Awesome game from an awesome series. With great gameplay, what's not to love?
Devil Survivor looks great as well. The hand drawings of the character portraits showing their different emotions while talking with them is done quite well. No complaints on the battle animations either so far.
Now, about the battle system integrated into the game. The strategy aspect takes a bit of getting used to because you'll often get swarmed by tougher enemies if you don't have the right position on the isometric game board. When you engage an enemy in combat, the view switches to one that takes after the battle screen in the Dragon Quest series. The enemy's stats show up on the top screen, so you can check out their weaknesses, and exploit that. However, that doesn't quite cut it if you're being swarmed by enemies at higher levels. There are numerous free battles that you can get into, which help boost your levels, so doing those will put you at an advantage when you are faced with an event battle.
To help you with all the battles, you collect demons with different abilities. One of the ways of doing so unique to the game is an auction system where you can obtain demon contracts.
If you've played previous Shin Megami Tensei games, you know those have great story, and have many different paths with which you can take. The same holds true for Devil Survivor.
When you first select 'New Game' from the start menu, you're immediately hit with the fact that you will be making a lot of choices in the game, and those choices determine your fate. After that, once you've entered your name, your story starts out mellow, with you meeting up with a couple friends at Shibuya Station. Things quickly get eerie when you get a newsletter that tells you what is going to happen that day, the events of which are tragedies happening to different people. That's right, they haven't happened yet, but are going to, unless you can do something about it. The game has you going to different areas in Tokyo where you have to alter what the email newsletters say. They're more heads-up warnings so you can get there in time to stop them. I don't think I mentioned that you only have a certain number of days to change these events before you're killed off.
With each decision you make, you can change the number of days you have yet to live, so not all hope is lost. The number of days is displayed over every head, warning you that you need to do something amazing and fast, or you're toast.
All these events taking place in different areas in Tokyo are quick enough to go through. There is a map screen that actually shows you everything that's going on, events with certain characters, free battles, or just to simply overhear some of the conversations going on between the different people in Tokyo.
My conclusion, buy this game! You will spend hours with the game just to see the conclusion, which by the way, there are several different endings based on the decisions you make, so the game is definitely worth playing again and again simply to see all the different endings you can come up with.