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 You know when I had the idea to tackle all these routes in a single video per, I imagined they'd be around an hour, an hour and a half tops each. I suppose if anyone wanted Amane's 8th Day in one Endgame length video, this LP has you covered. It's efficient on the upload count at least.
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Dec 17, 2023 02:35
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| # ? May 5, 2024 23:09 |
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Jesus christ. I suppose as the Law Holy God path, it should have the most material, but still....
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Dec 17, 2023 04:18
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I severely underestimated the length of the cutscenes in this route, many of which are a torrent of exposition. There's about a good 20 minutes spent giving the cliff notes version of the story of Cain and Abel and the story of Job.
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Dec 17, 2023 04:24
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMe6H_K_ND4 Part 50 is out! In this 3 hour behemoth of a video, no stone is left unturned as we go through Amane's 8th Day. This epilogue is a bit of a mixed bag, we set about establishing the kind of police state you tend to expect of law paths in this game, but at least there is an effort made to genuinely redeem people. This route also has some interesting character reveals and developments for Amane and Naoya, plus some of the most brutal tactical and combat challenges in the game, so it's at least not boring in spite of the exposition heavy cutscenes. There's quite a bit to this one, so I don't fault you if you can't get through the whole thing in one sitting. Mercifully, the next video will be much shorter, though I can't make the same promise for Yuzu's 8th day. We're in the home stretch now, just one more path to finish!
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Dec 17, 2023 15:34
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Units: Amane, Gin & Izuna The final batch of team leaders you can use in this game, and certainly the least of the characters to use in this game, sad to say. Since it really doesn't matter in the context of this let's play what their expected starting stats are, I'll just be posting their level 99 stats alongside their status pictures. Let's go over them from best to worst. Amane  Amane at Level 99: HP:665 MP:486 ST:17 MA:40 VI:34 AG:24 The lady of law in Devil Survivor and the most specialized mage in the game. Amane is also notable for actually having a set join level instead of a scaled one, she always joins at Level 50 in any Day 7 route where she allies with you. Anyway, Amane is somewhat similar to Mari, being a mage character who picks up a generous amount of VI, making her rather bulky for what's usually a squishy archetype. She also prioritizes AG over ST, which is definitely the better plan long term. In spite of this, she takes a much different road to level 99 than Mari, beelining for capped MA while her other stats languish. Truth be told, I find Mari to be superior in the context of playing a normal run, as she has far more survivability and tactical use at the expense of negligible amount of damage dealing potential and MP. Amane's HP growth is easily the worst of any VI focused character in the game, and since it takes awhile for her VI to grow to a appreciable level, she is beyond squishy and prone to being sniped without adequate defensive passives. Like Yuzu, she also only has 3 move but lacks the speed boon, giving her a disadvantage in the turn order comparatively. This is another thing that puts her below Mari in my eyes, Mari has both 4 Move and a speed boon, letting her put in much more work without additional aid. This LP kind of soured my perspective on Amane, she's just not that good in comparison to Naoya or Yuzu, and she only beats Mari in combat at the highest levels. She's still probably the best of the remaining jokers we have to talk about though. Gin  Gin's at Level 99 HP: 793 MP: 219 ST: 34 MA: 23 VI: 29 AG: 28 Gin is such a cool character, but man is he a disappointment as a usable character. Gin is literally just Atsuro but worse. His stat growth at every level is almost identical, with the key difference being that he loses out on a point of ST, VI and AG in exchange for 2 points of MA. And when I say he's Atsuro but worse, that's more true than you realize because if you actually add up Gin's combat stats, you'll notice his overall stat total is actually one point less than Atsuro's! The only thing he gets in exchange for this bizarre penalty is that he gets 2 extra points of speed. Yippee. Gin also has the distinction of being the single rarest character in the game in terms of route availability, only being usable in his own ending route. On a normal playthrough, he's available for 6 fights, and on new game + there's a 7th he can partake in. As an added kicker, Atsuro is a mandatory deploy in the Babel fight of Gin's route, so it's undesirable to even bring Gin along for his own final boss. Biggest let down of the game for sure. Izuna  Izuna at Level 99: HP:945 MP:160 ST:35 MA:8 VI:36 AG:36 Dear lord. It's rare that people can agree 100% on anything when it comes to team building in RPG's, but I think most people will agree that Izuna is the worst character in this game, if not one of the worst characters in the entire MegaTen franchise. And by quite a sizable amount too, it's an impressive feat to make Kaido's MA look good in comparison. Izuna is a physical fighter who takes the dubious path of raising ST, VI and AG equally while basically completely ignoring MA. This is a horrendous way to build a character in any MegaTen game, and especially bad in this one where MA is a god stat. 80% of the attacks in this game are magic, and MA governs magic defense, so in spite of her high HP Izuna is hands down the most fragile character in the game. And because she raises all her focus stats equally, that means she's never the best at anything, and is often even more fragile to physical hits while hitting softer than Atsuro. Atsuro's whole gimmick is he's supposed to be the balanced physical attacker who doesn't excel in any one stat! She doesn't have the decency to even cap a single stat, and she has no tactical boons to compensate for her dogwater combat ability. She is the epitome of a clown character, someone you only use as a self imposed challenge or a joke. I really could not ever recommend using Izuna. Fortunately you're rarely in a position to do so anyway, since she only appears in Gin and Atsuro's routes, plus she's a redundant join at the tail end of Naoya's good 8th day. In terms of usage within routes though, she is the rarest character in the game, being available for only 5 fights in Atsuro's route, 3 fights in Gin's, and 2 fights in Naoya's good 8th day. You can add one onto that for the New Game + bonus boss on Day 7, but Izuna should not be participating in that fight under any circumstance for a reason known all too well to people who have played that fight.
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Dec 17, 2023 16:28
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And here we have the downside of the chaotic character design, with this set of characters being straight inferior to the options you have at the time. With Amane, you could simply use Yuzu/Midori, and with the other two, they're physical characters in DS1 in the same routes that Atsuro is a forced deploy, and you can only properly run 1 physical character..... Great job, you two. And yeah, Gin was the one where I basically just forced my self to use him on his route (cause duh), only to be blindsided by the fact that Atsuro is a forced deploy on the last map. I have a feeling that the designers thought that players would run 2 phys, 2 magical characters, and then the problem of how powerful magical characters are compared to physical just kind of slapped that down. And, well, their skill exclusivity system kind of porks that in the ear, too. So yeah, say hello to 10 levels behind Atsuro. Funny thing is that map wasn't even particularly hard, the magical squads just kind of demolished any threats regardless.... Izuna is a character I could never bring myself to even attempt using. Her demented stat line meant that, yeah, I could not be bothered to the effort of porting Atsuro's skills to her. At least in Amane's case, when I made myself use her, she still contributed fine. Unlike the others, it's simply a trade-off to use her rather than Midori, rather than straight up shooting myself in the foot. Having to glue Wilder's to two different parties was rather interesting though.... I probably should've switched out Yuzu if I was going to use Amane. It also happened to be the first path I did, since I didn't feel like going with Naoya at the time. Though if I knew that Mari was over there, I would've went anyways since I went to the effort of saving her anyways, dammit. With Keisuke's corpse as a souvenir.
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Dec 17, 2023 21:00
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The funny thing about Izuna in the context of Overclocked is that in theory, she'd be the best user of Multi-Strike aside from the protagonist.... but that skill isn't available until the literal last two battles of the game, and she only half-joins on one 8th day route where she could potentially use it. It really feels like some of these characters were designed under the mindset they'd be available for more than the last 10% of fights in the game with no major skill restrictions.
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Dec 17, 2023 22:06
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I remember using Izuna against Lucifer, she can outspeed his minions with Tetrakarn which is very satisfying 
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Dec 17, 2023 22:31
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWjJzrDD_uE Part 51 is out! Thankfully, this is a much shorter outing than the previous marathon of a route, with Yuzu's day 7 being a quick and suitably anti-climactic ending to the lockdown situation. How are these kids going to get out of this one? Yuzu's Day 8 is the last thing we need to do before closing out on the final bonus boss, I'll be working on getting that video ready throughout the week and we'll be bringing this Let's Play to a close soon enough. TomatoPawah posted:I remember using Izuna against Lucifer, she can outspeed his minions with Tetrakarn which is very satisfying I'm really eager to post my video for that fight once Yuzu's route is done, I stomped it faster than I realized was possible.
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Dec 18, 2023 13:45
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Just chiming in that I'm halfway through the LP and enjoying the analysis and commentary. I played the original version but stopped near my first ending, eager to see what I missed.
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Dec 18, 2023 16:17
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Awesome to hear. The back half of the game where everything begins to breakdown is definitely the more interesting part of the game, so I hope it keeps your attention!
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Dec 18, 2023 17:23
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The Law ending with Amane is truly so disorienting because of the sheer amount of like. In a Chaos playthrough these people instantly abandoned you at the mere concept of rebellion against (the group of people who initiated the lockdown in response to their authority being threatened), but when you're like 'well, we're now going to enact a police state that executes people along laws set out by THE BIBLE, and that applies retroactively' and you are MADE THE EXECUTIONERS, they're like... [midori voice] haha, yaaay! I love a world free of sin! Like, phew! Phew boy!
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Dec 18, 2023 20:21
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I honestly did not know until recording this video that you can personally execute the corrupt cop, which adds a nice layer of irony since taking the Good Overlord path means you can have a Chaos route where you don’t personally kill any people while the law route forces you into a no win situation. It is kind of funny how this route sees Keisuke relapse if he’s still alive and everyone just kind of non-chalantly embraces his ideology.
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Dec 18, 2023 20:49
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvpOnVU7vTM Part 52 is out! This one is marginally shorter than Amane's 8th day, although still pretty lengthy in content. In spite of that, Yuzu's 8th day definitely feels the most tacked on. Not only does it pretty much completely ignore the Day 7 ending to split off in a completely different direction, a couple of the fights seem to be unfinished with unimplemented escort aspects and rather amusingly an untranslated piece of dialogue crept slipped into the script. There are some cool aspects to this route, and it's not a terrible conclusion to the story, but I'd easily say this is my least favorite 8th day in the game. With this done though, there's just one more challenge to conquer within the game, and it'll be the sole subject of the final video.
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Dec 23, 2023 06:27
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Yuzu's 8th day really illuminates how much the Chaos ending is the righteous and correct choice. It's insufficient to choose a neutral ending, we have to eliminate God or else who knows when He'll throw a hissy fit again and force a bunch of unprepared humans into a meat grinder with the hopes that one of them will acquire absolute power and turn that absolute power into absolute obedience. I'm being hyperbolic but only slightly. In every non-Chaos ending the angels either threaten to revoke free will the second humanity fucks up or actively revoke free will! C'mon! You guys suck!
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Dec 23, 2023 18:03
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I dunno, with every passing year it seems that humanity clearly deserves it.
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Dec 23, 2023 18:47
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My favorite Law path is the one is Raidou Kuzunoha 2, where you simply play Raidou as the world's biggest wet blanket and everybody craps on you for being a self-righteous wuss.
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Dec 23, 2023 19:04
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8LeYea6uP8 Well, here we are. The final video, and the final challenge of Devil Survivor Overclocked. The Lightbringer himself. Ol' Louis Cypher is a bit easier in this version of the game, less due to any changes to him and more due to the fact that Overclocked gives you way more viable options to approach this fight, some of them simply much stronger than the ones available to you in the original version. Don't get careless with this fight though, any sub-standard composition will quickly be chewed up and spit out in this fight, and due to the extremely harsh level scaling in this game, entering this fight with demons and team leaders below level 95 at the very least will simply have no chance of winning this fight. Overall, I was actually shocked how well the teams I cooked up for this performed, I ended up stomping Lucifer at a breakneck pace before he could use the strongest version of Megidoladyne and had no team leader deaths. I'll go into greater detail about the teams I used for this fight, but as for some general tips for how to deal with this guy: -You need any form of MP recovery you can get. Now most of the best demons in this game are Divine or Tyrant, so there's some MP restoration baked into the standard comp, but you'll also want Drain on all your casting demons, and any form of passive MP recovery on human casters engaged with Lucifer if they don't have Drain themselves. Once Lucifer enters his final phase and starts slinging out his own Drain, you can quickly find yourself dry on MP and in an unwinnable situation. Don't let that happen. -So long as you have someone with Nyarlathotep positioned in the center of the map, the additional enemies that spawn in for this fight are of no issue, as they will always attack someone who is in their range, regardless of if it's a good idea or not. Truthfully, they aren't that threatening to your health in terms of raw damage they deal, but they can poke you and allow Lucifer himself to more easily secure kills against you. -Megidoladyne becomes stronger every time it's used. It's not a bad idea to assume it'll be thrown out whenever Lucifer's turn will come up, so make sure to keep your teams at full health as best you can whenever a Lucifer turn is coming up. At the 4th usage, it deals in the ballpark of 650-800 damage depending on the MA stat of who is getting hit, so more than any other that's the one you want to be prepared for. It's also the reason why this fight is not realistically winnable without close to maxed out demons. To my knowledge, he doesn't use it again after the 4th shot, but that ended up not mattering since I killed him before he got to that point anyway. Teams Used Hero's Team: For myself, I used a build revolving around Dual Shadow procs. I chose to run Holy Dance for my main offence, with the passives of Dual Shadow, Phys Drain and Extra Charge. Dual Shadow + is the auto skill, giving me a 50% chance that any action I take is repeated. With the 2X damage multi-plier from Extra charge, this means that half the time Holy Dance can deal a whopping 4X damage on the Extra turn. Lucifer lacks Pierce in the final phase of this fight, making Phys Drain the optimal physical defense to have, particularly because Lucifer himself Repels physical attacks, which means bouncing anything back at him is pointless. Prayer is what I went with for healing, thought the ailment aspect of the skill is more or less irrelevant for this fight. Recarmloss is an emergency button skill, allowing me to bring back Loki or Metatron in the event they fall, though thankfully I never needed to do that. The biggest personal weakness here is that I have no resistance to the Maziodynes Lucifer throws out in the final phase, which means I'll have the occasional Shock status to deal with. For my demons, I ran Metatron and Loki, both running Holy Dance and Drain, and Samarecarm on Metatron for revival support and Prayer on Loki for extra healing options. Between Blood Wine and Tyranny, I was able to keep a steady flow of MP so I never ran short on Holy Dances to throw out. I slapped Anti-All on Metatron to cover his Elec weakness, and Phys Drain on Loki so Lucifer's Attack All's are of no issue to him, and both are running Dual Shadow to complete the build. This was easily the MVP team for shredding Lucifer in the final phase, and I got pretty good luck with the build allowing me to finish the fight way ahead of schedule. Naoya's Team: Naoya is set up with a Magic Yin build, focusing on maximizing damage from Fire Dances. Since we can't double up on Holy Dance, and Megidolaon is way too inefficient in terms of both damage and MP use, we instead want to focus on punching through a resistance of Lucifer. It doesn't have to be Fire specifically, just as long as it isn't Elec which Lucifer drains in the final phase. By combining Magic Yin, Fire Amp, and Awakening, Naoya is able to throw out Fire Dances at about 125% power for a very affordable 46 MP. This doesn't compare to the damage I can throw out with Dual Shadow Holy Dances, but it is a very stable and reliable form of damage. Naoya has Drain in case he runs into any MP issues, and Mediarahan for healing support. For demon support, Naoya has Susano-o and Astaroth. Susano-o is set up with Holy Dance and Drain for his main sources of damage, augmented with Dual Shadow for the occasional double strike. He has Samarecarm for revival support, and Anti-Most to patch out his weaknesses. In hindsight, the latter was unnecessary since Lucifer doesn't do anything that strikes a weakness of him anyway, so it probably would have been smarter to work in Elec Drain or maybe even Extra Charge. Mana Aid gives us a good amount of insurance when combined with Tyranny to make sure that Susano-o will always have the MP to keep Awakening up and give us the most damage possible. I prefer Susano-o to Asura for this purpose because Susano-o has innate phys repel, meaning I don't have to dedicate a passive slot to a physical resistance. Astaroth is set up pretty basic, Holy Dance for damage and Drain for MP sustain. I probably should have use a Mag overload to replace Deathbound with Mediarahan, but I was confident I didn't need it and was vindicated for that decision. Astaroth already resists Elec, so I worked in Phys Drain to cover Attack Alls and Dual Shadow for extra damage on occasion. Magic Yin makes this team very prone to being MP screwed once Lucifer's Drains come into the mix, so I usually opted to lead off with my own Drains with my demons to make sure I never ran dry on MP. Mari's Team: This one is going to be brief because Mari is not meant to engage Lucifer in any capacity other than being his punching bag when he isn't firing off Megidoladyne. Mari is running Phys Repel and Endure to make sure she survives these engages, and has Recarm to provide revive support. Otherwise she's just firing off Megidolaons augmented by Blitzkrieg alongside Nyarlathotep. Hecate is summoned to this team once Mari is in position to make sure we have no MP issues, and then Mari just holds the center against incoming enemy spawns to bait them to their doom. The only thing I'd change with this team in hindsight is I'd swap Blitzkrieg for Fortify. We have more than enough damage to dumpster the demons who engage this team, so I really should have focused on minimizing incoming damage instead, since that almost became a problem. Black Frost's Team: The only team that has a line up change mid fight due to Lucifer's changing resistances. Black Frost himself is set up with Samarecarm to support the team, Grace as his auto skill to fully restore his team should he be Lucifer's target after a Megidoladyne, and otherwise he has Anti-All to give him Phys and Elec resistances, Life Surge to ensure he has enough HP to tank Megidoladyne, and Ares Aid to give Holy Strike better odds of critting. Holy Strike does not benefit from Phys Amp, so this is the only way independent of Auto Skills to bring its damage up. For the start of the fight, Black Frost has two familiar sights: Pierce Phys Amp Multi-Strike Garudas. Lucifer does not repel phys until his final phase, so we can run roughshod on him in the first half with these. These guys are also running Phys Repel to bounce Lucfier's Attack Alls right back at him. This team is dedicated to speedrunning the first two phases of the fight, and they do that as well as they have performed throughout the rest of the game. Unfortunately, they aren't able to carry the whole fight, so once their role is done, I have Black Frost bring in Okuninushi and Remiel. Okuninushi is here to allow us to double up, increasing Lucifer's turn delay when Black Frost attacks. He's set up with Phys Drain and Mana Aid to make him durable as well as ensure he has the MP to provide Samarecarm support. He'll be using Holy Strike for damage, though honestly Holy Dance probably would have been better. Drain is there more for HP support than MP support, as Mana Aid and Blood Wine will give Okuninushi all the MP he needs for what he's doing. Remiel is here with Holy Dance and Dual Shadow for damage, plus more Samarecarm support. Drain is a bit more important for him since he can potentially run dry on MP from Holy Dances. Between that, Blood Wine, and his own Mana Aid, Remiel can go the distance. Sadly Black Frost himself can't really do much for this team directly since there just aren't enough skill slots for it, but he does have great survivability and that's the main thing I cared about. Overall, this set up absolutely stomped Lucifer, to a degree that surprised me. I had done a test run that was a lot messier, but I tightened up the builds and executed the strategy better, allowing me to blow through this fight in about 20 minutes, which is about double the speed I did it in on my first ever attempt. A very high note to end this series on, if I do say so myself. And that's a wrap! This was definitely a demanding series to make, but I feel like it was worth it. Funnily enough, unlike other Let's Plays where I deep dive and thoroughly clear games, I didn't really learn anything new doing this one. In fact, doing this let's play just reinforced my faith in the strategies I use, since I seldom had any issues clearing maps in what is widely viewed as an extremely difficult game. I see this game get accused of having luck based missions a lot, and I hope I showed that's far from the truth, you just need to be mindful of the options you have for any situation. Outside of that, I felt like Devil Survivor in general was lacking playthroughs with good video quality, and Overclocked especially was lacking in any video coverage. I hope anyone who watched this enjoyed seeing the game just as much as I enjoyed playing it! This isn't quite a comprehensive 100% let's play, as there are a number of event variations that I just felt were impractical to try and show, but I do hope that anyone who is curious to see those is inspired to check it out for themselves. If nothing else, I do feel like I went above and beyond to show off things I really didn't have to, and it was nice to have an RPG with multiple endings where it felt like a worthwhile endeavor to actually see the other endings. Hope to see you in what I end up doing next, I've already got a bunch of games lined up that I'm eager to show!
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Dec 23, 2023 22:37
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Thanks for running this, it was nice to think about Devil Survivor again. I maintain it's one of the best SRPGs for having the right balance of story and gameplay integration, and both being solid supports for the other. Yeah, it also has jank aspects, but that just makes it charming.
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Dec 24, 2023 12:23
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Yeah I think this game is something special. The sequel may be more polished, but I feel like the different elements of that game don't come together as cohesively as they do in this game. It'll probably be a long while before I play either of the Devil Survivor games again, I put in some serious playtime for the purposes of this LP so I'm all survivor'd out for the immediate future.
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Dec 24, 2023 14:42
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A large part of it for me is the story. The first game's warnings about death are vague enough to confuse the issue, but specific enough in hindsight to be a great horror type stinger when the party realizes that 'oh poo poo, we're in the middle of it now'. There's a definite less is more quality that makes them effective. It combines very well with the death timer, where it's just a constant reminder that everyone's in danger, but they're slated to eat poo poo even earlier than that. It racks up the tension, even during the calmer moments, both for the audience and the characters. There's also the point where the party are straight up homeless for most of the period. They're having to go from vaguely safe place to vaguely safe place, with some sleeping spots clearly still sketchy, but they have no more time to actually look for better. Again, great tension there, and adding to the pressure cooker feeling of the environment as a whole. I disliked the death warnings in Devil Survivor 2 because honestly, the spritework doesn't have enough life in it for me to make the action feeling work out for me. It's also a bit too straightforward to save people, the threat feeling isn't there. The breaking point for me was Keita's death warning, because that just straight up made me laugh for how goofy it looked. I understand removing the death clock, for not wanting to simply repeat things rote by rote, but not replacing it with anything.... yeah. The party here almost immediately cooperating with the local authorities and therefore always being safe at night undercut the tension. The city is apparently falling apart around them, but there's a sense of distance that robs the events of impact. Admittedly, DS2 for me falls short to some degree by comparison, I think if it wasn't acting as a sequel, I'd be more on board with it. But it was a rough fall for me going from a story and setup I absolutely adored to one I was meh on, overall.
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Dec 25, 2023 05:40
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Keldulas posted:A large part of it for me is the story. The first game's warnings about death are vague enough to confuse the issue, but specific enough in hindsight to be a great horror type stinger when the party realizes that 'oh poo poo, we're in the middle of it now'. There's a definite less is more quality that makes them effective. It combines very well with the death timer, where it's just a constant reminder that everyone's in danger, but they're slated to eat poo poo even earlier than that. It racks up the tension, even during the calmer moments, both for the audience and the characters. It’s still a really great game though. Letting Keita die lets you crack Force Dance early, IIRC. And, considering he’s a physical character and a raging rear end in a top hat  ….
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Dec 25, 2023 21:08
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| # ? May 5, 2024 23:09 |
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I do respect Devil Survivor 2 for trying to do something different with the story, though it definitely doesn't land as well, and the characters are way more one dimensional. It does at least succeed at being decently funny at times though, particularly the more abrasive script of the DS version. The gameplay is massively improved though, so it really depends on what you want out of the game when it comes to deciding which one is better. (Though with the massively expanded demon roster, they unintentionally made the grinding required to upgrade your team even worse.) Also while he's definitely an rear end in a top hat, I unironically think Keita is one of the best party members in the game and am always thrilled once I can use him.
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Dec 25, 2023 21:22
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