanase game with gravity defying boobs.

goopers... play this game if you LOVE little handhelds.... i LOVE my DS and i love shin megami tensei !!!!! the combat was pretty cool and the story was pretty cool but not cool enough for me to 100% new game plus it 5 times and fight lucifer superboss (wasnt super was kind of easy)

i think like its okay not ride or die but its pretty good and i wish atlus did cool things like this again i looove the vfx and sfx oh i love love loooove them but ATLUS SUCKS and they cant make their shit GOOD anymore WHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

https://twitter.com/rumblygoop/status/1662743683874127873?s=20 awesome ass image btw

Oh fuck I forgot about this game. Played it last year, was pretty cool and odd as my second SMT game and first I finished. Gameplay is pretty cool. I'm a big srpg guy so I enjoyed it. Skill slots felt a bit limiting at times and enemy skills got pretty wacky in terms of balance in the last half of the game. But overall I had fun. Story was pretty good too. I like the characters and Hero is a neat silent protag. I'm a bit torn on how story events are presented with picking and choosing which ones you get and which ones you miss. But each choice is usually pretty good resulting in some good character stories.