For this month's TR theme about playing handheld entries in traditionally console-based series (and vice versa), I decided to give SMT: Devil Children a go~. All I really knew about it was that it was Atlus's Japan-only take on Pokemon, but outside of that nothing. It ended up being a really interesting take on SMT, and the design changes and innovations to make it work like a Pokemon-style thing would made for a neat experience. It took me around 15 hours to finish the game's main story via my GameCube's GBA Player.
There are three versions of Devil Children, but the two that were originally put out were Red Book and Black Book (very much leaning into the Pokemon-ness of it all with having multiple versions). They each have a different but similar story, and Red Book's is about a 5th grader, Mirai, searching in the makai for her missing father after being attacked by a weird demon at school. The story is a remarkably interesting and involved one, given what I expected. It does a great job of making an SMT story still series and focused on Chaos Vs. Law (or in this case, Devils Vs. Angels) in a way that softens the presentation down to something kids could gel with but without too heavily cheapening the messaging. Mirai is a great character who is very much a kid but also doesn't take any nonsense from people she thinks are trying to take advantage of her. The protagonist of Black Book even features heavily in this as well. The two stories are largely parallels of one another, but they're different enough that I'm actually considering hunting down a copy of Black Book (or the third game, White Book) to see what that take on the story is. The mechanics of Devil Children are where things really get interesting. It's very much "what if SMT was Pokemon", but the way in which that is achieved makes for a unique if somewhat roughly balanced experience. Mirai herself doesn't fight, and instead has befriended demons do the fighting for her. Her first demon is a Griffon named Bell (the other main characters get different main monsters), and this mascot main monster will be with you and an important character for the length of the game. Beyond that, you have six more monsters who can be loaded into your Devilizer (a little pink pistol with a pentagram on the side) as well as eventually another three (and eventually again six) more monsters in your King-izer. The battles are two vs. two, and with Bell automatically taking the front spot of the Devilizer (although not counting as one of its six occupants), your demons emerge in the order they're loaded into each gun as they're KO'd. It's not a revolutionary system by any means, but it's a cool spin on the Pokemon formula in an era before those games had 2-on-2 battles of any description. You also have SMT's trademark demon fusion mechanic, as your demons don't gain levels like a Pokemon would. In order to get stronger demons, you need to take them to the research center and fuse them. Something that makes this game somewhat unique among SMT games is that not only can you have more demons than just the ones in your party (they go in a PC, just like in Pokemon), you can actually have more than one demon of the same type, however. If you fuse two demons of the same type (or ones incompatible to make some greater fusion), it will power-up the first demon selected with slightly stronger stats and sometimes stronger spells. This consumption of other demons is also how your mascot-companion (in this case, Bell the Griffon) levels up in power. Outright stronger demons or demons that just have stronger abilities are often most useful than trying to slowly upgrade already good monsters like this, but it's a cool feature to extend the life of already useful demons. It's a neat system for a Pokemon-type game, and it succeeds at being different enough from something like Dragon Quest: Monsters' monster breeding to feel like something new from that as well. My only real complaint is that this game really could've used a compatibility chart for fusions like the console games have. Testing one demon after another countless times just to see if you have any new fusions possible with the new demon you befriended gets old FAST, and not having to do that would've been nice. Thankfully, the UI goes pretty quick, and you can even speed up fusion animations in another very player-friendly bit of UI design. The demons themselves fight very similarly to how they do in the Super Famicom SMT games (no demon loyalty mechanics like the Devil Summoner games, mercifully). They can do normal attacks, do magic attacks for MP, and also do special moves at the cost of HP. Something also very much like SMT is the balancing of the game. Your monsters are just as strong as the things you're fighting, and just like in basically every other SMT game before this, you're incredibly vulnerable to getting the tar kicked out of you in the early game because you just don't have the tools and resources to keep fighting yet. This is a balancing issue that's more or less resolved by the time you beat the first real area of the game, but given that this is something that's supposed to be competing with first-generation Pokemon, just how tough the game often is, particularly right at the start, came off as a very strange design choice to me. Something a bit different from the console games, however, is that, due to how the human of the group isn't a fighter, it's the demons who both use items and do the demon negotiations. It's a very simplified system compared to the console entries though. It's just a roll of the dice to see if the demon you picked to negotiate gets a positive reaction out of the target demon, they'll almost always join you (although they'll rarely give you money or an item instead). Given how often you'll be recruiting repeat demons for the incremental power fusions and normal fusions, just how well this has been streamlined is one of my favorite changes to the formula that this game brings to the table in the spirit of making it more fast-paced and Pokemon-like. Another big highlight of the game is its presentation. Almost 300 demons (with basically no palette swaps at all) from the normal SMT games are here in adorably re-imagined super deformed chibi versions and they're a delight to discover. All of the art, from the cutscenes and character art to the super colorful and popping environments are super well done and really impressive for a black-cart GBC game. I almost wish I had a normal GameBoy to play this on, since I'm really curious to see how all of this translates to being played in monochrome. The music is also quite nice, being a fun mix of quite Pokemon-y tunes but having a bit of SMT flare to them to make them more than just wannabees. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It has its flaws (and sadly lacks a fan translation), but this is a super fun and solidly put together game. The art is great, the story is fun, and the gameplay is addicting (and even has a pretty darn tough post-game to toy around with too, if you want). It's a little short, but it can be gotten for super cheap. If this ever gets a fan translation or if you can read Japanese, this is definitely a GBC game worth checking out if you're a fan of SMT, Pokemon-style games, or just RPGs in general.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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