A new season is slowly starting, my work schedule is going to be awful during the next two months and I’ll obviously watch too much anime. Why can’t I just drop things?
That being said, I didn’t drop Devil Survivor 2, so have a simple summary. The story revolves around Hibiki, a teenager who happens to be at the right place at the right moment and ends up being dragged into what’s close to the apocalypse. Thanks to a little program on his cellphone he and his friends become powerful demon summoner and fight the bad guys who want to destroy life on Earth.
As you can guess there is nothing special when it comes to the plot. It’s a pure shounen story: the protagonists are your typical group of friends, you have the real enemy and even the fake enemy who might or might not be a friend. Demons attacking humans who use those same demons to fight back aren’t nothing special either, nor is the special military group constituted especially to counter those Septentrions’ attacks. (The etymology of the word septentrion is actually pretty fun, kinda cute and fitting, you should look it up.)
Either way, each one of those Septentrion, those bad, overpowered, demons attack once every day for a week, and if humanity does not kill them all, then there will not be any humanity left anymore. As I said, nothing in this is surprising, but worse, it’s adapted from a video game, and everyone knows that adapting stuff from a video game while keeping both the atmosphere of the original game and making it enjoyable for people who do not know said game is really hard.
Sadly, I cannot say that Devil Survivor 2 did that. I mean, the plot is not bad in itself since I’ve seen many things completely un-original turning out better than expected. My problem with this anime was that it followed the same pattern every week. They developed the main characters slightly, sent them fighting and then they came back, more or less alive, sometimes even completely dead, and then the next week they started the same again. Except the dead characters were somehow revived. If it happened only once I would have been able to bear it, but it was a recurring thing. Could have been done interestingly, but it really felt artificial most of the time.
As for the characters, well, what should I say? Hibiki is the typical shounen protagonist, he always wants to save everyone and their mother no matter the consequences. And he always managed to do so because he’s the protagonist and thus must be stronger than anyone else. Same went for Nitta. She was not completely annoying, I mean, she was tolerable, a bit too shy but she’s a girl so again that’s not a very original trait. Daichi was the typical outgoing sidekick of our shonen protagonist.
The only ones I got interested in were Yamato and Alcor because of their ambivalence. Nice guys, nice voices too.
I did like the cast. I also liked that it did not suffer from the Suzuhito Yasuda syndrome, meaning that every anime I watch where he was the original character designer, I end up confusing the characters with the ones from another anime and that is just not OK.
Other than that, well, I guess this is an anime just for fans of the franchise, because seriously, at times Devil Survivor 2 is a bit boring.
