Soul Hackers 2

[DF]

I received this game during a Secret Santa gift swap. I've been kind of looking forward to trying it after liking the original Soul Hackers and the few games from the overall Shin Megami Tensei series I've played, so let's jack in!

Soul Hackers 2

Game size: 20.46 GB
Time played: 60.6 hours
Dates played: January 03 ~ February 11, 2025
Game status: I've never played this before. But I made it to the end!

Soul Hackers 2 is a turn-based RPG released on PC, Microsoft Xbox One and Series consoles, and Sony's PlayStation 4 and 5. For some reason, this title doesn't have the Shin Megami Tensei or Devil Summoner branding.

YouTube video playlist. I have nine gameplay videos and one glitch/bug video. Videos have lots of story content in them, but there are bookmarks in the descriptions going to the lead-up to battle.

Mods Used

None.

Setting

The end of the world is nigh. Aion, a digital lifeform beyond humanity, has sent its two agents, Figue and Ringo, to help prevent it from happening. Running into Devil Summoners from warring factions Yatagarasu and the Phantom Society, they revive three recently-slain Summoners to enlist their aid for this grand mission. What does the Phantom Society hope to achieve by bringing about the apocalypse, though?

The world of Soul Hackers 2 does not seem to be the same as with the prior game where the Paradigm X incident happened. There are still some characters like Madam Ginko and Victor and the Phantom Society as a group, but this seems like a non-sequel much in the way the numbered Final Fantasy games are not related outside of common themes and features. That said, in terms of locations, you're in Tokyo despite that never being stated. Dungeons take you to urban settings like an abandoned shipping yard or subway station, but there's also the Soul Matrix virtual space where Ringo deepens her bond and understanding with those she revived from the dead through her Soul Hack power.

Gameplay

Despite being called Soul Hackers 2, this doesn't feel much like a sequel to the first at all. There is no loyalty system, there are no moon phases, there's no Magnetite system to keep your demons summoned, and you don't even explore dungeons in grid-based first-person mode. What we get is something that feels like a mix of typical Shin Megami Tensei and Persona. There is a strong focus on the bonds between Ringo and her teammates, but the ersatz Social Link system only involves them.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3400075790

In this game, you explore dungeons in 3D like in Shin Megami Tensei IV. And like in that game, enemies appear on the field--this time as red, glitchy masses. If they see you, they'll let out a low tone of a roar and give chase. Ringo, your player character, can swing her sword to disable the enemy. Hit them to knock them down! You can either leave them be and have them eventually get sucked back into the ground or run into them to start battle with the chance of a free attack. If an enemy touches Ringo, though, then the enemy side might get the advantage.

Combat is turn-based, phase-based specifically. Everyone on one side goes, then everyone on the other side goes, passing back and forth. I think the order your team acts depends on everyone's Agility score, but sometimes it'd change in the middle of battle without buffs/debuffs being a factor. When it's one of your team members' turns, you'll have a number of different options available from Guard to using an Item to using a Skill to having the game pick the best option for you. When you target an enemy, you'll initially see their elemental affinities as "?". There are seven affinities: Physical, Gunfire, Fire, Ice, Lightning, Force, and Ruin. Everything in the game is either weak, neutral, resists, nulls, drains, or repels those seven things. An eighth affinity for Almighty isn't shown, but almost nothing can resist that.

Like in almost any game in this series, you want to hit enemy weaknesses. Instead of Press Turn or 1 More/All-Out Attack, hitting weaknesses adds to a Stack counter. After everyone on your side acts, Ringo triggers a Sabbath using the demons in the party. The higher the Stack, the more demons participating, the bigger the damage. Only one event battle resists Sabbath damage, so you ideally want to trigger it as many times as possible in a fight. While you initially will only be able to add one to the Stack each turn, developing your team will allow you to get double credit for weaknesses or for landing a critical hit, so you'll eventually turn a potential 4 Stack per round into 10...or even higher! Stack only goes as high as there are demons in the party, so you'll want to keep a good balance between enough for big Sabbaths but keep enough room to add new members.

Unlike Press Turn, you're not penalized for hitting a null/absorb/repel or missing just the same as enemies don't lose turns hitting your own or missing. The battle system in this game isn't nearly as dynamic, so you don't need to go for elemental defenses nearly as much as you would in other SMT titles. Weaknesses still suck to be exploited, but you can usually burn one or two slots to cover those, Fusion chains depending. Also, I've noticed that buffs and debuffs only apply once instead of three times like I experienced in Shin Megami Tensei IV. So, if you have Tarukaja on the team, casting it again will only refresh the duration instead of boosting the effect.

In this game, demons act as equipment. They not only boost the character's stats, but they also apply whatever elemental defenses, and they allow the character to use the demon's skills. Winning battles earns everyone and their demons EXP, demons in reserve get a small portion, you earn Yen, and there may be items won, either those usable in battle or demon parts used in upgrades and buying special items. When your characters level up, their stats silently increase. When a demon levels up, a screen is shown if they're able to learn a new skill which is always shown on their status screen. If their skill list is full, you'll have the opportunity to dump one skill or pass on learning the new one. Demons who learn all of their abilities will give Ringo a gift, usually a Mistique that equips to a COMP with effects like "electric skills deal 30% more damage" or "support effects last one more turn".

Oh, the places you'll go. There are several places around town to hit when you're not braving the lonely abandoned subway network or local shipping yard. What are the hot spots out there?

Safehouse
This is the Inn of sorts. Your party can Rest here to restore HP and MP for free, but you should take the time to be given or buy Meals. These items give a short scene of everyone eating the Meal, and their responses depend on how they like the Meal or not. Meals also give the party a buff like "higher-level enemies give more EXP" or "slowly restore HP while wandering in a dungeon." Meals also stay in effect for the entire duration of a dungeon trip! That unfortunately means if you step in and back out because you forgot something, the Meal goes away.

Axis
The underwater base of operations for Aion. Here, you can access the Soul Matrix, three sets of dungeons tied to your Devil Summoner allies. One floor of Soul Matrix can be bigger than several other dungeons combined, but the dungeon design has no visible walls, letting you see pretty far. Soul Matrix progress is gated by the Soul Levels Ringo has with each party member. When the Soul Level is high enough, Ringo can open a Gate to rewards but also teach a Summoner Skill to whichever ally's Soul Matrix they're in. When total Soul Level increases are enough, Ringo herself can learn a Summoner Skill in the Soul Matrix lobby. Ringo's Illusion also provides Aion Directives, directing Ringo to collect quest items, destroy demons, and take on a mini-boss on each character's Soul Matrix floor.

Soul Matrix is optional except in two instances, but you still should stay current with it. New Summoner Skills are pretty potent! And really, the game's set up to let you skip almost every encounter, so you can focus on mapping if you really want.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3407171010

Zafiro
An accessory shop run by Mannequin, the cutest being in existence (or so he claims). Accessories increase Defense and may raise or even lower another stat. Sometimes accessories are only for certain characters.

Bar Heidrun
A bar run by Hughes. Here, you can buy Meals unlocked by party members, but you'll usually come here for Hangout Events. Here, Ringo and one or more party member have a drink and chat for a bit. Hangout Events add little to the character's/characters' Soul Level, and many are unlocked by either story progress, doing sidequests, or by finding special items in the field.

De La Mancha
Yume runs this general items store. You can buy items that provide minor healing or revival, and some limited buff items are for sale here.

Club Cretaceous
Madam Ginko handles Requests for Devil Summoners. Here, you can browse and accept many sidequests, though there are occasionally some found in the field instead of through her. Like with Aion Directives, you can get the gist of what you have to do and see the reward you receive in most cases.

COMP Smith
Tatara is the girl to see for upgrading your COMP. Provide the money and materials, and you can increase the ATK values of your weapons as well as passive abilities like "Arrow's Gunfire skills do more damage when his HP is 25% or less" or "Milady can use a weak Almighty attack even when Sealed (silenced)." Ringo can also buy new Commander Skills here, powerful abilities that either occur randomly during battle or can be manually triggered with only turns gone by as cooldown. Everyone can set one passive effect as "Master" at the final upgrade tier, but you can only have one Master upgrade per character. If you want to change which upgrade gets the boost, you can just pay Yen and materials as normal, but you don't get a refund on your previous choice!

Yang Yang Palace
Lina runs this exquisite item shop. There are powerful battle items available here, but you'll need to also bring demon materials along with money to purchase them.

Cirque du Goumaden
Victor acts as ringmaster at this demonic circus. Here, you can engage in Fusion of your demons, mashing together two lives to create a new one! You can either do Normal Fusion and put two demons in your party together, do Search Fusion to see a broader list available (especially if you allow summoning from the Compendium that records all of your demons ever acquired or manually Registered to their current power), or Special Fusion using multiple demons to make one specific new entity.

Fusion works just like in prior games where Race 1 + Race 2 = Race 3 demons, but skill inheritance is a little different. You can't just stick every element on one demon at a time since their unstated affinities may not be compatible.

Mistiques Merchant
This abandoned demon girl shows up outside of the Goumaden. If you give her Mistiques you don't want, she'll give you Mistiquartz which you can then give back to her for new Mistiques. Her stock expands as you give her more Mistiques, and this is a great way to get a specific Mistique if you're not lucking out with demons.

You can also visit different 'towns' in the area to talk to NPCs and shop at vending machines or smaller stores, but you can also jump right to everything above but the Mistiques girl from the world map menu.

What are dungeons like? When you enter a dungeon, Ringo sends all of the demons in the party out for a search. This Demon Recon causes your demons to show up with either items, recovery, or even new demons interested in joining up! But it's okay, the demons equipped to the party can still fight. But it's kinda cool to see your demons act in the place of inexplicable treasure chests or the like. As for the actual dungeons, they're all unoccupied places in an urban setting. Other than the two shipping yards, you're either underground or in a building. Early dungeons are easy to explore, but later ones start employing things like one-way doors. Thankfully, the game automatically maps for you, and things like those doors are called out. Later Soul Matrix floors start adding two-way warps...then one-way warps. But there are also Teleports at the entrance and deeper inside, and you can jump between any two of these within a dungeon, even if the entrance and end point are on different floors. If you need to get out quickly, one of Ringo's early Summoner Skills is Traesto, a 1MP skill that immediately returns you to the world map.

Apart from the usual red demon battles, there are occasionally gold ones that show up. These are Rare Enemies. If you win, you'll get items worth quite a lot of Yen! But they'll try to escape, so hit them hard and fast (and accurately)! Then there are the large, purple hulks. These Risky Enemies scale with your party and almost always have a level advantage. They'll kick your ass, but if you can win, you'll get items that can be traded at Yang Yang Palace for stat-boosting Incenses and later, accessories that make Risky Enemies easier to fight. Risky Enemies are also notable in that you can't knock them over. Hitting them with Ringo's sword only knocks them back, so if you want to avoid a fight, you may need to batter it about a bit while you run! Or, if you get dragged into battle, throw down a Trafuri Bomb.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3413321499

There is a considerable amount of story and dialog in the game. I'd argue that the ratio is like 3:1 for story versus gameplay? There is a fast forward feature, and some cutscenes can be skipped entirely, too, though.

Gameplay Modes, Minigames, and Character Classes

There aren't any modes nor minigames. When it comes to classes, your party of four is flexible. While demons have affinity to elements that prevents them from loading up with every element, your characters also kind of have affinity for using certain elements. For example...

Ringo has passive skills that give extra Stacks when hitting physical or electric weaknesses, so you'll probably want to ensure the demons she uses have those, though you won't always be able to fight demons weak to both. Ringo is the only character to learn Commander Skills, and if she's unable to act, you can't use any. You normally can use Commander Skills even when it's not Ringo's actual turn, at least. And even if she's disabled or knocked out, Ringo can still pull off Sabbaths. One of Ringo's COMP upgrades gives her a chance to scan new enemies to find out their elemental defenses without trial and error.

Arrow works with gunfire and ice skills. He learns skills that increase the EXP given to demons in reserve, and he can also redirect enemy attacks to himself when a party member is in critical. One of his COMP upgrades has a chance to prevent enemies from getting the jump on the party, even if they touch Ringo in the field without being knocked over.

Milady attacks with physical strikes and fire skills. She learns skills that increase Stack when inflicting status effects, and she later has a chance to instantly kill a weakened target if another ally brings an enemy to critical health. One of her unique COMP upgrades regenerates her MP when she uses normal attacks or her special Piercer attack.

Saizo uses gunfire and force skills. He also gets skills that put him into a 'combat medic' role, having a chance to not consume items in battle, increasing the amount they heal, and even having a chance to increase Stack when healing. One of his COMP upgrades gives a chance to put an enemy into Faint status when using a gunfire skill/normal attack.

Just because one ally favors one or two elements doesn't mean you should only let them use those! If you're fighting a boss weak to electric, gaining Stacks with just Ringo will only help the battle drag on longer. I complain about Fusion down below, but trying to make a team of godslayers isn't going to be perfect. That, and there are a lot of good skills competing with your limited slots...

Microtransactions/Add-On Content

There are quite a few things.

Useful Item Set & Extra Difficulty
The only free one of the set. This adds the Very Hard difficulty (prevents item use in battle), but also gives two Beads (full HP restore to one), two Chakra Pots (full MP restore to one), two Balms of Life (full HP revive to one), and one Original Flame (allows Continuing on Normal or is a full HP restore to the team).

Costume & BGM Pack
This is unfortunately the only way to get Outfits, but they're sourced from other SMT titles like outfits of the Samurai of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado (SMT4) or the school uniforms from Persona 4 and 5. There is also battle music from the referenced games. It looks like the Outfits only work in-battle, but there is a mod that has them apply in town, too.

Bonus Demon Pack
This lets you fuse popular demons like Mara, Tzitzimitl, and even lets you make Nemissa from the previous game. Or you can just summon them for free from the Compendium once. This is the only way to get said demons, though, so people weren't too happy about that.

Bonus Story Arc: The Lost Numbers
This is a side story like the label says. Nana, a Demon Summoner from the countryside, winds up in the city looking for someone...and crossing paths with Team Ringo. It looks to be better utilized on a new game or New Game Plus since Nana's sidequests unlock as you play. The bonus dungeon doesn't seem too popular with reviews, though.

Booster Item Pack
This is cheaty DLC. Winning battles rewards you with valuable items to sell, items that can be traded for stat-increasing Incenses, and items that grant partial or full levels to Summoners or demons. At least you can either choose to ignore these items or turn the feature off entirely in the settings.

How I Played

I did every Request in Club Cretaceous, so that may explain why my playtime is so inflated. I did most of the "eliminate demons" and "collect items" Aion Directives, but I didn't do almost all of the "kill miniboss" quests. Those put limitations on you, and you also have an invisible turn count else the miniboss instant-kills your entire team. Also, I did the first four Soul Matrix floors. And when it came to dungeons, I tried to map the entire thing, Soul Matrix included.

When it came to the story prompts that increase Soul Level, I stuck with picking the option that'd raise the lowest Soul Level among everyone.

And for demons, I tried to raise every demon until they gave up their gift, then tried to equip the party with demons close to the maximum level I could. I had trouble with skill inheritance which is why Arrow still has Bufula going into the final battle. I really wanted to keep everyone with their favored elements, and sometimes that just didn't work out.

I avoided quite a few fights just to speed dungeon crawling along, but I don't think I finished at too high of a level, just at 67.

Controls

Screenshots! I'm going to hit the limit on embeds in this post, I think.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3428244653
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3428244157
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3428244142

Controls worked out pretty well for me. I had to disable the 'chase cam' to move it manually myself, but that wasn't an issue.

Difficulty

There are three difficulty levels with the fourth, Very Hard, being free DLC. I'm not sure if there are any edits to incoming/outgoing damage between the four, but here's what you can expect from each:

Easy: Unlimited continues when your party gets defeated in combat. Continues revive the party to maximum health and resume battle where the party wiped.
Normal: Limited continues using the Original Flame item. You can only carry a max of nine, but these cannot be bought or sold, just rarely found in the field.
Hard: No continues. You can still use Original Flame to heal living members to full HP, but it won't save you when everyone's down.
Very Hard: No continues and no item use in battle.

I played the entire game on Hard, and I actually found it to be mostly easy. Sure, I did Game Over a few times, but I still didn't think was that hard. I did avoid the Risky Enemies who are designed to kick your ass, though. New demons and boss battles are an obvious uptick in difficulty because you have to try and figure out what they're weak to, but if you get wiped, then you can carry that knowledge forward into a hopefully more successful attempt. If demons appear in a boss battle, they'll also have ??? for defensive affinities, but if you remember what the common version was weak to, the boss version will be weak to it, too. The final dungeon is a bit more difficult than the rest of the game due to facing multiple enemies with hit-all attacks, so everyone will eat a bunch of damage each turn unless you equip demons to counter that happening.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3413321496

I had serious issues with MP use until the last leg when I just fused Qigong (recover a small amount of MP with every action in battle) on everyone. I guess when you're constantly building Stacks, you're understandably gonna run dry. MP recovery items are pretty rare, too. I thought about sticking to the weakest elemental attacks to conserve MP and rely on Sabbaths for most of my damage, but I ultimately didn't do that, and I think it worked out well enough. I guess, don't be afraid of retreating to the Safehouse. You can just knock over enemies to work back to where you were. By the time I was in the endgame, I actually used Milady for after-battle healing since she already could recover MP naturally on top of Qigong, so she always had MP available to get the team in top shape.

I kind of accidentally made the game harder on myself for not using Commander Skills. I guess I misunderstood the way they work. I thought that you had a pool of turns, so using any one would decrease that pool and potentially prevent you from using other Commander Skills. No, every skill just has a number of cooldown turns before it becomes available, so nothing's stopping you from using Shield Deployment every few turns if you want! Other than a boss' patterns having some big hit that you probably ought to deflect.

Saving

There are 20 save slots with a special Autosave slot that unsurprisingly gets written to automatically, like when you transition between rooms on a map or when you enter combat. You can save anytime on the world map or in the field, but you still can't save in battle or in the middle of a conversation or cutscene.

When you finish the game, you're prompted to make a Clear Save. Loading this puts you into New Game Plus, so don't overwrite a save you want to revisit.

Graphics and Performance

The entire game is 3D graphics from the landscape to the characters. Despite that, exploring dungeons is still mostly a 2D affair since elevation isn't a factor except in Soul Matrix with some floors having stairs yet still being considered the same floor as the rest of the area. You can't jump or anything, so Ringo's feet stay firmly on the ground.

When you're in town areas, the camera takes a fixed perspective, automatically sliding along with Ringo as she moves. When you're in dungeons, you can manually control the camera or let the game handle it for you. The camera does a good enough job, but it has a tendency to collide with walls and take some readjustment. This doesn't happen much in Soul Matrix due to it lacking solid walls, but you're still glued to the road!

Characters display a bust while they talk, and these 2D images will have their mouths move with dialog and even have a change of expression before the textbox changes! Something I found neat was character models also having expressions, but the camera is often zoomed out too far to really notice this in most dialogs.

There is an option to speed up the flow of combat, and this really just affects animations. Some demons look goofy when sped up, but it is a considerable boost to how quickly you can resolve combat in real time. Everyone, both your Devil Summoners and demons have a different animation when they're at critical health, but demons take on a glitchy appearance.

When you start gaining Stacks, the background will eventually fade away into a nightmarish swirl of color surrounding both parties while 2D images of the demons participating appear behind the enemy party, complete with solid red eyes. At the end of the player turn, Ringo will trigger a Sabbath with the gun component of her COMP, summoning the models of the participating demons (still with glowing eyes), then they either rush the enemy or surround the enemy, summon a massive sphere of energy, then drop it like an evil Spirit Bomb.

Most cutscenes are in-engine, but some seem to be prerendered. I think the in-engine ones can be fast-forwarded only while prerendered ones can only be skipped.

When battle starts, instead of a fight woosh, there's a closeup of Ringo, though sometimes another character appears when it's a fight relevant to them.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3418454614

The UI sticks to the bottom left corner of the screen, showing the team status whether in the field or in battle. Icons appear next to the character icons to indicate status effects and buffs/debuffs. Otherwise, the rest of the UI involves the damage numbers that pop out whenever anyone gets damaged along with CRITICAL or RESIST or WEAK or BLOCK depending on elemental defenses. When a character's turn starts, there's a readout of different commands, and you actually press a button to do a command instead of moving a cursor.

I kept the game running at 30FPS on the Deck, and the Deck performed well. The only real frame drops I had came from the Sabbaths, mostly summoning the big Spirit Bomb, or the transition into battle. I don't think there were really any other serious dips otherwise.

These were my settings:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3428313337

Audio

Of course there's a lot of voiced dialog in this game. Every story event is voiced, but things like Hangout Events just have voice grunts. There are quite a few lines in combat where people call out if a move will be nulled/reflected/absorbed, in case you missed the visual cue. Unfortunately, voices tend to cut each other off due to their frequency.

I didn't mind the soundtrack, but there were very few songs used for dungeons. There are maybe four: One used for everywhere but the final dungeon, one used for Soul Matrix, one used for the final dungeon, and one for the final dungeon's top floor. I guess there are really eight themes since the music gains instruments when an enemy notices and chases you. Here's the link. Songs I liked... The theme for Karakucho, the COMP Smith store theme, Mansei Realm, the Soul Matrix theme, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. The first game did a lot better on music (though I only realized long after the review), but the dungeons really could have used more, though.

Stability, Glitches, and Other Weirdness

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3427902083

I only really had one glitch show up. There are rare occasions where building up Sabbath Stacks causes the battle music to just stop for the rest of the battle. I only saw it happen four times, but that's across nearly 61 hours of play and who knows how many battles.

Replay Value

New Game Plus adds a few events and has exclusive Requests from Cretaceous, but you can see both endings in your first loop as long as you get everyone's Soul Level to 100 and beat the boss on their fourth floor. The Nana DLC is supposed to have episodes during the game, so I figure it's worth going through once vanilla then go through New Game Plus with that DLC and whatever minor extras.

Also, yeah, there are two endings. If you've unlocked the good ending, there's one last popup that lets you pick if you'd rather see the normal ending or the better one.

There are Achievements! I actually did pretty good, getting 42 of 47 out of my one run through the game. The last ones I need are one for getting all of the others, fusing a Pixie with Megidolaon, completing the fifth floor of someone's Soul Matrix, doing a total of 85 Requests/Aion Directives, and completing 100% of the Demon Compendium. Maybe next time. At least it looks like some 92.9% people have started the game with Arrow's Soul Hack sequence.

What Worked For Me

Dungeon crawling? More like, dungeon striding
Traversing dungeons was really painless in this game. I really like when there are visible enemies and when you can simply choose to not fight by smacking everything with your sword. Ringo is able to move at a faster speed in towns and in dungeons now. Teleporters aren't incredibly common, but there's almost always one right before a boss, so you can freely leave, Rest, then come back at maximum power. The game even warns you before there's a boss fight!

Magnetic personality
Normally, Demon Negotiation in SMT titles are, well, frustrating. You're asked a series of questions, you have multiple choices, and picking the right answers is a matter of luck. Then when it comes time to the 'gimme gimme' phase, you have to part with your stuff...and there's still a risk of the demon just deciding to take off with your ♥♥♥♥! Here, you just enter a single 'gimme' phase with no Q&A session, and if they want an item, it's always something common like Medicine or Life Stone. I even had a few just offer to join for free!

It's going to seriously suck trying other games in the series and having to repeatedly fail at Negotiation. Note that because Negotiation happens outside of battle, you'll never be able to end battle by attempting to talk while having another copy of that demon in your party just the same as enemy demons will never beg for their lives or try to take you out for murdering their friends. You still can get items/money/healing for trying to recruit a demon already with you, though.

An eye on characters
I liked that the cast was smaller since I thought it made the team more cohesive, but I haven't played a modern Persona in close to 20 years now. I also liked interacting with demons on Demon Recon. Responses are limited to personality (insane, beast, young girl, young boy, old man, tough guy, etc), but it was interesting to see what they'd say sometimes, and I actually got surprised seeing when there'd be new comments. There were comments while leveling up and while giving gifts, too. And I actually bothered to interact with NPCs in the towns. That poor lady who keeps seeing the host Johannes who belittles and hits her needs to see some better company...

A chatty protagonist
Silent protagonists don't do it for me anymore, so it was refreshing to have Ringo say so much and to be so spirited despite being so young in her current form. She felt like an actual leader interacting with party members and actually making plans instead of, in the case of Flynn in SMT4, merely being told where to go and only having any personality poke through with player responses.

What I Didn't Like

Please shut up
Sure, I liked the voice acting in this game. I liked that there was a considerable amount of dialog in battle. I didn't like that, when selecting an option (at least on Fast Mode), there's a quip every single time you select it. Like, let's say you're fighting a group of enemies all weak to the same thing, so a group of Jack Frosts. You've already fought them before, you know they're weak to fire, so you pick Agi, and every time you select one of the Frosts to burn, someone will comment. Every single time. If you rapidly select a new target, then someone will start to say something before someone else cuts them off.

Then Victor did the same when browsing demons to fuse! "Now..." Every single time?!

Fusion foibles
It's telling that the most recent Shin Megami Tensei game I've played was 4, so while you could freely pick what skills passed down when fusing, you also had eight slots and could really stick anything you wanted on anything so long as the parents or other ancestors had the right skills. Here, you only get a max of six skill slots, and every demon has an affinity towards every element. It's sometimes hard to guess if a skill will pass down to a new demon. Usually, you can look at their elemental weaknesses, like, Nue is weak to fire, so it can't inherit any fire skills, but then you have cases like Dakini who is weak to ice and ruin, but can learn ruin skills. Or Rakshasa who is weak to force and ruin, but can't learn fire/ice/lightning.

I guess I slammed my head on this mostly because I liked the idea of everyone having a set demon, then I'd fuse new demons into it...and wind up with something I couldn't use because of how affinities work. You can probably get around this better by following a guide, but it felt like a bad case of juggling. "Okay, so this demon has gunfire and ice, but if I fuse it into something at Arrow's level, I lose the gunfire...hmm..."

I know Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse had a system similar to this, except every demon had bonuses and penalties for each element. You could still put whatever you liked on a demon far as I can tell, but if you didn't play into their strengths, their 'bad' affinity moves would perform worse and cost more.

Few dungeon themes
Something I realized in the first Soul Hackers is how many songs there were. It is nice that the songs get more instruments when an enemy chases you, but having multiple songs would've gone far in making the dungeons feel better.

Small battle item stock
I get that powerful items like Attack Mirror should be limited (but just to two?), but I didn't like that you could only hold five single-target elemental attack items and two hit-alls. I get they wanted you to rely more on your skills and to keep you from getting full stacks of Sabbaths each turn in spite of those, but I really made use of them in SMT4 even with taking my Flynn down a magic path. And even then, there are no items that provide a physical, gunfire, or ruin effect. Five uses and then having to farm out items to buy more? Eh.

Verdict - 5/5

I rate games based on 'emotional response.' If I have fun in a game, naturally it'd have a favorable response, and if I felt little to nothing, then that'd end up with a 3. If a game isn't fun, then there'd better be something else to pick up the slack. In this case, the actual gameplay was all right. Exploring dungeons was mostly easy, I didn't really have problems with the battle system, but what drove me was the story. I used to be someone who played for the story way long ago, but anymore, I care more to have fun and if the story's good, then that's a bonus! In this case, I really enjoyed the story and the characters, even those outside of the Fab Five.

So! If you want a pretty heavy focus on story, chatting with allies, and all that over dungeon crawling and turn-based battle, I think you'd like this game. I think the base cost is a bit much, but $30 is acceptable. I sucked nearly 61 hours of enjoyment out of it, and I wanted to play more instead of getting it over and done with. I wouldn't recommend it if you want something really compelling in a game's battle system. This is pretty basic, not as swingly as Press Turn, but it was enough to keep me engaged. It's not quite SMT, it's not quite Persona, it's not actually Soul Hackers' sequel.

But I loved what was there.

little advice

This site can be useful for planning Fusions.[aqiu384.github.io] You can look at any demon, then see what demons can make it, or look at 'forward fusions' to see what that demon plus another will make instead.