So, at 9:30PM something happens that hasn’t happened since Day 1: we get a second death clip. This one is set at JP’s Nagoya, showing another battle between JP’s and the insurgents, and the original quartet of Hibiki, Daichi, Io, and Joe arriving just as things are getting underway. It then cuts to the end of the conflict to show Makoto on her knees in defeat, and Ronaldo executing her. No kidding around, he takes out a gun and straight-up shoots her, and she simply collapses and bleeds out. Personally, I find this to be the most visceral death in the whole game, as it’s so...normal for lack of a better word and mundane compared to being incinerated or frozen solid, not to mention being at the hands of another human and there being no cutaways like with Jungo’s death. Daichi immediately runs up to Hibiki and exclaims that he can’t imagine Ronaldo going that far but, well, there it is in the clip.
So, the process of saving Makoto is two-fold. First, we have to do the upcoming story mission right now at ten o’clock, otherwise we’ll be too late. As in the clip the scene depicts Hibiki and his fellow three Tokyoites arriving at JP’s Nagoya to see that Ronaldo and his forces have mustered themselves for one final last-ditch attack on the branch, and their numbers are too much for the personnel still stationed there. Makoto will eventually order Fumi and the personnel to withdraw, and upon she and Ronaldo both seeing Hibiki arrive they each urge him to help them. We’re given a choice the, to side with Makoto and fight against Ronaldo and the insurgents, to side with Ronaldo and fight against Makoto and the JP’s personnel, which’ll result in the scene from the clip playing out, or fight both sides.
Now obviously I’m going to side with Makoto even though I don’t need any Fate points for her anymore because doing otherwise feels dickish, but before I start the mission I have to talk about how this scene, specifically the death scene, is the crystallization of the flaw I mentioned earlier in the blog about how characters’ development in their side-plots doesn’t always bleed over to the main game when it should. If you end up sealing Makoto’s fate the post-battle scene plays out with Ronaldo asking her to surrender but she remains defiant, saying that she’d rather he kill her than betray or become a liability to JP’s, with him quickly obliging leaving Io a sobbing wreck just to further kick the player. Now, I think you can see the problem here. This whole setup runs counter to the respective characters’ subplots that I went through earlier in the day: Ronaldo’s was specifically about him going down the wrong, extremist path, recognizing that fact and renewing his pledge to fight for true equality. Yet here he’s right back to “JP’s must die!/Anything to get at Yamato!” as if that scene never happened, sinking to the same level as his sworn enemy, being a hypocrite, and placing himself firmly in the villainous camp. When you consider this scene and the fact that he’s directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of several much more popular characters, you can see why he’s not a very well-liked character. And Makoto has the exact same Aesop Amnesia problem too, as her subplot was about her realizing that she could follow her own heart in the pursuit of justice (Ronaldo’s favorite word) and listening to her doubts, yet here she’s literally martyring herself without a second thought, in the service of a guy who would probably just shrug off and dismiss her death. Just because one of her signature demons is derived from Joan of Arc doesn’t mean she has to senselessly take the same route! Like, I understand that the writers couldn’t take into account every possible scene order the player would take, but to not even make a token attempt to reconcile these two characters’ supposed growth at such a pivotal part of the game blows a bit hole in this scenario, and it doesn’t feel satisfying to resolve. Like, what I would’ve done, is if you had completed those events, the end-of-battle portion would go differently, such as having the characters both mutually recognize what’s happening to them and/or talking each other down or something. It would do their character arcs more justice, certainly.
Anyway, enough of that. Time for some actual gameplay.
Mission 36: Ronaldo Rises
- Ronaldo must be defeated
- The whole party cannot die
- Makoto cannot die
Naturally we start at the bottom of the map while Ronaldo and Makoto are at the top, near the clock-thing. In addition to heat, this time Ronaldo’s packing...
Ronaldo (Lv. 55)
HP/MP
- 820/280
- Resists Fire, Ice, Elec, Force, and Curse
- Holy Dance - Deals several random hits of Almighty damage to multiple targets.
- Multi-Strike - Deals multiple Physicals hits to entire enemy party; number of hits dependent on user’s Agility.
- Diarahan - Fully restores one party member’s HP.
- Drain Hit - Absorbs HP when using Physical attacks.
- Anti-Most - Grants resistance to all elements other than Physical and Almighty.
- Dual Shadow - 25% chance of repeating last action.
- Debilitate - Reduces enemy party’s defense and hit/evasion rate by 25%.
- Abaddon, Badb Catha
Still rocking that Vile + Avian combo I see. Like the first time we fought him here on Day 3 he out-levels us and has a good skillset. Drain Hit allows him to fully recover the HP lost to activate Multi-Strike, and if Dual Shadow triggers on that, ouch. Fortunately his Magic isn’t too high, so Holy Dance won’t be too troublesome.
Makoto, on the other hand, will need all the help she can get. While at first glance she looks okay, she’s got a Kresnik and Hecate (the latter of which knows Diarahan), Diarahan, Life Stream to give her over 900 HP, you then notice that neither of her demons have full loadouts, and thus struggle to inflict lasting damage. But the real kicker is her Auto Skill, Desperation. Desperation gives the team a big speed advantage, but at the cost of extra turns, and without the advantage of range that Evil Wave and Chaos Wave allow. So she takes a lot of damage from Ronaldo and any of the other insurgents that reach her, and while the other JP’s personnel focus on keeping her alive with stuff like Affection, they’re soundly outclassed.
Given that Makoto’s prone to losing big chunks of health it behooves the player to use movement demons to reach her vicinity as soon as possible to provide support. One of the insurgents has the highly useful Magic Yang Auto Skill to crack, so don’t miss that!
Completing the mission earns us 2500 EXP and 7600 macca.
With the death clip averted things go about as you’d expect, with Ronaldo declaring his war against JP’s as he retreats and Makoto thanking us for saving her life. The game director said on the development blog that a couple scenes in the original game got altered for Record Breaker, so I hope that this was one of them. Anyway, that leaves just the final event of the day, and it looks like I was able to fulfill most of my plan - Yamato’s not at Fate Stage 4, but he’s the only one other than the Anguished One, so eh. Close enough.
The day’s final event takes place at JP’s HQ in Osaka at and is entitled “Unified Will”. It’s a bit of a misnomer though, since the characters still can’t come to an agreement over which philosophy to follow. When Yamato arrives he says that there’s no longer enough time left to wait for everyone to come to a consensus - starting tonight he will marshal his forces and set out to create his ideal world. Hinako asks what’s going to happen to those who disagree with him and he says nothing, as long as they stay out of his way, that is. Otherwise he won’t hesitate to kill them.
A voice says that that’s so like him and Ronaldo appears to object (what, was he hiding behind a curtain this whole time?). Yamato gives him the dreaded “who the hell are you?” treatment and poo-poos his ideal of egalitarianism, but some of the others speak up in support of it. Ronaldo gloats to Yamato that not everyone will fall under his sway, so the two determine that tomorrow will be a battle between merit and equality. Daichi finds his voice and exclaims that he thinks that both options are too extreme (I’ve been wondering why he objects to Ronaldo’s plan though - like I can see him thinking that the man himself is too extreme as we’ve seen, but I would think he’d be on board with an option that promises to end all conflict) and says that there has to be something else, but since he can’t articulate an actual plan he gets the “quiet down kid the grownups are talking” treatment from the two faction leaders. Hinako at least does speak up in his defense, saying that there should be an option that doesn’t involve bickering to the bitter end.
So basically, after summarizing the three positions available (meritocracy, equality, and...something else) and everyone is done drawing their lines in the sand the characters go about outlining the rules of the upcoming battle royale, as silly as it is to watch. Whichever faction comes out on top will have the right to seek Polaris and enact their choice, while defeated members will agree to stand down. With that all hashed out, the group splits up at last. Keita, Makoto, and Fumi go with Yamato, Ronaldo takes Joe, Otome, and Airi with him, and Io, Jungo, and Hinako accompany Daichi.
So here it is, the decision point. Devil Survivor 2 is a lot more lenient than it’s predecessor when it comes to unlocking the ending routes: once again there are five total, though the basic three are unlocked automatically. The other two have some requirements to meet, one of which I did not (I think you can guess what that one will entail) and the other branches off one of the original three. So, let’s take a look at what we’ve got to work with here:
Ronaldo’s dream of a peaceful, utopian world is a nice one, but the man has shown himself to be rather shortsighted, and that death clip of him murdering Makoto leaves a very bad impression. However, it’s clear that his character arc involves shedding those qualities as I’ve said, and with guys like Joe and Otome with him, it’s hard to believe that they’ll stand for that sort of behavior. Putting Ronaldo himself aside for a moment, the biggest criticism thrown at his ideal of egalitarianism both in-game and by real life sociologists, is that it is a directionless ideal. To paraphrase a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., progress is spurred by sacrifice. In Ronaldo’s world there is no sacrifice, no loss to drive change, and thus it leaves itself open to stagnation...the same stagnation that gave birth to Polaris’s void. However, considering the bad shape the world is in today, perhaps it’s still worth giving it a shot, to have something better than what was there before. And looking at things another way, living for another is still a reason for living, so perhaps what I just said about egalitarianism inviting the void isn’t strictly true? Perhaps through the influence of Hibiki and his friends, Ronaldo’s ideal can become the basis for the new world after all?
Yamato, on the other hand, has no one on his team like that. Fumi has a very noticeable lack of empathy, Keita doesn’t really care what happens as long as he gets to fight, and while Makoto is the most moral and empathetic member of the group she has a hard time calling out her superiors, and even if she did Fumi or Yamato would probably just overrule her. Despite him being a royal asshole on a personal level, Yamato’s meritocracy does actually have some upsides that are touched upon. For example, his idea of a new world is not simply one where the weak are left to languish, but one where people have to earn their keep, and those who are qualified and competent are in the positions that they need to be. He wants to see an end to stuff like nepotism and the indolent. That will certainly satisfy Polaris’s standards...but Yamato also said at the start of the game that “when man grows accustomed to power he tends to abuse it.” There’s really nothing stopping his meritocracy from devolving into the usual sort of anarchy common to Megami Tensei Chaos routes, or from one person becoming absolute which, spoiler alert, is implied to kinda be what happens if you take this route. And not everyone will be a (semi)benevolent despot like Yamato is.
Finally, we have Daichi and his friends. While all of them are good people, the problem here is that they don’t have a plan, and there’s not much time left. Daichi himself is not a very charismatic figure but he does have a point that all this fighting is absurd when the world is literally falling apart around them. Do they have the time and will needed to come up with another solution, and what’s more, can they even enact it? Is there even another way?
So, lots to think about. Which path is best for humanity?
Compendium
- Taown
◊
- A member of the Chinese Si-Xiong Four Fiends, Taown is a creature made of a mishmash of human, pig, and tiger body parts. It represents ignorance, never listening to advice and pushing people towards apathy and away from enlightenment.
- Baihu◊
- The White Tiger of the Chinese Si-Xiang. Baihu is said to have originated as a normal tiger who turned white upon living five-hundred years, and only appears when the world is at peace. As its color symbolizes the west, Baihu is considered the guardian of that cardinal direction. In the anime Baihu was Hibiki's signature demon.
- Seiryuu◊
- The Japanese name for Qing Long, one of the Si Xiang, or the Chinese Four Symbols, mythological beasts that represent the constellations. In Japan it is a guardian of cities, Kyoto in particular, and represents the element of wood. The Megami Tensei games often erroneously conflate it with Long, one of the four Chinese Ssu-Ling, or Benevolent Animals.
- Osiris◊
- The Egyptian god of the afterlife and the son of the earth god Geb. He was killed and torn to pieces by his brother Seth, however his sister Isis reassembled him and in recognition of her devotion the gods resurrected Osiris as the god of the afterlife. In this capacity he was known as a merciful judge and the progenitor of life and fertile land on the banks of the Nile river.
This installment's namesake is the opening song from the anime FYI, since I felt that it was one of the few parts of it that did justice to the game's themes.
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