Devil Survivor 2: Day 6. Still enjoying myself.
After the extremely dumb attempted fanservice of Day 4, Day 5's Kama / Shiva plotline was considerably funnier and better done. A pleasant surprise there. The whole Sapporo plotline was strange and slightly botched... hey guys you have to do this ludicrously evil action that will destroy a city!!1! But wait nobody will actually die because of the completely unbelievable reason that they're all already dead (and you are somehow able to guess this?!)! I was hoping this would be just bullshit made up to make us feel better about killing them, but nah, seems it was actually true. I'd have just set it up so that we tried to destroy an empty patch of ground if I was the scriptwriter, but I guess that'd be less dramatic or something.
Also there's things like rail tunnels in-between cities, and it's possible to calculate flight times between Tokyo & Sapporo, but wasn't
the void devouring everything not protected by a barrier? Is the void starting on cities but leaving the countryside untouched or something?! Since travel-through-void is presumably harder to track or time.... Yeah never mind that's clearly thinking too hard about this.
Day 5 boss was erratic - if you don't realize how the Neurotoxin works he will utterly slaughter your teams effortlessly from extreme range off great speed, but once it's negated he totally has a glass jaw and dies really fast. Okay.
The game tries to make something of a PLOT TWIST revelation out of the fact that JPs, the secret governmental organization in charge of defense against the supernatural, has a giant magic circle in the basement of the equivalent of City Hall. Okay that location is mildly surprising (in that it's stupid, pick a basement in the middle of nowhere), but the fact one exists is about as shocking as finding out the military has a tank in its armory. It's not like the circle is being powered by human sacrifice or something. Sheesh.
The Law/Chaos ideologies are more compelling and believable than in your average SMT game, which is a very low bar to clear. On that note. Why is it the 15-year old tsundere who gets to treat the Chaos ideology with the respect and seriousness it deserves. Which is along the lines of "This is crazy. And stupid. Stop being stupid."
Yamato, Anguished One, and to a lesser extent Ronaldo cannot shut up about how awesome I am, and it's often hard to tell them they're being creepy. Grah. SMT really embraces the "you are a fanfic self-insert character."
In the realm of linking to better games, an interesting comment from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTVBSxnwiCo, a retrospective on Deus Ex from Warren Spector, was that JC Denton comes off as really callous partially because the developers could never be sure if the player would actually do any random sidequest / request / etc. So you'll have somebody giving a sob story about their daughter being kidnapped and Denton will go all "I'll think about it" as far as helping. Anyway since I've named Our Hero JC Denton in Devil Survivor 2, I wish he was able to brusquely dismiss a lot more of this nonsense while keeping his options open, but that is usually either impossible or means less
friendship fate points, so. Being blandly nice to everyone it is.
