King Critter’s World

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor — for Nintendo DS

This game is, in some ways, very reminiscent of The World Ends With You. They’re both set in Tokyo, they both involve a 7-day countdown, they both have time limits for each mission, and they both have to do with the afterlife/underworld.

Devil Survivor, however, plays completely differently. It’s a tactical RPG with many layers of depth. You control a party of up to four humans. Each human is accompanied by two demons. There are no “action points” like some tactical games. Instead, you can take every action once per turn, in any order.

For example, you can cast a defense-boosting spell with one demon, and offence boosting spell with the other, then move towards an enemy, then attack the enemy, then cast a healing spell with the human.

Yes, all on one turn.

Demons are are like Pokemon, only cooler. But these creatures don’t come in poke balls — they’re bought and sold in a market. Any demons you defeat in battle are sent to the market. You then can buy them — bid on them, actually. Computer players bid against you, and can win if you’re stingy with your cash.

But not all demons can be bought — the really awesome ones have to be created. You can fuse demons together to form new type. This requires some strategy in order to get the best carry-over of stats and spells from you old demons to the new one.

Speaking of spells, it’s rather interesting how you learn new ones. Your demons learn them automatically, but your human party members have to fight for them. At the beginning of every battle, you can set the “skill cracks,” where you assign a party member to a particular demon’s skill. If you defeat that demon with that party member, you “steal” the selected spell. You can only assign three spells at once, per character, so your extra spells go in your skill folder. You can reassign them to your hearts content outside of battle.

Battles are interesting. You first choose what each of your fighters (your two demons and the human) are going to do. Then every body springs into motion and blasts the hell out of each other with crazy-awesome (and very pretty) spells. There’s six elemental types, to which every demon can be weak or strong against (or absorb, block, or reflect). Likewise, every spell is aligned to one of those elements.

After everbody finishes their move, each combatant gets a chance at an extra turn. These are awarded for doing certain things, such as scoring a critical hit, absorbing or reflecting a spell, or just being lucky. After the extra turn (if there is any) combat ends.

tl;dr: This game is awesome. If you like RPGs and/or tactical games, I suggest you rent/buy/pirate the game right now.