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Devil Survivor 2′s Fate System Is A Twist On Persona’s Social Links

By Spencer . February 3, 2012 . 5:45pm

Devil Survivor 2s Fate System Is A Twist On Personas Social Links I’ve been playing Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 and one new system in the Nintendo DS game should sound familiar if you played Persona 3 or 4. Talking to your teammates forms a "Fate" bond and as it develops you unlock more abilities.

 

Devil Survivor 2 begins in Tokyo with you and Daichi Shijima, who acts as the comic relief, waiting for a subway train. Both of you run into Io Nitta, a classmate adored by all of the male students. Daichi sheepishly tries to talk to her, but the protagonist steps in. Before you can have a conversation everyone’s phones beep with a message from Nicaea, a mysterious web site which shows a clip of them… about to die.

 

After the trio cheats death by defeating demons a main menu opens up. Instead of a list of locales like Shinjuku and Shibuya, Devil Survivor 2 has a small list of events. Most events center around the characters you meet instead of say chasing Naoya around Tokyo. You’ll get to know the secondary characters better even little details like where Io shops and the mystery behind Joe Akie’s girlfriend.

 

Devil Survivor 2s Fate System Is A Twist On Personas Social Links When you talk to characters or save their lives the Fate system powers them up. The first Fate bonus you earn is elemental resistance. Daichi gets Anti-Fire and Io learns Anti-Elec, skills reduce damage against Agi and Zio, respectively. Fate resistances do not take up skill slots either so you have room to add on other passive abilities like "Moneybags" which gives you a Macca Bonus or "Extra Bonus" to increase the chance of earning an extra turn. At level two, Fate adds on a joint skill crack. In Devil Survivor games, you set which abilities you want to learn before a battle begins and if a specific character defeats that demon you gain a new skill. If Io is Fate level two, joint skill crack gives you more options. Either the protagonist or Io can deal the final blow to learn the skill.

 

The Fate system also summarizes your relationship with each character. In the Fate menu, you can see a list of events with each character. So far, it feels like Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 is more streamlined than Devil Survivor since most of the events center around developing relationships between the game’s characters.


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  • solbalmung

    Good to hear. More character developpement, interaction ftw <33333

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Daniel-Morandi/100000837836996 Daniel Morandi

      Sadly you don’t have some individual endings I believe. That’s something I would like to see in a SMT.

  • OverlordZetta

    Ah hell, this realizes my worst fears. I’d been hoping, praying even, that the social links wouldn’t touch Devil Survivor, but I guess it couldn’t be helped.

    Maybe Atlus will have learned their lesson, or this game will do the idea of friendship and relationships and all that justice, but I dunno…

    • solbalmung

      I really don’t see where the problem lies in adding social link like feature to DS. In fact I think its a good move, more character interaction adds more to the plot and the whole experience. We do know that the SMT franchise is never lacking in the gameplay departement. So a better plot, character developpement is a big plus!

      • OverlordZetta

        Problem is that any of that development is ultimately null and void in the main story. A character gets over something in a social link, but they’re still upset about it throughout the story. You’re dating a character via social link, in the story mode the other characters tease your girlfriend for having chemistry with another guy right in front of you. One could try to accept that kind of thing in a more lengthy game like Persona 3/4, but doing that kind of back and forth in a game where you only have a week would just be awful.

        That’s why I hate the social links. For side characters, they’re fine, but for important ones, they just seem like shallow fanservice/cutscenes to entertain you while you wait to get that final Persona (in 4′s case).

        Until they mean something (as, well, they may very well – the relationships mattered in the first Devil Survivor, but I feel that putting a label on it like this is the first step in the very wrong direction) in the plot and not just in the, ultimately, irrelevant social link cutscenes, I can’t say I’ll ever approve of them.

        • Ty Arnold

          I’m pretty sure you need to do it in order for a lot of them to live to the endgame.

          That plot relevant enough for you?

          • OverlordZetta

            Certainly!

            Don’t misunderstand, I think Devil Survivor was very well done, and it handled its relationships pretty well. It’s mixing that with Persona 3/4′s social links that I’m worried about.

          • http://twitter.com/Laith_Rem Laith Rem

            Don’t be, while indeed similar to Persona’ Social Link system, the Fate system events are more in line with Devil Survivor’s events. It’s exactly the same from the first one except that now you can actually see it.

            For example, giving Midori her Comp would be the level 1, trying to convince her that killing Beldr = bad idea would be level 2, her joining you at level 3/4 and fighting for the demons with Black Frost her level 5.

            Comparing them to Persona’s SL system is comparing apples and oranges, yes they are a system to interact with other party members but they function completely different and the Fate system does come into play in the main plot, in Day 7 to be more exact, unlike the Social Links where it was something that you could not finish and there would be no consequences, per se.

            That’s a really big wall of text to say they are different, I guess.

    • Herok

      i can only see this helping plus this grants ability and not extra XP for demons i think, but with the set up of the game it makes sense since its day by day like P3 and P4 and is more event focused and not location selecting like number SMT:DS plus the first game more or less had this already since you need to talk with people to be able to do their ending.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Daniel-Morandi/100000837836996 Daniel Morandi

      Even loving the old persona saga more I think the S. Link were a great thing in the newest Personas and I don’t think that this is something that makes DS2 worse. The first Devil Survivor you can talk with each character and the only difference now is that now you can learn some skill by doing it.

      • OverlordZetta

        That’s fair. That’s fine. I’m just worried how far they’ll go and how shallow it might become in the process.

    • LynxAmali

       Technically they aren’t. Think of them as the various routes from the first. They essentially fill that role and give you abilities depending on your connection with other characters. The routes are still there but these are more or less character paths.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Fitzpatrick-Phillips/1786364591 Fitzpatrick Phillips

    Here come the complaints.

  • http://amc9988.deviantart.com/ amc99

    Cheers for social links!!

  • http://twitter.com/DanijoEX DanijoEX

    At least, it’s adding something to it.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3ITUZUKPZYUV2VUCVXUW3DVO6Y AJ

    Skill Cracking was brilliant, but annoying.  Damn NPCs stealing my kills.  :/

    I can’t wait for this game.

  • http://twitter.com/Laith_Rem Laith Rem

    So Enishi is translated as Fate. Ok.

    The Fate system has a total of 5 points. While Spencer explained the first two levels, which by the way the 2nd is a blessing, I’ll explain the other 3.

    Number three is a new fusable demon.
    Number four is the ability for the MC to take that person’s demon and placing them on his party. However they are not replaced on the partner’s team, so you are in fact crippling him, think well before using it.
    Number five is another fusable demon and another thing. It’s a bit spoilerish so I’ll refrain from saying it.

  • neetyneety

    Hmm, since this is akin to Devil Survivor 1 events except now you have a sort of actual measurement for checking, is it possible to max Fate for all characters? Or will it be impossible if you’re gunning for a certain route for a specific character? (i.e. Amane won’t assist you during Naoya’s ending regardless of how much you’ve talked to her) Speaking of which, there are still different routes, right?

    • http://twitter.com/Laith_Rem Laith Rem

      The former actually. That is not to say that the law person will align him/herself if you are going with the Chaos route but you can up their Fate, ’till a certain point of course.

      And yes there are different routes.

  • theworldofnoboundries

    Lol even after 3DS coming out, DS still have some good games like this coming out.

    Well as ussual for Devil Survivor, DAY ONE BABY!!!

  • ShadowWolf

    ill be honest, these changes don’t seem like bad ideas.

  • PrinceHeir

    glad Atlus is STILL supporting the DS despite the 3DS almost being a year now(wow time sure flies by)

    amazing stuff and i Salute you Atlus!!!!!!

    • Testsubject909

      Plus there’s a possible reprinting of Radiant Historia.

    • Ladius

      Don’t forget the awesometastic Growlanser Wayfarer of Time on PSP :) That one is gonna rock hard!

  • http://openid.anonymity.com/5HuDuQyz Woot

    The story’s rather promising and the beginning of the game seems to validate that. Survive a train crash, fight your soon to be demons and go on to unfold the truth behind the monsters invasion and this Nicaea stuff.

    Simple but effective! I like it!

    Day one for me. :3

  • PoweredByHentai

    Damn it, I saw “STATUS” and somehow read that as ATLUS.  >_<

    I need to update my glasses.

    • http://profile.yahoo.com/U2UHZLVTHH5EFWNTDCP2MJ4TGQ Nick

      lol saw that same thing and im wearing glasses too!XDDDD

    • http://myanimelist.net/profile/Kuronoa Kuronoa

      Dat different colored T throws us off everytime!

  • antperze17

    it kinda seems difficult but wen i play it, it prob wont be that hard

  • http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/members/55321.html FinalArcadia

    I loved the first Devil Survivor, but never finished it. With the changes this one has, I think I might actually beat it. And I like the main protagonist’s design better. :P

  • A_LINK_IN_TIME

    This and the Pokemon spin-off are DS’s last stand. 

  • Novac

    Hopefully Social Links can die peacefully with the DS,along with forced motion controls and forced stylus controls.

    • http://myanimelist.net/profile/Kuronoa Kuronoa

      But DS didn’t start the social links and doesn’t have motion?

    • Ladius

      Excuse me? Ds has no motion controls, and Social Links in their current form were born on the PS2 Persona games.

    • Exkaiser

      If you don’t like the Fate system, you could just… not talk to your party members? I’m not seeing the issue.

  • http://twitter.com/Ankurre Ankur Jain

    I don’t know why people are crying about the social links. If you want a dungeon crawler then go play disgaea or something. For people like us who prefer more story and less dungeon crawling and grinding this is a godsend.

    • Ladius

      This is the first time I see someone labeling Disgaea as a dungeon crawler, probably because it is nothing like that, being a tactical jrpg with no dungeons whatsoever.

      Ironically, despite the Social Links and strong emphasis on narrative and characters relationships, the ones that can be technically described as dungeon crawlers are Persona 3 and 4.

      • Exkaiser

        “being a tactical jrpg with no dungeons whatsoever.”

        Item Worlds. Item Worlds are nothing but a randomly-generated dungeon grind. Depending on the way you Disgaea, Item Worlds can be a huge, huge part of the game.

        That doesn’t make it a dungeon crawler, of course, but it certainly has its dungeons.

        • Ladius

          Having a constant stream of tactical battles set in an unique environment has nothing to do with dungeon crawling, since, quite simply, you aren’t crawling in any dungeon (the lack of exploration being the most obvious difference).

          Of course there’s grinding, and there are stages that could be compared to the floors of traditional dungeons, but then again grinding is commonplace in most jrpgs (of course Disgaea emphasizes that trait, but in the tactical subgenre).

          • Exkaiser

            The Item World is a dungeon, and you’re crawling through it.

            Don’t try to mince words. They’re randomly-generated dungeons engineered for the sole purpose of grinding levels and raising the stats of items. They’re identical in purpose (and in design, in a lot of respects) to the “Random Dungeons” of Phantom Brave. Are those not dungeons, either?

          • Ladius

            Yeah, they aren’t. Dungeons are meant to be explored, and the “dungeon crawler” monicker was born exactly because the player (or the roleplaying party in rpgs like D&D) was meant to carefully tread them searching for treasures, traps, and monsters, exploring them floor after floor for many game sessions (in the beginning, many rpg modules concerned themselves mainly with dungeons).
            One of the most important parts of old-school dungeon crawling was drawing maps of the areas you had already explored, for instance.

            That formula stimulated the young videogame industry, giving birth to first person dungeon crawlers like Wizardry, and the same could be said of other kinds of dungeon crawlers, like roguelikes or some action-jrpg series (recently Cladun, for example).

            On the other hand, iterative tactical battles set in small maps meant for grindinglooting have nothing do with dungeon crawling simply because they lack the basic recipe of what constitutes dungeon crawling, exploration.

          • http://geekouts.blogspot.com/ miruki

            Didn’t the Item World dungeons have like a hundred floors or whatever and you could only save your progress every ten levels or something? That sounds very dungeon crawling’ish to me. It’s completely optional tho. I wouldn’t exactly call the Disgaea series dungeon crawler games, but the element is definitely there. Dunno what’s so bad about accepting that fact. oO

          • Ladius

            There’s nothing bad, and I’m not refuting it due to any kind of personal agenda (I like both Disgaea and most subgenres of dungeon crawlers :P). It’s just that I really can’t equate those gameplay elements with dungeon crawling.

            If you want to say that grinding=dungeon crawling, or that having iterative tactical arena battles with riskreward mechanics= dungeon crawling I guess you can do it, but for me it’s somewhat absurd to label a game that way when there are no actual dungeons to explore, and as I said I was taken aback by this whole discussion since I thought the radical difference between explorable dungeons and tactical maps was pretty much agreed upon by everyone. Guess I was wrong on that regard, though, different viewpoints and all XD

          • Exkaiser

            Your unerring allegiance to word-mincery knows no bounds. I have to tip my hat to it every time I see you.

            A veritable deontologist of words. Definition regardless of utility.

            But, hey, if having a finite number of floors and a theoretical goal of reaching the end of the floors is not enough dungeon-like features for you, well, I’m not about to stop you.

            I, personally, would argue that the definition of “dungeon” is very loose and varies depending on the work in question. Particularly because the usage as it evolved for a tabletop gaming basis has nothing at all to do with the word’s original usage. It expanded from “underground prisons” to “any multi-room area filled with obstacles and possibly rewards,” mostly because a lot of these multi-room areas happened to be castle dungeons.

            Don’t try to tell me that the tabletop gaming usage of the word isn’t that loose. It is. I’ve seen D&D books call four-room burial mounds “dungeons.” I’ve seen the adventures they were in call themselves “dungeon crawls.” I would personally argue that such a thing constitutes neither, but clearly the adventure writer disagrees with me.

            Ultimately, it’s normative and not positive, less about “this is the way the word dungeon is used in video games these days” and more “this is the way I feel the word should be used,” which is really a different argument altogether. I’m not really interested in arguing normative statements, so I can only say that the modern usage of the word dungeon, as it pertains to video games, most definitely includes Item Worlds. But that’s just, like, my opinion on word usage, [i]man[/i].

            Anyways, here’s something unrelated I wanted to ask. You seem pretty passionate about old-school dungeon crawlers like Wizardry and tabletop crawls. Are you also a fan of Dungeon Master-style games, such as Lands of Lore and Eye of the Beholder?

            If so, are you aware of Legend of Grimrock? Certainly seems like the kind of thing that would be up your alley, especially if you feel that drawing your own maps is a key defining feature of dungeons.

          • Ladius

            Believe me, I’m not trying to push a personal agenda here – it’s just that I can’t honestly consider using “dungeon crawling” when you can’t explore any dungeon, and I never saw such an usage of that monicker before. I didn’t want to start a semantical debate, either XD

            You can have grinding, looting and so on without dungeon crawling, and we all agree that the Item World is a great example of iterative power playing and that it takes some elements from the d.c.roguelike genre, but it isn’t dungeon crawling per se. From a game design standpoint, Disgaea’s power playing is more akin to the subquest-grind model of mmorpgs, imho. Of course in the history of traditional rpgs dungeon crawling has been used in many different contexts, but still even in its most barebone incarnation it always involved exploring something, be it a little cave or a massive underground temple.

            Basically, you can have dungeon crawling without grinding, but you can’t have dungeon crawling without explorations, at least in my book.

            Also yeah, back in the days I was addicted to western crawlers, even if I have since lost some interest in that formula (especially considering the Wizardry-like turn based subgenre, I’m still fine with games in DM’s style, or with roguelikes and overhead action d.c.). Labyrinth Tower Legacista, Grimrock and the fantranslated version of Falcom’s Dinosaur, as different as they are, are all games I would like to play this year (tbh, I must still tackle Xanadu Next’s fantranslated version).

    • http://geekouts.blogspot.com/ miruki

      Persona & Shin Megami Tensei games are pretty heavy on grinding and dungeon crawling imo. I mean.. that tower from Persona 3 was just this massive dungeon crawl and you had to grind quite a bit to not die or to be strong enough to defeat the optional bosses.

      I also spent a lot more time on grinding fighting in Devil Survivor than on reading story, since especially later on I had to restart lots of times since those stupid NPC characters killed the demons / characters my chars needed to kill for skill cracks.. or because I needed more skills for my chars with awful skills. I’d say Shin Megami Tensei games are story heavy dungeon crawlers / grindfests. But I’m no whining about the social links, I love those. :>

    • xNekux

      Disgaea is a dungeon crawler?
      REAL.

    • Jirin

      I’d love to have both, but I’d take well designed combat mechanics before story.  Games are for gameplay, story is extra.  Just so long as they kept the special movement abilities that made DS1′s combat unique.

  • Ladius

    DS2 looks far better than DS1 so far, I’m really glad to see Atlus USA publishing games like this and Growlanser Wayfarer of Time in 2012 :)

  • http://twitter.com/saintgalgo Bruno Cesar

    I liked the Enishi system. I just don’t love this game more than the first, at least story-wise, because it doesn’t have certain classical SMT elements it had. It’s still one of the best DS games along with the first. Can’t wait for the english version.

  • AzureNova

    Devil Survivor 2 is going to be one of the best games this year! Day 1 for me! (Excited) =^_^=

  • Jirin

    I’m so looking forward to the deluge of games we get in February and March.  After a relatively slow year or two for RPGs, now we’ve got this, Xenoblade, Tales of Graces, and Mass Effect 3 all dropping in rapid succession.  I’m so suspending my Gamefly.

    I loved the first Devil Survivor.  I hope they keep all the things that made it special, only balance out the healing powers and the ‘Protect defenseless civilian’ battles.  (In other words, please no more fields where every enemy can heal themselves and cut down their turn order three times per turn.)

  • Joanna

    Sounds good~ I’ve always liked VN-like elements in my RPGs. Hope the game gets to me without too much trouble so I can get it sooner rather than later. x3

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