Holy COOOOOOW! Finally finished
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor.
I really liked this game. Actually, I liked it so much that I decided to play through all five endings (there's also a sixth ending which is essentially a
non-standard game over and which I also got). The game actually has a New Game + feature, which allows you to keep everything but your player levels (I'm not sure why your players drop back down to level 1; I guess it's to allow you to play the game through the "normal" way again (i.e. starting out with low-level demons and gradually building up to high-level ones) if you want to.)
My one gripe about the game is that the first five chapters play out nearly identically, regardless of what path you choose. This isn't a big deal until I reached the third playthrough, at which point I wished there were some way to just jump to chapter 5 and be done with it. There are actually a few things you can do differently which actually affect the story, but these mostly involve letting various characters die. Causing even a fictional video game character to die just for my own amusement feels wrong, though, so I didn't. However, the corollary to this is that you shouldn't get too caught up in trying to do things perfectly the first time through; even if you manage it, that just means there's little for you to improve on in any future playthroughs.
I guess to continue on with this gripe, one of the things which makes the game so monotonous is that the majority of your dialog choices actually do very little. I think there may be some point system behind the scenes which affects which endings you get to choose from, but on my final playthrough I tried my hardest to give what I thought was the most wrong answer, and the only result was that at best some dialog would change, and at worst nothing at all would happen.
These complaints only start to really manifest on the fourth or fifth time through, though. It's sort of like complaining that Chrono has to go through the Millennial Fair each new game in Chrono Trigger. Maybe so, but it's still a great game, and it only becomes a problem once you've played it enough to memorize it anyway.
Also, a couple of the endings are really depressing. For four of the endings I think the game does a decent job of not making any one end the "best", but naturally I chose the ending which seemed most appealing first, and went in decreasing order from there until I wound up with the two endings I was least enthused about on my last two playthroughs. It's funny how I actually had to tell myself "dude, you're
trying to get this ending" when my natural inclination was to go a very different direction.
Fans of Front Mission games in particular or tactical RPGs in general will probably like this game; I certainly did. The music is quite good, the gameplay is excellent and challenging, the story is nuanced and interesting, and the characters inspire empathy. I recommend Devil Survivor highly.
