Two questions for you, DS owners out there. One: Have you played Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked (the recent 3DS rerelease, which I reviewed)? Two: If so, did you enjoy it? If the answer to both these questions is "Yes", "I did", or "Heck yeah! Woo! SMT forever!", then it may please you to know that a sequel will be coming your way in only a couple of months. Unless, of course, you live in Japan, in which case you’ve had access to  SMT: Devil Survivor 2 since July.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 doesn’t continue the story of the first game, but the plot is similar in many ways. Like the first one, it begins with an adolescent protagonist and his two friends on a normal, regular, "No way anything strange and ominous will happen today" kind of day. But then, the obviously expectable defiance to that "No way anything…" thing I just said kicks in, when they receive an e-mail on their cell-phones from a website that warns people of their deaths, showing the three a video of them dying in a freak train accident. They are able to avoid the accident, but right around then, the city is invaded by demons led by a group of creatures that call themselves the Septentrion. In order to combat this threat, our heroes make a pact with the devil, which enable them to summon demons to fight back with.

Gameplay, judging from the looks of it, plays out just like in the first Devil Survivor. The game looks to repeat the same pattern of alternating text-driven cutscenes with tactical-RPG battles. For those who don’t know, the battles in Devil Survivor 2 take place on arenas divided into grids. Your team is divided into four squads (each consisting of two demons and a human captain) and you take turns moving about the grid, after which, the enemy demons do the same. Once you are close enough to a demon, you can switch to a quick turn-based battle between your squad and a squad of demons (I’d rather not bog this preview down with too many details regarding combat, so check out the review I mentioned near the beginning if you want to know more and get a general idea of what’s to come in this game).

While the game may play identically to its predecessor, new features are introduced to spice things up a bit. To start, the story this time around will take our heroes to cities all across Japan, unlike the first Devil Survivor, which stayed within the confines of Tokyo. Gameplay too comes with a few new tweaks. In the first game, attacking an enemy’s weak spot earned you an extra turn in battle. DS 2 ups the ante by allowing you to attain two extra turns, allowing you to wreak more havoc upon the demon baddies in less time. And topping things off is the new "Enishi System", which will allow you to develop relationships with characters, and the stronger the relationships, the more effective those characters are in battle.

Those sound neat, but are these new features enough to save  SMT: Devil Survivor 2  from feeling like Devil Survivor all over again? Will it soar, giving us gamers a reason to peruse the DS section at the game store once more, or is the game doomed to suffer the wrath of the law of diminishing returns?! Oh dear, I can’t stand the waiting. It’s too much to bear! (Mind you, I just added that last part just to sound dramatic). These questions may plague you, dear readers, but rest assured, for you only have to wait until this February to find the answers to the mystery that is Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2.

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