	Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army
	Developer: Atlus Software Publisher: Koei Release Date: Out Now Players: 1	Words By:
Devil Summoner:The Longest Subtitle for a Video Game Since Peter Jackson Licensed His Gorilla Movie ™ © hits Western shores after enjoying popularity in the Asian market and although is an RPG at heart it tries to break into the adventure detective market. But is it more Columbo or Murder She Wrote? DS is set in 1920s Japan, where Western industrialisation is just starting to show itself in the Japanese culture. You play a strange character; you can type a first and last name, but your name is also Radiou Kuzunoha, Devil Summoner the 14th. You have been dispatched to Japan’s capital to protect the normal folk from the nasties that are ‘crossing over’ from another realm. Unfortunately you don’t get to fight John Edward; demons inhabit the other realm and it’s your job to put ‘em back where they should be, like an inter-dimensional policeman. It’s all secret, mind you, so your work is carried out under the guise of a detective agency. Soon enough after a simple demon kidnapping you find a conspiracy big enough to threaten the future of the human ra… you get the idea. The gameplay has an RPG nature in the way you interact with the NPCs, level up and tinker with your demons but you spend a lot of time interrogating people, looking for clues and following up leads, so it plays a lot like a detective adventure game. The demons you’ve captured also come in handy when investigating: one can read minds, one can intimidate and one can even calm characters when you’re talking to them, which is a good element tying in the demon aspect. One thing I didn’t like was the inconsistency of the game; at one point you’ll know exactly where to go and what to do, the next you know what you need but have no clue what to do to get there, short of scouring every inch of the city for it. Usually in games like this the NPCs would change their dialogue to offer subtle hints but they rarely change their couple of lines of broken English in all the time you’ll spend in an area, no matter how far the story progresses. The combat sequences are conducted in 3D real-time and you can run around a small area freely fighting the enemies that appear with either your Katana or Pistol. Before you think ’this sounds cool, it’s just like Devil May Cry’ - no, it’s not even close. You can only do a three-slash combo and single poke at a time with your Katana and a three-shot burst with your pistol so there’ll be no impressive combo attacks and acrobatics here. Although you start off with just a sword and gun, you can capture most of the demons you face in battle so pretty soon you’ll have an army of demons working for you, which you can summon to battle alongside you. They usually are elemental and have different strengths and weaknesses and although you can issue some generic commands they are essentially computer-controlled. I almost thought this seemed like quite a cool dynamic to boost the rather bland combat; making evil demons repent and work for you is a nice concept. Then the demons spoke. While in combat they’ll shout streams of pointless dialogue, one of the worst being: ’Hells Yeah! Anarchy in the Capital!’, spouted by the fire pixie you first capture. Apart from being the most irrelevant and stupid comment I’d seen in a video game in a while, it reminded me of another series of games, that also spawned a TV series, where stupid characters ponced around on-screen summoning stupid annoying characters to fight for them. Suddenly the dark Chinatown-like detective RPG seemed more and more like an adult version of Pokemon, and I seriously don’t want to “catch them all”. Ever. I understand that the game requires that you capture demons in order to progress but the sheer amount of random battles you’ll come across while playing DS is astronomical, especially if you’re lost or looking for something. It wouldn’t be so bad if the combat wasn’t painfully simple and tedious, but it only compounds your frustration every time a battle loads up. Devil Summoner has a title that pretty much sums up my experience of the game: long, incomprehensible and not as interesting as it sounds. There are a lot of good elements in the game but there are a larger number of poorly implemented ones that means only fans of the series or people with a lot of patience will stick with it.

Best Bits
- Good story
- Original setting
- Detective elements are good
- Lots of demon customisation

Worst Bits
- Poor combat engine
-Terrible translation
- Inconsistent quests
- Mediocre graphics
- Dangerously close to being Pokemon…


by: Crazypunk