Survival isn't quite so hard...unless your a boss.
Here are some of the reasons why:
1) Interesting plot that while mirrors some of the original Devil Survivor's beginnings goes into a vastly different scenario, all on it's own.
2) The characters are genuinely interesting and unquie, and the game does encouraging getting along with them, so it's easier for certain cut-scenes to become much more impactful (Dachi and Dubhe comes to mind).
3) The music certainly helps set the tone for what's going on around you, though I still think D.S. 1 wins out.
4) The amount of allies and customization you've got available to you will be so immense that there will be times where you'll have to decide which style suits you best, allowing much greater thinking on how to proceed.
5) Fusion and regaining demon's is a snap with the compedium, which makes the fear of losing certain allies with needed skill vanish.
6) Fighting is easy to pick up if your a new player and has an in-game tutorial, and if your a vet nothing's changed from the first one, and even allows you to skip the tutorial.
7) New game plus bonuses! (though you have to use in-game bonuses to unlock)
However like every game their is cons.
The not so goods:
1) Difficulty jumps and grinding inhibition: One of the huge flaws in the game is the sudden jump in boss battle difficulty. One of the bosses, Mekrez was a huge pain in the ass, because when I first encountered him he was 5-10 levels higher than all my guys, this wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that he could multiply endlessly, and got stronger with each multiplication, but also because of an anti-grinding feature which makes level grinding take several hours to become close enough to actually beat the bosses, which even then sometimes requires a little luck, or abusing the intrim save feature. So at the end of the day, I'd spend 2-3 hours level grinding, which just made me feel like it was done to extend the game, since I could defeat the next batch of monster easie-pesie.
2) The Main Character doesn't seem quite as animated as the original devil survivor's protagonist, though since you pick the responses it's a bit moot.
3) Pretty easy to save just about all the victims, and unlock most routes. The only things that could make saving them difficult is if your trying to do the whole fate system, and not really remember people need to be saved. At least in the original Devil Survivor, while you did have a time and place, making things a little easier, you sometimes had to do events before hand to balance things out (mari and Keisuke come to mind)
4) Enemy AI can occasionally be relentless coupled with seeming favortism: Now I won't say that making the enemy smarter is a bad thing, but there were times where things just got completely unfair. In battle you can only have up to 4 leaders at any one time, while the enemy might have 5-10. This wouldn't be so much a problem if every single enemy didn't gang up on a single unit, causing them to take enormous amounts of damage, and send them even further back in the turn order. What really makes this bad is that (usually) the enemy attack hit harder then yours and always seem to land on your teams medic. Now while it is a valid strategy, as I am guilty of doing it myself, it would be nice if the enemy showed a little more variety in targets. Already being at a numbers disadvantage, and usually unable to heal or revive at a distance can make free battle irksome, and story battle take a whole 'nother level of difficulty. The final thing on this point is the fact that enemies will seemingly always have extra turns on someone regardless of the fact who started the fight. More than once I attacked someone only to see one EX. on my side and two or all of them with another go. As for bosses they don't seem quite as bad, their just a little harder in lossing the extra turn as opposed to gaining...usually.
So all in all the game is pretty good, and has great replay value on account of all the NG+ features and different endings, though the developers could have cut back on the huge discrepency of bosses from the normal varitey of enemies, and cut back on their relentlessness and ability to gain extra turns so easily.
I know the review ain't much but I hope it helps!