Devil Survivor 2 is a commodity

The original Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor for the Nintendo DS was one of my favorite games ever. Its cousin, SMT: Persona 3, sits beside it on any “Favorite Game Ever” list I’ll never be commissioned to make. Both of these games had highly hyped sequels, Persona 4 and the recently released Devil Survivor 2. Four hours into Devil Survivor 2, I can’t help but draw a parallel.

Persona 3 was one of the most authentic games I’ve ever played. It was rough at times, a little unpolished, but it put us in a world we were dying to explore, with characters who had that certain something that made them more than stereotypes. Persona 4 fixed nearly all of its problems, but this comes with a caveat: the game didn’t have as much soul. It felt more like a commodity than a piece of art. Persona 3’s edges had been whittled down to perfect, but you could tell that Persona 4 had been coolly designed to appeal to an audience, while Persona 3 felt like a labor of love.

This doesn’t make Persona 4 a bad game: it’s a fantastic title. But while P3 was a journey, P4 felt more like hanging out with your best friends. The negative parts had been peeled away so that there was nothing impeding your enjoyment of Persona 4’s world.

That’s the feeling I get from Devil Survivor 2: it feels like a commodity.

I have intensely positive feelings about the original Devil Survivor. Sure, it stumbles into heavy-handed forced grinding towards the end of its run time, but the story it tells, and the method it uses to tell it, is masterful. By forcing the players into an enclosed, desperate space and giving them strict time constraints, Devil Survivor created this atmosphere of fear and anxiety that video games so rarely try for. You had things to do, and you had a limited amount of time to do them in. This built tension: this made the game gripping, a white knuckle ride through the apocalypse.

Devil Survivor 2 feels like its developers looked at the first game, realized what worked, and slapped them onto a sequel. I’m not prepared to announce the game as schlock just yet; this is not a review, merely impressions (I’m a games blogger, not a professional reviewer: I will take my time with games I have emotional attachment to). But what I’ve realized is that this is game design as commodity: taking what works, getting rid of what doesn’t, to the exclusion of common sense.

Devil Survivor’s plot involved a lockdown. You were stuck in Tokyo, and, furthermore, the death clock established that there was a time-sensitive mystery to solve. Everyone was going to die in six days, and you couldn’t leave the area; people outside the area weren’t going to die then, so your choice was clear: escape the lockdown or defeat what was going to kill you in six days. There was urgency to this.

Here’s Devil Survivor 2’s hook: an “earthquake” nearly kills you, you learn you can summon demons through your cell phone (less deliciously meta than Devil Survivor’s summoning handheld, which was an actual DS), and, after a brief run in with a mysterious organization, you defeat a completely random boss ripped straight from an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion. That’s all on the back of the box, btw, besides you beating a monster, which…well, it’s a video game. Of course you punch some awfully named thing in the mouth.

The time mechanic returns, but this time it feels hopelessly out of place: there’s no narrative urgency. There’s no indication the world is going to end at the end of the week. While Devil Survivor created its urgency through narrative device and then backed them up with game mechanic, DS2 only has mechanic. There’s mystery, but there’s no urgency. It doesn’t play up the immediate threat (nightfall in a panicked city full of demons would suck), and it leaves me wondering why I’m worried about time.

Its attempt at creating tension and immediacy is its death videos, which show you how people are going to die. None of these have the same time stamp as Devil Survivor’s similar Laplace Mail, which gave the player agency: you knew when someone was going to die, so you could stop it. The death videos show you where and how someone’s going to die, but not when. As such, there’s no indication of whether or not there’s a time constraint. This created a very awkward situation early in the game where I saw a death video of a character, then proceeded to dick around until the time we were supposed to meet with them. I went to the meeting, fully expecting that I’d show up on time, save them, and everything would be peachy. Instead my characters made the dumbest choice imaginable: instead of waiting for the guy to show up, they went outside, wasting the event. I go back to the map screen and I have to pick a battle called, “Too Late” where they die solely because my characters made an utterly absurd choice I was not telling them to do.

I reload the game (subtle complaint: multiple save files has made this a much more forgiving game, like Devil Survivor: Overclocked. That said, I’m thankful for it here), going to the meeting thirty minutes sooner. The victim isn’t there a half hour earlier, so we go outside again. This time, however, when we go back in at the time I went originally, he’s there. This sort of internal inconsistency drives me off the wall. Games cannot be urgent unless they are consistent: we must know exactly what we did wrong every time we do. Here I did nothing wrong: my idiot characters did. It’s the thing that’s going to torpedo Devil Survivor 2‘s chances of capturing my heart like the original did: it’s urgency is solely mechanical, and game mechanics can be misunderstood.

Before I close, let me touch on the characters briefly. Devil Survivor 2 pulls a Pokemon with the original’s cast. Want to be a generic heroic male with an insecure, large breasted female and a kind of nerdy guy? Want to recruit an unassuming, technically responsible male and cosplayer next? Surprise! You are! Sure, the specifics are changed: Daichi is Strength/Agility as opposed to Atsuro’s Strength/Vitality (and he is much less nerdy) and Io is Magic/Strength as opposed to Yuzu’s Magic/Agility, but you get the picture. Worse is how little personality these characters have. Yuzu might have been a stereotypical female anime lead who liked fashion and rejected the bullshit that was going down, but she at least sold those stereotypes. Atsuro at least loved computers. I could tell you exactly zero traits Daichi has, despite him being my best friend. Io is shy and has awkward breasts, which aren’t a problem except there her only trait. Add to this mess “Joe” and Keita, who are possibly the two most annoying RPG characters I’ve ever seen, and you’ve got a clusterfuck of a story developing.

(An aside: I actually started to like Joe not because of anything he’s done but rather because I’m reading him as a commentary on female anime characters. You know the type: the female character who’s scatterbrained, has absolutely no idea of the urgency of the situation, and is just generally airheaded. The kind who want to go to an amusement park while someone you know is about to die because “I used to have fun here.” Yeah, that’s Joe. Except he’s not a lady. Read as social commentary he becomes an incredibly incisive character. He’s the highest point of the game, but that’s another post.)

I’m still playing Devil Survivor 2. It’s beginning to grip me, it’s status as a soulless commodity aside. It could open up in hours 5 through infinity, certainly: I have faith that it will, like Persona 4 before it. Like Devil Survivor 2’s introductory scene it’s straddling the line between trainwreck and exciting, logic-defying happening: why am I still playing a grindy, tension-free take on a better game that completely lacks any character I can empathize with? Devotion or morbid curiosity, I can’t decide.