Fan of the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei series of games and for a 3ds game this does not disappoint. The grid based strategy element combined with different demon racial powers/abilities is a lot of fun and there are plenty of combinations and demons to mix things up. There is an element of replayability as there are 4 endings as well.

Pros
-Extensive cast of interesting characters
-Skill crack feature and selection of your own abilities gives you lots of options and strategies to use
-Multiple endings and huge compendium of demons makes the game easily replayable, as well as being able to fully customise the stars your main character gets on level up
-harder difficulty presents a decent challenge without becoming a marathon of restarting battles

Cons
-Paying for demons is a little bit lame, the auction can be unpredictable at times and stupid Carol J bids way more than her expected amount and then you don't get that 5 star demon boi you really wanted. I ended up using the Moneybags perk on every team during Day 2 so I didn't have to grind free battles
-Carol J
-All of Carol J's family

While I have a handful of issues with this game and the Septentrione arc felt like a chore at times, I can't bring myself to look into certain endings and say "Yeah this game sucked".
Maybe you just have to sit, remove any expectations and simply let the game do its thing the same way you do when you put on your usual brainless comedy TV series in the background.

The characters weren't handled very well for the most part, but if you take a moment to think and analyze their dialogues, a few actually have interesting motives/backstory/way of thinking. Makoto, Yamato, Anguished One and Fumi are my favorites in that regard. Io and Miyako had a nice arc as well, but I didn't care too much about them.

About the other characters... Despite the game being set in an apocalypse, it's written like a romcom, so yeah...
I can't bring myself to dislike any of them after so many hours played, they're good kids, but also they don't do too much, some are forever squished onto their tropes.

The Fate system is something funny because it both ignores and follows the main story. Depending on your actions and who you've talked to by that point, the Fates can be completely different and/or change a bit to give info you might have missed on previous Fate levels.
But it also suffers from the same problem Persona has with its Social Links. The characters' grow in Fate almost never reflects on the story, there was a point I was like "Why are you two fighting!? You made peace an hour ago!"

Though its still far from perfect, I enjoyed the sequel arc a lot and that's why I'm giving this game 4/5 stars. At least on that one you had various objectives and "mysteries" from the start rather than "Just beat up these guys and we will make up an excuse for a route split later" like in the Septentrione arc.
The way characters already know each other also helped in making things more entertaining.

About the gameplay itself, they improved the battle mechanics a lot (I miss the magnetite system though...), the OST was better than DeSu1's imo and there's a bit of more dialogue variety depending on the time/who you have talked to, so that made re-playing less boring.

(Oh also the fanservice got ranked up by 300% on this game. The MC is pretty much on a perpetual harem with every female character and even some male ones lmao. I personally find these kind of scenes funny, but it can be bothersome to others)

Same great gameplay as the first Devil Survivor but really falters when it comes to writing. The characters in the original were some of the most nuanced and well-written in any Megami Tensei game (yes including the Persona games) and really any JRPG I've ever played in general. The characters in this game tend to fall victim to one dimensional writing and an overuse of anime tropes. While the former is almost always bad, the latter doesn't have to be a bad thing. The newer Persona games employ quite a lot of anime tropes but the quality of the writing usually allows these characters to be likable and memorable. For another example, the Danganronpa games employ a lot of anime tropes but make them so exaggerated and so ridiculous that it creates an engaging and memorable experience in a kitschy sort of way. Most of the characters in DS2 are unfortunately neither likable, engaging nor memorable. The game is still enjoyable in terms of gameplay and the story works well enough to keep players entertained but the whole thing really falls flat in regard to characters - one of the main things if not THE thing that made the original stand out.

The changes made to the combat were great and I see some really unique ideas in the plot MegaTen never really attempted tackling, but the writing is mostly garbage. Seems to also be suffering from an identity crisis on what it wants to be.

It draws most of its inspiration from NGE and modern Persona, but doesn’t try to make its own identity otherwise. Interesting mesh, but the over abundance of anime tropes, way too many filler characters, and a plot that drags on for much longer than it should, it further clutters the product with nothing but incomplete concepts. Really disappointing, yet I’ve seen much, much worse.

I first started this game thinking I would find it inferior to the first game, which was my mindset going in and I didn't have any fun. But after I got past that, I had a wonderful time with it, it exceeds in its gameplay and honestly the septentrione arc is really good. I really enjoyed it on a second playthrough especially when on that second run I did Anguished One's route, really fucking good.
For as much as I don't like the Triangulum arc, I will admit it got me to cry a couple times, my god this game hits way different than the first game and I love it for that.
Good shit

As a big fan of the first game, I didn't really know what to expect going into this one hearing a lot of negativity about how it's not really as good as the first one. But now having beaten the game I wonder.... Why is everybody lying!?

While I am definitely not going to use this game to downplay how fantastic the first one is, because really it is still amazing, I found that this game built off of that game in the best way possible. With more demons, skills, and a lot more content, and a bunch of new mechanics that fit in almost perfectly with the loop that the first game established, this game feels like it truly lives up to, and even surpasses the original in more ways than one.

I do completely understand however, if someone were to prefer the tone/story of the first game. It is very tonally different, and not all of the story beats hit as hard, just due to the overall nature of trying to show a different side of the tragedy here. I don't find it to be necessarily worse however, frankly it would have been bad if they just tried to tell the same story again, or relied on the same beats, but if I'm being completely honest I really wasn't as immersed as I was in the first game, but I still definitely enjoyed it all the same. The last act here however, I found to be infinitely more interesting/engaging than the original games.

And another thing I really like about this game over the original is how its sort of structurally designed. In this game you get access to a whole bunch of party members pretty early on, all with different strengths and weaknesses, and you're given ample time to use everyone and figure out who you like in your squad. Very unlike the first game where you're kind of stuck with the same 3 for first half, a fourth for a little while, and then right at the very end they drop so many more on you, but its almost like what's the point at that point, I'm already set.

And bosses here are MUCH better. The first game pretty much shoved in every single boss fight in the last 15% of the game. Which I found to be a downright bizarre design choice for an rpg such as this, but this game thankfully has fun and interesting boss fights sprinkled all throughout the game, which created a more interesting day to day gameplay loop.

But both of these complaints from the first game, a la characters and bosses, were backed up pretty heavily by the excellent narrative, and it all did make sense within the story it was telling, and I will never try to undermine it for that. But at the end of the day from a purely mechanics standpoint this game no doubt takes the cake in my eyes. Tl:dr, play both of them NOW.

I've played this game so much in high school as it was one of the first SMT games I actually bought store front when it first released. I stopped playing after a while with only three more endings left, so I recently came back to finish where younger me left off.

While my opinion on the story may have changed over the years, the gameplay and the amount of content this game delivers was still enough to keep me invested. If you'd like to hear more on my overall thoughts, as well as what I think about Overclocked, you can read about it in a retrospective I've recently posted on my blog: https://artbycarlyh.wordpress.com/2024/05/04/human-of-bel-devil-survivor-retrospective-5-4-24/