Last time we talked about combat so let's hone in on the narrative systems & themes of Devil Survivor Overclocked! Devil Survivor is a game centering on crisis management. To that end, it centers on how individuals and major organizations (like the military) react in response to disaster. The major flow of story involves how to spend each 30 minute block from 08:00 - 18:00 each day. Can you save everybody at risk of dying? If you can, whose plan to end the lockdown do you believe in and spend time trying to make work? You have to make hard decisions in investing your time. Be warned, this post will have general spoilers for up to the 7th Day & ending setups! Hee ho-nwards! Half-Hour Time Blocks & Knowing The FutureIf I had to categorize the structure of Devil Survivor, it would be in the style of dating sims (with Persona being the easy comparison). 'Time' becomes a major resource a player must consider through investing in the story arcs of major characters or character self improvement. Devil Survivor is similar, though with less dating. Though, the amount of character death is not that off from certain visual novels! Over the course of a playthrough, the player is tasked with choosing how to spend each half-hour time block in the lockdown (with free battles available endlessly for grinding). Your options for each time block is given through notable NPCs in a location, a combat encounter prompt, or both.
A key aspect to wrap this together is pressure. How do you meaningfully prepare for objectives and not simply wander aimlessly for 7 in-game days? How do you write for this? Devil Survivor does this by telling the future through Laplace Mail and Death Clocks. Everyday you receive an e-mail, called Laplace Mail, to your demon summoning phone/3DS that predicts major events in the day with exact time stamps. These start with simple events like city power outages or train shutdowns but quickly escalate. See, the Laplace Mail can also predict the death of your own party, which ties to the Death Clock. Every character has their death predicted with an ominous countdown next to their heads; 0 meaning they're dying today. As the player, you're told multiple times about major encounters that will kill your group, but the future can be changed! Through the power of your cool demons (and lots of RPG mechanics), you can beat fate. This could have become very formulaic in having a daily boss that you grind to defeat, but the predictions of your death vary the pattern. Devil Survivor 1 eventually chooses to ominously warn the player of the upcoming major bosses that will kill them days in advance. Starting with everybody's favorite difficulty spike, Beldr! [crowd cheer into heavy crying] Gameplay wise, the Beldr fight is sorta a big problem of early Devil Survivor relying on heavy chance through lucky critical hits & dangerous ailments missing the player. Story wise, it serves to tutorialize the investment the player has to do for major arcs. You hear rumors about Beldr as this invincible demon, by which all living creatures have sworn to not harm him. Except, for the Devil's Fuge. Yes, this is Baldur from Norse mythos and the Devil's Fuge is a mistletoe. Your trio spends the crux of the 3rd day finding the Devil's Fuge and eventually (re)kills Beldr. Fight mechanics aside, this is a really interesting way to intro how the eventual major & optional arcs will be structured. You're told to listen to rumors around the city (noted as blue 'free' actions that don't pass time), that tell you when and where to obtain the Devil's Fuge. It helps you feel rewarded for being at the right place at the right time! On that.. Friend TriageWhile the main party is roped in to fight demon gods and the like, life goes on for others in the lockdown. The Death Clocks the party sees predicting when people are gonna die? Other people can see them. And they don't have the future sight of the Laplace Mail to avoid their death. Worst of all, everybody's timer indicates nobody survives past 7 days of lockdown! Just past the Beldr fight, people begin to panic about the circumstances of the lockdown. This is also when many character arcs begin operating in parallel. On rough count, there are 10 major arcs to develop:
These arcs eventually collapse in to 5 main endings represented by a character: Atsuro, Haru/Gin, Naoya/Kaido, Amane, and Yuzu Many of these arcs develop alongside another arc, which creates a really interconnected sprawl of character moments. If you're invested in a particular character like Atsuro, you're forced to reckon with his old friend Keisuke trying to become a punitive murderer during the lockdown. Most importantly, you have to reckon with the threat of his death, one of the central arcs to manage. Keisuke is fated to die by the hand of Kaido in the default course of history due to Keisuke killing members of Kaido's gang. Your crew and Atsuro especially does not want this to happen, so you take the lessons of preparation from Beldr and try to point these two murderous weirdos in opposite directions to not meet at Keisuke's fated death time. This requires stepping back and knowing what Kaido is about since he's the easier to nudge person. He's out looking for Keisuke out of duty for his gang, but he's still thinking about his murdered brother. You hear about Kaido's brother primarily through Mari and her adventures in finding the.. vampire.. that killed Kaido's brother. So the end solution to Keisuke is preoccupy Kaido with helping Mari kill a vampire. This requires spending time in solving Mari's anti-vampire dust search. You also have to not spend the time to give Mari the anti-vampire dust but give busy work to Kaido to do it so he's busy thinking about the vampire who killed his brother and not Keisuke. All in all, it's the hardest arc to do correctly with how specific the player has to act. It's also very entertaining to see it unfold and talk about how different it goes with friends! It can go bad in so many different ways! You can even still partially mess up after Keisuke is saved and not confront him and lose a party member! But I respect making so many characters have their arcs intersect. Elite Panic Through An SMT LenseDevil Survivor 1 as a story of response to crisis also has to contend with elite panic as a concept. Elite panic is the fundamental idea of those in power responding to disaster events with fear of civil disorder instead of aid efforts. Often this manifests as a change of priority from relief efforts to defending private property out of paranoia. Some initial disclosure is very important to get out of the way on this. I've been adjacent to some disasters as someone living in south Florida in the states during hurricane season. Despite that, I've not experienced remotely the amount of destabilization that impoverished tremendous of people during the worst of hurricanes and don't intend to speak from that angle. But I have seen the way that narratives around who is 'resourceful' and who is 'looting' form during crisis and how that breaks across lines of race and class. It's important to get across that people in crisis do not fall into some preconceived notion of inherent violence but have historically helped each other out. The violent escalation often comes from those in power or those well isolated from the disaster that start manufacturing a moral crisis and cause forces like the national guard to make things more stressful and dangerous for those in disasters. Devil Survivor 1 understands aspects of this theory well enough. The Tokyo Lockdown of the game is one imposed by the Self Defense Force (SDF) due to the existence of demons. The government is trying to prevent the spread of demons outside Tokyo as the COMPs can mass summon demons if allowed to. But the SDF sure isn't going to offer any aid to the people inside to make it past the disaster. Their efforts are honing in on crowd control and ensuring nobody leaves the lockdown with a COMP. They're more than willing to use lethal force to prevent people from leaving and willing to sacrifice everybody else in the lockdown to end the crisis. An interesting minor character that dissects this is minor character Shoji. She's a reporter that helps to break down what's the role of the SDF & the government are in the story. Early on she discusses crowd control theory and how the SDF tries to keep an initial peace by drip feeding people false stories of why all transportation is locked down. Eventually she helps to confirm a rumor that circulates in the mid-game: the government is supported by angels. The angels themselves are backed by God flavored in the manner of the Biblical Old Testament variation. The lockdown is not just a way to prevent demons from overrunning the world, but also supposedly a test from God! God wants to see if humanity can reflect upon their mistake of the creation of the demon summoning COMPs. He can't intervene directly cause that would mean human free will was a failure, humanity has to figure it out on their own. Sorry, them's the breaks. But God is also not above opportunism. Part of why elite panic is deployed is that it's often politically convenient for those in power to spread fear of the 'other'. This is how you get things like cruel hostile architecture to prevent the homeless from resting on benches to incredibly inflated police budgets. Amane, as the representative for the angels faction, pushes heavily for your character to act as a new Messiah of humanity. Not just Amane, but God himself wants the protagonist to be his special little guy and lead humanity as a pillar of faith. Free will of humanity is neat and God wants that to stick around but also would love if it favored God a little more. Part of this is that angels and demons within Shin Megami Tensei are not omnipotent parts of the world. The faith and vibes of humanity empower the supernatural and make heroes of myth real. Demons thrive in a world where survival of the fittest is king and people fight each other to survive. Angels thrive in a world where everybody follows the rules and listens to those above. So when you're asked to lead humanity by Amane, she is also asking you to lead humanity to a world where everybody is more subservient to God. But this also marks Devil Survivor 1 unique in thinking about the apocalypse. Trusting In Community or Only YourselfWith the five endings of the games, they fit into 3 categories depending on their relationship to crisis & apocalypse fiction:
Apocalypse games, generally, run a whole host of problems about narratives of 'regressed' society. They often tell stories about how the lost of law and centralized law enforcement means everybody will turn on each other and eat each other (sometimes literally). This is how you often get corny 'man is the real monster' graffiti. Often, these stories center on how you can't trust strangers and you have to prepare to defend you and your own by any means necessary. An assertion that the individualistic narrative spread in the consciousness in places like the US is what is true in the world. Here's a good piece dissecting the issues with this framing in games like The Last of Us from Nic Gordon. Devil Survivor 1 provides an interesting refutation of the regression reading of apocalypse. One of the earliest conversations before the lockdown hits in the game is about the Tower of Babel and how the internet is the new Tower of Babel. Eventually, it's revealed that this is literally true and that the endless negative vibes produced by the internet poisons the world. Important to this framing is that humanity's ambition and freedom has progressed so far that it has become hubris against the ideals of (Old Testament) God. The initial Tower of Babel required a regression of society with the creation of different languages to 'fix' humanity's ambition and the request from Amane for the hero to lead humanity would lead to a world where everybody lives in fear of God to be good. Of course, this is only one of the five endings the player can choose. The Naoya ending does present a choice to push humanity towards one of full freedom in defiance of God's edict to restrain desires. This does result in the 'Chaos' style endings of SMT and creates a survival of the fittest scenario that is more standard of apocalypse fiction, but as an ending. You also get to kill God! As such extremes of Chaos (Naoya) and Law (Amane), the endings both choose to abandon community and trust as core of human nature. Instead, both offer an individualistic fear as what humanity is led by. Fear of either God himself to be good or fear of others that you should preemptively show strength over. These endings end up being the 2 easier endings to unlock with only single people representing their ideology. With the Atsuro & Haru endings, more ideals of community and belief in humanity comes through. Atsuro's ending reaches an overly optimistic view of technology and how well humanity can use it and utilize it for good and end hte lockdown. Big portions of his ending requires spending lots of time with him and encouraging his ideas throughout the lockdown as well as ensuring Keisuke survives. Likewise Haru's ending requires both her and Gin survive and develop as they have a way founded upon their love of their old friend Aya to stop the lockdown. You're similarly tasked with encouraging the two of them to stay positive in the midst of the crisis spiral caused by the lockdown. In Haru's case a depression spiral from her lost mentor, and in Gin's case an obsessive spiral that almost gets him killed in trying to find Aya. These endings hit emotionally really well as a reward for figuring out a proper path through the time block system, but also present a hopefulness in humanity that's grounded not just in high minded philosophy but in close relationships. Such personal stakes to endings at the time of Devil Survivor 1 were rare outside of Persona. Yuzu's ending is.. the hardest to evaluate. Yuzu as a character gets a pretty poor shaft as someone who doesn't really get to do anything except mostly complain about circumstances. Her ending is the 'default' ending and the only available if all others are failed. As an ending, it's one that combines both the 'teamwork' of the Atsuro/Haru ending and the cynicism about humanity of Amane/Naoya. Everybody works together in their final burst of desperation to escape the lockdown and kill the SDF keeping everybody within Tokyo. It does eventually wrap in everybody leaving the lockdown, but demons escape beyond Tokyo to the rest of the world. My read of this ending is one that reflects the current hell world that is 2022, which is to say one that desperately tries to claw back at a sense of normalcy. Yuzu and most of the normal folk just truly wanted a way to return home and live life peacefully, but the old normal can never truly return. I think we (as a people) are collectively in the Yuzu ending of this lockdown, aha.. To The Future of NarrativeWith all this looooong writing, let's do a wrap up thoughts! Devil Survivor Overclocked is a really bold game in its approach to multiple endings and the branch of ways multiple arcs can resolve. In return, it's a game that a single playthrough can wrap within 30 hours, with 5-8 hours for Naoya/Amane/Yuzu extra content added on. It sits quite nicely next to Triangle Strategy's 25-30 hour campaigns! By relative comparison, this is closer to 'average' game length of games at the time versus the 60-100 hour counts you would often encounter in standard JRPG entries. This is really important in terms of game scope, and also allowing for replays! Due to shift in life priorities like doing projects like this blog, a 120 hour game with missable content like Persona 5 will almost certainly never get a replay from me. Something like Devil Survivor 1 with its 30 hour campaigns is a lot more compelling!
Another idea to take away is how much the player can balance at the same time, without being overwhelmed. Despite having up to 10 possible arcs that run throughout the game, the writing hones in on 3-4 major events happening in a moment. This was right on the cusp of being overwhelming, but I have the benefit of having tried to play this game 3 times. For others who are new to this, it does end up being a difficult balancing act. Devil Survivor 2 would go on to ease the complexity of character death prevention, which is great for reducing fear of missing out content. That said, I would love a third Devil Survivor to try another sprawling character arcs.
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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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