Part 40: Feinne's Notes: Assassinate, Makoto and Demon Races Continued

Before we start, Diastrophism is in fact a term for deformation of the Earth's crust. So yeah, an earthquake.

I mentioned Assassinate when Phecda had it, and Dragonatrix mentioned it again. When you're going for Unkillable and there's Assassinate demons on the map, they have to be target one. You need to hit them hard, fast, and overwhelmingly because they can totally wreck your shit. If Assassinate demons are going to get a chance to attack a fragile party leader, I'd suggest Guarding and praying to YHVH that they don't get splatted and force you to restart the map. That Hamsa/2xKumbhanda party is much more dangerous than the Megrez Bud, once it's dead you should be fine. Just don't let yourself get worn down too badly by the earthquakes.

We saw a few more new Races this past day, so let's talk about them.

Megami: Megami's Race Skill is Affection. It's a large group heal and status cure for one party within four tiles. It's moderately expensive but pretty reasonable and not based on the Megami's health like the Femme's Devotion is. Megami are pretty universally great demons with powerful magic skills that would be good even if they didn't have one of the strongest Race Skills. There are bad status on the map screen that are really no joke that we'll want to be able to cure as well, though we haven't seen them. The only real impediment to having four Megami is that at some levels they're Unique.

Deity: Deity's Race Skill is Awakening, which makes the team do 1.5x Magic damage for the next skirmish. I don't think I need to explain why that's amazing, but seriously more damage is more. That said, only the very first Deity isn't Unique and some of them are kind of mediocre. Some of them aren't even really Magic demons at all, which makes it hard for themselves to use their own ability. So, they're potentially good but this doesn't always in practice give you the results you'd hope.

Vile: Vile's Race Skill is Chaos Wave. It gives the party a range of 3, negates their ability to get Extra Turns, reduces their movement by one, and makes their skirmishes delay their next turn even more than a Dragon's skirmishes do. I'm not a big fan of Viles at this point in the game, they're slow and incredibly vulnerable to being turn locked (that penalty also applies if you're skirmished) unless you can totally insulate them from enemy skirmishes. They pretty much shout for you to pair them with a Wilder or Avian, most of which are kind of blah. I think I'd like Viles more if there were more maps that incentivized going on the defensive. This is not to say that there are not uses for them, indeed I'll describe a good one later. But for now, they're kind of meh. Viles are mostly Unique and honestly aren't usually very good in and of themselves.

Tyrant: Tyrant's Race Skill is Tyranny, and it's incredible. You restore MP for the party after every skirmish based on how much damage the Tyrant did, and you delay the enemy's next turn more than usual. It's not as much as it was in the original Devil Survivor, though, so you can't singlehandedly turn lock enemies like you used to be able to. Tyrants are still incredible, though. They're all Unique and almost all of them are amazing demons in their own right.

Fiend: Fiend's Race Skill is Uncanny Form, which lets a party with a Fiend act again. It's incredibly expensive and most Fiends are awful, so you'll probably never use it except just on principle to justify bothering to fuse a Fiend. Which you shouldn't do for the first three, because they are really bad.

I don't think I've given Makoto a post yet, so let's do that too.

Makoto Sato: Makoto is basically Io. She's a Strength/Magic character with almost identical stat spreads overall. At earlier levels she focuses more on Strength, whereas Io focuses more on Magic. You can basically use Makoto anywhere you'd use Io, she's pretty okay. If you are going to use, well, any of the Strength/Magic characters you really need to give them a physical as well as some magic to capitalize on their ability to potentially switch to that sort of attack. Having the ability to smoke parties that are more vulnerable to physical attacks than magic while also being able to kill parties that repel physical is a niche that does come up on some maps later in the game. Makoto is pretty solidly mid-tier.