Devil Survivor Overclocked is a real fascinating game to revisit in 2022. Friends and I are revisiting it together and I've been really enjoying dissecting the game's attempt to adapt Shin Megami Tensei to tactics and its narrative around.. a government enforced lockdown. This is my 3rd attempt since 2011 to beat the game and maybe this time will be the one! Today we're gonna talk about the gameplay systems of Devil Survivor Overclocked! As a tactics genre entry, there's a very unique attempt to adapt Shin Megami Tensei systems to tile-based tactics. The depth for each of the 4 units you can deploy creates such a wide range of unit complexity that intertwines with classic Demon Fusion that SMT is known for. Onwards past the read more! A Persona(l) JourneyMy main history with the Shin Megami Tensei story begins with Persona 4 in the early 2010s. The main hook for me there was the social life systems interweaving with a solid RPG system. There's a long talk to be had about how I initially thought Persona 4 was transgressive at its time and a very formative work to me. But with distance I think it mostly ends up being an extremely poor take on LGBTQ+ themes and mostly a gracious accident that the writers made something sorta resonant on those themes. After Persona 4, my exposure to the SMT series is Persona 3 Portable, Shin Megami Tensei 4, Persona 5 and three separate attempts to beat Devil Survivor Overclocked since 2011. Oh, and also Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. Look, it's good. In the past few years, I played a high amount of The Masks We Wear, a tabletop system based on Persona by NatTwentea. That, notably, puts my focus on how one adapts a dense RPG system like the Shin Megami Tensei Press Turn System to a multiple unit tactics (or multiplayer tabletop) game. Cursed and Soulbound to Suzuhito YasudaDevil Survivor as a series is difficult to talk about without mentioning its artist Suzuhito Yasuda. They are known also for their character design in Durarara!!, Digimon Cybersleuth and.... Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? My personal thesis is: Suzuhito Yasuda is an artist that needs an editor I generally like a lot of works Yasuda is tied to and the idea of the character designs they create. He just needs someone to tell him to tone it down with the anti-gravity chest sizes. Yozakura Quartet is Yasuda's main side manga project, for which I have deep fondness for. It's a quaint action manga about a human-youkai town (though the recent Hana no Uta adaptation gets into deep trashy fanservice territory). Durarara!! was a foundational anime for me during the early 2010s and I still really enjoy that cast. Shizuo, Celty, and Izaya are all time character design icons and I still have the wall scroll of them from college stashed away somewhere. The works from Yasuda in the early 2010s show a distinct point where he still has some quirky edges to his art that will naturally be refined with experience. Unfortunately, that refinement would also be constantly increasing the Roundness of chests. Yasuda just truly needs editors that aren't bought in to fanservice designs, which in the grand scheme of marketing is hard to find. Still, major parts of Devil Survivor 1 and especially Devil Survivor 2 are distracting cause the character portraits have notoriously bad proportions centering on absurd chest size. A curious aspect in how his character concept has been editorialized is in the Digimon games. Due to needing a second artist to make models off the original portraits, the 3D version of the Cybersleuth characters tend to have reduced fanservice to them. The models are much less egregious as a result and more people should do this to Yasuda. Adapting RPG to TacticsBack to talking about gameplay! Devil Survivor, in adapting the SMT core to tactics, has to decide how to handle giving the player multiple units on a map. There's certainly a simpler version where the player only controls the player character and 3 demons, just like current SMT mainline games. This is the approach seen in entries like Pokemon Conquest, which I plan to visit for comparison.
When one of the teams 'attacks', both attacker and defender are pulled into mini-RPG encounters. Both sides can choose a round of actions and the order is resolved depending on unit speed. Depending on how units perform (hitting weaknesses, getting hit by an element your resist), a unit gains an Extra Turn and can perform another action. I think this is a really cool way to adapt SMT. Each 'unit' is operating as though they are a player team in the mainline games. The dynamic of a leader unit trying to implement a strategy, while supporting demons try to keep them alive and act as part of a strategy is constant through the game. Enemy units similarly adhere to team dynamics, which the player can take advantage of! While a supporting demon is alive, the leader will take reduced damage. If the leader dies before the supporting demons, all the supporting units die automatically. So the player is given an initial tactics choice*: attempt to rapidly defeat the leader unit and get rid of that team OR take out the supporting units to reduce their options & damage before tackling the leader alone. *For grinding purposes, it's most effective to not kill the leader alone, which does benefit specific AOE attack builds. An aspect of player favorability is that player units are not limited to just the support demons deployed at the start of a map. A damaged demon can be recalled and a new demon can take their place (or the place of a dead demon). And the demons of Devil Survivor can swing wildly in their utility thanks to their skills! Behold the Skill BucketIn battle, the player can freely see the skills and element resistances of all enemies currently present in battle. This is a major diversion from other SMT titles where all enemy information is obtained through trial and error. Part of this choice is the desire by designers to constantly deploy new enemy types while still being fair to the player in a tactics context. Also early in Devil Survivor Overclocked, Skill Cracking is revealed as a major system. At the beginning of battle, the player can target enemy skills with one of their team leaders. If that team leader lands the killing blow, the skill is added to a Skill List. Your leader units can freely equip one copy of skills from the Skill List as long as the unit has the stats for it. This is a major aspect of how team leaders get more powerful by unlocking more options for their equipped skills. Unit stats generally adjust the damage dealt by physical or magical skills and determine how fast an attack may come out but skills are where I want to focus on. Each unit in Devil Survivor Overclocked has a set limit of skills they can equip:
Active skills are par skills present across SMT games. You have element & physical skills with varied ranges along with ailment skills. The 'Dance' skills are unique to Devil Survivor and deal 2-5 damage instances to a random enemy. They're luck based skills but become surprisingly effective when used against lone leader units far into the game. Passive skills are where the skills begin to really play with the team building. There are simple skills to boost or reduce damage of certain elements. You then have skills that add a chance to apply ailments on physical damage (which synergizes really well with multi-hit moves). There's also the 'Soul' passive skills which allow either a supporting demon to take damage that would be lethal for a leader or vice versa. The Soul skills quickly let you build teams where you have a bulky leader protect the frail mage support units or have beefy support units protect a mage leader unit! If the player doesn't take advantage of this team dynamic, the enemy units often will! Racial & Auto Skills are an interesting split. All demons have unique skills that range in utility from passive skills allowing a unit to ignore obstacles to active skills that increase movement up to 7 tiles. Human units on the other hand can equip Auto-Skills, which automatically occur at the beginning of battles. Auto Skills range in effect like making all physical attacks never miss or preventing all damage if it's below 50. Auto Skills are unique in that you can only Skill Crack them off other humans. There's an early battle where 3 Auto Skills (notably Marksman) can be obtained and those skills don't pop up again for a long time. Marksman is an MVP skill of Overclocked so it's really brutal that you can miss it. Layered on top of the skill system is the amount of free actions a team gets. Each living unit on a team gets a single free action outside of combat. Healing skills, 'active' Racial Skills, and Demon Summon/Recall skills to change team composition can be used anytime before the team ends their turn. This versatility adds even more complexity to team building! You can recover from a bad fight you instigated by spending free actions healing your demons or use a movement increasing racial skill to run away if movement is still available. If you do really poorly in a fight you can spend the leader's free action to replace a dead demon. The Demon Punnett SquareAs an SMT game, Devil Survivor follows in tradition of demon shenanigans. There's the Devil Auction, the Demon Compendium, and the classic Demon Fusion. The Devil Auction is the first way the player is able to obtain new demons. Instead of negotiating with demons, the player bids on demons like it's eBay. Certain demons for auction start at higher levels (coming with more skills) or bonuses to certain stats. You can obtain up to 24 demons total, so get buying! The Demon Compendium allows you to re-obtain demons at a steep price. I've found this extremely hard to use until you get near the very end of the game which really hurts early team planning. They're really steep costs compared to purchasing demons at the auction. Demon Fusion is where the meat of demon management comes in. Much like the mainline games, demons can be fused together to make new demons. The new demon can inherit a certain number of active & passive skills of the component demons, so you can bring along favorite skills to new powerhouse demons. Devil Survivor might be one of the more dense cases of demon management. At minimum, you have to manage 8 demons for the 4 teams but you often lose a few units or need to change tactics entirely with new support demons. This is where the game really spikes in difficulty at various points. Daisy chaining three active and three passive skills onto a demon with a good unique skill (or element resistances) gets complicated very quickly. And you might need to do this for up to 24 demons! Mostly you just need 12 or so really good demons by the endgame but that's still quite a lot of planning. Devil Survivor helps to reduce complexity in a few ways. You can see which combination of demons can create a new demon through Search Fusion, reducing guesswork pretty heavily. Element fusion is one I've used much less than other mechanics but allows you to essentially 'upgrade' a unit to their next best type in the same race. That all said, Devil Survivor Overclocked has been an extremely compelling game to play despite its difficulty. Capturing the spirit of the core SMT experience with 4 units in a tactics context is an impressive design feat. Coming in with a refined experience of tactics games gives me hope I can finally wrap the main game.
That's it for now! Next time, I will hopefully have completed the game for real while talking about the narrative!
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AboutTriangles, Tactics, and Tabletop, Kupo! is a blog discussing thoughts on tactics games and tabletop rpgs I've played. Archives
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