Here is a youtube video of a battle from that game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53M8PwCgdis
Does that answer your question (I have no Pokemon experience, so I can't make a determination on that).
I actually started playing Devil Survivor just over a week ago for the first time. My nephew told me it was an "evil version of pokemon." For example, instead of collecting pokemon, you collect demons.
I'm only a couple hours into the game, but I've already started adding all the other Shin Megami games to my request list.
It kind of is in the sense you are collecting "monsters" to fight for you. In terms of actual combat mechanics its a quite a bit different.
It's not like pokemon in the sense that you fuse demons into new demons, so you can't keep all your old demons, nor can you really keep a demon even if you like it as it will eventually be too weak. You HAVE to fuse them. So that sense of having the same group of monsters with you isn't really there as you'll constantly be fusing to upgrade.