Official website
JP: July 28, 2011
NA: February 28, 2012
EU: sorry, but at least you can import and play it on a DS or 3DS
The main character and two classmates are walking home when they receive emails on their cellphones from a website called Nicaea. The emails contain videos depicting their imminent deaths. Ooh, scary!
Meanwhile, a series of strange disasters are happening all across Japan. What's the cause of all this? It's a mystery!
Devil Survivor 2 is a strategy RPG featuring the demon lore of the MegaTen franchise. There's nothing quite like Devil Survivor, but its gameplay system is essentially comprised of many common RPG elements.
The battlefield is a square grid on which enemy and ally teams take turns moving, attacking, and performing other actions. When an attack is initiated, the battle plays out like one turn of a Dragon Quest-style battle, but up to two extra turns can be granted by landing critical hits or blocking/exploiting elemental strengths/weaknesses.
Building strong demons is really the crux of the game, and demon fusion is one of the main features you'll be using. Basically you can fuse two demons into one higher-tier demon, and you can choose which skills the child inherits from its parents.
Outside of battle, there's only two things you can do: (1) view events and dialogue, and (2) build and manage your party and demons. That's it.
There are multiple routes and endings depending on the event and dialogue choices you make. And there is a new game plus feature to help you breeze through subsequent playthroughs.
The gameplay system is much more detailed than I've described here, but this should give you an idea of what the game is like.
Q. Do I need to play DS1 before DS2?
A. No, the stories and characters are completely separate.
Q. What's new in DS2?
A. The most important new features are the Demon Compendium and the Fate System. Other than that, there's alot more demons, more skills, more characters, and some other tweaks to the gameplay system.
- Demon Compendium: In DS1, the only way to obtain a new demon was to buy one from the Auction, so building really strong demons was tedious. In DS2 (and Overclocked), you can register your current demons in the Compendium, and then buy clones of the registered demons. It's expensive, but building strong demons is now much more efficient.
- Fate System: The main character has a "relationship rank" with each of the other characters, which is affected by event and dialogue choices. There are various bonuses for increasing a character's relationship rank, such as sharing skill cracks and better elemental resistance.
A. It's probably harder than most RPGs, but it's not unfairly brutal or anything. You should know that simply leveling up isn't enough, you really have to put effort into team building and strategy.
Q. How should I build the main character?
A. In DS2 both physical and magical builds work well. Unlike in DS1 where a physical build sucked.
Q. Will there be a Devil Survivor 2 Overclocked?
A. Highly unlikely. DS2 already has many of the improvements in DSO.
1UP: A-
Destructoid: 8.5/10
GameSpot: 8.5/10
Joystiq: 4.5/5
JustPushStart: 4/5
Nintendo Power: 8/10
Nintendo World Report
RPGamer: 3.5/5
RPGFan: 89%
Siliconera playtest
Worthplaying: 8.5/10
ZTGD: 8.8/10
Teaser trailer
Invasion trailer
Gameplay trailer
Battle tutorial
