If you're short on demons, you can always buy new ones in the Devil Auction.
Devil Survivor boasts an impressive amount of character customization, and if you ever have difficulty with a particular mission, you can always redistribute your abilities to try a different angle. As you progress through the game, you will battle new types of demons and add their powers to your skill list, which you can then assign out to any of your human characters. Skills fall into three categories--commands that can be used on the field or during combat, passive abilities that are always active, and those that are automatically activated at the start of a battle--and while up to seven can be distributed per character, you can't assign out the same one twice. Each character's stats grow differently as they level up, making them more or less effective at certain types of attacks, so it's important to make sure that their squad of demons compliments their style of combat.
From the city map, you're able to spend your hard-earned macca (the currency of the netherworld) on new servants through the Devil Auction system by bidding on their services or buying them outright. Demons level up alongside their masters in combat, but to truly unlock their potential you've got to fuse them together to create even more powerful netherworld denizens. Optimizing your army is a fun and addictive way to pass the time, and it's never been simpler thanks to a searchable fusion database that cuts chance out of the equation entirely. Furthermore, by fusing demons you can elect to pass on more desirable skills to the product of your experiments. By effectively pairing up demons with demon tamers, you can create powerhouse teams to thrash your enemies.
Fans of the Shin Megami Tensei series who have come to expect top-notch presentation in its games will no doubt be pleased with what they see and hear in Devil Survivor. The artwork is stylish and full of personality, and though some of the demons will be familiar to the Atlus faithful, there are plenty of new ones to spice things up. Character sprites are well animated, breathing a surprising amount of life into their pixels, and the battlefields do a fantastic job of showing a slowly decaying city as it falls apart. The J-rock music style that infuses Devil Survivor's soundtrack further emphasizes this sense of crawling chaos with its gritty, urban sound, and it helps to add a great deal of atmosphere to the battles and storytelling. It's a pity that there isn't any voice acting to further complement the adventure.
Exploit enemy weaknesses to get extra turns.
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor is a thoroughly enjoyable role-playing game with a ton of atmosphere and style. By streamlining many of the series' trademark features and making them more accessible, Atlus has crafted a gameplay experience that longtime fans and relative newcomers alike can enjoy; by weaving multiple subplots into the overall narrative that can't all be explored in a single play-through, they've left plenty to do on subsequent replays. If you're looking for a riveting portable adventure, then look no further: Devil Survivor will take over your life and leave you begging for more.
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