To be honest, I'm probably the only person that had these problems with Devil Survivor:
- Story only being entertaining for the first time you play, and it stops after a couple of days because
- the story is very shallow. I doubt things would go as smooth as they went in the game.
- Demon levels growing slower as their level go up and damage input stagnating, the consequence being us having to hire or fuse new ones. Problem: incredibly uninteresting higher demons.
- Battles are the huge obstacles of the game. I always finished a fight just to see what would happen next, not to prepare for another battle.*
Hm?
-After 3 days shit hits the fan and riots break out. That feels rather realistic to me, because supplies were short and people wre getting desperate. When people get desperate they start to fight more easily, which is also taken advantage of in numerous movies (after all, even in zombie apocolypse movies there's always at least one person killed by the other survivors, rather than the zombies).
-This is an issue with almost any -Mons game. Pokemon is about the only one where you can just use whatever you want, all others require upgrading as you go along in order to keep up (other SMT games and DWM games also tend to be that way, though even pokemon has monsters early on that lose steam if you keep using them until the end of the game...). You can compensate with -Tamas to an extent (they each add 3 to their respective stat), but once you use 3 it will begin to penalize you in other stats if you keep adding them so that you can't take a pixie and make it have 40 in all stats.
There's plenty of interesting high-level demons, but most of them require unlocking via multiple playthroughs (and Lucifer is highly arguable regarding whether or not he's worth the trouble...).
-....huh? How could you have a game without battles?
That pretty much sums my grips with the game. Maybe it would've been better had it been a tactics game?
It is a tactics game, technically. o.0 It has RPG elements, but placement on the map is at least as important (if not moreso).
Maybe they should have made the choices affect much more the game than just the last day... As far as I can see, someone who finishes Gin's path in the first playthrough (like me) already beat the game in the most beautiful way possible, so even going back to see the other endings you didn't choose feels awkward even after you get to see them.
Gin's path is bittersweet because once you complete it the lesson is lost. The government sweeps everything under the rug and nothing changes, which means more ordeals will come since people did not learn from the previous one. Neutral routes have always been comparatively better in SMT games, but here even Atsuro's route, argued to be the best one, has its drawbacks (in his ending Japan uses the demons to take over the world).
*For all the people having trouble: use Recarm, Media, and try to go for dance moves or high damage input for only one foe. That's pretty much the general rule to never lose.
Media and Recarm lose their usefulness after a short while. However, Samirecarm and Mediarahan cost a lot of MP to cast in a game without items to restore MP with (or any items at all, for that matter). Also, while single-target works on bosses, some bosses have minions and random enemies late in the game tend to mix parties so that you have one minion weak to physical and one healed by physical, one weak to wind and another reflects it. Dances hit randomly (as do the better physical attacks like Deathbound), so your best bet is probably to just Megido/loan them.
