RPG Talk: Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker

I finished Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker's Triangulum Arc this weekend and it was a real joy from start to finish.

Devil Survivor 2 for the Nintendo DS took its time earning my affection. At first I really couldn't decide whether I liked it or its older sibling, the original Devil Survivor more, but as a gamer, I suppose the proof is really in how much time you spend with a game, how hard you try to complete all the extras.

By that measure, Devil Survivor 2 ranks up there as one of my all time favorites, one of the games I would take with me if I was stuck on the hypothetical deserted island.

It's not that it's a flawless game, but it's delivers everything it promises. There's no throwing the game at the wall for story or game mechanics that come out of nowhere, and when you win a tough battle it totally feels like you earned it.

The cast is almost completely gender balanced, with seven recruitable males and six recruitable females (the main character is unfortunately set as male, which is too bad since he's player named). What this allows for is a wide range of personalities, and this is particularly noticeable with the female characters.

None of them are forced into the role of representing for the entire gender, so there's a lot of room for a variety of characters, and half of them hold positions of authority within the secretive JP's organization, whether as a doctor, researcher, or military officer. The artwork is unfortunately male gazey, but their behavior is not. The game easily passes the Bechdel test, and none of them are ever the helpless, whiny girl there to hold the team back. They're not all made of steel, but each one is fully capable of pulling herself together.

Though the cast is crowded with a total of 14 playable characters, each with their own subplots, it manages to do a fairly good job of it. The cast size is one of the reasons that I initially was unsure how much I liked the game, because there is so much game time spent getting to know everyone that DeSu2 loses the tension that ran through the first game, where time is very much a precious commodity you will never have enough of.

But now that I do know everyone, they're collectively one of my favorite casts in any game ever.

The Triangulum Arc is essentially a sequel storyline packed in with the original Septentrion Arc in the in the 3DS re-release, Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker. Atlus thoughtfully allowed for players to jump immediately into the new Triangulum Arc without replaying the Septentrion Arc, which I did.

Considering that the original Septentrion storyline had five different endings based on player decisions, I was curious how they were going to handle the Triangulum Arc, and they basically merged two of the endings to make a sixth that allows for the necessary storyline to take place (because it honestly wouldn't work in any of the five legitimately obtainable endings).

I found I didn't mind this, because that means that none of the original five endings are the "real" one, so any of them could be. (I founded a meritocracy with Yamato my first playthrough, so that's my headcanon.) To me, the Triangulum Arc is still just one possibility based on choices the protagonist might have made throughout the storyline, even though the player could not do so while in command of him.

But that doesn't mean it's not a good story on its own.

The Triangulum Arc starts after the world has been regressed to an earlier state, undoing all the damage that had happened during the Septentrion Arc, and introduces the new female character Miyako Hotsuin, who appears to have taken Yamato's place in the restored world.

Despite having saved the world from an otherworldly administrator beyond our reality, the world doesn't enjoy the peace that it should have, so the plot is rife with people trying to figure out what went wrong and why extradimensional beings are invading again. Worse, the cast is initially split up all over Japan because they had lost their memories in the restored world and the protagonist and his friends put a priority on reuniting the team.

As more and more of the cast join together, it's possible to see how they've grown since their ordeals in the the Septentrion Arc (the Triangulum Arc behaves as if everyone had lived and their subplots followed to completion). Friendships are stronger. They're better people than they were.

I loved spending another round of adventure with these characters, and due to the way time is managed in the game, I know I haven't seen even half of the sub-plot scenes. The fun part in following their new sub-plots is seeing what they plan to do with their futures now that they remember everything they did to earn them. They continue to grow and try to be better people than they were, while still remaining recognizably the characters I fell in love with in the first place.

The Triangulum Arc also feels more tightly written than its predecessor. I suspect a lot of this is aided by the audience and the characters already knowing each other, but it's also a shorter storyline than the original (though not as short as it would initially have you think). I finished in just over 40 hours, but I was definitely taking my time. Other estimates would place it closer to 25-30.

I only have a small complaint as far as replay goes. Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker uses the same Title system as the original DeSu2 but adds very few titles specific to the Triangulum Arc. Titles are essentially achievements the player can earn in game to make subsequent playthroughs easier.

Each title is worth a certain amount of points depending on how difficult it is to achieve, and then points are spent on perks for the next playthrough. For instance, I completed the game without a single human character falling in battle, which was worth 200 points, but raising Fate to rank 5 (essentially finishing a character's sub-plot) for an individual character is only worth 10.

Because the Septentrion Arc is longer, it's easier to finish sub-plots, and there are bonus bosses on New Game+ that allow the easy accumulation of even more Titles. (With five endings in the original DeSu2, it's nice that each ending progressively gets easier and easier to obtain.)

It will be a bit harder replaying for the extra Triangulum endings since I'll have less to work with, but it might be worth taking a spin down memory lane since there is a hefty Title bonus for having finished both arcs in Record Breaker.

One of the things that Record Breaker is supposed to have done is fix some translation errors in the original Septentrion Arc. There were a few things that were a bit murky for me in the original storyline, so those might have been fixed. The other bonus is that Record Breaker is now entirely voiced save for mid-combat dialogue.

It took a little time to get used to character voices since I already had established my own mental image for how characters sounded, but most of the voice actors eventually won me over. Kaiji Tang is perfect as Yamato, which was a big concern for me considering how the anime series had grossly misinterpreted Yamato's character, but Tang totally balances Yamato's arrogance with his respect and naivete.

Ben Diskin's Daichi was probably the hardest for me to get used to. While he plays Daichi's dorkiness exactly as it should be, it was his voice itself that I found the most jarring since he just didn't have the right sound I expected. My mental voice for Daichi was higher pitched than he turned out (more like Atsuro in the first Devil Survivor).

Still, I had a great time and I'm a little sad that it's all over again.

There will be replays, but the story's done and the cast have earned their happy ending many times over, so I wouldn't want to put them through the wringer again. They survived.

Devil Survivor 2's Anime Adaptation - Choosing the Ending

Note: This was actually written last weekend, but I delayed posting because of the fortutious news that my new short story "The Held Daughter" went live. Since Devil Survivor 2 did not begin streaming free in its entirety for general audiences until this past Thursday, I don't think the timeliness of the post was hurt much.

Devil Survivor 2: The Animation finished airing last Thursday. Though it's not one of the Spring 2013 anime season's clear winners, it's popular enough to be in the top third of simulcasts that Crunchyroll was running.

But it has its flaws.

I was trying to find a way to talk about a series that has both struck a chord with me and driven me crazy without writing a massive essay, and while turning over the plot in my head I think I hit a major problem, so I'll talk about just that one, because it was probably the most important decision the writers had to make.

DS2:TA is based on the Nintendo DS RPG Devil Survivor 2, which is a favorite of mine. It's the only game in recent years that I've managed to play through a whopping four times in the space of less than a year. That just hasn't happened since I graduated college (though it did help that at one point I came down with the flu and couldn't do much else).

Part of the reason it's so replayable is that there are many variations of events and five different endings. It is impossible to do a perfect playthrough and see everything the first round just because of how the game is structured. Even allowing for the different endings, you just can't see everything. The clock in game just doesn't give you enough time. And that's part of the point.

The world has eight days until it ends and you can't delay the end of the world by doing side missions and making friends with everyone.

Devil Survivor 2 has 14 playable characters (but never all in the same playthrough) and each of them has different ideas on how to solve humanity's crisis. Who the player sides with among the possible faction leaders determines the ending of the game.

And therein lies the problem with the anime. It has to choose.

The protagonist of Devil Survivor 2 is a blank slate with no default name. The player names him at the start and all his dialogue is chosen by the player. He can be a silly guy who spaces out in tactical meetings and plays jokes on friends when the world is only days from ending. Or he can be a militant badass badgering his friends to toughen up.

It's possible to adapt a blank player protagonist into a successful main character in an anime series. Persona 4, based on a sister RPG, was done by the same director and did it beautifully.

But the difference between Persona 4 and Devil Survivor 2 is that the former series has all the main characters working towards the same purpose, so it's easy to give the protagonist a similar moral and motivational grounding. They're all on the same mission and so is the player.

In Devil Survivor 2 the cast shares the goal of stopping the world from being erased, but are divided on how to handle the rebirth of what remains.

The player will likely side with whoever's philosophy appeals to them the most. But the anime doesn't have five endings for its audience. Its protagonist has a name, Hibiki, and Hibiki is not a blank slate.

When I started getting acquainted with Hibiki I was irritated with him for being overly idealistic in an apocolyptic show, and plagued with far more angst than possible for him to express in game. Though the protagonist's dialogue is always player chosen, the general consensus of the other characters is that he's a very calm and collected individual who rises to the occasion. Hibiki eventually rises to the occasion, but never becomes calm and collected. He oddly feels like he was transplanted from the wrong anime series and dropped into DS2:TA.

But I wonder if it wasn't Hibiki's fault so much as the writers needed a character who would want the ending they went for.

The core struggle in the game is to survive long enough to meet with the otherworldly entity known as Polaris, who is the administrator of multiple realities, including Earth. Polaris has determined that humanity has lost its way and plans to erase the world and start over. But it's possible to convince Polaris to spare humanity and rewrite the world so that humanity has a guiding philosophy again.

This results in one character wishing to change the world into a meritocracy, and another wishing for the polar opposite with a world of equality.

There are other options too, such as killing or replacing Polaris, and of course the reset button that restores the world to what it was before Polaris intervened.

I was fairly certain the show would go for the Restorer ending (which it did) because it allows the world to be restored and for everyone who died in the mass destruction of Polaris's assault to come back to life as if nothing had happened. Everything is normal again, so on the surface it is the happiest ending with the least amount of death.

But was it the best choice?

I understand that certain endings just would not work. The general audience probably wouldn't like the Meritorious ending, because we want to root for a hero who helps people, and not someone who creates a new world order with a social hierarchy based on talent and ability, but there is a very big reason I did not go with the Restorer ending my first playthrough (even though it's the ending I would naturally gravitate to).

And that's because of Polaris.

Polaris doesn't die in this ending, nor are its desires fulfilled, ironically making it the ending where humanity is most at risk of being erased a second time. Hibiki is essentially asking for a second chance, to be given time to fix things without forcing change on others. Humanity continues to be divided and without a purpose and it seems all too easy that Polaris could decide at a later date "Well, that didn't work. Let's clean up this mess." Even Hibiki understands that.

Choosing an ending that leaves humanity in the greatest amount of future danger in exchange for rewinding time to the day of the first attack, means that the hero has to be someone who would make that choice, someone who would be idealistic enough to believe that a difference can be made in the eyes of an uncaring creator when he and his friends will be the only ones who remember how the world nearly ended.

Hibiki is that character.

Unfortunately, he's ridiculously so, to the point it's not even possible to play the main character that naively optimistic in game. He even wins his final battle in the anime through the power of friendship (I'm not joking).

And it creates this strange dissonence between how bleak the story is supposed to be and how Hibiki behaves. The world is being destroyed and Yamato, the leader of the secret JP's organization, is making tough calls to allow humanity to survive long enough to face Polaris. If it means sacrificing one city so others may survive, he will do that. His decisions are harsh, but his position demands it of him. Hibiki would not have survived until the end of the series if not for Yamato.

But Hibiki constantly butts heads with him. Granted, Yamato has terrible social skills so he doesn't make any attempt to get Hibiki to understand his point of view, but Hibiki makes no effort to understand either.

The result is a lot of wailing about how Yamato's tactics are terrible and unfair with Hibiki unable or unwilling to present any alternatives. The times Hibiki proves Yamato wrong are always with the one thing Yamato lacks; an idealistic heart that refuses gives up.

In another show, this would be all right. There is a place for idealism. But it's really hard to root for Hibiki when most of the time logic demands I agree with Yamato. In the final episode, even Hibiki admits that humanity wouldn't have made it as far as it had without him.

I personally would have liked to see either the Kingmaker or the Liberator endings. Since they don't involve reshaping human society, they would not have required a protagonist who the audience might be philosophically opposed to.

The Kingmaker replaces Polaris with a different otherworldly entity that loves humans, and he in turn creates a brand new world for humanity where they will be free and he will not interfere. It's happy enough, though presumably anyone who died wouldn't come back from the dead. Still, it's a win for humanity and people can live in freedom.

The Liberator is simply killing Polaris with no replacement. The characters return to a shattered Earth where they have to rebuild from what remains, which at this point in the story consists of three vastly reduced islands of Japan. It's a bit bleak, but humanity is completely free from outside interference.

Either one would be a permanent solution to the Polaris problem and would allow for a victory at some cost.

Devil Survivor 2: The Animation is streaming for free online at Crunchyroll. Though I have mixed feelings about it, it does have its moments and the action scenes are well done.