Part 11: Monday's Turmoil (En Avant)
Monday's Turmoil (En Avant)
[Music: Exploration]
It's fine.
Ah, sorry. I just didn't see you or Akie... That's why I came to check up on you. It's a difficult situation we're all in. What about Daichi?
The same for Io, too. Once Daichi's escort comes back, it'll be your turn, but... ......Makoto falls silent...
What's the matter? ...We have some new information. In truth, I doubt their houses are safe. Yours either. Keep going...
One more thing, though, which I should tell you just in case...Makoto produces her cell phone...
As a result, a number of our members will use the summoning app on a trial basis. What did you do until now?
But this one is far more efficient than the one we'd been using previously... That's all we've been able to find out about Nicaea and the summoning app at this stage. Why's that? Well, to begin with... We haven't even determined the location of its server. As a national organization, we have advanced IT to work with, but we're making no progress.
It this okay to tell me? Hm? Oh, it's not an issue. I have permission from Chief Hotsuin.
Anyway... Thanks to you, we have a better grasp of the situation. We owe you one.
Hah... Interesting. You're not like your friends. It'll be a bit longer before Daichi's escort returns. Make yourself comfortable.
Makoto bids you farewell and leaves the room...
This e-mail in question goes on for a fair bit longer, but we can fuse things now. That's the important bit, it's right at the top and it basically tells us everything we need to know.
So let's spend an uncomfortably large amount of macca doing just that.
[Music: Devil Fusion.exe]
The Fusion menu itself has 2 sub-areas. Fusion, obviously, is where you actually fuse things. Search tells you every possible combination you can use to make something. More SMT games need that, really. It's much more efficient than sitting there with GameFAQs open the entire time.
Actually fusing itself is pretty simple. We just pick 2 demons we have with us and they become something new. Many demons, especially end-game ones, will never ever go up for Auction for one reason or another. This is the only way we can get those particular demons, like Tam Lin (no, we are not making this Tam Lin).
Tam Lin's a weird one because he's level 6 but he's a Unique demon. Like the tag implies, we can only ever have 1 Tam Lin at a time with us. It seems kind of unnecessary here, but it makes a lot more sense for most other things.
Switching over to something I will make, here's Kikimora. The important thing here is that the top screen shows not just her base skills but also her stats. She normally does not have 12 Magic nor 6 Vitality. Devil Survivor games are nice in that they let you pick the skills to make whatever kind of demon you want (this can be abused to easily create things that are basically invincible, yes).
Unfortunately, it wouldn't really be an SMT fusion without adding something you'll be quitting and refusing ad nauseum for. So, you get random stat gains instead! The more level ups and bonus stat points from Auctions you have, the more randomly get distributed in fusion. This can be problematic at times, but it's not as bad as randomly picked skills. It's also much easier to mitigate, since it usually errs towards whatever that demon is good at anyway.
Oh and just in case you're thinking of buying cheap 1/2 star demons and using them as easy fodder, that's not a very good option. Stat penalties are also carried over when fusing.
Whenever you throw things together, before the process itself they have a short quip to say. These are just stock and based on the demon's race. Nothing exciting.
The fusion process itself is a bit too lengthy for my liking, but you can just skip it anyway so it doesn't matter. I always do that whenever actually playing so I had to actively try not to do it here. I don't really like the animations in any of the games for that matter; they just seem needlessly complex and longwinded I guess.
And here's a completely different Kikimora I also made because they are really good at healing. Devotion, the Femme racial skill, restores the entire team for half her remaining HP; this is simultaneously really good and also potentially worthless. Not always something to rely on, but since I like to keep healing easily available it should seldom be the latter.
She's pulling double duty right now, since she's here to demonstrate that the result of a fusion has a line based more on the demon itself than its race. Most of the time; there are lots of demons, so they got lazy with it later. Her stats aren't quite as nice as the other ones, only 11 magic instead of 12!, but she has different skills than the other one could.
Watchful gives a tiny amount EXP for every fight that the MC is in while she's not assigned to any active team. It's not a lot and isn't worth worrying about really but it's good enough for keeping lower level demons up to snuff at least. Naturally there is a better version later which has extra bonus effects on top of being an EXP share.
Also when picking dudes to use, you can just press the X button to see what the result is beforehand. The results are varying colours for simple reasons. Knocker and Tam Lin are both completely bright because we can make them, and have seen then before (we've fought against Tam Lin which counts). Ogre and Erthys are light named but darkened portrait because we can fuse them but have never seen them before now. Gagyson is all darkened because we've never seen him and Hibiki is too low a level to make it.
Since we're using Hibiki's phone, all fusions are based on his level. That's why I keep feeding him boss EXP and will continue to do so forever. It's just more efficient that way.
I'll do a lot more fusing while you're not looking, so let's distract you with the Search function. Just clicking Start now would show everything we can currently make and some stuff just above our level.
We can narrow that down further, but the only filter I really use is Race. It's the only one that really matters, and there's 24 of the buggers so it cuts out a lot of things we don't need. We'll only need to concern ourselves with 22 of these most of the time, though.
Elements are special cases and we'll see them in more detail later (Erthys from before was one so we could make one now but won't). Mitamas are also special cases but we cannot make them at all. They won't come into play for a long, long, long time.
For the time being, let's focus on Dragons. As you might remember from Bai Suzhen their racial skill is one I really like and want ASAP. This bunch of snakes in a gourd is the lowest levelled one at level 12 so we can get it pretty soon. We could also get Bai Suzhen herself at level 20 if we wanted to. From here, let's just select the Toubyou though and...
We can see all the constituent parts that make it up. Were it not for the level issue, we could make it in 2 different ways already but you may have noticed something. When creating demons, its based solely on two things: the race of what you use, and their base level. As we can see, a Dragon is made by either a Wilder+Jaki or a Snake+Ghost.
There are also other combinations that make a Dragon, they're hiding just off-screen, but which Dragon we get is where the level comes into play. We'll worry about that later though.
For now, let's worry about our business with our party. We have time to go check up on 1 of them before actual proper business turns up. But, since the day's just started we'll handle this one a bit differently; we could instead opt to push this as far as back as we can for a change. There is exactly enough time to deal with all three before being forced into something else. The tradeoff there is we may not have enough time later to deal with everything you might want to.
Of course, there's also extra scenes we open by doing these. They're just general Fate scenes though, so we can get to those later. Much more important is do we just do 1 scene and get plot stuff out of the way ASAP, do we deal with 2 of them and leave one person out to dry or do we do all 3?
As usual, voting can be done here.
