RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

As with other Shin Megami Tensei games, demons in Devil Survivor are divided into groups, in this case known as races. Each race has an ability unique to them, called a Racial Skill, which can be some of the most powerful and useful in the entire game. And since players get two demonic allies to a team, these abilities can be combined in some very unusual and useful ways. This week, we’re taking a look at these abilities and offering up some advice as to how players can use them to crush some skulls.

To start with, we need to consider the most common type of win condition in Devil Survivor; the nearly ubiquitous “Guard the AI” mission. The AI allies that need protection often start a considerable distance away, making it difficult to provide healing or support to an AI who doesn’t understand the purpose of getting closer to the folks with the healing. These stages are made more difficult by the fact that the normal healing spells — Dia, Diarama, Mediarahan, et al — have a maximum range of one single panel. Thankfully, the Femme, Fairy and Megami races all have abilities that heal from a distance of at least three panels, and up to five in the case of the Megami. These three races also tend to focus on magic, making them some of the most effective demons in the game, often well beyond the point at which they should’ve been traded in for the newest model.

Unfortunately, long-range healing isn’t always the most effective method of saving an NPC at a distance. Sometimes, there’s nothing for it but to run up and shield the fools with your tender, stabbable body. The game offers a number of movement-increasing abilities, from the Genma’s barely useful Teleport-esque Phantasma, to the much more useful Avian Flight ability. But by far the best movement ability is Devil Speed, the Racial Skill of the Beasts. Rather than fiddling around with your style of movement, Devil Speed simply boosts your Move stat to seven, no questions asked. In a game where maps tend to be small enough to make even one point of Move significant, but so large that traversing them still takes several turns, Devil Speed is a cheap, easy and highly effective way of getting where you need to be when you need to be there, and is so consistently useful that it’s a good idea to simply rank-up your Beasts by fusing them with Elementals in order to keep a high-rank Beast with you throughout the game.

Movement abilities tend to combine well with the peculiar Racial ability possessed by the Dragon and Vile clans, called Evil Wave and Chaos Wave respectively. Both abilities extend the range of your basic attack, essentially turning any character into a ranged attacker, but with the nasty side effect of removing that character’s ability to make use of the Extra Turn system. Combining Evil or Chaos Wave with, for example, Devil Speed, will give that character the ability to strike just about anywhere on the map at will. The Kishin Racial ability, Double Up, combines particularly well with the Wave abilities. As the name implies, it allows one character to use the basic attack command twice, in this case effectively removing the biggest drawback to the Wave abilities.

Later in the game, it’s not entirely uncommon for players to drain MP at an astonishing rate. Between expensive attack magic and healing magic that frequently rises above 50 MP for a single use, maintaining a constant supply of MP quickly becomes a major concern. There are a few Racial abilities that lessen the burden on players; for example, demons of the Fallen clan offer Sacrifice, which restores a small amount of HP and MP at the end of any encounter where an enemy is defeated. Tyranny has a very similar effect, with the added bonus of automatically dropping the foe’s Agility score. But perhaps the most useful ability in this arena is the Divine’s Blood Wine ability. A simple activated ability, Blood Wine restores a portion of your team’s MP in exchange for a fair whack of the Divine’s HP. Thankfully, Blood Wine restores enough MP to other members of the team that it’s a simple enough task to follow up with a Media or Mediarahan.

These are just a few of the more powerful abilities available to players in their journey through the seven-day Tokyo lockdown. Next week, we’ll be taking a look at the Passive and Command skills players can use, and suggesting a few nasty surprises for your enemies.