SMT Devil Survivor: Overclocked

Playtime: 14.5 Hours.

Suspended 24 August 2025.

Playing on Normal difficulty, paused partway into Day 3, which is pretty early in the game. Was playing a very heavily magic-focused MC, and tried to proactively Skill Crack everything I could through Free Battles whenever possible.

Unless I have a sudden change of heart later on, I really don't think this game is for me. I feel like I typically enjoy both SRPGs (in the vein of Fire Emblem or XCOM) and JRPGs, but I don't think this game does a good job of merging the two genres. It's a shame, because I really like the premise of the story in this game (lockdown in central Tokyo due to a demon outbreak) and the characters and interactions have been very solid so far.

One way to summarize my thoughts on this game's general gameplay flow is that the management aspect is so heavily emphasized to the point of exhaustion for me. Not only do you need to optimize your team's equipment (in terms of demon parties) for each fight, you also need to manage the positioning of each team, as well as each individual demon's setup in every team. This means that with 4 active teams, you need to optimize 12 different characters for each fight, each with up to 10 different skills. Furthermore (and perhaps more importantly), you need to manage your stock of demons to have options for different enemies, so you actually need to handle more than 12 characters and 4 team layouts at a time. Because of the way each demon works in this game, you also need to consider specific racial skills on top of the affinities, skills, and stat distributions already required as in any other SMT game. This kind of reminds me of the insane micro-management required in the Labyrinth of Refrain DRPG, where you had to manage 5 full parties of characters. Menuing for optimizations probably takes up over 80% of my 15 hours in the game so far; I found that micro-optimizations were even needed when grinding during free battles, making pretty much every aspect of the game feel super exhausting and annoying to play. The little bits of "brain off" time you get in most other JRPGs just doesn't exist here, even during grinding - which is pretty much required to some extent for anyone not super familiar with these games.

What further compounds my irritation with the game is that it's not even a good, or decent SRPG; it's actively bad on that front. When I consider tile-based SRPGs, a huge portion of the enjoyment and dynamism of the game comes from having larger movement ranges, and more varied actions to choose from. High-movement FE tends to be more fun than low-movement FE because there are so many more formations that units can be in. Similarly, the variety of movement, cover, and action options you have in XCOM allows you to really think about what your best moves are, and this is largely motivated by the fact that the granular movement options allow you to dictate the pace of the game to an extent. In contrast, Devil Survivor has typical movement ranges of 3/4, which is pathetic. Not only do you have almost no room to actually maneuver, especially given that you have a maximum of 4 units (teams) available to you, the lack of any interesting terrain-based mechanics also just means that the field gameplay of this "SRPG" just involves walking at enemies you want to kill. It doesn't help that actions go by a delay-based system, where your per-character turn delay increases for each action your team takes. This encourages you to minimize your turns, avoiding the use of the actual tactical advantages you have. Even so, given that unit counts overwhelmingly favor the enemy in each fight (usually at least 2:1), it's almost inevitable that every fight eventually just turns into a series of forced encounters; enemies that haven't had a chance to attack in a little while get to move very quickly, essentially meaning you can't really tactically position your units much at all. This is especially true given that EVERY enemy is active from turn 1 in this game; there's no concept of baiting or activation ranges, so enemies will very quickly form giant blobs that you get to clear out slowly. The lack of agency in trying to dictate the pace of a fight is beyond frustrating.

On top of all this, I feel like the game really likes to spam certain specific racial skills in fights so far, usually making them super unfun and more obnoxious than anything. This tends to come from the fact that there aren't that many different kinds of enemies at any point in the game, so each subsection of the game will have only a few enemy demon types, often sharing (and spamming) certain skills. Early in the game, almost every enemy had Aggravate, so every enemy would get free crits in every fight. Bind spam further limits your movement down to 1, which is just insulting given that the range of 3/4 was already bad to begin with. This is also a complete death knell for any of the (so far plentiful) escort/protect quests, making them near unplayable at times. Evil Wave allows the enemy to outrange you for free, which is basically just free damage with no retaliation on your party - excellent "design". None of these are fun to interact with, especially when 8 groups of enemies can spam the same shit at you in one turn, and because of the poor design around turn order/delay, counterplay is also limited. A lot of the fights end up feeling like encounter generators where you can only walk straight at the enemy, since there's no actual room for strategy.

When zooming into individual combat encounters (3v3 between 2 teams), they're not awful, but honestly not great either. It's essentially a very watered-down version of any other SMT game; the extra turn mechanics are cool but not interesting to actually interact with, there are fewer elements than other games to partially compensate for the increase management elsewhere, etc. But I noticed there really isn't much variety to the combat either; units can only have 3 active skills so your moves are limited, and each portion of the game so far has heavily emphasized 1 or 2 weaknesses at a time. The individual combat encounters are simply less interesting than other SMT games. FWIW, it also doesn't help that I think I've gotten some of the most insanely bad luck in this game, missing ~10x on an enemy weak to a curse skill, and simultaneously getting hit almost 50% of the time on multiple demons strong against curse, and also getting stunned several times. If we go by the rough numbers on any other game, I feel like I probably hit multi-lottery jackpot odds with that, but that kind of thing was surprisingly common in my experience so far. So maybe something is busted, or nonfunctional? Not sure, but that kind of thing really doesn't inspire confidence in the combat either.

At the end of the day, I feel like this was a strange attempt at a SRPG/JRPG hybrid, but it ended up being a bad SRPG and a mediocre (at best) JRPG. Even though the atmosphere is cool, I just can't push through how poor the rest of the game feels; every part of it feels like a missed opportunity or an undercooked component. And this is the updated/expanded version for the 3DS! I originally tried a bit of this to get my feet wet a few years ago and had the same fears, but now am sorely disappointed that they were all founded in what the game ended up being to me. I think that a lot of people who love this may really enjoy the heavy emphasis on the teambuilding aspects and optimizations that can be done, and it might help that NG+ gives you a ton of bonuses to make much of the tedium go away, but my conclusion for now is that this simply isn't for me.