Merger and acquisition can be a real pain sometimes. Originally announced in 2012 as a follow-up to 2011's Devil Survivor Overclocked, and serving as a remake of a game that released nearly a year after the 3DS launch, Record Breaker will likely be a new experience for many people. Although I haven't been able to dive into the added content for this new version, the original game would be worth checking out on its own.

At the start, you are presented with two storylines, and the game is quick to tell you which one is for the new player and which is for the person who went down this road a few years back. In the Septentriones (original mode), you play as a self-named character – thanks to Bryan, my character is named Kota Ibushi, because canon can suck it – who signs up for a mysterious service known as Nicaea that shows you videos of people who are about to die. It also comes with a complimentary application for summoning demons, which you then use to save Tokyo as is the contractual requirement of every Shin Megami Tensei game.

The main game sets you on a grid in which you dispatch up to four members of your team, paired with up to two classic demons, to try and rid the map of other demons and occasionally other humans. I am allowed to confirm that I have had run-ins with two members of the Jack family, for instance. The game is time based, but unlike other time based games Atlus has put out, you are dealing with a single week instead of an entire calendar year. Each battle or conversation sequence takes up a half hour of game time for the most part.

The conversations are vital to your survival and battle performance as well, thanks to the game's FATE system. Your conversation choices drive your relationship with what appears to be thirteen different characters, and who you side with in the end game will determine the kind of ending you get. And as usual, the path to the true ending is very narrow and one wrong move can send you spiraling into a bad end.

Thankfully, the FATE system also gives you battle power ups. Your characters learn skills through “Skill Cracking”, where you defeat the enemy to gain one of the moves they have, and high FATE levels will let your main character defeat everything to unlock skills for the rest of the party. If you want the demons to do the murdering for you, you can use the money earned from battles in the Demon Auction, in which you bid against other unseen users to acquire demons of varying strength. Once the demons outlive their usefulness, you can fuse them into more powerful demons and keep some of the skills the demons learned in that time.

So far, there's only been a couple of issues on the technical end. One is a menu option that when opening it actually hardlocks the 3DS, but that should be resolved in the files that go gold. The other is the odd use of the 3DS screens. All of the action is on the touchscreen, with the top displaying an overview map, stats or during the story scenes, nothing at all. This was understandable in 2011's Devil Survivor Overclocked, but four years later seems to be quite a curious omission, especially since the stylus can't make any selections. I'll be curious to see if the new mode makes any changes to this.

I'm enjoying what I've played of Record Breaker to this point. I bought the original Devil Survivor 2 but never played it, so I'm appreciating the storyline – even if it does have a sequence that is just slightly less anime than Metal Gear Solid. The battles are tricky but not impossible, usually just requiring me to take a second crack if the first one goes completely off the rails. The characters are growing out of the stereotypes, though I have just encountered one particularly creepy one halfway through the week. And certain members of our staff will appreciate the copious amounts of, um, life on display.

Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker releases on May 5 in North America and this fall in Europe.