Inexplicable Video Game Review: Devil Something 2

For whatever reason, I continually forget the name of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2. In my browsing history are searches for Devil Summoner 2, Demon Summoner 2 and Demon Survivor 2. This is despite the fact that I beat and enjoyed the first installment of the series, and I've played pretty much every other Persona / SMT game. Maybe that's what is causing the confusion - All those games just blurring together in my head, man.

Anyway. Devil Survivor 2 is basically the first game with a new story. The action is still tactical RPG, kind of like Final Fantasy Tactics minus jobs, to make an odd comparison. You get up to four leaders in fights, with each leader controlling two demons, making a primary controllable force of 12. Combat is turn-based, with positioning and movement on a map beforehand mattering quite a bit.

Like a lot of the Persona games, you primarily make your demons more powerful by combining them with other demons. The only slightly annoying thing about this - The power of demons just seem to be influenced by their level and their base level, and not just their strength or magic statistic. This can make it a bit tough to decide what demons to keep and what demons to use for merging.

Well, until the end of the game, that is. By the seventh day (think chapter; one day is one part of the game), pretty much everything can waste your party unless you have proper protection. By this, I mean the proper damage reduction skills - Some let you reflect or absorb enemy actions, even physical attacks. The last couple of boss fights are definitely white-knuckle though.

Like every other Persona game, a good portion of it is spent building relationships and trust up with the other characters. This aspect of the game is done pretty well, and unlike past games, thankfully you only have to earn four levels of trust with people, as opposed to 10. There also wasn't a horrible clunker of a plot in these, which was nice - Persona 3 and Persona 4 both had characters that I wish I could ditch and still get the good ending.

So anyway, final judgement - This is a pretty swell game, if you like your DS and you like your tactical RPGs. I scooped up for $25 on GameFly. (Random note on GameFly: If you have a membership, you can now play a bunch of PC games for free. I lost a weekend of my life to Civilization 4 as a result.)

The picture of Jack Frost comes from a random post on the Giant Bomb forums.

At The Commercials: AXE Actually Makes Something Good!

I normally associate AXE with really horrible commercials. You know, like the one I blogged about in the past that had Jamie Pressley talking about washing balls. (Get it? It sounds like she means a scrotum, ha! That's why it's funny, because it's about washing balls, and you think about like a scrotum instead of a body product.) And oh, they also had a delightful commercial with a guy spraying water out of his armpits.

However, AXE's new commercial with Kiefer is legitimately pretty clever. I didn't recognize his voice - I'm not a big 24 guy - so the reveal at the end was pretty good. Maybe AXE is taking a page from Old Spice's book and just focusing on actually producing good commercials.

At The Commercials: Pizza Hut Mom

A YouTube commentator succinctly sums up this commercial: "The mom in this video is ****ing hot. I would love to pound that."

Pizza Hut, why are you bothering with this crappy boyfriend angle? We need to know more about that mom. Oh, la and LA, as the great Dave Dameshek would say. She is quite fetching, even on the 1,500th viewing. (As the main description for the video implies, networks have been playing the snot out of this commercial - Pizza Hut bought time on the Olympics and a bunch of other shows.)

At The Commercials: What's Goin' On, Dr. Scrubs?

It's weird to me when I recognize people from other roles, and it's not at all acknowledged. Some times, it's understandable - Plenty of actors pop up on Law and Order, and it wouldn't make sense to sequence break and go, "Hey, that's really Chevy Chase, and he's just pretending to be a drunken actor for this role."

However, the lack of acknowledgement makes less sense to me when you cast a semi-famous actor in a normal commercial. The above State Farm commercial makes absolutely no reference to Dr. Scrubs, even though everyone knows him from that. Heck, I barely ever watched Scrubs, and I still immediately recognized him.

(In case you're curious, his actual name is John C. McGinley. He was also in Platoon, which I shamefully haven't ever seen, and he played one of the Bobs in Office Space. For more, read his Wikipedia page.)

I don't know why he's on the State Farm commercial anyway, and it's especially weird that they don't acknowledge that he's a famous actor, because they've done this for some of their other commercials:


If it's good enough for Bill Lumbergh, why not Dr. Scrubs? Come on State Farm, don't be That Guy.