I've been playing the game SMT Devil Survivor Overclocked on my 3DS for about a month now, and it's quickly become one of my favorite 3DS games. It's a great turn based RPG / strategy game, somehow mixing Persona and Fire Emblem gameplay wise. It's my first Shin Megami Tensei game outside of Persona and honestly I think I'll be playing a lot more of the series from now on.
Devil Survivor is a game that takes place in a specific part of Tokyo, Japan that gets cut off from the rest of the country by a sudden lockdown and power outage. Around the same time, the protagonists get 3DS like devices called COMPS that can summon demons and recieve emails that predict the future based on an algorithm that can be changed, allowing you to see when characters are going to die and how, and prevent them by summoning your demons to save them from wild demons or other tamers. But simultaneously, you're trying to figure out why this happened and how to escape before the seventh day, when the comp shows that everyone will die.
The story is really interesting and the inspirations from all sorts of religions are cool to see. On top of that, I'm really invested in a lot of the side characters and the main characters are great too. I made decisions that led to one of my party members leaving and subsequently dying because I couldn't save him in time. Characters die all the time in Fire Emblem but the way this game did it was on a whole different level and I can only assume it's possible for this to happen to many other characters in a way that ends up integrated into the story. The game has branching paths but I never even notice when I'm making a decision, it just naturally flows into the game.
As for the gameplay, battles are short enough that they don't get boring, but often enough that I never feel like the dialogue and story sections are too long either. It's a very well paced game. There's only two difficulties: Normal and Easy, and from what I read online I knew what I was getting into, but wow Normal difficulty feels far from normal sometimes. If you're not careful, you can get underleveled very quickly, and even more frustrating is that you'll find even the free battles necessary to grind up your characters and demons to be ridiculously hard. It should be easy to stay at a good level but in my experience it wasn't, and demons need more exp to level up so you have to stay ahead on fusing higher level demons too.
Overall, the game has been fantastic and I'm looking forward to seeing how the story continues to unfold. I give this game an 8.5/10.
