Soul Hackers 2 is the latest addition to the popular Shin Megami Tensei series, developed by the same team behind Tokyo Mirage Sessions FE#, Nintendo’s exclusive Fire Emblem crossover from a few years ago.
Only twenty-five years passed. Soul Hackers 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner – Soul Hackers, second installment of the subseries Devil Summoner, which was originally released for the Sega Saturn in 1997 and later ported to other platforms, most recently in 2012 for the Nintendo 3DS. Do not be fooled by the “2” in the title: this is the sequel to the sequel to a spinoff.
Soul Hackers 2 It poses a future where technological progress is such that it has not led to a utopia but to total social stagnation, where social interactions have almost disappeared and people spend their days trapped in wild consumerism and banality. You know, completely different from the real world. In this context, Aion, the supercomputer that manages the affairs of humanity while we are scratching four hands, has a premonitory vision warning that certain events are about to occur that will lead to the end of the world, and decides to take action in the future. topic personally. To this end, she creates Ringo and Figue, two human versions of different facets of her personality, to investigate the mystery.
Ringo is our protagonist, whom we will control for most of the game outside of combat, and who recruits the rest of the party, whom she literally brings back from the dead using the titular soul hack, since they were all involved in some way. somehow with (and were killed by) the Phantom Society, the organization of demon summoners behind the potential apocalypse. Iron Mask, the leader of the society, wants to get hold of a mysterious power called the Covenant, and he must be stopped before it’s too late.
IF I CROSS IT BURNS ME
The gameplay of Soul Hackers 2 It doesn’t vary too much from what we expect from the series. The exploration during the story is limited to some small areas of the city that function as hubs from where we can access the different points of interest, as well as an apartment that serves as our base of operations.
Combat is basically the same elemental rock-paper-scissors as always, save for a few minor additions. Each character can equip a demon with different skills and elemental affinities. Upon hitting an enemy with his elemental weakness, one of the demons on our list is added to a “stack” that at the end of our turn Ringo uses in a special attack called Sabbath, for extra damage. The more demons in the stack, the more damage, plus some demons get special abilities that only activate during the Sabbath, like applying status effects to enemies or healing the party. Of course, as the game progresses and different upgrades are given to us, the combat increases in complexity.
For the most part, the game unfolds without many surprises and does not break the schemes of the series, or even of the genre, with which the review could easily end here. But I have a lot left to say, and little of it is good, so it’s easier to get rid of the things I liked about Soul Hackers 2 before you start giving it.
In no specific order:
-RINGO SPEAKS. Atlus has finally been played and our protagonist has dialogue throughout the game, with moments where we can choose between dialogue options and everything. Don’t go back to the silent stars please.
-All the main characters are adults, with internal conflicts that feel real. There is zero teen drama to fart. At the design level they are also fantastic and memorable, as expected.
-The areas of the city that we can visit, as small as they are, are very successful aesthetically and convey a very particular mood that exudes style while highlighting the themes of materialism in the story.
-The music at times is very good.
-You can have a beer with the pi.
…and this basically ends the good things I have to say about Soul Hackers 2, because it’s been a while since I’ve seen a game click so fast. Atlus seems to have spent the entire budget on the character models because it sure wasn’t on the level design, which is the most basic I’ve seen in a JRPG in a long time.
SQUEEZE EVERY PENNY
And it’s not that Soul Hackers 2 make an attempt to hide your limitations, not at all. We are not even talking about a situation in which the game throws all the meat on the grill at the beginning to make a good first impression and the first levels show a level well above the rest, as so often happens. The first dungeon in the story is a series of basic corridors and containers, and the second a series of corridors on a subway line. The third? Another subway line, with the same assets and the exact same color palette. There is “use the budget wisely”, and there is “not spending money to change the color of a wall”, man. The story sections that follow add a bit of visual variety to the deal, but despite this the bare bones and emptiness of the maps never fail to come through.
All the dungeons are reduced to a series of corridors and square rooms where we find random enemies that spawn every so often, as well as our own demons with whom we can talk to find an item, a new demon that wants to join us, or sometimes recover some HP and MP. Sometimes you’ll even find a locked door and the key won’t appear until you talk to one of your demons again, which makes exploration feel inorganic and unimportant. Ringo has a sword that we can use to attack and knock down enemies, which increases our chances of ambushing them if we decide to fight, or gives us a chance to escape. For some reason this attack seems to miss for no apparent reason at times, with Ringo’s sword clipping through the enemy model, leading me into a fight I wanted to avoid.
Another problem is that, at least on normal difficulty, most dungeons are a process until the boss, which if you are not at least at the recommended level, it will be a significant jump in difficulty. If adjusting your strategy didn’t work you’re going to have to grind through levels fighting normal enemies because none of the secondary content gives experience. Oh, and you can’t directly retry a fight. If you have been fighting a complicated boss for minutes and you have already given up the fight or you simply want to try something else, your options are: either close the game, reopen it and load a save, or activate the automatic combat until you lose the fight, and there reload the save.
Did I mention that all the dungeons have the same music? Because nothing, that.
The recycling only becomes more apparent thanks to the secondary content, which consists mostly of quests to find person X instead of Y, almost always without further indications that “he is in this area where you have already been”, forcing us to backtrack again to through these empty and repetitive maps in search of a particular NPC or enemy.
But possibly the best (and by this I mean worst) example of all of the above is the Soul Matrix, a digital world that we can travel with Ringo to rummage through the memories of our companions and thus learn more about their pasts which, in turn, unlock different skills for each of them. What in theory sounds like an interesting idea, in practice translates again into walking through a labyrinth of empty corridors with the most generic digital world aesthetic you can think of. Think of the Digiworld version of Cyber Sleuth Digimon, but more generic still. Just a bunch of blue cubes everywhere, with zero ripple. The visuals don’t even vary a bit depending on the character they represent. Any. You could be going through level 1 of Arrow’s Soul Matrix or level 3 of Saizo’s, and you would never know it by looking at screenshots.
Even certain gameplay elements are implemented in a super basic way that makes me think they’re just there out of a sense of obligation more than anything else:
You can recruit demons, but this time randomly, and you can’t add one more demon if you have the maximum in your inventory. Where person 5 it let you free up a slot at the time, here you have no choice but to let it go and pray it will reappear soon, at least until the game lets you target specific demons in combat, which increases their chance of being recruited but still feeling like a partial solution.
You can improve your relationship with your companions, which unlocks new doors into their Soul Matrix and new abilities, but you do so by choosing between dialogue options that tell you exactly which character they relate to and how many points your connection with them will raise, far from the depth of Social Links.
Even navigating the world outside of dungeons could basically be a series of menus and nothing would be lost, as the areas we can traverse are tiny and places of interest and shops are usually menus with static images anyway, and to which we can transport ourselves by touching a button.
Hell, even the name of the game has little to do with the narrative, because there is very little soul hacking in the game and it all happens in the first few hours.
TECHNICAL SECTION
The PS5 version of Soul Hackers 2 it offers two visual modes, one emphasizing graphics and the other performance, the latter being the one I decided to use for the entirety of the game, as its simple visual style isn’t really benefited by the graphics mode, especially since it cuts the framerate to 30fps . I recommend turning off tips on loading screens as it removes them almost completely, allowing us to constantly jump from one place to another instantly.
The music (by MONACA, Keiichi Okabe’s production company) is… okay, although it suffers from the same repetitiveness as everything else in the game. It is a bit incomprehensible that each shop has its own theme but then all the dungeons repeat the same theme over and over again. It shines more in the moments of tranquility in the city, leaving aside the pomposity for a very chill electro jazz that makes you want to sit down and listen, beer in hand.
But a story with a gripping mystery and well-written characters cannot save Soul Hackers 2 from the tedium of sitting down to play it, thanks to the poor variety of its combat and exploration, and its recycling of content in each of its aspects. The experience is so exciting that it is possible to finish the game in less than 30 hours, and even so it was hard for me at times to get the desire. What we are left with is an RPG that screams low budget everywhere, and that can be fun at times, especially for fans of the series, but that could – and should – have been much more.