LP Beach

Yes I'm aware this version of the game uses the phrase "Peaceful Days Died" instead but that sounds really silly to me.

The Game

Devil Survivor is the first title in the Shin Megami Tensei sub-series of the same name, originally released in 2009 for the Nintendo DS. The game is notable for combining classic MegaTen style turn based combat and demon fusion with a turn based tactics play format, something ATLUS hasn't pushed out for the series since the frosty reception of Ronde on the Sega Saturn over a decade prior. Devil Survivor Overclocked is the updated re-release of the game put out for the then new Nintendo 3DS in 2011. This version of the game introduces a whole host of improvements and additions, with about a dozen new skills to customize demon and human characters alike with, over 20 new demons to expand upon and balance out the existing roster, 3 of the 5 ending routes getting an additional 8th day epilogue to add further content to the game, and full voice acting for all major and minor story events boasting an impressive amount of recorded dialogue. Additionally it reintroduces a staple mechanic of the series, the demon compendium that was conspicuously absent in the original release, allowing for much easier creation of high end demons. That's not even going over the litany of quality of life changes that easily make this the ideal version of the game to play. And we're going to go through as much of it as I can manage.

The Let's Play

We'll be starting a fresh file on the game's Normal difficulty (there is no Hard mode) and pursue my preferred ending route for the late game. I'll be making an effort to crack all the skills we can along the way and do so in as skillful a manner as I can manage. There will be no suspend save abuse and I'll do my best to show off advanced tactics that make some of the more infamous missions in this game more manageable. We will also be covering all ending routes in the game (Though I will be using New Game + for everyone of them after the initial playthrough) and seeing every bonus boss that is available on New Game +. Along the way I'll be making supplemental posts in the thread explaining the various mechanics and units of this game, I'll provide liner notes in the thread posts on skills and demons we obtain in the videos, and I'll elaborate on why I approach the game the way I do. It's worth mentioning that I never had the opportunity to play the original release of Devil Survivor, so my knowledge of version differences isn't perfect. Thankfully, there's a pinned thread on GameFaqs covering most of the changes and I did study up so that I could point out the prominent and important ones as we come across them.
*Important Note:This game will be played via the 3DS Emulator Citra, as while 3DS capture boards exist they are expensive and not really worth it for me to invest in for a single game. The visuals in the emulation are fine, but there will be the occasional audio hiccup. (Strangely, the sequel game Devil Survivor 2 reportedly does not have these issues despite how many assets it reuses from this game)

The Videos

Part 1, Peaceful Days Are Over
Part 2, City on Lock
Part 3, Cold Snap
Part 4, Rockstar Rescue
Part 5, Graveyard Smash
Part 6, Gang Busters
Part 7, Black Ops
Part 8, Relationships and Reverie
Part 9, The Stand
Part 10, Free Battle Firepower
Part 11, Disaffected Youth
Part 12, Magical Girl
Part 13, Kaido's Ambition
Part 14, Under the Mistletoe
Part 15, Beldr's Gate
Part 16, Differing Mindsets
Part 17, Judgement Day
Part 18, Rising Tensions
Part 19, Vampire's Kiss
Part 20, Police Brutality
Part 21, Demilitarized Zone
Part 22, Vampire Killer
Part 23, Judge Not
Part 24, The Answers
Part 25, Amane's Power
Part 26, Naoya's Challenge
Part 27, Paint It Black
Part 28, Gin's Struggle
Part 29, All Coming Together
Part 30, Heaven or Hell
Part 31, This Fffire
Part 32, Hellbound
Part 33, Remiel's Resistance
Part 34, The Evil Within
Part 35, Dimensional Merge
Part 36, Ballad of Fallen Angels
Part 37, Hel's Bels
Part 38, Atop the Tower of Babel
Part 39, Overlord's Decree
Part 40, First Blood
Part 41, Street Sweeper
Part 42, Martyrdom
Part 43, Chop Suey
Part 44, For The People
Part 45, Dark Hero Days
Part 46, A New Week
Part 47, To Serve Man
Part 48, Song of Sealing
Part 49, Willing and Abel
Part 50, Legacy of Cain
Part 51, Break Your Barricade
Part 52, Peaceful Days Will Return
Part 53 (Finale), Louie Louie

Supplemental

Mechanics: Stats and Our Starting Units
Demon Race: Fairy
Mechanics: Skills and Skill Cracking
Demon Race: Touki
Demon Race: Beast
Demon Race: Jaki
Demon Race: Wilder
Demon Race: Avian
Unit: Keisuke
Demon Race: Femme
Mechanics: Fusion
Demon Race: Fallen
Unit: Midori
Demon Race: Genma
Demon Race: Snake
Demon Race: Dragon
Demon Race: Avatar
Demon Race: Megami
Demon Race: Divine
Demon Race: Kishin
Demon Race: Deity
Demon Race: Tyrant
Mechanics: Endings
Units: Naoya, Kaido, Mari and Black Frost
Demon Race: Vile
Demon Race: Elements and Mitamas
Units: Amane, Gin and Izuna

*Shout outs to my friend Ren who recreated the Death Clock I use for the thumbnail numbers! You can find them here: https://ranchzilla.newgrounds.com/

Mechanics: Stats and our Starting Units

In this post, we'll be going over the statistics of our starting characters and why I make the decisions I do for building the Hero the way I do. I'm going to forgo commenting on our current demons as they're pretty junky and quickly become irrelevant and replaced.

To start with, Devil Survivor prunes down the typical stat spread featured in MegaTen games, removing the luck stat and leaving us with HP, MP, Strength, Magic, Vitality and Agility. I'm going to assume you know what HP and MP do, so let's jump straight to the primary combat statistics:
Strength (ST): Enhances the power of your physical attacks, and that is it. It's worth noting that ST is not the sole determinant factor behind your physical attacks, as the strength of them is also influenced by your level as well as the base power value of the move itself. ST is the most one-note stat in the game, literally only affecting one aspect of your character and is quite useless if you're not a physically oriented fighter. In general, you should ignore this on your main character as magic is vastly superior in this game most of the time, and for reasons we'll get into later it's actually very impractical to run more than one physical leader in battle. One wrench that gets tossed in the works is that skills in this game have stat requirements to use, and some important skills do require a small investment in ST. To cut a long story short, the minimum recommended ST is 9 to cover almost all your magical offensive options, and 16 is the maximum to have full defensive options to go along with it. As an added kicker, there are quite a few physical attacks in this game that either use stats besides ST, or derive bonus power from a stat other than ST.
Magic (MA): Magic enhances the power of your magic based attacks such as Agi and Zio, powers up healing magic as well, affects your defense against magic attacks used against you, and provides a bonus to your MP (Typically +3) for every point you invest. Already you can see things are quite imbalanced here as MA affects way more than ST does. Devil Survivor is definitely a game where Magic is the dominant build type, especially because the way the skill distribution works means that you cannot equip the same skill to multiple characters. Consequently, it's much easier to field an entire team of casters while pretty much impossible to use more than two physical fighters at best.
Vitality (VI): VI affects your defense against physical attacks and gives a bonus to HP for every point invested (Typically +6). This isn't a super critical stat, but you can't go wrong putting points into it every now and again. The majority of damaging threats in this game are magic based, so beyond the extra HP this stat doesn't necessarily afford you extra protection against everything you'll face. That being said, to their credit physical attacks do become pretty potent by the end game and you definitely don't want to be blindsided by your leader being deleted by a Phys Amp'd Deathbound. I'd recommend funneling points into this once your agility exceeds that of the common threats for a day and/or avoiding characters who have low VI.
Agility (AG): Like MA, AG affects a lot of different things though the full effects aren't quite as noticeable. The most basic thing AG affects is turn order: Leaders and Demons with the highest AG go first. There's a little bit of randomness to this, and generally you need +3 AG over an enemy to be guaranteed to go before them. There's also move priority to consider, which is another can of worms we'll cover later. AG also affects whether or not you start with an Extra Turn in battle, with higher AG making it much more likely you do. High AG also gives better odds of securing an Extra Turn when striking a weakness or resisting an enemy attack, while minimizing the odds you lose them when you screw up with attacking an enemy resistance or when an enemy strikes a weakness/lands a crit. Lastly and least importantly, AG gives minor bonuses to physical accuracy and evasion, though it does nothing for magic which is 100% accurate under all circumstances. Personally, I like to invest in AG a decent amount since going before the enemy and crushing them before they can attack goes a long way for avoiding damage, and being able to secure Extra Turns effectively doubles the damage you can do. I don't like it as a primary stat, but it's my go to secondary stat when I'm investing into a stat that isn't MA. It is also worth noting that there is one extraordinarily broken skill that gets stronger based on how much more agility you have vis-a-vis your enemies, and it's absolutely something to keep in mind for late game physical builds.

Each of these stats has a maximum cap of 40.

Outside of the combat stats, there are the field stats that purely impact the tactics aspect of the game. Move naturally determines how far a character can move in a single movement action. Most characters have 4 move by default, with 3 in the game only having 3 Move (one of them being Yuzu). There's no way for character's to improve their movement on their own, but there are 5 demon Race skills that impact Move: 2 of them do so positively and 3 of them have a negative impact. One character does get a plot relevant increase to the Move stat, but this is right at the end of the game and only really matters for New Game + most of the time. Speed, not to be confused with AG, determines how much delay a given action in the field causes for your character and where they end up in the turn order after acting. 50 is the baseline for this stat, but there are quite a few characters who actually possess more than this while one has less with only 45 speed. On it's own you can pretty much ignore this stat since it really only matters a lot when in conjunction with a specific race skill, and the AI blatantly cheats in regard to this stat and affords the enemy demons whatever amount of delay makes them the most annoying/threatening to you.

With all this established, let's go over our starting Team Leaders and see how they apply these stats in actual fights. I do want to preface this by saying that the relative strengths of the Team Leaders in this game really don't matter in most cases. For most of the game, we have little to no control over who we can deploy, and it's entirely possible to play the game in a way where you get no options to change your primary line up. Still, it helps to know who's good at what and where you should focus them when sending them out to get mauled by demons. Do note that while characters always hit the same stats at level 99, the path they take to get there is slightly random and they'll generally have different stat spreads at different points in the game from playthrough to playthrough. You'll never even see 99 in a fresh new game run, I just provided those stats to emphasize the builds each character tends to run.

Hero


Hero at Level 1:

HP:30
MP:14
St:5
Ma:4
Vi:4
Ag:4

My Hero at 50:

Hp:372
MP:212
Str:12
Ma:26
Vi:12
Agi:16

My Hero at 99:

HP:812
MP:458
St:16
Ma:40
Vi:26
Ag:33

The Hero is the one character in the game you have full control over the growth of, being able to distribute one stat point into an area of your choosing on level up. He also has decent natural HP and MP growth, starting off relatively low in both stats but growing better as the game goes on. As stated previously, magic builds are generally superior in this game and it really behooves you to make a magic focused Hero since you'll be getting way more magic skills early on while there's barely enough physical skills to outfit Atsuro. Skills set to Team Leaders cannot be shared between them, so going with a physical focused Hero leaves Atsuro almost completely useless in many situations. My general approach is increasing magic on every even level, while boosting another stat I feel needs it on the odd ones. Typically I'd ignore ST when following this kind of build, but ST is required to use certain skills that a magic focused Hero really wants. With an ST of 9, you'll be able to use all Almighty magic in the game. With an ST of 16, you'll be able to utilize all types of physical resistance passives, as well as Fire Amp which has ST as a required secondary stat. The highest AG you'll ever face down in the game is 33, so that seems like an obvious stopping point, but honestly you'd need 40 to have a chance to go first on Defense due to how the attacker in an engagement gets an AG bonus for turn order, so I'd actually recommend 31 as a cut off. By exceeding a unit, friendly or enemy, in AG by at least 3, you will always go first with a similar priority move. 31 AG will allow you to always attack before the enemy when on offense. Any excess points should go into VI for added HP and survivability against physical attacks should you not be running Phys Repel. Built properly, the Hero will form the vanguard of your offense and score a lion's share of kills alongside Yuzu. Speaking of,

Yuzu


Yuzu at Level 1:

HP:31
MP:19
St:4
Ma:5
Vi:5
Ag:4

Yuzu at 50:

HP:339
MP:240
Str:13
Ma:23
Vi:14
Agi:17

Yuzu at 99:

HP:646
MP:458
St:23
Ma:40
Vi:23
Ag:30

Despite her cowardice in story, Yuzu is something of a born fighter. If you add up her stat total, you'll actually find she gets one additional stat point over Atsuro and the Hero, her stats totaling up to 18 instead of 17 at level 1, making her ever so slightly stronger in combat. She also has decent HP growth and mammoth MP growth, making her remarkably durable and able to contribute consistently in prolonged battles. One drawback though is a distinct tactical weakness: Yuzu only has a Move stat of 3. This means that if something is 8 spaces away, Yuzu would take 3 turns to reach it compared to the 2 Atsuro and the Hero would take. In slight compensation, Yuzu has a Speed stat of 52, meaning her turn comes arounds a little bit faster. This generally isn't a huge help, but thankfully we have options to work around this limitation and it's highly advisable you use them. As you can see, she builds herself pretty close to how I build the Hero, with just a bit of an overinvestment in strength. Once we start picking up more Magic, Yuzu readily makes her worth known in battle and she'll likely rack up a good amount of kills and be one of your higher leveled characters. Just keep her in good company with the demons you provide her and she'll put in good work.

Atsuro


Atsuro at Level 1:

HP:37
MP:7
St:5
Ma:3
Vi:5
Ag:4

Atsuro at 50:

HP:421
MP:111
Str:20
Ma:12
Vi:18
Agi:16

Atsuro at 99:

HP:799
MP:216
St:35
Ma:21
Vi:30
Ag:29

Atsuro is the first physical leader you get in the game, and he fills the role of the "balanced" one. His magic is decent enough early on to put in some work with the copious magic skills you get in the beginning of the game, after which he shunts it a bit to generalize in the other stats with only a slight edge in strength. It really says something about the other physical fighters in the game that he is still the best caster among them by a mile in almost any route of the game. This also has the fringe benefit of him being one of the few dedicated physical attackers who isn't torn to shreds by magic. Unlike the Hero and Yuzu who consistently do well in battle, Atsuro is much more erratic in usefulness throughout the game. He'll go from powerhouse to craphouse in the span of a single day, and it's all dependent on the skills available to him. Physical skills are pretty harshly tiered in this game, and when they begin to fall off they plummet in usefulness. One thing Atsuro does have going for him is that he gets access to the really good passives and single target skills that enable his style sooner than the dedicated mages of the game. While his multi targeting damage will go from being the best to being the worst in short order, Atsuro does also at least enjoy being a good single target smasher, getting access to a multitude of good single target skills before mages get their hands on the higher tiered magic. You'll have to accept with Atsuro that on his own he won't clear any enemy formations, but he is great at crippling them and it's surprisingly rare that he has to worry about dealing with physical resistance. He definitely requires the most care and planning to use throughout the game, but he's also stable and reliable with his good defenses and huge HP growth. Also he's the best character in the story, so there's that going for him.

Part 2 is out! I reduced the gain on the game recording by 7 decibels, so the audio should be less grating at high volumes in this video. Don't hesitate to let me know if I should drop it a little bit further though! Onto the actual video itself, we're still in exposition land, but we've unlocked a good chunk of the major mechanics of the game and the videos should be much more structured going forward. I'll leave some liner notes on these posts about demons and skills we've gained access to within the videos to let you know what's worth your time should you decide to play this game yourself.

Demons Available

Touki Kobold: Our first physical demon and it is quite bad, with low strength and miserable defenses, preventing it from even being a good wall. We also simply lack the physical might at this point to make good use of Aggravate, and shortly into the game we'll get a skill combo that let's us roll guaranteed crits without Touki demons. Still, it learns Hero Aid, which can be handy to fuse up into better physical demons when we get access to fusion.

Beast Kabuso: Probably the best demon of the starting selection we get. Extremely fragile at its base level, but it comes with valuable attacking magic and has a magic stat that lets it hit really hard for this point in the game. The level scaling in this game can be really harsh, so Kabuso will be on its way out shortly, but its invaluable for the first few story battles and is good fusion material for better casters later on.

Fairy Pixie: An even more fragile caster type than Kabuso who doesn't even start with attack magic. Pixies boast our first form of multi-targeted healing though and can do so at a safe range, so they're good for staying alive in prolonged encounters, as demonstrated in the story battle in part 2. Pixies can contribute a decent amount once they gain access to Zio, but like Kabuso level scaling will pretty quickly push them out of the picture.

Jaki Ogre: Ogres actually have decent synergy with Kobolds, having a mighty strength stat at this point in the game to dish out potent criticals, and they have the HP to stay in battles for a good while. Their magic resistance is dreadful, but the only thing they have to fear right now is Kabuso for the most part, other magic attacks they have to weather at this point are Ice skills, which they resist. Not a bad pick up, but I'd save money for Wairas if avoiding free battles.

Wilder Waira: Speaking of, Waira! Best demon on the first day easily, boasting good stats across the board and the best Race skill in the game. Devil's Speed is key to winning fights efficiently, especially when secondary objectives start to enter the picture. Devil's Speed also gives a bonus +10 initiative on offense, giving it use even when you don't need the Move bonus. Waira also picks up some decent passives in Hero Aid and Life Bonus after a couple levels, so he has good fusion potential too for physical demons. Independent of that, Wilder demons are a necessity in a lot of maps, so you'll want one of these for all your Teams regardless of their actual combat ability. Highly recommend picking up 2 of them before the next story battle, as Zan has important use in that fight.

Avian Moh Shuvuu: Our first Avian type demon! Avians possess the extremely useful Flight race skill, granting an extra point of Move and the ability to pass through obstacles in the field. They compensate for this by being unbelievably terrible in fights with garbage stats across the board. Moh Shuvuu is pretty decent though, with balanced and our first access to Ice magic. Not that anything is vulnerable to that right now, but it is there. It's worth picking up one of these to staple to Yuzu for general use, as this puts her at the same Move as the rest of our party. Moh Shuvuu also has remarkably good resistances for this early in the game, Draining Elec magic and resisting Curse attacks.

Skills Learned

Agi/Bufu/Zio/Zan: Our starting selection of elemental magic, and the early staples of magic offense! In terms of simple use, they're all the same being single target attacks that cost 4 MP, essentially functioning as normal attacks for the magically inclined fighter. What weakness these can strike is the main consideration for which to use, but there is another thing to think about. Zio, Bufu, and Zan have secondary effects that can make them slightly more valuable: Zio can Shock enemies which renders them unable to act and every physical attack against them becomes a crit. Bufu can Freeze enemies which almost identical to Shock, but also nullifies the enemy's physical resistance. Shock and Freeze are temporary ailments and dissipate at a battle's end. Zan doesn't inflict any temporary ailment like those two, but it can shatter and kill petrified enemies guaranteed. To my knowledge, Agi does not have any kind of bonus to it (like having higher base damage in Nocturne or cheaper SP costs in the Persona games) but it does benefit from not too many enemies in the game resisting it. Let me know if I'm wrong on this!

Dia: Your basic single target healing. Not too much to say about this, but it is worth reiterating that unlike the Persona games, Healing magic does scale in power with the MA stat, so this will be stronger in the hands of a MA oriented character. The base power on it is good enough though that it is a very good idea to pass this around as skill filler for your demons, who are not constrained on duplicating skills like your team leaders are.

Amrita: This is a good example of consolidation in this game. Normally Amrita is a mid-game ailment curing skill with you needing dedicated cures for specific ailments up until the point you get it. Ailments are pretty heavily de-emphasized in Devil Survivor, so instead a cure all is the base line for dealing with them. This is decent slot filler though I'd generally advocate just avoiding situations where you'd need it.

Hero Aid: A flat +25% to your basic crit rate (Additive, not multiplicative). Pretty good for Atsuro, though as mentioned previously we will be getting a combo early on that allows for guaranteed crits. Once the use on that combo expires, this goes back to being decent slot filler, though I generally prefer more guaranteed returns when delegating my skill slots.

Race-D: 50% reduction in damage received from enemies of the same Race of the skill bearer. Very situational and not advisable most of the time. There is an offensive counterpart that is still pretty situational but a lot more useful when those situations do arise. I'd pass on this skill as anything other than filler in lieu of better options.

Life Bonus: +10% to your max HP. Not a great amount, single digit gains for most characters at this point, but every little bit helps I suppose. It's pretty close to slot filler at this point, but it does grow in power as your characters level and Atsuro can put it to good use around level 10 or so.

I've posted a re-edit of part 1 with adjusted audio levels that are hopefully less aggressive on the ears. I'll probably delist the original upload and swap it with this one after a point, but I'll leave the original upload intact for now.

Demon Race: Fairy



*Note: Spriggan and Troll are Overclocked Exclusive

I thought it'd be fun to go over the various demon races of the game, the themes they tend to follow, their unique abilities and ultimately which ones are worth your time. By design, the demon races in Devil Survivor 1 weren't really intended to be balanced and some of the later demons have just flatly superior abilities to demons that are available earlier than them. Considering all this, how does the humble Fairy race hold up? Pretty good actually! Fairy is stacked with tons of potent caster type demons, often being specialized towards a specific element. They have abundant options to be fused into, and it's perhaps no coincidence that many of these component demons can be strong casters themselves, leaving good opportunity for huge MA inheritance on fusion. Some notable ones are Pyro Jack, who can easily be set up to be an incredibly strong dedicated Fire caster, Lorelei who has great MA for the stage of the game she's available and can be fused at a time where you can use Magnetite Overload to get a ton of good commands on to her, and Spriggan who has good stats across the board, great resistances and excellent skill flexibility. The Fairy Race does end on a bit of a weird note with Troll, who's more of a mixed attacker with pretty bad resistances, but he is at least available at a point where you'll have Anti-All/Anti-Most. The Fairy Race got a notable viability extension in Overclocked, as the demon line originally ended with Vivian who would find herself rapidly outpaced by the constantly jumping levels of enemies on Day 7. The biggest drawback a Fairy has to contend with is their fairly poor Race skill, which is very much designed purely for the early game and even by the end of Day 1 we can get access to a skill that is almost flatly superior to it. This doesn't impact them too much in combat since they still have great stats for fights, but it does force consideration now and again when you have access to the strongest demon of another specific Race that has the superior Race Skill. Speaking of which,

Charm is the Race Skill of the Fairy Race. This is a command type race skill that costs roughly 16% of the demon's MP to use. It can self target the demon's Team, or assist another team up to 3 spaces away. It heals all members in a Team with roughly half the power of a basic Dia spell. Charm can have one of three bonus effects triggered at random, and with relatively low odds: it boost the critical hit rate of the affected team in the next fight they engage in, it can remove turn delay from a team and allow them to act again sooner, and it can fully restore the HP of the affected team. Charm is almost purely designed for the early game. It's potent enough right now to keep your teams up and running, being the earliest multi-target heal you have access to, and the potential bonus effects are nice when they trigger. It is rapidly outclassed in terms of raw healing power however, and its low base power means it scales horribly even as early as Day 2. Once you get access to Femmes and Megamis, you have no reason to pay heed to this skill anymore and any time you do use it will be matter of serendipity and hoping for the bonus effects to activate. This skill is easily the biggest limiting factor for Fairies as a whole.

Part 3 is out! We have our first boss fight of the game, and fortunately it's super simple so long as you go in with the right preparations. Going forward, my goal will be to fit in as many story segments I can and one story battle for a 30-40 minute time frame, and hopefully make these videos easier to get through in a single sitting.

Demons Available

We unlock fusion in this episode and get a whole slew of new options for team building, so let's go through them all!

Element Erthys: Our first Element demon, as is traditional for these, usage of them is less related to their merits as a party member and more their use in fusion. Elements lack a Race skill, putting them well behind any other demon in the game, but can modify the ranks of demons when fused with them. When fused with the proper demon, it will transform that demon into the next demon up in their race, allowing you a way to continually upgrade demons you've been using for awhile. Fused improperly, it will devolve them to a lower tier demon. Due to their unique ability to essentially upgrade your current line up, Elements require a catalyst fee of 1,000 macca to fuse, making them a little too expensive to make use of early on. They're great for keeping your team up to date and for obtaining every demon in a given Race. Do note that some of the more special and often fusion exclusive demon races can only be demoted by Elements.

Fairy Kijimunaa: Essentially just a level upgrade from Pixie. There's not too much to say about this one, other than its low vitality and low HP growth make it a bit frail. Best set up as a caster, as is true for most any Fairy type demon.

Avatar Heqet: Eh? Likely the first fusion exclusive demon you'll make, Heqet has pretty decent strength and magic but is held back by being an Avatar. Not to put too fine a point on it, Switch is easily one of the worst Race skills in the game, and Heqet itself doesn't really light the world on fire. I have a pretty low opinion of most Avatar demons due to their overly balanced stat spread and lack of a clear focus, and Heqet is a good intro to this. Still, it's the early game and it isn't overly horrible either, so it does well enough as some extra chip damage and is decently durable.

Genma Jambavan: A fairly beefy demon against physical threats and has good strength, but its weakness to Ice and Elec magic make it less survivable then you'd hope. Phantasma is a pretty good Race skill though, and with Hero Aid, this guy can occasionally land mighty criticals. Most Physical demons struggle at this point though due to a lack of skills, both in the sense that they don't come with any good ones and that we lack any skills in our own pool to write to them via Magnetite Overload.

Touki Bilwis: A sizable upgrade over Kobold, which isn't really saying much. Still, this guy can hit decently hard and has pretty solid durability, with a good VI stat, high natural HP, and a remarkably good spread of resistances. Like most physical demons at this point, lack of good skills is what holds Bilwis back.

Beast Hairy Jack: Our first demon that resists Physical, and that's the main thing that's going for him. Still, he's a stronger demon than Kabuso that gives us access to Animal Leg, and there's one mission on Day 2 where I'd like to have two of these, so he will at least see some use. We also get a good Auto Skill on Day 2 that synergizes very well with his innate Anger Hit.

Femme Kikimora: The stand out demon of Day 1, Kikimora is a very solid caster. She's definitely on the glass cannon side of things, but her high strength and access to a strong heal in Devotion definitely make her worth picking up multiples of. She'll fall off quickly into Day 2, but we can easily fuse her into stronger casters, and with her high MA growth, we can make some strong demons off of her.

Wilder Garm: Fast and powerful but with the constitution of wet tissue paper, that is Garm. Shortly into Day 2, we can get skills to write onto Garm that make it a surprisingly formidable fighter with its very high ST. Garm sticks around for awhile since the next tier of Wilder is over 10 levels away, and it doesn't do terrible in that time! The sun will eventually set on Garm's glory day, but I suspect we'll see a lot of him in Day 2 out of necessity.

Element Aeros: Same deal as Erthys basically. Slightly stronger, but still mostly just fusion material. I would not recommend using this as an actual combatant, though I suppose its resistances are decent at least.

Skills Available

Ice Dance/Elec/Force/Fire: We only get Ice Dance in this video but much like the basic elemental spells, these spells are all functionally identical save for the secondary effects that Ice/Elec/Force have, so we may as well roll them all into one. Dance skills are medium powered magic skills that randomly hit 2-5 times. The skills will always hit at least twice, and cannot hit a single target more than 3 times. Use against a group, your results can range from hitting each demon once, to hitting one three times, to hitting 2 demons once, to hitting one demon 3 times and another 2. Naturally, Dance skills cannot be relied on to clear enemy groups, but they're a huge step up over the tier one single target skills and are your go to skills for tougher engages for a good chunk of the game. Right now, at 23 MP, they are crazy expensive to cast and we can't throw it out willy-nilly. If you need something dead though, or need to thin a crowd, Dances are more than capable of doing that. This is one of the few times where a Command skill is the best choice to crack.

Anti-Ice: Terrible idea to crack this right now. Barely anything uses Ice at this point, and by the time we do see things that throw Ice out, we'll be able to crack it no problem via Free Battles. Only crack this if you want to make the game harder on yourself in a very weird way.

Anger Hit: Flip a coin and see if it turns up a critical hit. Obviously on its own, this is useless due to the lack of reliability. On Day 2, however, we will get our first bonafide skill combo that suddenly makes this Command great and you'll want to pass it around to all your dedicated physical demons.

Mechanics: Skills and Skill Cracking

Now that we're at a point where we can expand our skill selection which will only ever continue to grow, it's a good time to discuss the nature of how skills work in Devil Survivor and what we should shoot for with skill cracking. Much like Digital Devil Saga, Devil Survivor allows you to freely set and remove skills from a constantly growing pool giving you extreme flexibility with building your human characters. Unlike DDS though, this pool is shared between all your characters and the game does not allow human leaders to share skills between them. Additionally, skills are divided into one of 3 categories, each having a limit on how many can be set to a character:

Command Skills are our attacking, supporting and ailment inflicting skills. A human or demon can have up to 3 command skills set at a time, either going all in on a specific attacking type or diversifying between physical, magic and support skills. With only 3 slots to work with, its typically better to specialize a character or demon than generalize them, but not always.

Passive skills are, naturally, the skills that passively affect the inherent attributes of our characters and do not consciously need to be used like Command skills. A human or demon can have up to 3 passives equipped, and these span a wide range of effects from improving your defenses, to amplifying the power of specific attack types, to boosting specific stats and even fringe stuff like improving ailment success rate or allowing your physical attacks to restore HP. For the most part, it's a good idea to have one skill that improves your offense with specific attack type, a good defensive skill, and either adding onto one of the two previous categories or throwing on something that aids the character for something specific about them. (Like a caster equipping Mana Surge for more spell flinging goodness)

Auto skills are a type we have not seen yet, and these essentially function as the buffs of this game which otherwise lacks the traditional variants of buffing magic seen in the MegaTen franchise. Auto skills do actually cover a much wider range of effects than that though, and there are plenty unique ones that simply require more elaboration as we unlock them. Auto skills are unique to our Human team leaders, only one Auto skill can be equipped at a time, and they function by automatically firing their effect off at the start of an engagement. For demons, Race skills take the place of Auto skills, and obviously are inherent to specific demon races and cannot be changed beyond fusing the demon into something else.

Anybody even loosely familiar with the MegaTen series will immediately notice that we only have 7 skills to work with as opposed to the usual 8, and of those 7 we are given constraints on how much of a specific type we can allocate to a character. This changes up the dynamic for skill selection quite a bit, and the no duplicate restriction is the major reason why it's impractical to attempt to use more than one Physical leader in his game. Now demons are a little less constrained, as you can run as many duplicate skills between them as you want, but there are some restrictions to them. The most obvious is their Race skills, which cannot be changed without getting an entirely new demon. The second is that any skill they have by default will remain when fused or purchased. Now Command skills can be overwritten via Magenetite Overload, so as long as you're patient enough to grind out Free Battles, you have full control over what a demon has there. Passives, on the other hand, cannot be overwritten so any Passive a demon has by default is stuck with them permanently. This can be fairly unfortunate for a good few demons who have pretty lousy passives cluttering up their limited skill set.

With this game's unique spin on the skill system laid out, let's get into skill cracking. At the start of every battle, in preparations, you can set each team leader to crack a skill from a single enemy, so long as it isn't something you already have in your pool. Each character can only crack one skill, the crack will go through so long as the team leader or one of their demons secures the kill on the targeted unit, and as you probably suspect, there will be cases where a single enemy unit within a team has multiple skills you can crack, but you can ultimately only get one of them. Effective skill cracking is one part deciding which skills are most valuable, and one part delegating your teams in the most effective manner to obtain each skill they can crack. To that end, you should always be mindful of who you're setting to crack what and make sure they can actually manage the job. (It'd be lousy to have Atsuro go all in on a physical power team and then set him to crack a team that mostly has Phys Repel defenses, so always double check this stuff before committing!) How do we decide which skills are the most worth pursuing in the event we have more options than we do team leaders? This is actually pretty easy:
1.)Auto skills should almost always come first and foremost. These have extremely powerful effects but are also very rarely available. A good chunk of these are only available once per playthrough, or are only obtainable from Free Battles on the 8th day for endings that have that. You should almost always prioritize these, with one exception. There's a line of Auto skills known as Ban (x), with X being a specific attacking type. These skills prevent the first usage of the affected skill type from working in a battle, and then proceed to do nothing if the same skill type is used multiple times. These skills are highly situational, with only Ban Phys, Ban Curse, and to a much lesser extent Ban Fire having any real use. They always show up before the ending route splits, so if you're going for 100% completion or just want to go for a clean single clear of the game, you can easily ignore these.
2.) Passive skills should be the next priority. Passives are a bit rarer than command skills and some of them can have tremendous effects on a Team Leader's ability with a given specialization. While most of these do appear in Free Battles after a point, some do not and they generally take longer than Command skills to populate them. Speaking of,
3.) Command skills are easily the lowest priority. As far as I can tell, all command skills are available from Free Battles over the course of the game, often shortly after your first opportunity to get them from story battles. Unless the other options you have from passives and autos are garbage like Drain Hit or the Ban skills, Command skills are always bottom priority. There is some advantage to cracking these as early as possible, namely using Magnetite Overload to quickly write a good new Command to one of your demons, but there's never a situation where you'll be screwed out of a command if you don't get it the first chance. Ice Dance from Wendigo is one of the very few situations where the Command skill is the ideal one to grab.

Demon Race: Touki





*Tokebi and Ongyo-Ki are exclusive to Overclocked

The Touki Race is pretty close to being designed purely for enemy use instead of your own, as evidenced by how commonly you fight against them. They're the first physically oriented race of demons, awful at magic with pathetic MA and overt elemental weaknesses, though as Tokebi shows there are exceptions. While Touki demons are more than usable, around the mid-game you start getting access to more specialized demons with stronger Race skills that overshadow them pretty badly. That said, there are two early game powerhouses here and one very solid mid-late demon at our disposal. Gozuki has a mammoth strength stat for the time he's available, and can put in very good work with Berserk and Anger Hit. Mezuki runs counter to the design of the race and is more of a balanced magic user, and a pretty darn good one. It's very simple to fuse him in a manner that allows him to have Maragi and Mazio with corresponding Element Boost passives, allowing him to uncork some very potent multi-targeting damage. With innate Endure, Berserker is a very formidable demon and has extremely high ST for when he can be fused, just one point shy of Yaksa who is 10 levels higher! It is very easy to use fusion inheritance to snag a Berserker with 30+ ST, Mow Down and Phys boost, making an amazing team clearer. As for the rest, Tokebi is notable for having remarkably good defenses for a Touki but no real specialization at a point in the game where it's difficult to just create that on a demon. He mostly just serves as a way to beef up the roster for Touki demons so they don't have a huge gap between Mezuki and Berserker anymore. Yaksa is fine but available at a point where a slew of stronger physical demons can be made. Ongyo-Ki has a very high base level and decent stats, but I've just never been sold on him due to the useless Null Elec cluttering up his passives and the relative uselessness of Aggravate. With that segue established,

Aggravate is the Race skill for Touki demons. This is a Command type race skill that costs roughly 16% of the demon's HP to use. In exchange, all members of the demon's team get 1 guaranteed critical hit. For multi-hit skills, this only affects the first hit of the skill. That last point is what makes this skill pretty not-great, as most of the best physical attack skills in the game are multi-hit and thus you're better off trying to work Ares Aid into a build if you're interested in critical damage. It's pretty useless at the start of the game due to the relative weakness of physical attacks early on, and late game you can usually win fights just fine without it. Not that it doesn't hurt to set it up if you do have it on a physical based team, but its usage is so limited I often forget I do have access to it, and you could easily argue it's not worth the turn delay it causes to set up. It compares pretty badly to the magic version of this skill, which is a flat 50% boost to the damage of magic skills that DOES affect multi-hit skills. Like I said at the start, Touki demons really feel like more consideration was put into how they can be used against you, and this skill is wonderful in that context, allowing enemies to chip away at you more and potentially deny Extra turns.

Part 4 is out! More attempts are made to find a weakness in the lockdown, but the SDF has the area well and truly secured. As well, it seems like we're not the only one having a brush with mortality today...

Demons Available

Fallen Gagyson: A fairly unremarkable demon on his own merits, but he is a better Zio caster than Pixie that's easy to set up with additional elemental coverage. The main thing to note about Gagyson is that he is our very first form of MP sustain. The Sacrifice Race skill of the Fallen Race procs a small restore to HP and MP for the whole team every time Gagyson can notch a kill! It's not super significant right now, but a well made Fallen demon can give quite the extension to your team's ability to fling out high powered magic.

Skills Available

Watchful: Passive skill that allows demons not in an active party to gain leaked EXP. Additionally, it gives a bonus to EXP received when participating in battle. Team leaders don't really need this on their own as the human characters get leaked EXP when they don't participate in battle anyway, but the EXP boosting effect is fairly useful. It's a good slot filler for the main character until we get better options.

Counter: A passive that gives a small chance a character or demon will respond to physical damage with a normal attack of their own. Fairly useless at almost any stage of the game, and the fact it requires 7 ST and 8 AG to equip means it's not even good slot filler as all our characters are unable to equip it right now. Even in the best circumstances, this is so weak and random I really couldn't recommend running it.

Mana Bonus: Passive skill that gives a 10% increase to your maximum MP. Life Bonus' more attractive sister that is ultimately only marginally better. On both the main character and Yuzu, this will just result in an extra tier one elemental spell to cast. It's slightly better on Yuzu who has higher MP growth, but it still just slot filler at this point. By the time it starts giving an appreciable bonus, the upgraded version of it is available to use.

Never got into this franchise or its spinoff, the Persona series. While both of them seemed to explore interesting themes, what I saw of the gameplay of both felt somehow overcomplicated and bland at the same time. Is there any game in either franchise that would let me get over this impression, if it's not too much trouble?

Digital Devil Saga for the PS2 has always been a preferred game of mine and one I like to recommend. It captures all the, what are to me, fun elements of gameplay in the franchise while being very accessible with a set party a very flexible skill system. Each game in the duology is only about 30 hours too, so they're not huge investments compared to most other RPGs. The HD version of Nocturne updated the fusion mechanic to allowing you to select the inherited skills of your selected demon, making that version much easier to get into and I'm definitely among the people who consider that game to be a franchise apex. IV Apocalypse for the 3DS is another really strong game that's easy to get into and prunes some of the more annoying random elements from team building. If you're looking for something with the team building aspects but different gameplay, the Raidou Kuzunoha games are definitely worth a look, being action RPGs built around a campy detective story.

Part 5 is out! Rounding out Day 1 with a very straightforward fight, we get some insight into the workings of the Demon Summoning Program from Atsuro and kick off Day 2 by realizing the government knows way more than they're letting on. Starting from here, we're going to be dealing with way more events to see than there is time to see them, so there will be a lot more jumping around in time via save states from here on it. Day 2 also grants us access to far more unique and interesting demons, so our strategic options will expand greatly from here on out!

Demons Available*
*I reached Level 15 in the process of obtaining new skills, so most of these became available post-video

Megami Sarasvati: We were actually capable of making this in the previous video since it's a level 12 demon but lacked the components to do so until now. Sarasvati is our first Megami demon and Megamis are some of the best casters and specifically healers in the game! They're often one step ahead of everything else when it comes to healing support access, they have sky high magic stats, and their Race skill is incredible. Affection gives us a 4 range Mediarama combined with Amrita! Absolutely fuse these demons when you have the option. Sarasvati herself comes with good skill options from fusion and learns Force Dance after leveling up, making her a very solid addition to your offense.

Snake Makara: Our first Snake demon, Makara is nothing too special on his own, especially due to his cluttered Command list blocking good inheritance. What Makara has going for him is the Snake Race skill, Constrict. I used to have a very negative opinion of this skill until I read the fine print and found out it's awesome. The primary effect of Constrict is that it restricts the movement range of adjacent enemy teams to 1 Move. Highly situational and mostly meant to be used against you. (Though it is a way to restrict Move that can be done on Summon, unlike Bind) The reason this skill is awesome is its secondary effect, advantage on Defense. What this means is that when an enemy attacks you, instead of having no initiative in the skirmish, you gain +10! This invalidates the enemy's initiative and puts you at the advantage, allowing you to counter-crush the enemy formation and avoid a ton of damage. This can be put to great use in many fights, always be mindful of this option.

Divine Angel: We get a TON of great demon options at this point. Angel is our first Divine demon. Again, we have limited skill options when it comes to fusion, so how good Angel is in battle can vary but her Race skill makes her worth whatever she has. Divines have access to Blood Wine, a command type race skill that trades 28% of their HP in exchange for restoring 12% of the MP of everyone on the Team. This is easily the most reliable MP sustain in the game, and it isn't too hard to balance the steep HP cost with healing skills. Definitely keep this handy if you plan to toss around a lot of dances.

Fairy Jack Frost: Hee-ho! Not much to say about this guy who needs no introduction, he's a dedicated Ice caster, and is pretty good at the job. Coming in with innate Mana Bonus and learning Ice Dance shortly after creation, with decent inheritance on MA Jack Frost can cover all your Ice casting needs. There's a lot of Ice weak enemies on Day 2, so this is much appreciated.

Kishin Ubelluris: The first Kishin Demon in the game, he is a sack of ST and VI who mainly just spams Berserk and calls it a day. Notably our first access to the Double Up Race skill, which allows us to engage in two skirmishes in a single turn, though it is a conditional Passive and can only activate if he's in the team BEFORE the first skirmish. Notably is only weak to Curse which is not much of a problem right now as the only skill we have to worry about there is the not terribly threatening Mute Eyes.

Dragon Toubyou: The first Dragon demon we can fuse, there's not too much to this one. His stats are very balanced, so he can flex onto anything but starting with innate Zio probably makes a general caster build more appealing for him. Dragons have the Evil Wave Race skill, giving you an attacking range of 2, but for a slew of drawbacks. I'll elaborate more on this skill and how it should be used in the next video.

Femme Lilim: The next level up on Femme demons, and pretty darn good as a dedicated caster, with a solid base 10 MA that can be pumped up further with inheritance. The biggest weakness of Lilim is that she starts with no innate attacking skills and needs to level up repeatedly to learn Elec Dance, though if you fuse her via Gagyson that already knows it, it can unlock the skill for her immediately. Advisable to fuse right away if you can cheat Elec Dance onto her like that, and her much higher HP makes her a better Devotion user than Kikimora.

Element Aquans: The next to last Element Demon you can fuse, there isn't much to say about this one beyond its fusion purposes. It does come with innate Ice Dance though, which is a good attacking skill to fuse onto anything it can rank up.

Skills Available

Race-O: The offensive counter-part to Race-D, and the much better skill. This gives a pretty solid 50% bonus to your damage when dealing with enemies of the same Race. It's fairly situational and can only be set to one team leader, so I wouldn't recommend using this most of the time, but we will have an opportunity to put it to work on Day 2.

Elec Dance: Ice Dance but Elec. It's pretty good.

Mute Eyes: Our first Ailment skill, and it is bad. Even on things that are weak and with the corresponding boosting skill, ailments are just frustratingly unreliable in this game and run afoul of the "just kill the enemy" problem endemic to the archetype in a lot of RPGs. Anyways, this inflicts Silence which prevents spells from being cast. The enemy being dead also prevents them from hitting you with spells, so I'd advocate optimizing for that instead. There are several skills that combo with ailments, so this gains more use once you have those, but anybody running an ailment focused build usually opts for one that is just flatly superior to any other. We'll see it in due time.

Demon Race: Beast





*Cabracan is exclusive to Overclocked

Beasts often seem to be suffering an identity crisis most of the time, having stats that lean hard towards physical with magic focused skill lists. While there are magic oriented Beasts like Kabuso and Cait Sith, the majority of them lean towards bruiser type stat spreads. Beasts can function very well in this role, provided you can get the skills onto them, but often they're more valuable either for their Race skill or for the potential as fusion material. Take Orthrus, who comes with innate Fire Dance and can fuse that off with Fire Amp as a bundle, AND can learn Pierce, an essential ability for physical builds. Cabracan comes with the all powerful Multi-Strike, and while he's mediocre at using it he can easily be used to fuse it onto a powerful demon who uses it to devastating effect. It's hard to recommend specific demons here since you generally want at least one anyway for Animal Leg strats, but if could make some specific recommendations: Cait Sith has decent MA and comes with two multi-target magics. Getting Fire Boost onto him and Media for some support creates a solid caster for AoE chip to let your stronger fighters mop up the rest of the formation. Orthrus is very easy to fuse with good MA inheritance, so he can be surprisingly potent with Fire Dance once Fire Amp unlocks. Cerberus is basically just an upgraded Orthrus but with a more flexible skill set. Getting Cerberus with Deathbound+Pierce+Phys Amp creates fast powerhouse of a demon who can obliterate the enemy flanks or even just delete the team leader depending on how the dice fall.

Animal Leg is the Beast Race skill and it's a darn good one if used properly. This is a conditional passive that functions as such: if the the team has already made a move and initiates combat, they will be able to move again at the conclusion of the skirmish. This is likely intended for hit and run strategies where you crush or weaken one demon team and then back off before reprisal, but the other more useful strategy is traversing large chunks of the map in a single turn. It's important to note that the Move bonus from Devil Speed does not wear off after movement, only after the turn ends. Combining these two skills can allow you to cover 14 spaces in a single turn in the right circumstances. Additionally, this skill also combos with Double up, allowing you to move, attack an enemy, move again, attack another enemy, and move one more time, covering 12 spaces and 2 different enemies. If that's not enough, the game can't move you back once you've moved again, so you're free to swap out your Beast for a more appropriate demon once you've accomplished your goals! Animal Leg isn't strictly useful everywhere, but it's amazing in the situations and never hurts to have. Definitely an ability where the only limit to it is your imagination on how to put it to work. The only thing to be mindful of is that all of these additional actions do generate turn delay, so a character can be left idle for awhile after pulling these maneuvers off, but it can absolutely be worth it for the complex tactical moves you can execute with this.

Part 6 is out! We start to see the first signs of breakdown within the lockdown, and the truth is starting to become apparent to the keen eyed. On the battle front, our options grow ever stronger! We can expect the challenges thrown at us to become more complicated in due time.

Skills Available

Tailwind: We got this in the last video but I figured it was worth mentioning it alongside the other auto skills. This is the default auto skill the game provides us with, and it's much better than it seems at a glance. Most auto skills cost MP to cast at the start of the turn, but this one is a free cast. For a price you can't beat, this gives +5 agility to everyone on the team. That doesn't seem like much, but remember that also goes alongside initiative, effectively giving you +10 Initiative on offense and all but guaranteeing everyone on your team will go first and wallop the enemy before they can do anything. On defense, this pretty much nullifies the enemy's initiative bonus allowing for the faster person/demon to go first. Additionally this goes a long way in helping to secure Extra Turns. The lesser thing this does is give you better accuracy and evasion to physical attacks, which isn't too major and there are better auto skills for that. This skill also has a unique synergy with a late game physical command, which can allow characters and demons to be much more effective with it than they would be normally. I can actually pretty highly recommend this skill, it is far more helpful than its mundane effect would lead you to believe.

Hustle: Another Auto Skill, and this one is pretty bad. This increases accuracy and evasion for the whole team by 25% at a cost of 3 MP. Once again it bears repeating that only Physical skills have to worry about accuracy so this does far less than you would hope. This would be okay if not for the next skill on this list that covers the offensive portion of the skill way better, and there are far more reliable defensive options later in the game. Given that this effect costs MP, however small, you could easily say it's not really better than nothing since the effect will often not matter at all.

Marksman: This auto skill on the other hand is awesome. At the cost of free, your accuracy becomes 100% for all physical attacks. This is the combo for Atsuro I alluded to earlier, as this skill does affect Anger Hit and makes it a guaranteed crit. This is a great skill for physical teams, and if you don't have a specific plan in mind that requires optimal physical damage, I'd advocate having this on as a default to give physical users absolute consistency. Great auto skill, and I suspect Atsuro will be running this for the majority of the game.

+Poison: A passive skill for a change of pace, and a pretty useless one. This gives marginal odds that your physical attacks will inflict poison. It is worth noting that this applies to Command skills as well as your basic attack. These skills are okay as slot filler, but the other ailments that have similar passives to this are generally much better. Poison in this game is much more of a hassle for you than the enemy, and the damage that could potentially be reaped from this avenue of inflicting it will by default be much lower than the actual attack that caused it. In some MegaTen games Poison can kill, but not this one. It will drop a unit to 1 HP and require a finishing blow. Like so many other early game passives, I would not advocate for this in any capacity once you have something superior to run in its place.

Demon Race: Jaki





*Kudlak is a Special fusion, he cannot be fused without unlocking him in the story first
**Macabre is exclusive to Overclocked

I mentioned Touki demons kind of feel like they're designed to be used against you as opposed to being serious additions to your party, Jaki demons DEFINITELY give that vibe. Early game they have horrendous defenses and are slow as molasses, pretty much designed to be blown up by magic. Mid-late game they are unremarkable generalists with no interesting specialty skills to give them a niche. They usually have solid offense in terms of stats, but certain factors hold them back considerably like Loa having a cluttered command list on fusion or Legion being weak to two of the more commonly seen magic elements. Even Macabre has weirdly bad resistances for a late game demon, although that does not matter too much. Are any of these guys worth using? Well, Legion does have pretty good MA and VI, so if you can get his Ice Dance and Amp online and work around his weaknesses, he's a pretty solid attacker and bulky defender. Kudlak is a very flexible physical attacker with his almost completely empty skill list and has pretty balanced stats across the board with solid innate resistances. Macabre is okay but there are better physical attackers available around the same level, and having a skill slot dedicated to a Passive that is identical to his innate resistance is extremely annoying. There's a handful of demons like this in the game and it's largely intended for using them as fusion material for demons that possess weaknesses for that element, but there's no way to clear it off the original demon meaning they have a dead slot in their passive list. It's a large limitation in a game where skill slots are at an absolute premium.

Bind is the Jaki Race skill, a command type skill that allows them to lower an opposing team's Move to 1. It costs 18% of their HP to use and has a range of 3. This is a situational ability largely reserved for escort quests and the rare mission where you have to prevent an enemy from escaping. Note that it can be counteracted by Devil Speed, adding another reason to keep Wilders on stand by for all of your teams. One major problem this skill has is that Jaki demons tend to suck and seldom will you have them in an active slot at the start of the battle. Likely you'll be summoning them in mid battle if you use them at all, and they cannot use this on the turn they're summoned. Effective use of this skill requires good planning and frankly it's just easier to come up with a plan that doesn't involve this skill. It does have synergy with a later Race skill, though again I'd just come up with a plan that doesn't involve this skill even if you have that option. Naturally, this skill is unbelievably annoying when used against you and you don't have a Wilder out. Getting locked in place by this skill can cause many time sensitive missions to go sideways, so always be mindful when the enemy has the option to throw this out ad nauseum.

Part 7 is out! We have a battle double feature in this edition, discovering even more suspect behavior from the government and witnessing the formation of an unlikely alliance. Between all of this, whispers of a mysterious and imposing master for the demons can be heard.

Demons Available

Deity Thor: The very first Unique demon we can fuse. As that signifier implies, you cannot have more than one Thor in your roster. Thor himself is highly specialized, with rock bottom MA and AG but ridiculously high ST and decent VI for this stage of the game. If you can get Berserk onto him, he can do some serious damage but that abysmal MA makes him a much bigger glass cannon than you'd expect. Naturally, Awakening is pretty useless in the context of his own magic, as he will never deal good damage with Elec Dance and doesn't even have the MP to cast it after using Awakening.

Genma Tlaloc: The next tier of Genma we can use and a decent upgrade over Jambavan. With Fire Dance and Berserk, he can mount a solid offense. I'd advise shooting for some MA stat inheritance if you have the option to since we don't have access to Fire Dance ourselves at this point and it can be handy to have a potent caster for it.

Touki Gozuki: The first really good Touki demon, Gozuki has great ST and innate access to Berserk. Combined with Anger Hit and Marksman, he can dish out some serious damage to anything that doesn't have Phys Resist. Definitely pick this guy up for Atsuro's team.

Skills Available

Berserk: The first random hit skill for physical attacks, functioning like the dances at 2-5 hits but with the added caveat that your current HP influences the end damage result. The more HP you have, the stronger this skill is. Once Atsuro has the stats to equip this, he'll likely be running it until Day 6 when you finally get an upgrade over it. Having Atsuro and at least one other demon spam Berserk with Hero Aid is a pretty potent crowd clearing tool.

Taunt: Makes the caster the target of incoming single target attacks when used. Not a huge fan of this, skirmishes are too short for this to have a huge impact, and it does nothing against multi-target skills. Later in the game, we'll get a much more effective version of this concept with Passive skills, and even then that still fails against multi-target attacks.

Anti-Elec/Anti-Force: More skills that convey damage resistance. Equip them if you're going to be seeing a ton of the skills of the corresponding elements thrown your way. I elected to pass on Anti-Force since it's not terribly useful right now and can be obtained easily from free battles later.

Anti-Curse: This one deserves to be mentioned separately. In addition to protecting against Curse type attacks, this also halves the chance of ailments sticking in general, including from sources like the +Ailment passives. It's a good idea to run curse protection on your best fighters, because there's nothing like having a strategy go sideways because your team leader got petrified and shattered immediately after.

Force Dance: Another elemental dance, use it when the corresponding weakness comes up. Since expanding our offensives options is more important right now, I elected to take this over Anti-Force.

Demon Race: Wilder




*Catoblepas is exclusive to Overclocked

Wilders are slightly erratic but generally lean towards a physical specialization as the game progresses. The only one truly more geared towards magic is Mothman, though Catoblepas is fairly balanced and can run a mixed build if you desire. Typically I highlight notable demons that I'd recommend using in serious teams, but that doesn't really work for Wilders because you often want them on your team regardless of anything due to their amazing Race skill. If I could highlight some demons, Afnac has decently balanced stats and joins at a point where physical builds experience some time in the sun. With his access to Phys Boost, he can put in some good work for awhile with Berserk and Mow Down. Moth Man has high VI and MA, and with proper skills he can be an extremely durable caster with his innate Endure and Media. Behemoth is one of the most min-maxed demons in the game with sky high HP, ST and VI and trash tier MA, AG, and MP. He can lay down some absurdly powerful Deathbounds with Phys Amp, but don't expect him to do much past that. He's also somewhat held back by having the useless Extra Savings passive cluttering up his Passives list. One thing to note about Wilders is their erratic progression. Waira is quickly outclassed by Garm, only for there to be a sizable gap to Afnac. Mothman is relatively better spaced, but then there's a whopping 20 levels before you can update to Catoblepas and you won't be seeing Behemoth at all if you're not on an 8th day route. This problem was even worse in the original release, where Catoblepas didn't exist at all and you were stuck with Mothman for the rest of the game until New Game+. As a consequence of this, Wilders can be remarkably fragile in a first playthrough due to the effects level has on damage calculation, and this is probably why Mothman has Endure as an innate passive.

Devil Speed is the Wilder Race skill, and it's the main reason why the previous paragraph essentially does not matter. This is a command type Race skill that costs about 18% of the demon's HP to cast. For that cost, your Move is set to 7 for the remainder of the turn (so if you get a second Move via Animal Leg, you'll still have 7 Move on the refresh) and you will get +10 extra initiative when going on the offensive in a skirmish for that turn. This skill also counteracts the Move debuffs Bind and Constrict. It is impossible to overstate just how good this skill is. Any map where you need to reach a certain position or reach certain units within a time limit, this skill makes those a breeze. Being able to no-sell Move debuffs that enemies love to use is fantastic, and even when you don't really need the extra Move, this skill still has use by ensuring you get the first strike with your entire team when engaging an enemy. Any drawback inherent to Wilders is well worth enduring, as this is hands down one of the best Race skills in the game. It'll be rare for me to not have at least two teams running a Wilder at all times, and maps where time really is of the essence, you'll want to have a Wilder on hand for everyone.

Part 8 is out! We begin some snooping, discovering an unexpected relationship between two wildly different individuals and also getting some information on Honda's reason for being here. The aggression from the demons is starting to ramp up as well, forcing action on our part to avoid any human casualties.

Demons Available

Avian Suparna: The only demon we got access to in the video, unlocking at level 18. Not too much to say about Suparna, he's a decent upgrade over Moh Shuvuu in terms of level, and his MA is okay enough for putting his innate Force Dance to work. He also comes with Phys resist, though his weaknesses to Elec and Curse can still cause him some serious problems. The main reason you'd want a decent one is for Flight of course, as otherwise we're starting to get access to much more specialized and powerful demons.

Skills Available

Fire Dance: Another elemental dance, and if you count Berserk as a physical dance, we now have this kind of coverage for 5 of the 6 resistance types. There are two more dances to get in the game, though it'll be a bit before we get them and only one of them is useful. Not much to say about Fire Dance specifically, though I will note at this point that if you're building your Main Character like I am, you'll likely not be able to make very effective use of fire magic for most of the game as ST is the secondary stat for the corresponding damage boosting passives. This kind of thing is important to keep in mind when optimizing for the most damage possible.

Demon Race: Avian





*Rukh and Huoniao are exclusive to Overclocked

Avians as a whole are demons that are appealing for their Race skill, much like Wilders. Avians have less of a clear offensive focus than Wilders, either prioritizing agility or being low grade physical walls. Avians by and large have pretty low HP growth and middling defensive stats, so they tend to be pretty fragile regardless of what archetype they shoot for. Overclocked was pretty kind to this Race, however, filling it out with some potent demons, adding skills that they can actually put to good use and adding additional fusion tools that can let you pump them up a bit more so they can contribute a better offense. To be honest, I don't really recommend using any of the earlier Avians unless Flight happens to be really useful on the map you're heading to, but this Race does take off a bit in the end game. Rukh has decent physical stats and innate Dual Shadow, giving him some pretty good striking power. Huoniao is definitely fragile, but he comes with some choice multi-target spells, very good MA and complete flexibility with his passive list, giving him really high potential as an offensive caster. Garuda is actually one of my favorite demons in the game, with high AG and good enough ST to really put in some work with a new skill added in Overclocked. Garuda also has full control over his passive list and pretty solid base resistances, so he can run some pretty diverse builds depending on what kind of attacker you want.

Flight is the Avian Race skill. This skill is a non-conditional passive, giving +1 to your Move and the ability to pass through barriers that would otherwise take additional move to get around. Naturally, any bonus to your Move is always a good thing, though +1 on its own often isn't enough which is why I think Devil Speed is generally the superior skill. This one is by no means bad though, and with diligent fusing to take advantage of stat inheritance, you can get a solid tactical advantage by hooking up your teams with strong Avians. Also as a non-conditional passive, you can take advantage of the bonus on the turn an Avian is summoned into your party, unlike Devil Speed. It always pays to keep it in mind when you have this option in reserve. The most appealing idea is to make at least one strong Avian every time a new tier becomes available purely to throw onto Yuzu's team to offset her naturally lower Move.

Part 9 is out! We round out some of the remaining story events before participating in the most complicated battle of the day. No time to rest on our laurels afterwards, as tomorrow is our slated death date and a serious threat looms on the horizon.

Demons Available

Avatar Shiisa: We unlock a lot of demons at level 19, Shiisa being one of the lesser ones. He does come with innate Power Hit, a potent single target physical move, so fusing him with decent ST inheritance can make him work well enough but I've never been a fan of Avatars due to their middling stats and gimmicky Race skill.

Beast Nekomata: Nekomata is not that much of an upgrade over Hairy Jack all truth told, her low MA means she falls pretty quickly to any non-force spell thrown her way. She has the ST to throw out reasonably strong Anger Hits, but I wouldn't really recommend using her for anything but Animal Leg strats. She does have innate Watchful though, making her an easy way to get bonus EXP gain onto new demons.

Fairy Pyro Jack: Pyro Jack on the other hand is pretty awesome, especially with good MA inheritance and passive skills. Starting with Fire Dance and learning Maragi shortly after, he comes primed for fire casting with a command slot for additional coverage or support. Likewise with some fusion trickery, it actually is not that hard to get Anti-Ice onto him as well as Fire Boost, although you need to be level 20 for the latter. A well fused Pyro Jack can put in great work for the whole of Day 3, and I likely will go through the steps to make one.

Jaki Wendigo: The first boss of the game is now available to fuse! And he's pretty whatever. Horrible MA means he won't be doing anything with that Ice Dance innate he has, and he's not terribly strong either focusing more on AG than ST. Wendigo is more notable for his fusion potential, coming with innate Anti-Ice and learning Brutal Hit with levels. Anti-Ice can obviously cover fire weaknesses and Wendigo can fuse directly into Pyro Jack via fusion with Avatar Heqet, while Brutal Hit is one of the strongest single target physical skills in the game, so it's good to be able to pass this around to your phys-focused demons.

Femme Yuki Jyorou: Coming in with an incredible 14 MA, Yuki Jyorou can be an amazing caster provided you can start her off with a good command or grind out a Magnetite overload for her. She has a pretty cluttered skill list loaded with some not super useful passives (physical passives on a mage?), but she easily has the most damage potential by default of the things we've gotten access to.

Skills Available

+Mute: Our next +Ailment passive and this one is a bit more useful than +Poison at least. Silence prevents the afflicted from casting magic, which is the majority of the command skills available to use in the game. Should you fail to score a kill, sticking mute on the enemy generally prevents them from doing something nasty. With the unreliability of Berserk, it actually isn't a terrible idea to bolster it with this, though I'd generally say this is only worthwhile until we have access to things that actually improve the damage.

Part 10 is out! The beginning of Day 3 is pretty story heavy, and there's a whole load of new demons and skills for us to claim off of free battles. After jumping an absurd 6 levels by doing a handful, we make some preparations for the rest of the day and get nailed with loads of exposition.

Demons Available

Touki Mezuki: Like I said above, we jumped a few levels so a whole slew of good new demons are available to us, and this is the first. Mezuki is an outlier for Toukis, having more of an emphasis on magic. He learns Mazio and Elec Boost via leveling, and it's trivial to fuse him in a way that also nets him Maragi and Fire Boost, making him a solid addition to your AoE damage. How do you get him with Maragi and Fire Boost?

Element Flaemis: The last Element we can fuse and probably the best one for what he provides. Coming in with innate Maragi and Fire Boost, Flaemis is a ridiculously simple way to make potent fire magic demons. Even if he doesn't directly rank up a demon, you can use him to rank up component demons and then fuse that into something you want. Definitely worth your time to level up a Kobold and Bilwis to exploit inheritance if you don't mind the extra grinding.

Megami Kikuri-Hime: The next tier of Megami, Kikuri-Hime boasts good MA and a cool resistance in Curse Null. She will also learn Media and Recarm via level up, but as a trade off comes with no attack Commands by default. She also has full flexibility with her passives. Definitely get an elemental dance onto her, and watch her tear up teams that are weak to it. If you can manage it, it's also not a bad idea to fuse her via Tlaloc so she can enjoy having Anti-Fire. One last thing to note is that Recarm is famously broken in this game, and Kikuri-Hime is pretty important by being your earliest access to it. Hopefully I can explain why it's so busted soon enough.

Snake Pendragon: Christ, this guy is over the top. 20 base ST? Obviously the trade off is that his other stats are garbage and he has horrible weaknesses to Fire and Elec, but this can be worked around by just simply only using him on Defense. Combined with Tailwind, his lousy 5 AG suddenly becomes 20 for turn order purposes, and any enemy attacking you will be on the receiving end of uber strength Power Hits and Berserks. Great demon.

Vile Orcus: Our first Vile demon! Orcus is pretty bad, extremely similar stats to Thor but with the miserable Phys weakness in his resistances. That's not the reason you use him though, you use Viles for Chaos Wave. Chaos Wave gives you an attack range of 3 in exchange for all the penalties Evil Wave has AND also reduces your Move by 1. Like Evil Wave, this ability is better used defensively rather than on offense. Orcus himself can do good damage with Brutal Hit and Berserk, but I'm not terribly fond of him since there's no good way to work around the phys weakness right now.

Tyrant King Frost: Hee-ho! King Frost is our first Tyrant demon, and he is amazingly good. Coming in with Mabufu and learning Ice Boost not long after, he can tear through ice neutral and weak formations like their made of paper. Additionally, Tyranny gives us the best MP sustain in the game and can allow us to turn lock bosses. Tyrants are really good in general, but relative to his position in the game, King Frost is extra good. Do some fusion chicanery and get anti-fire onto him, and he's remarkably tanky as well with amazing resistances for this stage of the game.

Genma Heimdall: This guy on the other hand is pretty bad. He reflects Ice, which is something I guess, but otherwise he has mediocre stats save for AG and no interesting skills by default. There are better things to fuse at this point, only pick this guy up if you need a higher level Phantasma user.

Fairy Silky: Another Fairy already? Silky is pretty alright, clearly meant to be a healer learning Media by default. She's another 14 MA demon so she can put it some work with good fusion inheritance. Like Kikuri-Hime, she has full control over her passives, so she's very flexible and can easily cover her weakness while also augmenting elemental magic further.

Dragon Basilisk: Our next Dragon demon, and something of a sub-optimal mixed attacker on the basis of stats. That's not really what he's used for though, learning Petra Eyes and +Stone via level, this guy is all about turning things to stone. This is of situational use in your hands, but always be careful when engaging these when they're an enemy. Petrification can spell disaster for any well formulated plan if it slips through.

Avian Vidofnir: Absolute garbage, worst Avian in the game. A mediocre ST stat for his level with a command list that is 2/3rds magic, while only having 8 MA and 6 VI? This thing dies if you so much as breathe on it and I'd highly advise against trying to use it. It's more notable as an enemy, purely because you can crack the amazing Drain skill from it.

Beast Cait Sith: The successor to Kabuso as a magical Beast, and he's pretty good! Honestly, just rank up a Nekomata with a Flaemis and suddenly you have a solid caster with access to boosted Mazan and Maragi. Cait Sith is simple but effective and can stay relevant for a good long while as the level curve suddenly drops off pretty hard during Day 4 and doesn't pick up again until around the end of Day 5.

Skills Available

Maragi/Mabufu: The AoE versions of Agi and Bufu, dealing the same damage but hitting all available targets in a skirmish. It's quite a mark up for that, costing 20 MP, but we're at the point in the game where that won't run us dry in as little as 2 skirmishes. Proper planning will make the most of these, always keep in mind who will be fighting who in order to get the best mileage out of these skills. Maragi enjoys a slightly higher degree of usefulness right now due to the next skill we learned.

Fire Boost: Passive skill that boosts the damage of Fire Magic by 20%. Not much to say about this, more damage is more damage and this can be especially potent when striking a weakness. Yuzu can absolutely slay with this and Maragi right now, though you could also assign it to Keisuke to bolster his meh damage.

Power Hit: A stronger physical attack, that is all there is to this. That said, that's by no means a bad thing. This flatly hits harder than Anger Hit, so we can now swap that off and run more interesting physical builds. The guaranteed crit aspect of Anger Hit does have usage for Extra Turns, but the greater degree of consistency with killing things when going on the offensive in a skirmish makes this more appealing to me.

Paral Eyes: Command that attempts to inflict paralysis on all enemies. Paralysis is a pretty crippling ailment, heavily reducing accuracy and evasion while also giving a decent chance the afflicted will lose their turn altogether. Like Mute though, it's hard to really justify using a turn on just trying to inflict it. If ailments could be used from the field, they'd be amazing, but the fact they're only usable in battle really holds them back.

+Paralyze: Gives a chance for your physical attacks to inflict paralysis. Literally the only notable thing about this skill is that Atsuro can use this but not +Mute right now due to the stat requirements. Throw it on if you have nothing better.

Unit: Keisuke




Keisuke's Starting Stats:

HP:141
MP:64
ST:8
MA:9
VI:6
AG:11


Keisuke at Level 50

HP:353
MP:167
ST:15
MA:20
VI:10
AG:21


Keisuke at Level 99:

HP:678
MP:321
ST:28
MA:35
VI:16
AG:36

Our first new team leader, and our first opportunity to field 4 teams in a battle! How does Keisuke stack up to our current lineup? Ehhhhh. I'm not too fond of Keisuke. As you can see, he runs a MA/AG build but he keeps the stats close to even with each other, with only a slight edge in AG. This is pretty suboptimal in my opinion since AG is only useful up to a point and doesn't directly increase the damage of any attack you use. Likewise, Keisuke is hands down the most fragile character in the game, with the lowest VI stat at any point and HP growth that's only marginally better than Yuzu. Keisuke can be absolutely blown up by physical attacks, especially multi-hit ones if enough hits target him. He also has less than stellar MP for most of the game so he can gas out pretty quickly. He does have enough ST to run a specific physical build pretty effectively, but this is purely within the realm of New Game + builds and not something to consider in almost any normal playthrough. The end result is that Keisuke is something of a squishy master of none, and it can actually be a tough decision when he first joins if you want to assign good skills to him for the sake of helping him contribute more, or just delegate those skills to more effective characters who can really put them to use and keep Keisuke as a specialized errand boy. Do keep in mind, as I said in the original mechanics post, you don't have any control over your team composition for most of the game so Keisuke will see some use regardless and his relative strengths don't matter too much. It does help, however, to keep in mind who's the best at what, and Keisuke isn't really the best at anything so I wouldn't consider him a cornerstone of any strategy.

Part 11 is out! Once again Haru finds herself in a near death experience and is remarkably nonchalant about it. Afterwards, a weird guy creeps on Yuzu and gives us an oblique hint on how to survive today's biggest trial.

Skills Available

Brutal Hit: This is more or less the strongest single target physical skill in the game, and I'm shocked we get it so early. Brutal Hit runs off ST and derives bonus damage from your HP. The more you have, the more this does. Indirectly, this means that this skill also derives extra damage from VI. This is perfect for Atsuro who has great HP and solid VI, and by tomorrow we'll have access to a passive that can ratchet this up even further. There's not much reason to take this off of Atsuro once you have it.

Anti-Ice: We're given ample opportunities to scoop this up today after missing out on it on Day 1. Not that it's too useful, we're just about past all the things today that hit us with ice damage and there are remarkably few notable enemies in the whole game who actually use Ice skills. Prime slot filler for right now.

Demon Race: Femme





*Jahi is exclusive to Overclocked

Femmes are the earliest example of dedicated caster demons you'll get access to. In the early game, they often have extremely high MA stats relative to what else you can buy or create at that point and usually have good skills within their command list, whether knowing them by default or learning them via level up. The big problem Femmes have to contend with is the Megami Race, a Race of demons that is extremely similar to them but generally have superior abilities. Femmes get an edge by generally being available earlier at ever given tier and not having any Uniques in their ranks, allowing you to field as many of a given Femme as you please. The Race does go in a bit of a weird direction in the back half of the game, generally picking up skills and stats that put them in more of a defensive role or as fusion fodder. Rangda in particular is one of the easiest ways to access the phys repel passive in order to pass that around on your demons. For notable demons, Kikimora is obviously a solid early game addition, and Yuki Jyorou and Peri are extremely effective with their sizable MA stats and decent skill lists with plenty of options to fuse good skills onto them. Rangda is great for both walling out physical attackers and denying them extra turns and it is absolute simplicity to make her resistant to everything at the time she becomes available. Overclocked threw the Race an additional boon with Jahi, who has good stats across the board and complete freedom with her passives. Simply ranking up a Rangda that has Anti-Most and Phys Repel learned again creates a very effective wall of a demon, and she brings high MA back to the table. I'll admit my more hyper offensive style of play tends to pass over Femmes for more specialized demons, but they're still a great option at almost any stage of the game.

Devotion is the Femme Race skill. This is a command type skill that costs around 20% of the demon's MP to use. (I haven't really had a chance to comment on this but bizarrely the exact percentage of HP/MP spent by a Command Race skill varies from demon to demon in a specific race, not sure why they did it like that) This skill is a party targeting heal that has a range of 2, with the amount healed being half the current HP value of the Femme using it. In terms of raw healing, this is an upgrade from the Charm skill, but it does have quite a few drawbacks. For starters, the two range makes it surprisingly hard to use this to support other teams, often leaving it as a self-heal. Secondly, Femmes have pretty middling to low HP growth so this skill often isn't as strong as you'd hope it would be. Adding to that, to get the most out of it your team needs to have additional Dia support to heal the Femme beforehand if she has been hurt to make sure this does the most it can. Finally, since its effectiveness is tied to HP, this will never heal more than 449 hit points if you're even able to get a Femme to the HP cap. This is the most blatant example of some Race skills being inherently inferior to others, Megamis have Affection which has a range of 4, its healing scales off their MA, and it cures all ailments on top of it. Devotion is good in the early game when you don't have many options for group healing, but it definitely falls off almost as hard as Charm once the mid game rolls around.

Part 12 is out! We finally catch up with Midori, who has more misplaced confidence than me believing I can carry a coherent though without stumbling on my words. An unexpected guest crashes the proceedings before we can make any headway on reasoning with her. On the Beldr front, we finally get the lead on our silver bullet for dealing with him and we now need to just bide our time. An old friend of Atsuro slips us some potentially interesting information...

Skills Available

Mazio: It's Zio but it hits all enemies for 5 times the MP cost. Bring it if there are enemy formations that are weak to it.

Mow Down: A weak physical attack that hits all enemies. This is more for spreading damage around than deleting enemy formations, as you need an extremely high ST stat to get appreciable damage out of it. Demons can build for that, but for Atsuro he should just carry it for the rare situation where he can clean up one enemy and spread damage to others, and otherwise focus on potent single target damage or Berserk.

Media: Here we go! Up until this point in the game, it's been difficult to keep demons alive since we need specific races that can only heal on the field to top everyone off. Media changes that for us and I highly encourage passing this around to as many demons as possible via Magnetite overload. Even MA deficient demons can extend a team's survivability by a ton by using any free action they get to throw this out. Like all skills, it's held back for our Human characters by being limited to one, but if you find yourself with a free attack slot then obviously this is good to bring.

Ice Boost: +20% damage to Ice skills. If Ice skills are needed, you want someone to run this.

Anti-Force: -50% damage from Force attacks, per the norm. Actually pretty useful today since we will see quite a few Mazans tossed our way as the day progresses.

Petra Eyes: When ailments started to get thrown our way, I said there was one worthwhile ailment in this game. That's petrify, which turns the enemy to stone, incapacitating them and making any physical or Force magic blow they take potentially fatal. Petrify is not functionally death like it is in other games in the series, you can recover from it over time; however, getting hit with it is an unmitigated disaster more often than not and you'll be living on a prayer hoping to avoid death if it sticks. This status is the one more than any other that makes Curse resistance extremely important, and it's actually not a terrible idea to spam this skill on Curse vulnerable enemies, particularly with a specific passive.

+Stone: The one +ailment passive that's actually worth anything, your physical attacks can randomly inflict Petrify. On skills like Berserk and Mow Down, this gives not terrible odds that you'll disable one enemy in the opposing formation and gain a considerable advantage in the fight. Always carry force magic when rolling this into a build for best results. I generally prefer giving Atsuro more concrete bonuses, but you could easily run this in place of Hero Aid and have it come in clutch just as often, if not more so.

Part 13 is out! Our attempts to reason with Midori come to a dead end, but there will be a pay off for this later. We also follow up on the COMP we got from 10BIT, with Atsuro uncovering a massive conspiracy that throws the Governments actions into even further question. Rounding it out, we strike up a competition with Kaido, and find out his desire for power runs even deeper than what we can see on the surface.

Demons Available

Deity Mahakala (Lv. 26): Our next Deity demon available and very ironically he's really unique in the fact that he's not Unique, so you can have multiple Mahakalas in your stock which is not the case for other Deity demons. How does he stack up? He's a pretty good mixed attacker with decent resistances, and it's easy at this point to cover his Ice weakness by fusing him off of a chain involving Wendigo. He also comes with innate Ares Aid, a passive that gives an additive 50% bonus to your crit rate, allowing him to dole out massive damage with Berserk. His biggest drawback is his default command list is cluttered with the useless Might Call skill, but he's not a bad recipient for a Mag overload if you want to get rid of that. Very solid demon if you can fuse him with good ST inheritance, though Awakening is not that helpful at this point.

Divine Power (Lv.26): Power is a beefy glacier of ST and VI, in contrast with his more desirable trait of being able to restore the team's MP. He can do great single target damage with Brutal Hit but he's a bit of a one-trick pony in that sense. He has a completely open passive list, so he's very flexible in how you can build him, and he's only weak to Curse so he can make a decent meat shield. I usually don't use this guy too much due to a lack of need at this point, but he's perfectly usable and probably good to run with the MP deficient Keisuke.

Wilder Afnac (Lv.26): Probably the best Wilder in the game relative to when you get him, Afnac is a quick and sturdy physical wall of a demon with decent enough ST. His main claim to fame is being your first access to Phys Boost, giving Berserks and Brutal Hits he throws out an appreciable 20% damage bonus. Afnac will likely be putting in huge amounts of work for you for the remainder of Day 3 and all of Day 4. He does have some drawbacks though, such as his immense weakness to Fire magic and the useless Retaliate cluttering his passives list, so it's not the hardest thing in the world to make a demon who's superior in pure combat to him. The value of having Devil Speed way offsets this though, so it's not too much of a knock against him.

Kishin Nalagiri (Lv.26): This is the last Kishin you can get until Day 6 for whatever reason. How does he stack up? Eh. His stats save for HP are flatly inferior to Power and he doesn't start with any good skills so he doesn't have an edge there either. He does possess Phys resistance and Curse resistance with no weaknesses, so the enemy will have a hard time taking him out at least. He's probably more intended as fusion material as he has the redundant Anti-Phys in his passive list after getting enough levels. Mostly I just use this guy for Double Up in the situations where it's helpful, and then throw him back in the stock when he's served his purpose.

Touki Tokebi (Lv.26): An incredibly balanced demon with 3 elemental resistances and a curse weakness. Probably the best way to get this guy is to just rank up Mezuki, he can expect a decent MA inheritance and good skills off of that. Probably the biggest problem with this guy is his awful HP stat causing him to get squashed by the things he doesn't resist.

Fallen Nisroc (Lv.27): Another fairly balanced demon, though a bit more predisposed to casting with his skill list. Now that we have access to decent strength AoE skills, it's not a terrible idea to optimize a demon like Nisroc for wiping out enemy formations since he gets a little MP back for the whole team when he notches a kill. His skill list is way overstuffed though, so it's hard to customize him very much just via fusion. If you can make a good one, go for it.

Avatar Bai Ze (Lv.27): Here's a demon you'll hate to see, decent MA paired with resistances to the main elements except Force. Bai Ze is a magic wall demon, perhaps most notable for being your first access to Diarahan. I don't really care for defensive playstyles in this game, so Bai Ze isn't my thing. Magic attackers are already good magic walls by default since the MA stat handles both offense and defense, so Bai Ze also kind of fumbles there. He also has a redundant anti-ice in passives, so he's a little limited there.

Jaki Loa (Lv.28): An oddball for the Jaki race, Loa has really good Ma making him a decent caster. The big problem is that 2 of his 3 command slots have ailment skills, limiting his out of the box potential when fuse. Additionally, he no resistances outside of a Curse null and gets blown up by fire magic, which is bad because he's slow as molasses and can easily be deleted before getting a chance to do anything. I would not recommend this guy at all, but it's not impossible to make him work if you opt to give him more defensive passives and farm Mag overloads.

Femme Peri (Lv.28): Peri comes in with a massive 17 MA, which can get even crazier with stat inheritance. The big problem she has is her passive list, coming in with 2 skills one of which is the redundant Anti-Elec. Her command list is also cluttered with 2 skills, those being Mazio and Drain. Peri is essentially designed to be a dedicated Elec caster, making her a little limited compared to other caster options we get later, but she's certainly very good at the job. We will be coming across quite a few elec weak enemies in the remainder of Day 3 and throughout Day 4, so she can definitely put in some work. If you can fuse her with a MA of 20+ and get Elec boost onto her, I'd absolutely go for it.

Skills Available

Anti-Fire: I actually was not expecting to get this right now, but for whatever reason this was obtainable from a data card in the Shiba Park free battle. Saves me the trouble of cracking it later, and it'll come in handy for the Beldr fight later, so I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Mechanics: Fusion

Now that we have all the tools for fusing demons available to us, I thought it'd be a good idea to go over the unique aspects of this game's fusion system as well as how the heck inheritance bonuses work. The basic aspects of fusion you'd expect from any MegaTen game are present: Basic fusion is taking two demons and melding them into one new demon, with the resultant demon having access to skills the component demons had. The Race of the resultant demon is determined by the Race of the two demons involved e.g. fusing a Fairy demon and an Avatar demon will result in a Megami. The resultant demon will also be whichever demon that has a greater than or equal to Base Level compared to the average base level of the component demons fused e.g a Fairy Pixie with a base level of 2 and an Avatar Heqet with a base level of 9 will combine to form Megami Sarasvati, who has a base level of 12. There are no special fusion mechanics such as Triple Fusions or demons requiring multiple specific demons to fuse, but there are still special fusions that can only result from fusing 2 specific demons that would normally yield a different result following standard rules, such as the quintessential fusion of Barong and Rangda to form Shiva. Below is a chart displaying which races fuse into which, shoutouts to Gipig on GameFaqs who wrote the demon compendium guide where I got this chart from as well as information on how inheritance works!



So that's nothing new, and now that we've established what we can expect from fusing any two demons, let's move onto the tools available to us in this game. As always, you can simply go into the fusion screen and start mashing demons together to see what spits out what, but Devil Survivor is one of the earlier MegaTen games to give several quality of life overhauls to the system. Specifically, it added an extensive search system:



From the top, our options are:

Race: Narrows our search down to specific Races, allowing us to better locate demons that we want to create in a specific Race or have perhaps missed over the course of the game.

Owned: This one's a little vague just from the name, what this does is narrow our fusion options down to what we specifically have in our stock. Otherwise, the fusion lists will be populated with demons registered in your compendium, as well as demons you've confirmed.

Party: This only highlights if you have set Owned to Yes, this removes any demons that are currently in your stock from the fusion results.

Known: This changes it so your fusion results either only show demons you have confirmed (Confirmed means you've fused them, can buy them from the auction hall, or have subjugated them in battle) or it'll show results for unconfirmed demons. (Demons you have the capability to fuse but have otherwise not encountered)

Once you've set the categories you want (or just run a blanket search like I usually do), a results screen will populate with all possible fusions you can make. Selecting a demon at that point will display all possible fusion options for it within the search criteria you laid out. In addition, you can use the Search function to preview demons that are up to 4 levels higher than your current fusion level (Which just to re-iterate is your protagonists' experience level). This is a handy tool to quickly see what you're capable of fusing and what your options are for creating them. Remember that the search engine can generate fusion possibilities based on what's in your compendium or even what you've just confirmed, so it relays more information that what you can get from just manually picking your fusion components. That being said, I do prefer to do fusion manually once I've gotten the information I've needed so I can keep better track of the stat inheritance coming from the demons involved, as well as manually selecting a specific demon in the event I have multiple of the same type. The search engine is a fantastic tool for scoping out new fusion options as well as keeping better track of long fusion chains, so it's no surprise this mechanic worked its way into future MegaTen games. With this covered, let's move onto inheritance.

Inheritance is remarkably straight forward in this game, although stat inheritance isn't directly explained anywhere in the game itself beyond the fact that gained stats from component demons transfer onto the resultant demon in some capacity. We'll start with the simple aspect of inheritance, skill inheritance. Traditionally in MegaTen, fused demons would randomly get bonus skills from the demons they're fused from with preference given to skills that fit their general theme. As far as I'm aware, Devil Survivor is a landmark moment in the franchise, being the first game that actually let's you directly pick the skills that demons inherit upon fusion. All skills that the component demons have learned, whether it be from leveling or their own fusion inheritance, go into the relevant skill pools for the component demon and you can add whatever suits your fancy. Additionally, there are no limitations to this (Beyond not being able to replace skills that are in the resultant demons default skill list), so you can carry any skill you want down simple fusion chains. Naturally this was a more popular aspect of team creation in the game at the time it was released, and it's no surprise the more mainstream entries followed suit with this particular mechanic. Now onto stat inheritance which is a bit more complicated, but fairly easy to work with once you know the mechanics behind it.

To start with, demons have a cap on how many stats they can inherit via fusion. There is a hard cap of 24 bonus stats a demon can inherit, and a soft cap for what they can get via initial fusion that is determined via simple formula; 5+(Demon Base Level/5). Take Mezuki for instance, a demon with a Base Level of 20. Mezuki can inherit, at most, 10 stat points directly from fusion. It is possible to get him up the hard cap of 24 via Mitama fusion, a mechanic we'll go more in depth on when I get to them in the Demon Race analysis. So we know how many stats he can potentially get from a simple fusion, how do the stats transfer over? The game is remarkably generous here actually, stats transfer directly from the component demons with no averaging involved at all. Instead the way this works is that the stats demons have gained via leveling and their own fusion inheritance bonuses transfer at specific rates. The stats gained via leveling transfer at a rate of 50% while Bonus Stats from fusing transfer at a rate of 80%. It's important to note in the event of a decimal, the game will always round down. The game also directly transfers stats on the basis of what stat the level ups and bonuses went into i.e a demon with high ST will be transferring that ST directly into the resultant demons ST. So to put this into an example, say I leveled up a Fairy Pixie a few times and she had gained 6 points of MA and then fused her with a Heqet who leveled up enough to get 4 points of MA. The resulting Sarasvati would generally inherit 5 points of MA, as that would be the end result of the 50% transfer of the MA the component demons gained. If I then turned around and fused that Sarasvati into another demon, said demon would inherit 4 MA from her as that's 80% of the Bonus stats she started with. It can be a little hard to keep track of this because Bonus Stats and level up stats are tracked by the same light blue bars, but the game is calculating and transferring them separately. There are a few odd mechanics to this. You might have noticed I said Sarasvati would "Generally" get 5 MA from inheritance. This is because there's a somewhat silly random aspect to stat inheritance where the game subtracts 1 point from an inherited stat and applies it to another. It's possible for the Sarasvati to end up only getting 4 bonus MA and an extra point of ST, VI, or AG. Likewise, if there was a bonus going to another stat, it's possible for that to be subtracted and end up funneled into MA letting her inherit 6 MA. This mechanic is why the stats inherited vary slightly every time you refresh a fusion result. The other thing to note is that there is one last bonus to inheritance that can happen. Every demon in the game has specific favored stats or just one favored stat. This favored stat gets a +1 bonus for the purposes of stat inheritance when the demon is used in a fusion. Going back to Pixie, she is a demon who favors MA. If she had only gotten 5 points of MA via level up, she'd get an additional point for it when used in fusion, allowing her to pass on 3 MA instead of just 2. Adding onto the generosity, this bonus is also applied to Bonus Stats from prior fusion inheritance. In the event that a demon has multiple favored stats (such as Dragon Toubyou who actually favors all stats), then whichever stat is the highest when fused is the one that gets the +1 bonus. One last thing to note here, the resulting demon has absolutely no impact on inheritance beyond the soft cap based on their level, all aspects of inheritance lie with the component demons.

So what are the main take-aways here?
1.)Because stats transfer directly from demons when used in fusion instead of being averaged out, don't get too caught up with trying to fuse two strong demons together to get a good result. You can absolutely fuse one strong demon with a generic gotten from the auction hall and still get a tidy inheritance for the resulting demon.
2.) Because Bonus Stats from fusion inherit at an even better rate than level up stats and the soft cap on how many stats demons can inherit is constantly going up, this means demons fused later in the game are going to become stronger and stronger as you accumulate longer fusion chains.
3.) Directly tied to the last point, you should never release demons and always fuse them off into something, as the inherited stats can pile up and you can eventually find something to fuse your junk demons into in order to create something useful.
4.) The compendium is a super valuable tool for inheritance as you can register demons with powerful inheritances to later use them as components for high end specialist demons, making them absolute game wreckers if you play your cards right.
5.)Buying up weak demons from the auction and quickly leveling them up via free battles is a great way to conduct fusion chains for stat inheritance. Under leveled demons gain ridiculous amounts of EXP and can quickly rack up level up stats to transfer down into something more useful.

There's just a couple other miscellaneous points I'd like to mention here, somewhat tangentially related to the previous points. I mentioned that stat inheritance has a hard cap of 24. Any demon can reach this hard cap via Mitama fusion, but in the event they exceed it, bonus stats in other stats will be subtracted and redistributed into whatever stat you're trying to increase. It's worth noting that any demon bought in the auction hall that is 4 or 5 stars, those extra stat points they have are considered bonus stats and transfer at the 80% rate, though this seldom matters since they only rarely have more than 1 bonus point in a given stat. Something handy to know for grinding up weak demons for inheritance, every demon in the game follows a set level up pattern (In contrast to your Human characters, who have somewhat random progression to their final stats). All demons have a pattern of level up gains they follow that spans 16 level ups and then repeats (except very randomly and strangely Fairy Vivian, who's level up pattern repeats every 15 levels instead.) Demons will always gain the same stats in the same order, so you can take notes on who gains the most ideal level ups for specific stat inheritances. As one final note, it is possible to inherit stat penalties from the 1 star demons in the auction hall. With some serious fusion tomfoolery involving Elements and Mitamas, it's actually possible to reduce stats on demons to below zero and cause an underflow error, immediately looping them back around to the normal cap of 40. It's pretty easy to do this with VI and AG, but not really doable with MA and ST due to the favored stat bonus system with fusion.

Part 14 is out! A few cracks begin the form in the virtuous facade of the Shomonkai, indicating they're not quite the cohesive unit they portray themselves as. After picking up some very potent skills from the scuffle we end up in, we manage to secure the coveted devil's fuge to slay Beldr with, after cracking a few skulls of course.

Demons Available

Megami Ishtar (Lv. 29): Ishtar was actually available to use in the previous video but I was too out of it to notice I had hit level 29. Oops. Anyway, Ishtar is a strong mage, as per usual for Megamis. She has the same base 17 MA that Peri has but complete flexibility with her passive skills giving her a greater degree of build variation. She also has great resistances, with no weakness, an elec resist, and curse null. Her biggest drawback is having her command list locked down with Recarm and an unlearned Diarahan when fused, limiting her ability to contribute to fights beyond being support immensely. If you want her to be an efficient fighting machine, it's advisable to grind out a few Mag Overloads to overwrite her skill list. Good demon overall aside from that.

Skills Available

Blitzkrieg: The next auto skill we can pick up and easily the most generically useful of our starting selection. This is a party-wide buff applied at the start of the battle for a piddling 4 MP that gives the immense bonus of 25% extra damage to all attack types. It's essentially Omni-Boost and greatly improves the striking power of your team leader and demons, even more so when combined with Boost and Amp passives. This was the skill I bumped my ST to 8 for as it will make closing out kills so much easier and help greatly with the upcoming boss fight.

Fortify: The defensive counterpart to Blitzkrieg, only costing one more MP to use, Fortify lowers all incoming damage by 25%. Definitely a useful buff to have for your slightly weaker teams who might not be able to finish their plates with the battles they get into. It's preferable to avoid damage altogether of course, but if that's not an option then minimizing it is the next best thing. Another generically useful auto skill that's great for any situation that's not calling for a specialized build.

Recarm: Our first ability to revive fallen team leaders and demons alike, Recarm is stupidly broken in this game. When used, you can revive dead demons within anyone's team from anywhere on the map. If you revive a defeated team leader, they will be brought back to a space adjacent to the Recarm user and then immediately be put next in line in the turn order. That last aspect lends itself to some really silly strategies revolving around deliberately suiciding in fights and then using recarm to manipulate the turn order. I'll definitely be keeping Recarm around for the obvious tactical benefits it brings, but I'll refrain from doing broken Recarm Looping strategies. The only two limitations to the skill (which actually do matter a bit every now and again) are that you can't revive demons with the stock, and you can't revive demons within NPC teams. The latter can be pretty unfortunate in a number a fights depending on the dice rolls NPC allies manage in their inevitable battles.

Mazan: Our multi-targeting Force spell, Mazan is mainly notable above others for its synergy with petrification skills. Spamming Petra Eyes and following up with Mazan can wipe out opposing teams that are not curse resistant with little effort, though I'm not really crazy about this approach due to the unreliability of it. Try it if you want.

Elec/Force Boost: The final two Boost skills to round out our collection. Elec boost is very useful in the upcoming battle, while Force boost is just kind of there for now. We're dealing with a lot of Force resistant enemies at the moment, so it doesn't push up our damage quite as much as the other boosts right now.

Part 15 is out! After getting hyped up the whole day, the fight with Beldr finally comes around. He gets absolutely clapped and we move on with our day. Apparently though, this is just the beginning of our troubles, as if things weren't bad enough.

Demons Available

Snake Quetzacoatl (Lv. 31): My team building efforts have rewarded us with our next Snake. Quetzacoatl is a wall of VI with modest ST and that's about it. I fused him by ranking up Pendragon, so he's about as good for general purpose, though relatively he's even slower. Don't expect this guy to fire off Berserks or Brutal Hits at the start of the turn, and definitely don't expect him to go before anything without a Constrict/Tailwind Combo. He's more valuable for supporting stronger attackers in that sense.

Skills Available

Drain: The only skill we can crack that isn't stuck on Beldr, Drain is a famously valuable skill. For a piddling 2 MP, you launch a decent strength Almighty attack that restores 50% of the damage it deals to the enemy's HP and MP. This can greatly extend your ability to sling out high powered spells and completely debilitate the enemy. It's a good idea to stick this on any team lacking any other form of MP support. Don't fret too much if you can't get it here as it will be available in the free battles at the start of Day 4.

Mana Surge: We can crack one of 3 skills from Beldr, and I opted to go for this one since I know for sure I can get the others from free battles in the morning. This is the upgraded form of Mana Bonus, giving a much more sizable 30% boost to your max MP, ensuring you'll be able to throw out 2 or 3 more high powered skills. If you're lacking in MP support, this isn't a bad idea to throw on your dedicated casters.

Life Surge: Same deal as Mana Surge, this is a 30% boost to your HP. This can actually be a really strong survivability boost on most characters, and on Atsuro it is extra fuel for Brutal Hit which can definitely pay off massive dividends. We'll absolutely want to pick this up in the morning.

Weak Kill: This is a skill that combos with ailments, should an enemy you attack with this be suffering an ailment, this skill will do additional damage. I can't really recommend this, Brutal Hit or even just Power Hit do great damage without any chance based conditionals. We can get this from a data card tomorrow, so there's no reason to grab this from Beldr.

Part 16 is out! Unfortunately for us, Keisuke goes AWOL shortly into the day, reducing us back to a 3 person team. We continue our investigation into a means to end the Lockdown and get some promising leads. This episode is mostly exposition dumping with no battles to speak of (Unless you count me diving into free battles for skills I guess) but things will pick up throughout the day.



Demons Available

Dragon Ym (Lv. 32): The way this game spaces out the tiers between demons is so weird, didn't we just get a new Dragon a little while ago? That aside, Ym actually has a bit more going for him in combat than Basilisk. Besides having a solid MA stat to work with and only one weakness, Ym is our first access to Holy Dance, the almighty Dance skill. This skill boasts good power and doesn't have to contend with any resistances, making it a good general damage dealing magic skill that can fit into any casters skill list. Ym himself is far from the best user of it, least of all because he needs to level up for it, but making a good Ym to learn it and then pass it on to a superior fighter is definitely a good idea. Not much else to say about this guy, just approach him the way you would any other Dragon when putting him on a team.

Genma Hanuman (Lv. 32): Our next Genma, and like Heimdall he doesn't really light the world on fire. He does have a more complacent role as a physical attacker (albeit a rather mid one with 13 ST), but doesn't have any physical moves in his default skill list, requiring careful fusion to get him a good load out. He is one of our first ways to access the Endure passive, needing just one level up to grab it, but there's another demon we'll absolutely be using who also gets it and is generally superior to Hanuman save for AG. Pick one up for when Phantasma is useful, but that's about all I'd recommend.

Skills Available

Retaliate (Passive): Aside from the alternate Beldr skills we grabbed, this is the only new skill available from Free Battles right now. Retaliate is just Counter but the counterstrike launched is stronger. Counter is a bad passive, QED this is a bad passive, but you do want to be mindful of the enemies that have it. Nothing like throwing Berserk at a formation just to get deleted by repeated counterattacks.

Demon Race: Fallen





*Mithras is exclusive to overclocked

As you can see from their stat spreads, Fallens as a whole are exceedingly balanced. While their default skill sets generally favor magic, Fallens can be specialized towards whatever archetype best fits the components used to create them on account of their often dead even attacking stats. It's a bit hard to recommend demons from the Fallen race, not because they're bad by any means but because how good they are can vary wildly depending on your foresight with fusion or your willingness to grind out free battles in the interest of building stronger demons. Orobas is probably the easiest to recommend, having an obvious inclination towards Magic and learning Elec Amp (Though it is worth noting that demons we've gotten 15 levels lower have almost the same base MA), while Decarabia can be an extremely effective supporter due to learning Shield All. (Indeed I already a specific fight in mind where I'd like to have a good Decarabia at my disposal) Agares has the ever valuable Phys Drain, and his slight inclination towards ST is a nice boon considering he is available in the late game where physical attacks explode upward in damage potential. Mithras and Murmur might seem really bad at a glance due to their abysmal resistances for the late game, but they have complete flexibility with their passive lists and all those weaknesses can be eliminated with a single passive, so it's not hard to make these guys viable either. I know what you're thinking though, if Fallens are just merely decent if with some good flexibility, why should you use them over other more specialized demons?

Sacrifice is the Fallen Race skill, a conditional passive skill that triggers in battle. When a Fallen scores a kill, a small portion of HP and MP is restored to the entire team. (And I do mean small, to the tune of about 8% of your HP and maybe 4 or 5% of your MP) Sacrifice is our earliest form of MP sustain, and unlike other options it really only functions as a mean of sustaining your ability to sling spells rather than as a means to fund it. Later skills with MP restoration as their main draw not only refund way more, they can often completely eliminate the cost of spells and actually give you a surplus of MP. Sacrifice is never really going to hit that benchmark, but if you have the dedication to make a bonafide slayer out of a Fallen demon, it can definitely keep your teams in the game without gassing out. There are other things to consider that make this ability more worthwhile. Demons like Tyrants are unique at every tier, and they only get new blood every 10 levels or so, so you can't realistically run Tyrants on every team. Divines don't have this limitation (usually), but their form of MP sustain doesn't recover HP and in fact costs them a hefty amount, in addition to being a command skill and all the limitations that entails. All that said, I don't care for this ability a huge amount, but I do recognize the utility of it if you're willing to experiment with the demons its available to.

Part 17 is out! We finally catch up with Midori, and the gravity of her situation finally seems to be penetrating her thick skull. Unfortunately, Keisuke has gone a little off the deep end in scant few hours we've been separated from him. Afterwards, we get more evidence that not all of the Shomonkai are on the up and up, and we get a replacement for the recently vacated spot in our roster.

Demons Available

Fairy Lorelei (Lv. 33): Another base 18 MA demon, though at level 33 she has a slightly higher fusion inheritance cap. It's more than likely you can fuse her off of Ishtar or Peri, so she can end up with a very sizable MA out of the starting gate, but she has very restrictive skills in comparison. Lorelei is less flexible with her passives than Ishtar and doesn't come kitted out for combat like Peri, but frankly having more powerful casting demons at this point is only a boon, so I'd recommend getting the best you can out of her with one of the previously mentioned demons and then just putting in the effort to get the cash to pull them back out of the compendium afterwards. At the start of tomorrow, we'll be able to crack Holy Dance and write it onto any demon via Mag Overload, and a well fused Lorelei is a great recipient for that.

Unit: Midori



Midori's Starting Stats:

HP:209
MP:102
ST:8
MA:14
VI:11
AG:10

Midori At Level 50:

HP:368
MP:177
ST:12
MA:21
VI:17
AG:16

Midori At Level 99:

HP:704
MP:337
ST:21
MA:36
VI:29
AG:29

I know I've been pretty subtle about this but if you pay close attention to my comments you'll realize I don't much care for Midori as a character and find her pretty annoying. That's irrelevant to gameplay though, how is she in battle? Midori is decent enough, and I definitely prefer her to Keisuke. As I said in Part 17, Midori is extremely balanced with a slight focus on MA. Her striking power will never reach the same degree as a MA spec'd Hero or Yuzu, but she does enjoy greater durability than Yuzu and especially Keisuke, while only being slower than Yuzu by a single point of AG by the end of the game. She also puts less useless points into ST, though since she still fails to cap MA this is largely unhelpful and she still overinvests by quite a bit. MA focused builds are definitely superior in this game though, so it's not hard to get Midori rolling and contributing once you have good skills to spare for her. Past that, Midori has the standard 4 Move and 50 Speed, putting her next to Atsuro in the turn order most of the time while being able to keep pace with all other units without help, unlike Yuzu. She's definitely a welcome addition right now, but it's pretty hard to recommend her once we get into the end game and get access to more specialized characters who function better in the same roles you'd put Midori in.

Part 18 is out! Things begin to boil over as tamers with ill intentions begin to seriously utilize the power of the COMPS, while the civilian populace has the poorly thought out plan to hassle a tamer that isn't Midori and is decidedly less forgiving. Oh and we agree to take Naoya's garbage tomorrow.

Demons Available

Divine Lailah (Lv. 34): Out next Divine demon, brining us back to the realm of magical focus. In that regard, Lailah has quite a bit going for her as we can fuse her off of Ishtar and let her inherit some serious firepower. Additionally, she is our first demon that learns an Amp skill, specifically Ice Amp, allowing her to fire off Mabufu with a 50% damage bonus. Ice Amp alone makes her worth picking up, get her to learn that skill and you have a powerful set of skills to pass down to a stronger demon. I'll likely fuse her via Ishtar and do a macca grind to get Ishtar back.

Avian Babd Cath (Lv. 34): Our next Avian, thankfully much better than Vidofnir and is essentially Suparna 2. Like all Avians up to this point, how good he is depends on how much effort you put into fusing him with worthwhile inheritance, though he does have a decent amount of ST and we're at a high point for physical skills in the game. The biggest drawback to Babd Cath is his unimpressive resistance spread, having the desirable trait of being Phys resistant but having Force and Curse weaknesses with no other element resistances. Handle with care.

Wilder Mothman (Lv.34): Our next Wilder, and the definite odd man out of the race, which seems fitting. Mothman has good MA with mediocre ST and a good amount of VI. Between that and his ability to learn Endure, he's definitely geared for tanking. Due to his skill constraints and his ST being juuuuust low enough that I don't feel he can realistically be a good striker, you can't really make a good Mothman via rank up fusion on an Afnac, so I'd recommend putting more thought into what components you want to use as a base. It'll be the end of the game before we get access to another Wilder, so it behooves you to make this guy as good as you can and then use the compendium to pass him around like a blunt. Oh and he has gutter tier AG but Devil's Speed mostly offsets that.

Tyrant Lucifuge (Lv. 34): Level 34 is like a greatest hits reel for new blood in our roster. Lucifuge is a Tyrant meaning he's good by default, though in relative terms I'd say King Frost has a lot more going for him. Level scaling will quickly begin to push our frosty liege out of the picture though, so this guy is a necessary upgrade. Lucifuge is our first access to a -dyne level spell, possessing Agidyne, giving him some great magical punching power if you can get the right skills onto him. His biggest problem is having unfocused stats, meaning he needs good inheritance to put in good work in combat, and currently my best options for fusing him result in an advantage in physical attacking instead of magical. If you can get anti-fire onto him to patch out his ironic fire weakness and augment his offense with Fire Boost and good MA inheritance, this guy is top tier single target deleter for this stage of the game, and we're about at the point where Tyranny can completely refund the cost of magic with the potential for a surplus.

Skills Available

Diarahan (Command): Our next healing spell, Diarahan is great because it ignores your MA stat entirely and just heals you to full. It runs the same cost as Media as well, so it's about as economical as Media. I slightly prefer getting heals onto multiple people with a single action over healing just one unit, but this is a great filler skill for physical demons regardless since it completely bypasses their normally weak healing power from low MA.

Makajamaon (Command): Mute Eyes but with better odds. I don't care for Mute Eyes, so I don't care for this, but I suppose it is a good shut down in the situation where the enemies aren't resistant to Curse. Probably the skill to shoot for if you want to do a Weak Kill build.

Life Aid (Passive): At a battle's conclusion, restore 10% of your HP. Not a massive amount, but it is enough to refund most physical skills at this point. If you got a spare slot, it's good filler I suppose but I personally don't care for it. The MP version of this skill is way more useful.

Battle Aura (Auto): Battle Aura nullifies any damage received that is less than or equal to 50. At this stage of the game, this can essentially make your team leaders immortal as long as they have demons up, and with careful attention to your resistances you can expect that for the sturdier demons at your disposal as well. As I've said many times though, I prefer just crushing the enemy before they can dent me too much so I'd rather optimize for offense. Fortify is a much more consistent defensive boon as well, so I'd rather take that to bolster my entire team even if this more often than not benefits the team leader more. (Though this may have potential for securing Extra Turns since it's technically a null, I've never played around with that idea too much)

Ban Fire (Auto): This was another Auto skill in the first battle I was too dense to check for, but this one is complete trash anyways so it's not a huge deal. Ban skills are weird, they prevent the very first skill of a specific attacking type from being used in the battle, from either side. After that, the skill proceeds to do nothing. Ban Skills are extremely situational, and frankly only Ban Phys and Ban Curse have any real use. There is a situation in the game where Ban Fire might seem like a good idea, but just simply having fire resistance of any kind is more prudent and you'd rather have Ban Phys in that situation.

Null Force (Passive): Our first nullification skill, naturally if you're sending someone out to tank a bunch of Force hits, this is great to have. It also affords you some extra safety if you get petrified, though naturally physical attacks can still shatter you. Pay attention to what you're up against and equip this skill accordingly.

Drain Hit (Passive): This will restore your HP on landing physical hits by 25% of the damage you deal. This does affect skills, much like the +Ailment skills, so there is some potential for good healing here. In ideal circumstances, it's probably considerably more than what Life Aid will get you. Again, I don't care for Life Aid so correspondingly I don't really care for this either, but the fact it affects skills does give it some decent potential.

Part 19 is out! In this riveting video, Shoji hooks us up with some information, Haru once again stares death in the face, Kaido has beef with Keisuke and escalates the situation concerning him, and finally we reconnect with Miss Mari who is wrapped up in some paranormal business.

Demons Available

Fallen Orobas (Lv. 35): Our next Fallen demon and much easier to get something going for than Nisroc. Orobas learns Elec Amp at level 37, and with his good MA and built in Mazio, he can really clean house if you invest in him. Unfortunately, he also is available at a time where we want to dedicate our resources to creating demons that bring a lot more value than what a good Sacrifice user can bring. Now to be fair, money is essentially infinite in this game due to free battles, but free battles are slow and boring as hell and I'd rather not waste the resource of my time just to create strong versions of every potentially interesting demon we see. We can get this guy from the auction hall later at level 36, and that's what I'd recommend doing if you have interest in using him.

Beast Orthrus (Lv. 35): Peak material demon right here. Orthrus has a bit of conflict of interest with his skills, possessing good physical stats but magic focused innate skills. The reason you want one though is because of the excellent passives he learns, making him great for fusing powerful demons. Orthrus learns Pierce at level 36, allowing physical attacks to hit all resistances except Repel at full damage, and Fire Amp at level 37 which makes him excellent for fusing up powerful fire casters. Orthrus himself is good enough, but he quickly finds himself outclassed by hyper specialized physical attackers we'll have access to once we reach the 40's for our fusion level. Still, I'd recommend making a good version of this guy and registering him at level 37 purely for fusion purposes.

Part 20 is out! Rounding out Day 4, it's safe to say everything within the Yamanote Circle has broken down and danger is in every corner. Beginning on Day 5, even the world itself seems to be changing around our protagonists. As if that wasn't enough, we have to scramble to prevent multiple disasters on Day 5, lest we want to attend the funerals of some friends after this is all over.

Skills Available

Might Call (Command): Here's some trash for you, this skill gives the entire party 1 guaranteed critical hit. We have a skill called Aggravate that does the exact same thing from outside of battle that doesn't require you to waste a turn within the battle. You also need to start with an Extra turn if the caster wants to benefit from it. This is about as close to a useless skill as this game gets, there are far better ways to secure more critical hits if you really want to run that kind of build.

Mighty Hit (Command): For instance. Mighty Hit is about as strong as a normal hit but it's always critical and does not have to grapple with the accuracy penalty Anger Hit has. It's much more costly in HP though, and generally the power is less than what you get from Brutal Hit, so I can't really say this is a great skill. If you keep Marksman glued to Atsuro at all times like I do, there isn't any reason to run this over Anger Hit if you really like the sound of guaranteed crits.

Ares Aid (Passive): Oh hey another skill that completely invalidates Might Call. This passive gives a staggering 50% additive bonus to your crit rate, meaning you'll secure critical hits more than half the time when you launch a physical attack. That said, I'm not a huge fan of this on its own, but there is one particular build that can really ratchet up what this skill can do for you. Unfortunately, all the pieces for it are only available by the end of Day 8 on Yuzu or Naoya's route, so it's largely something you'd use to style on enemies in New Game +. In lieu of better things though, this passive is just fine.

Elec Amp (Passive): 50% bonus damage to Elec, yes please. Whatever is going to be the primary element a character uses, you always want the corresponding Amp to get the most out of it. Elec enjoys an early leg up with this, allowing us to delete enemy groups with Mazio so long as they don't resist Elec damage.

Phys Boost (Passive): 20% extra damage for Atsuro, of course you want it. This skill is a good time to mention why it's so impractical to use more than one physical attacker, because there's only one set of boosting passives that can be used for them, that means one attacker is always going to be a fair deal weaker than the other. That said, I guess if you want to go that route, it gives Ares Aid more of a purpose.

Anti-Phys (Passive): 50% reduction for physical damage is something I'll never say No to, and this is a great skill for your characters who are light on VI. If you're building the Hero the way I do, I'd highly recommend setting this on him, as he'll more often than not be your most vulnerable character to physical attacks and this relaxes how much you need to invest in VI.

Alter Pain (Auto): Now here's an interesting skill. Alter Pain makes it so that when taking damage in battle, you'll recover an amount of MP relative to the damage you take. I'm not too keen on skills that operate on the basis of getting beat up, but this is a reliable way to pad out your MP if you lack good Tyrants or Divines. Even the most offensively optimized team will likely take damage now and again, so this can be a good way to make the best of an undesirable situation.

Holy Dance (Command): If there's one skill that makes people really resent to One Per Human limit on skills in this game, it's this one. This is a fantastically powerful Dance skill that does Almighty Damage. The cost is steep, at 45 MP, but it's potent damage that works equally well on everything. This is a shoe in skill for your strongest casters, and while Amp boosted elemental magic does trump this by a fair amount, you will come across situations where enemies will resist everything BUT this. As absolute must crack skill, and thankfully it's super easy to get.

Vigilant (Passive): The upgraded version of Watchful. Demons and humans in reserve get even more leaked experience, though again benched Human characters always get leaked experience regardless (just more of it with this skill). As for the boosting effect this has on active combat, this does stack with Watchful so it's a helpful skill for level grinding if you're behind the game's level curve.

Cursed Dance (Command): This one's weird, it works like any other dance but the damage dealt is equal to a quarter of the HP of the enemy it hits. It's 50% if the enemy is weak to Curse. This can't kill enemies on its own, and the damage is often way lower than other options available. Easily the worst Dance in the game, not sure what they were thinking with this.

Endure (Passive): I'm sure we've all seen this kind of skill before, if you have more than 1 HP remaining you can survive an otherwise fatal hit. You can only Endure an attack once per skirmish, but there's no limit on how many times it can activate in a full mission. It's a pretty good defensive passive for that reason, and it's not a terrible idea to stick this on characters engaging on the riskier battles in a given mission.

Part 21 is out! We hand off Mari's bag to Kaido and pray that he doesn't fumble it, we collect Naoya's garbage from the Shomonkai, order further breaks down with the borders of the lockdown, and Keisuke is doubling down on his mission to purge the world of sinners.

Demons Available

Megami Brigid (Lv. 36): Our next Megami demon, Brigid is a marginal upgrade over Ishtar that still enjoys a decent amount of flexibility with her passives. Like Ishtar, she'll be as good as the components you use to maker her, though one thing to note is that she is not a Unique demon and you can field as many Brigid's as you want. Brigid also learns Null Fire, so she's an easy way to fuse that skill around which can be helpful come Day 6.

Jaki Legion (Lv.37): Another MA oriented Jaki, what are the odds? Anyways Legion has quite a bit more going for him than Loa, picking up Ice Dance and Ice Amp as he levels and having the MA to put in good work with it. Legion is mostly intended for walling physical hits with his high VI and Phys resistance, and while he does have the MA to take some magical damage as well, having weaknesses to the ever common Fire and Elec still gives him problems on that front. Not terrible by any means though, and his innate access to Petra Eyes actually has a distinct use coming up soon.

Deity Odin (Lv.37): Our next Deity demon, and Odin actually has the novel attribute of being really good with magic, with a solid base 19 MA. He's also our first chance to access Shield All, a fairly decent buffing skill that you will despise seeing when the enemy uses it. Like Brigid, Odin is as good as you can make him with a decently flexible skill list, and he's the first Deity who can realistically benefit a lot from Awakening, rather than just supporting the team with it.

Mitama Kusi Mitama (Lv.38): Our first Mitama demon! I'm not going to go too indepth on Mitamas right now, as like Elements they are not serious team members and are instead purely meant for fusion. All things will be revealed in time.

Dragon Python (Lv.39): One of the few demons in the game with a completely open skill list, Python also comes in with an impressive 20 MA meaning that he has extremely high potential for being a potent caster with the right fusions. If you see a good fusion set up for this guy, then it's not a terrible idea to pull it off even if it requires some free battle grinding to replace good demons. The only thing holding Python back is his low max MP, which means he can run dry extremely quickly without good team support.

Genma Cu Chulainn (Lv.39): The Genma race really enters a high point for the game starting around now and Cu Chulainn sets the trend here. Possessing a behemoth base 22 ST, Cu Chulainn also picks up Pierce and Phys Amp via leveling. This guy can hit like a runaway freight train if invested in, and once he starts to pass his prime he can be used to fuse up demons that will keep the train rolling. Absolutely look for a good way to make this guy, he can take Mow Down from being a mid-skill to being a tactical nuke.

Femme Hariti (Lv. 39): The odd woman out for the Femme race, Hariti instead focuses on ST instead of MA. She's not very good in this regard, as we have access to several better attackers at this point, and she doesn't learn anything that terribly useful either. I'd pass on her unless you're chain fusing her into another demon.

Avatar Airavata (Lv.40): Continuing the proud legacy Avatar demons have of being really crap, Airavata is a slow wall of hit points meant to take hits and fail to contribute to battles. He does learn Zandyne and Force Amp, but his horrible MA stat means he will accomplish little with it, so it's more meant for fusing off into a better demon. This guy runs counter to my entire playstyle so he was basically doomed to get condemnation from me. Grind him out if you want to fuse him off, but otherwise give this guy a pass.

Touki Berserker (Lv.41): This guy is obscene. 26 base ST? AND I CAN FUSE HIM OFF OF AFNAC AND QUETZACOATL? Yeah we will be doing that, and this guy will be coming in with around 33 ST and Phys Boost at his disposal. Another demon who can turn Mow Down into instant death to the opposition. He's a little slow, and his MA is unbelievably terrible, but who cares when he can use Tailwind and Initiative to detonate the enemy before they can exploit that? He also comes in with innate Endure, making him very difficult to kill even considering that. Highly recommend picking this guy up if you follow my playstyle, he will be beyond over the top. Best Touki in the game easily.

Skills Available

Pierce (Passive): Another skill long time SMT fans will recognize and immediately feel nostalgia for, Pierce causes physical attacks to ignore non-repel resistances. This last bit is a fairly uncommon concern in this game, so this skill lets dedicated physical attackers really run roughshod on enemy demons. As far as cracks go, this is another skill that really makes the One Per Human limit rule sting and another factor in why it's hard to run multiple physical leaders. Obviously put this on Atsuro, or whoever your dedicated physical attacker is.

Null Curse (Passive): A must have defensive skill when Petra Eyes is floating around. It's doubly important as it is the only passive that affords complete immunity to ailments, as Curse does not pick up a Repel or Drain type defense. Good idea to have your strongest fighter run this at all times.

Ban Curse (Auto): The only Ban skill that's really worth running consistently, as you don't often see ailments flung your way more than once per skirmish. I think, though I don't know for sure and feel free to correct me if you do know, that this also prevents ailments from going through until the Ban is actually triggered. It's a pretty good counter to +Ailment skills if that is the case, and I do know one fight outside of that anyway where this can really come in clutch.

Healing (Auto): I really bungle explaining this skill in the video, but it's really straight forward. If you enter a skirmish and anyone on your team has less than full HP, your leader will cast Media at the start before everyone can take their actions. This can actually go a long way in increasing your team's survivability as well as footing the cost of physical skills. If you're running a physically oriented team with a magic focused leader, this can be a great way to keep the whole team running like clockwork.

Demon Race: Genma






*Tschaggatta is exclusive to Overclocked
**Kresnik is a Special fusion and must be unlocked via completion of a Day 5 sidequest

I always forget just how many reps this race has in this game since I don't use them nearly as much as I do things like Wilders or Megamis. That aside, Genmas have a pretty elliptical usefulness curve throughout the game. Early game, they're fairly unremarkable physical specialists at a time where physical attacks are crap and there are more specialized and potent demons than them. This all changes mid game when Cu Chulainn hits the scene and suddenly Genmas explode upward in potency. The trio of Cu Chulainn, Kresnik, and Seiten Taisei are among the best physical specialists for their stages of the game. While there are definitely stronger dedicated attackers, these three enjoy far better resistances than comparable demons and Cu Chulainn creates an easy access to Pierce and Phys Amp. One really big thing that benefits these three compared to other Unique demons is that Genmas are a race that can rank up via Element fusion. (Most Unique demons in Devil Survivor 1 belong to Races that strictly rank down via elemental fusion) Accordingly, once the next tier of Genma becomes available to you, you can just upgrade with an Element. This allows Phys Amp and Pierce to carry all the way down, and you can search out a good passive to round out the completely open passive slots. I highly recommend these demons, and frankly once you can fuse Seiten Taisei, Kresnik is still good enough that you could easily pull him back out of the compendium and have both of these guys support your teams. Genmas end on a lower key note afterwards. While Tschaggatta and Ganesha are far from bad, the former tends to be much weaker than things in the same level bracket and Ganesha has lowish MP with horrible AG. Still, Ganesha can easily cap out a stat via inheritance and he has a lot of room to grow, and with two free passive slots you definitely have options for him. Don't sleep on this Race, they can put in good work for you if you know how to game the fusion system.

Phantasma is the Genma Race Skill. This is a non-conditional passive skill that affects movement. When Phantasma is in effect, you will be able to pass through terrain, enemies and barriers unimpeded much like Avian's flight. Unlike Flight, instead of getting a bonus point of Move, you get the less remarkable bonus of halving turn delay from movement. This isn't the most impressive effect in the world, but it does have one key advantage over Flight: this bonus stacks with Devil Speed while Flight's move bonus is ignored. When used in conjunction with Devil Speed, this ability essentially affords you 7 move for the same delay as moving 3/4. That can definitely give you a leg up in many situations, and it's a nice advantage even in situations where you don't need additional move and just happen to have a Genma fielded. And frankly, being able to ignore terrain and pass through enemies will always be a good thing regardless of the secondary effect.

Just as a random for fun miscellaneous post, I was making some preparations for the next video and rounding out some of the compendium when I got a really good example of how far ahead of the curve you can get if you make good use of fusion inheritance.



Remember how I speculated in the notes for the previous update this guy would probably fuse in with about 33 or so ST? Yeahhhhh. I have a feeling this Berserker is gonna be going places. (For the record, his level pattern has him getting two points of ST on his first two level ups, so this guy will almost certainly be our first demon with a capped stat in the game)

Part 22 is out! We set out to finally rid the world of Kudlak. Disaster strikes for our new game + aspirations, but otherwise things go smoothly. We also get a demonstration on why I'm none too keen on ailment based strategies in this game.

Demons Available

Vile Abaddon (Lv. 40): We lacked materials to fuse this guy in the last update, but he's available to me now. Abaddon is essentially Orcus 2 with his Phys Weakness, but he's available at a point where it's not impossible to get Anti-Phys into his one free passive slot giving him resistance to everything. The other notable thing about him is that he is the first demon that can learn Anti-Most, the skill that gives resistance to all attacking types except Phys and Almighty, adding that to your fusion pool. The next demon we'll discuss also does this though, so it's not a super critical aspect of Abaddon outside of the fact he's cheaper to pull out of the compendium. Abaddon otherwise has pretty middling stats, but this does make him able to flex onto anything you could want him to do.

Tyrant Hecate (Lv. 42): Hecate is pretty awesome, with good MA and balanced stats in every other category, as well as being our first demon to learn the ever valuable Mediarahan. If you can get a -Dyne spell and Holy Dance onto her, she can really put it to most anything you fight. Her main drawback is her cluttered passive list. She starts with a redundant anti-most that's purely there for fusion purposes, and learns Pierce via level up which is not great since she has much lower ST than MA. I'd recommend dedicating her free slot to a phys resist or Dual Shadow if you can manage it.

Skills Available

Extra One (Passive): Extra One guarantees you'll start a battle with an Extra Turn and prevents you from losing it. This definitely has its uses if you don't particularly need another passive for a given fight beyond your typical boosts and resists, but I can't really say I'm a fan of it either. If you don't mind sacrificing a little attack power, Atsuro can often make use of this since his ability to secure Extra turns more often relies on random chance.

Bufudyne/Ice Amp/Ice Repel: All of these are certainly tempting to grab, but require killing Kudlak personally to get just one of them which fails Mari's sidequest and denies us all sorts of goodies. We'll be getting a different -Dyne skill next video with the corresponding Amp not long after, so it's not the end of the world that we missed Bufudyne. Bufudyne actually becomes available from Data cards in free battles on Day 6, so we'll easily be able to pick this up for when we need it. The other two passives are good of course, but not worth failing the sidequest for.