So, do I need to know about Devil Survivor to read this quest?
Because I don't. At all. I do know P3.
The quest looks cool, though.
Source material knowledge for any of the wider Megami Tensei universe outside of Persona 3 shouldn't
necessarily be required if I'm doing my job correctly, but it will probably be helpful! In service of that, please accept the following informational. Any discrepancies from the precise text of the game is due to me possibly not quite remembering things correctly but will be instead attributed to this game taking place in an Alternate Universe.
Oh god, we haven't even made it to the third update and a Codex is already forming D:
Devil Survivor: an Introduction
Megami Ibunroku: Devil Survivor (released in the US as
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor because reasons) is a tactical strategy RPG set in modern-day Tokyo - specifically, within a quarantine zone bounded by the Yamanote Circle. You and your allies play the role of demon tamers, utilizing special modified
Nintendo DS Lites Communication Players (COMPs for short - a recurring item in the wider SMT universe that is always a demon summoning machine) to summon and command pairs of demons which join with the human tamer to form parties of three. Devil Survivor continues in the storied tradition of most SMT games by having a Silent Protagonist, whose personality is by and large determined by your in-game choices and your out-of-game headcanons. (In this quest, the protagonist's personality will largely be determined by the thread.) If you're a fan of turn-based tactical RPGs, strategy games, or SMT in general I'd highly recommend you pick it up. Regardless of if you do or not, the game released in 2009 - as a courtesy, the rest of this post is going to be massive SPOILERS for the story; as this quest is set a few months following the end of Devil Survivor, massive spoilers are unavoidable and won't be marked.
The Story
One day during the summer (I don't believe it's ever specified precisely, but the thread's initial choice of a few months allows us to set the time of the lockdown as the first full week of September with the quest beginning in the first full week of April of the following year), the Protagonist is summoned to a meeting between himself, his elder cousin Naoya, and his two best friends - everygirl Yuzu Tanikawa and prodigal hacker Atsuro Kihara. Yuzu arrives to the meeting with three heavily modified COMPs and mentions Naoya told her to give them to her friends and that he couldn't make it to the meeting as he had to "take care of something." Atsuro pretty quickly uncovers hidden files on the COMP, and decides that Naoya left them there deliberately for him to crack as a "friendly greeting" - it doesn't take him long at all to break through the first set of encryptions and uncover the Laplace Mail, a creepy set of predictions of future events that begins with a man being killed in Naoya's apartment complex roughly half an hour after the mail is discovered. Atsuro gets to work cracking the rest of the files on the modified COMPs, while the protagonist and Yuzu kill time wandering around until they see a bunch of police cars screaming towards Naoya's building. Heading over there, sure enough, the prediction came true - Naoya's next door neighbor has been killed by a "carnivorous beast" and Naoya urges the protagonist to rejoin Atsuro and "to not turn away from the events that are about to unfold - overcome your fate."
Sure enough, Atsuro calls the protagonist and Yuzu back with the announcement that he's figured out how to crack the rest of the encrypted files but that there's an additional protection which prevents him from doing it unless he has all three COMPs together. Once he does, they automatically reboot into the Demon Summoning Program and summon the tutorial fight monsters. As it turns out, the contract which backs the summoning requires you to fight and defeat the first demon in order to bind it to your service; if it kills you instead, it gets its freedom to run around the human world doing whatever. Luckily, the summoning program also includes a "harmonizer" that roughly levels out strength between our intrepid heroes and the demons they face. As long as you've got a COMP, you can go toe to toe with demons instead of just getting flattened into paste immediately. Sure enough, the protagonists win their tutorial fight and gain the strength of the demons they summoned. Atsuro declares that they can use the combination of the summoning program and the Laplace Mails to alter fate - since the death earlier in the day was caused by a demon attack, he rationalizes that they could have been there to prevent it if they wanted to and could in turn choose to prevent the other Bad Things That They Read About On The News. Yuzu wants to run away. (This is something of a theme for Yuzu and it's one of the reasons she's widely disliked.) Naoya eventually emails the group, surmising the confusion has died down, and tells them to go to Aoyama Cemetery to meet someone who will affect their future activities. Upon arrival, they meet Amane - a priestess and the Maiden of a cult called the Shomonkai, who also has both a COMP and about 30 levels on our protagonists. She's fighting a Wendigo, a powerful demon, and temporarily cooperates with the protagonists; after the battle, the last incident foretold in the Laplace Mail (a region-wide blackout) comes true. Amane places a barrier around the cemetery allowing the protagonists to spend the night there without fear of being killed by demons and then leaves.
The next day (the first of the Lockdown) the protagonists wake up to a Laplace Mail foretelling their own deaths - at 1pm, a snowman murders them. Additionally, the JSDF has put a quarantine into place - the Yamamote Circle has been entirely sealed, with power and communication denied to all those trapped inside of it. Naoya contacts the group again after a short time to provide them with access to the Devil Auction, a system where they can bid macca (the currency of Hell) to acquire the services of demons. Between this (Atsuro notes that for an Auction to be established, you need someone buying and someone selling and therefore demons have been around a long time before this) and the fact that an impenetrable barricade was set overnight, it starts to become clear that all of this was orchestrated well in advance and there's far more going on than a simple random disaster followed by a quarantine. The protagonists successfully use the power they've been granted to avert their own death by killing the Wendigo instead, and, buoyed by the knowledge that they can indeed change fate, set off to find a way to escape the lockdown and prevent others from dying. They learn that
something is going to happen in six days time that kills everyone within the Lockdown.
This something is later revealed to be a nuclear option embedded in every electronic device as part of the PSE Law - the Lockdown is the center of a battle between angels and demons to determine the worthiness of mankind (an Ordeal ostensibly handed down as a punishment against mankind but ultimately because SMT has a long and storied history of heaven being kind of assholes), and should the demon outbreak not be ended in seven days, humanity will be found wanting and the angels will destroy the world. To prevent
that, the government intends to press the button at the last moment and end the demon incursion by killing everyone and everything inside the Lockdown.
Additionally, the Lockdown serves as the stage for something called the War of Bel; a battle between 'Bel' demons to determine who among them will inherit the Throne of Bel and become the King. As it turns out, Naoya and the protagonist are respectively the reincarnations of the biblical Cain and Abel - Naoya remembers everything due to being damned to immortality for his sin of killing Abel, and though he's still a mortal human, the immortal soul of Abel confers eligibility for the Throne upon the protagonist. As such, beginning on the third day when he averts his death by killing and taking Beldr's power, the protagonist is also a participant in the War of Bel and is hunted down by all the remaining Bel demons.
Since the Throne of Bel has dominion over all demonkind, it becomes apparent at the end of the sixth day that the only way the Lockdown ends without everyone dying is if Abel ascends to the Throne and uses its power to end the incursion. You can choose the Law ending where you rule from the Throne as the Messiah, you can choose the Chaos ending where the protagonist embraces the power of the King of Bel and rallies demonkind for a war against heaven,
you can decide to use your power to instead punch through the Lockdown in Yuzu's ending despite knowing that this means humanity fails the Ordeal, you can choose the Neutral ending where you command the Throne and all the demons back into hell which erases them from the world...
...or, you can choose the second Neutral (what I would call the Humanity ending rather than True Neutral) option, where Naoya is convinced to change the server backing the summoning program and all the COMPs, which also happens to be the body that Babel (the manifestation of the Throne of Bel) is summoned into. By doing that, the protagonist ultimately commands the Throne to obey the summoning server's new programming, placing the power of demons into the hands of humanity and leaving the authorities to determine and control access to the system. This is the ending from which this Quest springs.
Most of the events that take place between the Silent Revolution (the Humanity ending) and the start of this quest will be revealed over the course of the Quest, including an explanation for what our protagonist has been up to between then and now. Suffice it to say, someone or something is looking out for him and that's why he's been allowed to drift aimlessly through the world and take the "who needs to talk through their issues I SURE DON'T" approach to his life right up until the Kirijo Group managed to find him and decided to tell him to come to Gekkoukan.
...geez, I skipped over a ton of things that aren't yet and possibly won't ever be relevant and this still ended up being this long. D:
