Our next stop in Osaka will be the Festival Gate amusement park, situated near the Shinimamiya train station. Joe’s like a big kid when he sees it, eager to check out the so-called “kingdom of dreams” while telling the others that it’ll be a bonus if Keita happens to be here. After a little back-and-forth between him and the kids over how they should shorten its name (“Festgate” wins out) the group steps into the entrance plaza and finds that it’s no longer a kingdom of dreams. The place looks like it’s been trashed and vandalized in the turmoil following the mystery earthquake, but there is one person still there: a blank-faced woman who’s seated at some sort of server/computer console setup, typing away at a keyboard. What’s more, there are some demons surrounding her, and she wordlessly takes out her cellphone and summons some more before going right back to her typing. Whatever the story here is we’ve gotta stop her, and that’ll require getting physical.
Mission 6: Demon-Hacked
- All enemies must be defeated
- The whole party cannot die
This map’s pretty small and simple, being a circular area with a raised, circular stage in its center. “Vacant Woman” is hacking away on top of it, but once again our heroes are stricken by the Insurmountable Waist-High Fence trope as they cannot surmount the three-feet-at-most stage without the aid of an Avian like Itsumade. Instead we’re forced to use the steps on either side of the stage. The demons here are actually on average lower-leveled than what was in the free battle, so most of my guys are at least three levels stronger. So they don’t pose too much of a challenge (though the Itsumades are equipped with + Poison, which at the moment can only be cured with Amrita), but once you start knocking off the teams the woman will wordless summon another each time her turn comes up. Otherwise, she doesn’t attack herself.
Vacant Woman (Lv. 16)
HP/MP
- 137/83
- None
- Hacking - Has no effect.
- None
- Hustle - Increases team’s chances of landing and evading Physical attacks.
- Makara x2
Since she doesn’t actively do anything, this battle’s really fought against the two Makaras that’re on her team. One of them is focused on assault with Agi, while the other’s support with Dia. Both of them also know Taunt, which draws attacks towards the caster while buffing our own attack power, but I’ve never, ever seen them use it. They both reflect Elec so the Elec Dance we just got won’t be helpful, but they are weak to Force, so Zan users like Kijimunaa and Kikimora will do well against them.
Once she’s defeated a new, stronger demon appears: Botis. Fortunately though we don’t have to fight him yet, he’ll just say that his master can’t afford to lose his pawn yet and both he and the woman vanish, leaving us to mop up any demons remaining.
Completing the mission earns us 125 EXP and 600 macca.
Some JP’s members burst onto the scene once the commotion’s over and immediately move to place us under arrest until one of them recognizes the group as the civilians who came here with Yamato. He explains that JP’s’s server was the target of a cyberattack a little while ago, and that they traced the hacker’s location to here. After Io explains what happened she says that it was like the demons were controlling the woman, and the man remarks that he’s never heard of a demon controlling a person like that before. The JP’s people get immediately called away by a report from HQ of another demon breakout before Daichi can ask them about the stairs in the death clip, so once more we have to hit the streets.
That’s actually the theme for the most of the following events: trying to find out more information from the natives but missing the opportunity for one reason or another. We can see Daichi trying to chat up some street-side vendors (selling no-doubt looted food and drink products) and almost getting ripped off, and some wannabe-ladies man trying to hit on Io until Hibiki steps in with a Boyfriend Bluff. Probably the most informative event is Joe’s, which is called “The New World”. Being a Megami Tensei game you’d expect this to be the seeds of one of the inevitable ending paths, but it’s actually about him reminiscing on a trip he took to the Shinsekai (“new world”) district in the past with his girlfriend. He laughs about how everyone got angry at him for mispronouncing the name of the Biliken statue at the base of the Tsuutenkaku Tower, but once you try being nosy and asking further about this girlfriend of his he just says he’ll tell us another time. Hm.
At 2:00PM it’s time for another battle in Dontonburi, near the Ebisu Bridge that crosses the Dontonburi Canal. Daichi’s starting to despair that they’ll ever find out the clip’s location, when they hear voices screaming “Monsters!” from nearby. Io says that they should help and is abruptly pushed aside by a woman with red hair, glasses, a lot of spirit, but not much clothes who rushes to help. The group follows to see two civilians on the bridge being chased by demons. “Buxom Woman” panics them further by summoning demons of her own but before you can say “deja vu” she explains to them that she’s here to help and her demons won’t hurt them, so they don’t end up starting a lynch mob like what happened to Midori in the previous game. The woman tells us to run too, but accepts our help when told that we’re demon tamers and says her name’s Hinako Kujou. So let’s get in there and save some lives, and I believe the most/only appropriate dialogue option here is “Awwwww yeeeeeeeah!”
Mission 7: Never Say Die
- All demons must be defeated
- The whole party cannot die
- Hinako and no civilian can die
Despite Joe’s grumbling that he hates Escort Missions this isn’t too bad. Ebisu Bridge is pretty wide and while there is a lower level to it in the form of two side paths they can be safely ignored for now. The demons are still underleveled too, though some reinforcement teams will appear at the far end of the map near the escape panels once a few go down, so it’s best to split your forces here.
The two civilians have the good sense to keep on the move so unless they get hit by Bind you don’t have to babysit them too much. Hinako well...the two demons she has, Hare of Inaba and Itsumade, give her a very high degree of mobility and Hare of Inaba can provide healing, but they’re relatively fragile, and will die quickly to concentrated assaults. So, what I did was try to keep whoever had Kikimora and Kijimunaa, in this case Io and Joe, near her as much as possible for their AOE field-healing Racial Skills in case things got hairy for her.
Completing the mission earns us 250 EXP and 700 macca.
After the grateful civilians depart Hinako asks us if we know of the “guys in yellow”, as she’s practically chomping at the bit to help out with JP’s and the humanitarian effort, such as it is. Once Hibiki offers to introduce her to Yamato she asks if we’re heading somewhere, so we’re finally able to ask about the site in the death clip. She immediately recognizes it as the place where we’re supposed to meet Keita, Bickman, and immediately insists that we have to save him. And so the party’s ranks are bolstered by the addition of Hinako Kujou. She’s Lv. 13 and really starts to demonstrate the paradigm shift I mentioned at the beginning in regards to stat distribution.
So in Devil Survivor 1 all non-Hero characters focused on maxing out (or almost maxing out) either Strength of Magic, while the remaining stats were kept relatively equal, with a few extra points here and there depending on the character’s secondary focus. Not so in Devil Survivor 2. Most of the characters focus instead on maxing out two stats at the expense of the others, with the result that most everyone is a lot more specialized and tend to have Glass Cannon traits.
Now, Hinako’s two stat specialties are Strength and Agility, which makes sense considering her occupation as a dancer. At first you might go “Strength and Agility? Uh...” but this combination actually makes her one of the most potent, if not the most potent, damage dealer in the game once we start getting more skills. See, the lovely skill Multi-Strike returns (or rather made its debut) in this game, and along with Pierce and Drain Hit it turns Hinako into the goddess referred to in the “Shin Megami Tensei” supertitle. A goddess of destruction who can utterly annihilate 95% of the enemy teams in the game. And what’s more her Magic is just high enough that she won’t be crippled by magic and can equip healing spells for emergencies. Once she gets going, she almost never leaves my team.
So now, we have to go save Keita. For the longest time I had no clue what real-world location “Bickman” was referring to, and it wasn’t until I was doing research for this entry that I figured it out. It’s actually a mistranslation of a Bland-Name Product: what it’s actually referring to is the Big Man video screen that hangs in the Umeda Station concourse, across from the entrance to the famous Kinokuniya Books bookstore and to the right of the large staircase and escalator set that Keita tumbles down. When we check out that location next you can see that the name on the screen is “Bic Man”, but I guess the translators overlooked that when translating the script. Anyway, there’s absolutely no one here, and Joe wonders if Keita got held up by the disaster.
So my readers, here’s a quiz for you. You possess the foreknowledge of someone’s death. You intend to prevent it, and you know where it will take place but not necessarily when. You arrive at the location and see that there’s no sign of the victim, or any other sort of trouble. Do you A: stay where you are to wait for the victim, do you B: go out looking for him while leaving some of your group behind just in case, or do you C: just faff off somewhere because eh, it’s probably nothing? If you chose anything other than C, congratulations, you officially have more common sense than all five of our heroes put together. Yes, talking about the disaster gets Joe thinking: how far exactly does the damage spread? They know about Tokyo and Osaka, but what about the rest of Japan, or East Timor (which is in another hemisphere entirely)? Io suggests they go to place that’ll provide a good vantage point, and Hinako suggests the Yodo River floodplain. So they do, leaving Keita behind to his fate. Once they get there though, all they can see is thick black smoke and devastation as far as the eye can see. Hinako’s shocked at the state of her city and Daichi gasps that this is way worse than a natural disaster or terrorists could do, it’s like the entire city’s a warzone! Hibiki and Io glumly figure that Tokyo was probably like this too, it was just hard for them to tell from ground level. Yamato was certainly telling the truth that there would be no rescue from this calamity.
Now it’s time to go back and save Keita. Because of our heroes’ genius idea to leave the station and because this sequence takes up two events, if you waited too long before heading here you’ll be too late: he’ll already be fighting the demons and’ll get sucker-punched and fatally knocked down the giant stairs by a Waira. Luckily I got here in time, and he’s hanging around, impatiently waiting for us. He wonders what we’re doing with another person in our party when screams are heard and he rushes off to fight the demons that’re terrorizing some civilians. We hurry after him and sure enough the kid’s unwilling to accept any help, but too bad, we’re getting in there too!
Mission 8: Osaka Soul
- All demons must be defeated
- The whole party cannot die
- Keita cannot die
- Hinako must be dispatched
This mission reintroduces the spawn point mechanic from last game. This time the spawn points appear as purple swirls of miasma that’re being caused by the summoning app on abandoned cellphones going haywire, and they’re removed in the same way, but having a character stand on top of them and selecting the “break phone” option.
This was a difficult battle for me. There are a lot of demon teams even before they start spawning from the miasmas, including Toubyous that can attack from a range and Mokois which are just sturdy and annoying, and everything that could go wrong for me went wrong. Key attacks missing, demons getting shocked (basically paralysis and every physical attack that lands is a critical hit), you name it. The battle’s actually even harder if you didn’t arrive in time to save Keita, for not only will you not have him as an AI ally, but you’ll be fighting the Waira that killed him, and they’re considerably stronger than they were in the previous game, being Lv. 17 and knowing Force Dance. Then again, Force Dance is a handy thing to have for an upcoming mission...
Well anyway, there are four spawn points and it’s important to get to them ASAP because once again the numbers are not in our favor and we can’t afford to be overwhelmed. The Dance skills start becoming pragmatic, if not necessarily economic, options, and to his credit Keita will use his demons to heal us if we’re nearby, and he does pack a punch on his own. I managed to scrape through without losing any leaders, but almost everyone was close to being tapped for MP by the end.
Completing the mission earns us 320 EXP and 500 macca.
Daichi shows Keita his death clip after the battle and the kid admits that us saving him’s worth a thanks before turning back to Hinako to ask what her deal is. He scoffs at her plan to join JP’s, so she has to remind him who it was who just fought the demons and saved him. He sighs and says fine, he’ll take us all to the main JP’s branch in Shinsekai, while Daichi, Io, and Joe congratulate themselves on successfully averting the death clip. Keita achieves Fate Stage 1, gains a Fire resistance, and joins the party at Lv. 13. Predictably he’s Strength-focused, and his build’s sort of like Daichi’s in that his other stats are mostly balanced (other than Magic) but stronger. Still though, he’ll be warming the bench for most, if not all, of the game because even setting aside Hinako there are better options for Physical attackers.
And speaking of Hinako, we have the time for one more event before heading to Shinsekai to meet with Yamato, and it’s a pretty simple one. We see a girl trying to get an SDF soldier to come help someone pinned by rubble, but he’s reluctant to leave his assigned post without orders. That’s when Hinako comes along to verbally tear him a new one for refusing to fulfill his duty to help those in need, and he the guy eventually caves and leaves with the woman. Having Hibiki complement her on her “negotiating” skills has her claim that it’s all thanks to being raised among hagglers; so yep, she’s basically the hot-blooded Osakan stereotype given flesh. Fitting both that and her sign Pisces, she gets an Ice resistance upon achieving Fate Stage 1.
Alrighty, off to JP’s.
Compendium
- Kijimunaa
◊
- Diminutive Okinawan tree spirits who like to play pranks on humans, most notably sitting on their chests so they cannot breathe. Sometimes they befriend humans and carry them around on their backs. If this happens to you, make sure you don't fart; they'll chuck you right off it you do.
- Heqet◊
- An Egyptian fertility goddess that was often depicted as a woman with a frog's head. As a symbol of fertility and childbirth, eventually she became more and more closely associated with resurrection resulting in some early Christians wearing her amulets.
- Makara◊
- A holy aquatic-dwelling creature who serves as the mount of Ganga, the goddess of the Ganges river in India. It's generally depicted as having the front half of a land-dwelling animal such as a deer or elephant, and in one Chinese depiction it's the size of a mountain.
- Botis◊
- The seventeenth demon of the Goetia. As the President and Earl of Hell he has power over sixty armies of demons and great prophetic powers. He usually appears as a snake, but can assume a winged humanoid form should the summoner desire it.
- Angel◊
- The beings that serve God and act as His messengers and soldiers. In Christian tradition the generic angel occupies the Third Sphere of Heaven and is the lowest in rank and in nature the closest to Man. Thus they are the go-to angels to pass messages along to humans.
- Waira◊
- A monster that first appeared in the famous "The Illustrated Hundred-Demon Night Parade" book compiled by the famous 18th century artist Sekien Toriyama. The Waira was simply described as a mountain-dwelling beast, and its in-game design is actually nearly identical to how it appeared in the book.
- Mokoi◊
- Mokoi is an evil spirit from Aboriginal lore. It was believed to kidnap and eat children and any death that was not due to peaceful old age was said to have been set up by a Mokoi somehow.
Soundtrack
- demonfusion.exe
- How could I forget the Cathedral of Shadows theme, eviler than ever?
- Battle With a Close Friend
- The battle theme for human bosses, but I wouldn't go so far as to call all the people we fight to this theme friends...
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